Pardon my cynicism, but does anyone else get the impression that the new End of Life announcement is framed in terms of "we are pleased to announce the open source release of..."
i.e. Let's outsource support for this sucker! I mean, how excited am I supposed to get, in 2005, about a techmology that allows me to marshall/unmarshall data and call remote procedures over the 'net? Isn't that already being done (a lot) by the various CORBA and RPC stuff already running on my Linux box?
Science numbers? What about business numbers?
on
Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd have thought that the natural interests of those reading the WSJ would be in how business/finance people misrepresent with numbers, not business people.
My favourite is "fastest growing." We're always hearing about something being the "fastest growing" but, unless I know whether this is in percentage terms or absolute numbers, I have to write it off as a useless statement.
Are you familiar with the basic tenets of mass production? If the market for something is you and twenty other geeks, be prepared to pay $10,000 for it.
If you think it can just be added to existing laptops for about $8, you're right, but it won't be, because most of the buyers of those laptops don't want the feature, and the manufacturer would prefer to keep the $8 x number of units for itself.
P.S. Don't verb nouns if doing so would conflict with already extant verbs, idiot.
You plug one end into your headless box, and the other end into your favourite I/O terminal.
Need something to install the OS in the first place? That device is called a 'schlepper' -- you pay him some money, and he installs the OS on the machine for you.
Hell, I've never even visited the state that my server resides in.
Some news outlets, when they get something marked "Press Release", don't immediately yell "STOP THE PRESSES" and become shills for the latest product being touted, which invariably isn't actually shipping for another x weeks or months.
Lately, companies have taken to marking their press releases "Confidential - Internal Use Only", because the media outlets (ahemSLASHDOT) then exhibit the desired behaviour -- does anyone really believe that the feature list of a cellphone due to be announced next week is TOP SECRET EYES ONLY?
And what's this crap about trade secrets getting legal protection? The whole point of the PATENT system is to reward companies for publishing information via the quid pro quo of limited time period protection (Don't bother telling me how it doesn't work, I'm talking about the IDEA). If you give companies protection for their secrets without the patent filing burden, you're rewarding them for keeping knowledge secret.
Remember that Perl bit that returned the number of years since 1900? Back when everyone used Perl for Internet stuff, they could count on that being a two digit number. Seeing stuff on the net dated 1/12/105 - that slays me!
Given the relative prices of aluminum and steel, I'm picturing something the size of my desk! How can aluminum vs. steel construction represent a price difference of over $100?
Now that miscellaneous events have succeeded in pushing the war to the back pages, with the occasional unfortunate flare-up, it's good to see stories about all the good things that war is bringing us. Freedom is on the hobble!
That's how it has always been in marketing. How do you get someone with a perfectly good set of golf clubs, and for whom the best way to improve his game is to play more, to buy new clubs? TITANIUM!
Why don't marketers care whether grandma can decode "P4 3.0 GHz 256 DDR 40.0 GB DVD/CD-RW"? Because ALL the profit in this low margin business is from people who CAN decode it.
NASA should have considered planning this mission to be a near-flyby. Given their record of hitting what they aim to miss and missing what they aim to hit...
Got a piano tied to your ass? Move to the city or accept that for you, rural living is the right choice, with all the trade-offs entailed.
I grew up rural, moved to the city, never looked back. Sitting in the country whining about how I couldn't get a good cup of cappucino -- and implying that the government ought to fix things so that I could -- didn't cross my mind.
So a laser covers what percentage of the sky at even one light year's distance? Trying to see a randomly pointed laser located a great distance away is the silliest thing I've heard yet. But it's from the folks at Harvard, so obviously they're seeing something that I'm not.
Th article is poorly written: "Just about everyone has peered through cheap binoculars having only a narrow field of view. They don't peer long." -- If I wanted a wide field of view, I wouldn't need binoculars, would I?
The SVA was apparently up to speed on taking over the war.
Yeah, that's right. Once the US Army began to pull out, the SVA was going to come back from their golfing holiday in Hawaii and replace 500,000 US troops. With equal effectiveness. Makes you wonder, why didn't the SVA and the US Army fight side by side? Obviously, if your thesis is correct, they could've won.
Not that we should make any inferences about Iraq...
I sometimes wonder why we don't do something similar at our land borders? We are protecting our sea borders by detecting all ships. Why not create land buoys to detect illegal crossings.
Y'all had them in Vietnam. I don't know how well they worked, but you lost that war.
Not any more! But my dictionary says gnostic sounds like nostik and gnu like nOO - so is Stallman really blaming people for not knowing that they're supposed to mispronounce the word that appears next to the animal of the same name on the GNU website? What an idiot.
So he thought through using a word that few know how to pronounce? Name any other words in the english language where the 'g' is pronounced in 'gn'? Aside from 'eggnog', I say there aren't any.
Yep, it's great that RMS sez we can port GNU stuff to the operating systems we have now, rather than having to wait until GNU Hurd thunders into view. Or does it only run on the Itanium?
Quick, someone, anyone.
Combine this with yesterday's P2P In 15 Lines of Perl:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/1 2/15/1953227&tid=95&tid=156&tid=1
Yeah, bit Christopher Diggins is "best known for developing the Heron programming language." [cdiggins.com]
If Wiki deleted the article, and we were left with Chris pointing only to Heron and the language pointing only to him, the garbage collector would discard them both!
The public has a right to know what's done in the courts, full stop.
Recently, courts have taken to imposing publication bans (Read: You've got a right to know, but to exercise it, you'll have to line up for a seat in person, not send your representative, the press), or to sealing documents at the request of either counsel.
I'm of the opinion that, in all but the rarest of cases, the public's right to know what sort of justice is being done in their name trumps parties' desire for secrecy.
I'd like to see the details of all settlements made public, none of this crap about parties using our courts to compel counterparties to agree to secret settlements.
High technology counts for about zero in a guerilla war. But to the extent that fiddling with the next gadget takse your mind off the main goal, viz, making yourself liked by the locals, then leaving, it is counterproductive.
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i.e. Let's outsource support for this sucker! I mean, how excited am I supposed to get, in 2005, about a techmology that allows me to marshall/unmarshall data and call remote procedures over the 'net? Isn't that already being done (a lot) by the various CORBA and RPC stuff already running on my Linux box?
My favourite is "fastest growing." We're always hearing about something being the "fastest growing" but, unless I know whether this is in percentage terms or absolute numbers, I have to write it off as a useless statement.
If you think it can just be added to existing laptops for about $8, you're right, but it won't be, because most of the buyers of those laptops don't want the feature, and the manufacturer would prefer to keep the $8 x number of units for itself.
P.S. Don't verb nouns if doing so would conflict with already extant verbs, idiot.
Need something to install the OS in the first place? That device is called a 'schlepper' -- you pay him some money, and he installs the OS on the machine for you.
Hell, I've never even visited the state that my server resides in.
Lately, companies have taken to marking their press releases "Confidential - Internal Use Only", because the media outlets (ahemSLASHDOT) then exhibit the desired behaviour -- does anyone really believe that the feature list of a cellphone due to be announced next week is TOP SECRET EYES ONLY?
And what's this crap about trade secrets getting legal protection? The whole point of the PATENT system is to reward companies for publishing information via the quid pro quo of limited time period protection (Don't bother telling me how it doesn't work, I'm talking about the IDEA). If you give companies protection for their secrets without the patent filing burden, you're rewarding them for keeping knowledge secret.
Remember that Perl bit that returned the number of years since 1900? Back when everyone used Perl for Internet stuff, they could count on that being a two digit number. Seeing stuff on the net dated 1/12/105 - that slays me!
Given the relative prices of aluminum and steel, I'm picturing something the size of my desk! How can aluminum vs. steel construction represent a price difference of over $100?
Now that miscellaneous events have succeeded in pushing the war to the back pages, with the occasional unfortunate flare-up, it's good to see stories about all the good things that war is bringing us. Freedom is on the hobble!
You know we wouldn't have gotten it without them!
Why don't marketers care whether grandma can decode "P4 3.0 GHz 256 DDR 40.0 GB DVD/CD-RW"? Because ALL the profit in this low margin business is from people who CAN decode it.
If that's your worry, crime statistics are available, as is Prozac.
I live in a city of four million, and a homicide rate 1/30 that of Washington, D.C.
But, as the morons say, "an armed society is a polite society."
I'd rather sit on my crappy dial-up and bitch.
Duly noted.
NASA should have considered planning this mission to be a near-flyby. Given their record of hitting what they aim to miss and missing what they aim to hit...
Got a piano tied to your ass? Move to the city or accept that for you, rural living is the right choice, with all the trade-offs entailed.
I grew up rural, moved to the city, never looked back. Sitting in the country whining about how I couldn't get a good cup of cappucino -- and implying that the government ought to fix things so that I could -- didn't cross my mind.
Th article is poorly written: "Just about everyone has peered through cheap binoculars having only a narrow field of view. They don't peer long." -- If I wanted a wide field of view, I wouldn't need binoculars, would I?
They were being supervised by Christ.
Yeah, that's right. Once the US Army began to pull out, the SVA was going to come back from their golfing holiday in Hawaii and replace 500,000 US troops. With equal effectiveness. Makes you wonder, why didn't the SVA and the US Army fight side by side? Obviously, if your thesis is correct, they could've won.
Not that we should make any inferences about Iraq...
Y'all had them in Vietnam. I don't know how well they worked, but you lost that war.
Not any more! But my dictionary says gnostic sounds like nostik and gnu like nOO - so is Stallman really blaming people for not knowing that they're supposed to mispronounce the word that appears next to the animal of the same name on the GNU website? What an idiot.
So he thought through using a word that few know how to pronounce? Name any other words in the english language where the 'g' is pronounced in 'gn'? Aside from 'eggnog', I say there aren't any.
Yep, it's great that RMS sez we can port GNU stuff to the operating systems we have now, rather than having to wait until GNU Hurd thunders into view. Or does it only run on the Itanium?
Do they think people will hold off getting a Hotmail account so they can have those three little letters that say so much instead?
If there's a stock analyst covering this sector who doesn't really understand this 'internets' thing, that's who this announcement is directed at.
Quick, someone, anyone. Combine this with yesterday's P2P In 15 Lines of Perl: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/1 2/15/1953227&tid=95&tid=156&tid=1
If Wiki deleted the article, and we were left with Chris pointing only to Heron and the language pointing only to him, the garbage collector would discard them both!
Recently, courts have taken to imposing publication bans (Read: You've got a right to know, but to exercise it, you'll have to line up for a seat in person, not send your representative, the press), or to sealing documents at the request of either counsel.
I'm of the opinion that, in all but the rarest of cases, the public's right to know what sort of justice is being done in their name trumps parties' desire for secrecy.
I'd like to see the details of all settlements made public, none of this crap about parties using our courts to compel counterparties to agree to secret settlements.
High technology counts for about zero in a guerilla war. But to the extent that fiddling with the next gadget takse your mind off the main goal, viz, making yourself liked by the locals, then leaving, it is counterproductive.