My point is that I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos to find the best tech investments, because his own company is doing a such a poor job of maintaining their own database, even in their core business. Do a search on something as simple as a book title (say, "War of the Worlds") then try and wade through the bizarre results. Of the top 5, one of them is actually a paperback copy of H. G. Wells' _The War of the Worlds_. Two of them are peripherally related (an illustrated version and a collection of short stories that includes it, I guess), and two results are not related in any way. In fact, most of the search results are for books on World War II, with copies of _The War of the Worlds_ buried in the search results.
Can I sort by book title? No. Can I exclude books with the wrong title? No. Can I sort by availability? No. Sort by author? No. Can I put quotes around the title and do an exact text search? No. Even in its core business, Amazon's site is only passable. And things haven't really changed or improved since the late 90s. I mean, what kind of book store doesn't let you search by author?
Search for CDs, for DVDs -- all the same problems. Get out of those core areas, and things get MUCH worse. Dozens of "unavailable" entries mixed into the search returns, bad specs listed for products, etc.
In summary, I don't think that Mr. Bezos would recognize a Web 2.0 application if it walked up and smacked him in the ear. I imagine he's a fine person, but I wouldn't take his investment advice for Web companies. He can't keep his own house in order.
Perhaps Mr. Bezos should spend more time working for Amazon.com. They used to be the best, but now they are a barely maintained database of discontinued products with bad specs and irrelevant search results.
But all basically irrelevant. Ultimately, I fork over $$$ in return for a product. I evaluate the market of products and choose the one that is the best value to me.
Truly, "value" is a purely subjective judgment, and it's up to the provider of the product to convince me that their product offers more value than the competition. The costs for the vendor are irrelevant to me -- the only relevant question is, am I getting the product I want for my money? That's value.
As for cable companies and their big franchise fees, etc -- well, nobody put a gun to their head and told them to get into this business. Nobody said a local monopoly was cheap, sonny. If local municipalities want to charge for easement space, you've got two options -- pay them, or choose a different method of delivery. Should new technology arrive that puts the monopoly at risk (gasp!), well, they had a good ride.
they unionize. Then they'll lobby to get a monopoly on every drug-delivery job, and prices will skyrocket, and we'll have to call them "pharmaceutical delivery workers" instead of "bacteria".
The problem with citing Wikipedia (or any Encyclopedia for that matter) is that it is a non-authoritive source. Not necessarily true. Many Britannica articles are written by authorities in the field. I knew the meteorologist who wrote the articles on lightning and atmospheric electricity (Dick Orville, http://www.met.tamu.edu/people/faculty/orville.php), and he is a well-recognized academic in the field.
I've been working university computer support for a long time, and questions like this really give me hope for the eventual doom of the Microsoft hegemony. Tomorrow's decision makers are learning Linux, and MS operating systems aren't even in the decision tree. The most common question I hear from scientists and engineers these days is, "Linux or Mac?"
I recently interviewed for a support position at a major university physics department, and Windows support wasn't even a factor. They had already evolved past Microsoft products; none of the critical applications in physics were running on Windows. Their platform distribution was 60% Linux & Solaris, 30% Mac, and 10% "other", with Windows buried somewhere in the bottom 10%.
Ultimately, I suspect that Windows will be relegated to executives and administrators who must run "mission critical productivity software" (that is, Excel and Access), while the desktops in R&D, marketing, the factory floor and the retail store are all running some variant of Linux or MacOS. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes _any_ attempt at corrective action to slow this "brain drain" in the sciences and engineering schools.
Anyway, back on topic, I recommend Fedora. Although I use Ubuntu and find it very approachable for somebody that doesn't want to spend lots of time under the hood, the fact is that RedHat and RPM packages are sort of an industry baseline for math, science and engineering. You'll find most big open source projects are precompiled for RedHat, while Ubuntu will be stuck with some old version out in the Debian Multiverse or worse, you'll have no choice but to compile it yourself.
There is so much wrong with these statements I don't know where to begin.
"The sun's output varies wildly."
No, it does not. Although natural variation in solar radiation is believed to be a driving force in climate (due to feedback effects), the actual variation over the course of the sunspot cycle is on the order of 1 watt/meter squared, or less than 0.1%. Occasionally something like an unusual solar flare will push that up or down by 2 watts/m^2 for a very short period of time.
"evaporation has nothing to with with depth, and everything to do with SURFACE AREA, of which the ocean clearly dwarfs our irrigation"
Soil evaporation is controlled by a lot of factors, not just surface area. The presence of plants is probably the most important factor, as they transport ground water directly into the path of sunlight. The land surface also has a much greater temperature response to solar radiation (soil is lower in heat capacity and tranmissivity than water), so it heats up hotter and cools colder.
Understanding the balance of these water vapor fluxes is an active area of research, and that field of study cannot be dismissed by uttering the words "surface area".
Yawn. And ten years ago, those $100 million worth of presses would only print from PostScript, or TIFF, or TeX DVI, or whatever. Ten years from now, something else will be the standard. PDF won't remain a standard unless Adobe works hard to keep it that way.
"you should pay for it, to show respect to the people who worked hard to produce the software"
No, that's not why you should pay for it. You should pay for it because (1) somebody else wrote it and (2) they require compensation for using what they wrote. I would add (3) because that's the law, but I won't suggest that the law is a moral justification.
Let X = software, movies, music, or whatever.
If you don't want to pay for X, the solution is simple. Choose not to partake of X, make your own X, or convince someone to give you X for free. Stealing X is stealing, no matter what X is.
You're missing the point. Ethanol costs MORE fossil fuel to produce than it replaces. Ethanol production increases our dependence on oil products; it does not reduce it. Those harvesters and tractors are running on gasoline, not self-produced ethanol.
That's why they call this the "DARPA Grand Challenge", not the "DARPA Mediocre Challenge" or the "DARPA Wussy Challenge". DARPA set the goal knowing that it would be nearly impossible in the first competition to create excitement.
And by all accounts, it seems to have worked, since there are many thousands more researchers (ranging from PhD engineers to talented gearhead hobbyists) working in the field of auto-navigated land vehicles than before the challenge.
And, for the record, I want the Golem Group to win:-)
Putting aside the questionable science of "antenna stickers", I will simply state that you have engaged in a logical fallacy. Perceived performance improvement of your cell phone that is coincident in time with the application of a sticker does not show that the sticker was causally responsible for improvement.
Two things that are coincident in time need not be causally related. Even if your cell phone provider made no specific changes, there may be other environmental changes that are responsible for improved performance (e.g., property owner a few houses down cut down a tree between you and the antenna, etc). If you don't make the effort to isolate these potential causes, you've not shown causality.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, mod me into obscurity for my opinions.
My point is that I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos to find the best tech investments, because his own company is doing a such a poor job of maintaining their own database, even in their core business. Do a search on something as simple as a book title (say, "War of the Worlds") then try and wade through the bizarre results. Of the top 5, one of them is actually a paperback copy of H. G. Wells' _The War of the Worlds_. Two of them are peripherally related (an illustrated version and a collection of short stories that includes it, I guess), and two results are not related in any way. In fact, most of the search results are for books on World War II, with copies of _The War of the Worlds_ buried in the search results.
Can I sort by book title? No. Can I exclude books with the wrong title? No. Can I sort by availability? No. Sort by author? No. Can I put quotes around the title and do an exact text search? No. Even in its core business, Amazon's site is only passable. And things haven't really changed or improved since the late 90s. I mean, what kind of book store doesn't let you search by author?
Search for CDs, for DVDs -- all the same problems. Get out of those core areas, and things get MUCH worse. Dozens of "unavailable" entries mixed into the search returns, bad specs listed for products, etc.
In summary, I don't think that Mr. Bezos would recognize a Web 2.0 application if it walked up and smacked him in the ear. I imagine he's a fine person, but I wouldn't take his investment advice for Web companies. He can't keep his own house in order.
Perhaps Mr. Bezos should spend more time working for Amazon.com. They used to be the best, but now they are a barely maintained database of discontinued products with bad specs and irrelevant search results.
But all basically irrelevant. Ultimately, I fork over $$$ in return for a product. I evaluate the market of products and choose the one that is the best value to me. Truly, "value" is a purely subjective judgment, and it's up to the provider of the product to convince me that their product offers more value than the competition. The costs for the vendor are irrelevant to me -- the only relevant question is, am I getting the product I want for my money? That's value. As for cable companies and their big franchise fees, etc -- well, nobody put a gun to their head and told them to get into this business. Nobody said a local monopoly was cheap, sonny. If local municipalities want to charge for easement space, you've got two options -- pay them, or choose a different method of delivery. Should new technology arrive that puts the monopoly at risk (gasp!), well, they had a good ride.
they unionize. Then they'll lobby to get a monopoly on every drug-delivery job, and prices will skyrocket, and we'll have to call them "pharmaceutical delivery workers" instead of "bacteria".
I've been working university computer support for a long time, and questions like this really give me hope for the eventual doom of the Microsoft hegemony. Tomorrow's decision makers are learning Linux, and MS operating systems aren't even in the decision tree. The most common question I hear from scientists and engineers these days is, "Linux or Mac?"
I recently interviewed for a support position at a major university physics department, and Windows support wasn't even a factor. They had already evolved past Microsoft products; none of the critical applications in physics were running on Windows. Their platform distribution was 60% Linux & Solaris, 30% Mac, and 10% "other", with Windows buried somewhere in the bottom 10%.
Ultimately, I suspect that Windows will be relegated to executives and administrators who must run "mission critical productivity software" (that is, Excel and Access), while the desktops in R&D, marketing, the factory floor and the retail store are all running some variant of Linux or MacOS. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes _any_ attempt at corrective action to slow this "brain drain" in the sciences and engineering schools.
Anyway, back on topic, I recommend Fedora. Although I use Ubuntu and find it very approachable for somebody that doesn't want to spend lots of time under the hood, the fact is that RedHat and RPM packages are sort of an industry baseline for math, science and engineering. You'll find most big open source projects are precompiled for RedHat, while Ubuntu will be stuck with some old version out in the Debian Multiverse or worse, you'll have no choice but to compile it yourself.
Rick R.
There is so much wrong with these statements I don't know where to begin.
/m^2 for a very short period of time.
"The sun's output varies wildly."
No, it does not. Although natural variation in solar radiation is believed to be a driving force in climate (due to feedback effects), the actual variation over the course of the sunspot cycle is on the order of 1 watt/meter squared, or less than 0.1%. Occasionally something like an unusual solar flare will push that up or down by 2 watts
"evaporation has nothing to with with depth, and everything to do with SURFACE AREA, of which the ocean clearly dwarfs our irrigation"
Soil evaporation is controlled by a lot of factors, not just surface area. The presence of plants is probably the most important factor, as they transport ground water directly into the path of sunlight. The land surface also has a much greater temperature response to solar radiation (soil is lower in heat capacity and tranmissivity than water), so it heats up hotter and cools colder.
Understanding the balance of these water vapor fluxes is an active area of research, and that field of study cannot be dismissed by uttering the words "surface area".
Yawn. And ten years ago, those $100 million worth of presses would only print from PostScript, or TIFF, or TeX DVI, or whatever. Ten years from now, something else will be the standard. PDF won't remain a standard unless Adobe works hard to keep it that way.
"you should pay for it, to show respect to the people who worked hard to produce the software"
No, that's not why you should pay for it. You should pay for it because (1) somebody else wrote it and (2) they require compensation for using what they wrote. I would add (3) because that's the law, but I won't suggest that the law is a moral justification.
Let X = software, movies, music, or whatever.
If you don't want to pay for X, the solution is simple. Choose not to partake of X, make your own X, or convince someone to give you X for free. Stealing X is stealing, no matter what X is.
You're missing the point. Ethanol costs MORE fossil fuel to produce than it replaces. Ethanol production increases our dependence on oil products; it does not reduce it. Those harvesters and tractors are running on gasoline, not self-produced ethanol.
That's why they call this the "DARPA Grand Challenge", not the "DARPA Mediocre Challenge" or the "DARPA Wussy Challenge". DARPA set the goal knowing that it would be nearly impossible in the first competition to create excitement.
:-)
And by all accounts, it seems to have worked, since there are many thousands more researchers (ranging from PhD engineers to talented gearhead hobbyists) working in the field of auto-navigated land vehicles than before the challenge.
And, for the record, I want the Golem Group to win
Two things that are coincident in time need not be causally related. Even if your cell phone provider made no specific changes, there may be other environmental changes that are responsible for improved performance (e.g., property owner a few houses down cut down a tree between you and the antenna, etc). If you don't make the effort to isolate these potential causes, you've not shown causality.
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#cu mhoc