A few months ago there was an article in the NYTimes about the decline in various African cattle breeds as they're getting replaced by Holsteins and other First-World agribusiness cattle. The African cows were big-horned ornery creatures that are adapted for their environments; the Holsteins are weaker, more disease-prone, don't get along as well on the local vegetation - but produce about 10 times as much milk, which means that a small farmer can produce enough surplus income to send his kids to school, so the old breeds are getting replaced, in spite of the extra costs for things like medication. There are essentially no wild cattle these days; they've been domesticated for a long time, so if farmers stop using a given breed, it's pretty much lost to the gene pool.
I'm surprised these things are $900 - compare them with the "invisible fence" dog collars, which are about $100/receiver (plus the wiring in the ground, which is the more expensive par.) These may be a bit fancier, and while you want the batteries to last longer, you can put much heavier batteries on a cow than a dog.
It sounds to me like what they're really able to do is make open-range grazing more possible - the West was mostly unfenced until farmers started winning out and forcing ranchers to keep their cows fenced in. (That didn't mean there weren't corrals or whatever.) If this kind of technology works out, not only does it mean that farmers will have alternatives to maintaining fences, but also that wild animals will have less fencing to deal with, which will help them do whatever migration they need to.
I'm skeptical about the report, especially given the lack of any field studies with it. The useful life of a piece of computer equipment is usually 3-5 years; high-end graphics cards are probably shorter, because the main customers are gamers who need cutting-edge performance to kill orcs with.
So does "10-100 times longer" mean that significant fractions of nVidias are failing in 10 days - 3 months due to bad solder joints? Or does it mean that the solder joints in an ATI will last 30-300 years, long after anybody except a few retro gamers are interested in a graphics system that's mounted on a card in a separate box and doesn't interface directly to their optic nerves?
I don't know, but my first reaction was that they were trying to say that rocks fractured the Mars Lander's plumbing, and my second reaction was that there should be a bad joke about plumber's cracks on Mars in there somewhere. Maybe you've just got better taste...
Plato thought the earth was round because spheres were really really cool perfectness. But by the time of Eratosthenes ~1700 years before Columbus, Greek astronomers had a pretty good idea how big the earth was (within 5-10%, depending on quite how long a stadia was), and they had a reasonably accurate estimate of the distance to the moon as well. An Indian astronomer around 500 AD had the circumference to within 60km. Columbus, on the other hand, thought the Earth was only 25000 km around, not 25000 miles (though in other units; it wasn't really a metric-English confusion, but it was a confusion about which kind of miles were being used:-), so as MatskEE says, he got very lucky that he into the Americas before he ran out of food and water.
On the other hand, he got out of Spain just after the Spanish Inquisition took over, and while maybe nobody expected it before then, lots of people expected it to continue once it had arrived.
Libertarians believe in personal freedom, economic freedom, and fiscal responsibility. Sarah Palin doesn't. About the closest she gets is that she knew enough to inhale when she smoked dope, but she's against legalizing it. But she thinks the Alaska constitution should be amended to give the state the power to decide who can get married, and thinks that schools shouldn't teach kids about contraception methods (other than the 100% reliable one, which is "expecting teenagers to stop at second base.")
Sarah Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it - as Governor, she took the money, and while she didn't build the bridge, she did build the access road to the bridge (and by the way, even in Alaska, why does a 3-mile gravel road cost $25M? That's about the price per mile of the Eisenhower Tunnel...) She took a town with no debt and left it with over $20M in debt for under 10000 people.
McCain, on the other hand, has plenty of experience dealing with failing mortgage institutions - the Keating 5's favorite S&L cost even more to bail out than the Silverado S&L, run by President GWBush's brother Neil.
Voice Notetaking on a cellphone is really convenient for short notes - in my case the phone's a Nokia, but many other phones can do it with varying UI qualities. After all, the phone has voice compression hardware, and any phone with a camera has enough memory to store a lot of notes as well.
I've used PalmOS, and liked the integrated functionality and especially the Sync-With-MS-Outlook features, even though the OS in Palm3 - Palm7 days actually sucked rocks. Are text notes still limited to 4KB or whatever? (Unfortunately, I can no longer find the right drivers to sync my Palm7 with Outlook, plus my work laptop doesn't have a serial port any more:-) (And either Nokia's phone-sync software or my USB BlueTooth Widget's drivers or something also fail badly, so they can no longer sync up even though the could a year ago...)
Before I got the Palm3 I had a Psion 3A, an absolutely wonderful device that was one of the predecessors to Symbian. It was a bit too big, but in return it had a keyboard that let me type two-thumbed fast enough to take fairly full notes from phone messages or meetings, as opposed to PalmOS Graffiti which I was good at but could only do about half as fast.
If you take notes on dead tree scraps and want to import them into your calendar or real notes, where they're much easier to retrieve when you want them, you'll have to retype them anyway. If you've got a cellphone with a keyboard, that means you don't need to haul a second device around. In my case, I'll need to get a Crackberry(tm) for work, but I'm currently using voice notes on my cellphone when I don't have a computer handy.
There's an editor I used to put on all my DOS floppies called "TED" - it was 3KB of assembler, WYSIWYG monospaced text, and did most of what I needed if I didn't need regular expressions; otherwise I'd fire up some kind of vi or emacs clone. It was small enough that there was no reason to stick to EDLIN.
My DOS and Windows wallpaper back in those days was Saint Dogbert saying "Out Out!! You Demons of Stupidity!!" from the Dilbert cartoon, becuse that was obviously what "DOS" stood for.
I do have friends who were using the little HP palmtop computer that ran DOS as recently as a year or so ago; merely being way obsolete doesn't keep them from being one of the better personal organizers ever made. I had a Psion 3A that was of similar wonderfulness, though being a bit larger and heavier meant it got dropped a bit more often and eventually died.
Sure, it's easy to just discard everything older than X. The problem is that there _is_ data you need to keep for a long time, so that crude an approach isn't very effective. (For instance, for financial records you need to keep a record of everything you've bought until you sell it or declare it fully depreciated, and then keep those records for N years longer for tax purposes.)
For my work, I don't usually need files much older than 2-3 years, but occasionally I do need to drag out something 10 years old (typically standards documents or RFCs, though), and one of my customers has an access ring that we installed 4-5 years ago and occasionally need to look up things about. In the telecom business, you regularly need to drag up design documents and database schemas for anything that's still in the field, which is sometimes quite antique. (For instance, the data format of a T1 hasn't changed much since the early 80s, and it's mostly the same as the ~1960 original, even though the implementation hardware and software have changed radically over the decades, and robbed-bit has mostly been abandoned. The European E1 standards were more flexible, since they learned some lessons from T1's signalling limitations, but that means that each different telco does some ugly unique cruft that you have to look up.)
Of course, there are extreme cases - my wife had a summer job in college converting a several-year-old database from a hand-rolled format into a then-current IBM database format, just in case the data got subpoenaed in an regulatory lawsuit of some sort (it never was, AFAIK.) But there's still telco data out there that predates the practical viability of the Relational Database...
George Bush The Elder stopped using the term "Voodoo Economics" when Reagan picked him to be VP, but it still applied, and he was happy to continue the practice himself. Dubya Bush's policies were quite similar, except they tended to be more of a "What, Me Worry?" form of it than Reagan's academic "Proof by Vigorous Assertion" approach.
John McSame is still talking to the same political base, because he needs their support, so he's still doing the same thing. Barack O'Bama, on the other hand, isn't much different - he's pretending that he's not going to raise taxes except for a few rich people who deserve it, and isn't saying how he's going to fix the deficit.
The Democrats are still the Party of Fiscal Responsibility by default, because even in their wildest dreams they're not going to be able to spend money as fast as Bush's military has. And they've got their own version of "Trickle-Down Economics", which is that instead of rich people spending money and having the leftovers trickle down to the little people, the government will spend money and the leftovers will trickle down to the little people. For the most part, I prefer how rich people spend money than how governments spend it, but YMMV.
IPv6 does have a mode where it autoconfigures devices using a munged version of the MAC address as the lower 64 bits of the address. (It's an ugly munge, not simply a 16-bit subnet plus 48-bit MAC, but in some sense it still gives you Netware-like autoconfig.) It's not clear how many people are going to use that mode, as opposed to a DHCP-replacement mode.
But that's not going to leak information about the wireless, because typically nobody outside your building is going to talk to the IP address of the wireless side of your router. Either they're going to talk to the IPv6 address of one of your computers, so they might see the MAC address of your laptop, or they might see the MAC address of the Ethernet side of your firewall, but that's different from the MAC address of the wireless side.
The stock didn't drop because Google News reported the story. It dropped because people read the story, not very carefully, and started selling in a panic. After that, of course, program trading tends to take over, and five minutes later people had noticed that it was a mistake and started buying again, real cheap, from people who were still panic-selling.
"Buy and Hold" is generally good, but if the stock's going bankrupt, holding it any longer isn't going to do you much good. You've got to know when to fold them.
(I once used a similar technique back during the Boom&Crash years, called "Wasn't paying attention that month", which cost me most of the value of a stock I held too much of - it went from ~60 to ~3, and never recovered past about ~5.)
Video's Down Already - Black Hole Successful
on
LHC Flips On Tomorrow
·
· Score: 2, Funny
If this were April 1, I'd have no problem with an announcement that the name's "Jaunty Jackalope". Are we going to end up with unicorns and sidehill goats, or perhaps dragons? Or is that just a placeholder for the _real_ J release?
Google became the dominant search engine for a couple of reasons - not only is it really fast and uncluttered, compared to some of its early competitors (remember Hotbot?), but PageRank did a good job of guessing what pages would be the most relevant and most interesting and displaying them first, and nobody's really caught up with them. On the other hand, they've still only got a bit more than 50% of the market - their two main competitors are staying in business.
In advertising, which is how Google makes most of their money, Google ads are uncluttered and fast, so they're not as annoying as other ads, making web site authors more willing to carry them, and apparently advertisers think Google does a good enough job of targeting ads to readers that they're more effective than their competitors or have a better price per result or something.
And unlike Microsoft, where the tight integration between the OS, device drivers, the mail system, the calendar, and Office makes it difficult to leave once you're addicted, it's easy for anybody to use another search engine instead of Google, or for an advertiser to use a different ad agency, and the reason Google stays on top is because they invest enough development money to keep their quality high.
Their website says they'd be interested to see what people do hacking it, and if you do something cool, please let them know. They say that it wasn't particularly designed to be easy to hack, and they don't know how, so you'll have to figure it out for yourself, but have fun.
If you've had material taken off your YouTube pages, and people who try to access it see that you were allegedly "violating YouTube's Terms of Service", or you've had your YouTube account canceled because the Co$ falsely claimed you were infringing, especially if you had your real name on the YouTube account, then your reputation has suffered (certainly your reputation with YouTube; possibly also with your adoring fanbase if you've got one.)
And maybe you'll only win $1 damages, or $1 + legal costs, but it's going to cost Co$ lawyer time to defend themselves, and losing repeatedly will make it harder for Co$ to get away with false accusations.
If the Co$ is sending people letters saying you're violating the law by infringing on their copyright, and it's not true, and they know it, doesn't that count as libel?
Slashdot Mirror
A few months ago there was an article in the NYTimes about the decline in various African cattle breeds as they're getting replaced by Holsteins and other First-World agribusiness cattle. The African cows were big-horned ornery creatures that are adapted for their environments; the Holsteins are weaker, more disease-prone, don't get along as well on the local vegetation - but produce about 10 times as much milk, which means that a small farmer can produce enough surplus income to send his kids to school, so the old breeds are getting replaced, in spite of the extra costs for things like medication. There are essentially no wild cattle these days; they've been domesticated for a long time, so if farmers stop using a given breed, it's pretty much lost to the gene pool.
I'm surprised these things are $900 - compare them with the "invisible fence" dog collars, which are about $100/receiver (plus the wiring in the ground, which is the more expensive par.) These may be a bit fancier, and while you want the batteries to last longer, you can put much heavier batteries on a cow than a dog.
It sounds to me like what they're really able to do is make open-range grazing more possible - the West was mostly unfenced until farmers started winning out and forcing ranchers to keep their cows fenced in. (That didn't mean there weren't corrals or whatever.) If this kind of technology works out, not only does it mean that farmers will have alternatives to maintaining fences, but also that wild animals will have less fencing to deal with, which will help them do whatever migration they need to.
I'm skeptical about the report, especially given the lack of any field studies with it. The useful life of a piece of computer equipment is usually 3-5 years; high-end graphics cards are probably shorter, because the main customers are gamers who need cutting-edge performance to kill orcs with.
So does "10-100 times longer" mean that significant fractions of nVidias are failing in 10 days - 3 months due to bad solder joints? Or does it mean that the solder joints in an ATI will last 30-300 years, long after anybody except a few retro gamers are interested in a graphics system that's mounted on a card in a separate box and doesn't interface directly to their optic nerves?
You could make something more useful than chum, pal...
I don't know, but my first reaction was that they were trying to say that rocks fractured the Mars Lander's plumbing, and my second reaction was that there should be a bad joke about plumber's cracks on Mars in there somewhere. Maybe you've just got better taste...
Plato thought the earth was round because spheres were really really cool perfectness. But by the time of Eratosthenes ~1700 years before Columbus, Greek astronomers had a pretty good idea how big the earth was (within 5-10%, depending on quite how long a stadia was), and they had a reasonably accurate estimate of the distance to the moon as well. An Indian astronomer around 500 AD had the circumference to within 60km. Columbus, on the other hand, thought the Earth was only 25000 km around, not 25000 miles (though in other units; it wasn't really a metric-English confusion, but it was a confusion about which kind of miles were being used :-), so as MatskEE says, he got very lucky that he into the Americas before he ran out of food and water.
On the other hand, he got out of Spain just after the Spanish Inquisition took over, and while maybe nobody expected it before then, lots of people expected it to continue once it had arrived.
Libertarians believe in personal freedom, economic freedom, and fiscal responsibility. Sarah Palin doesn't. About the closest she gets is that she knew enough to inhale when she smoked dope, but she's against legalizing it. But she thinks the Alaska constitution should be amended to give the state the power to decide who can get married, and thinks that schools shouldn't teach kids about contraception methods (other than the 100% reliable one, which is "expecting teenagers to stop at second base.")
Sarah Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it - as Governor, she took the money, and while she didn't build the bridge, she did build the access road to the bridge (and by the way, even in Alaska, why does a 3-mile gravel road cost $25M? That's about the price per mile of the Eisenhower Tunnel...) She took a town with no debt and left it with over $20M in debt for under 10000 people.
McCain, on the other hand, has plenty of experience dealing with failing mortgage institutions - the Keating 5's favorite S&L cost even more to bail out than the Silverado S&L, run by President GWBush's brother Neil.
Voice Notetaking on a cellphone is really convenient for short notes - in my case the phone's a Nokia, but many other phones can do it with varying UI qualities. After all, the phone has voice compression hardware, and any phone with a camera has enough memory to store a lot of notes as well.
I've used PalmOS, and liked the integrated functionality and especially the Sync-With-MS-Outlook features, even though the OS in Palm3 - Palm7 days actually sucked rocks. Are text notes still limited to 4KB or whatever? (Unfortunately, I can no longer find the right drivers to sync my Palm7 with Outlook, plus my work laptop doesn't have a serial port any more :-) (And either Nokia's phone-sync software or my USB BlueTooth Widget's drivers or something also fail badly, so they can no longer sync up even though the could a year ago...)
Before I got the Palm3 I had a Psion 3A, an absolutely wonderful device that was one of the predecessors to Symbian. It was a bit too big, but in return it had a keyboard that let me type two-thumbed fast enough to take fairly full notes from phone messages or meetings, as opposed to PalmOS Graffiti which I was good at but could only do about half as fast.
If you take notes on dead tree scraps and want to import them into your calendar or real notes, where they're much easier to retrieve when you want them, you'll have to retype them anyway. If you've got a cellphone with a keyboard, that means you don't need to haul a second device around. In my case, I'll need to get a Crackberry(tm) for work, but I'm currently using voice notes on my cellphone when I don't have a computer handy.
There's an editor I used to put on all my DOS floppies called "TED" - it was 3KB of assembler, WYSIWYG monospaced text, and did most of what I needed if I didn't need regular expressions; otherwise I'd fire up some kind of vi or emacs clone. It was small enough that there was no reason to stick to EDLIN.
My DOS and Windows wallpaper back in those days was Saint Dogbert saying "Out Out!! You Demons of Stupidity!!" from the Dilbert cartoon, becuse that was obviously what "DOS" stood for.
I do have friends who were using the little HP palmtop computer that ran DOS as recently as a year or so ago; merely being way obsolete doesn't keep them from being one of the better personal organizers ever made. I had a Psion 3A that was of similar wonderfulness, though being a bit larger and heavier meant it got dropped a bit more often and eventually died.
Sure, it's easy to just discard everything older than X. The problem is that there _is_ data you need to keep for a long time, so that crude an approach isn't very effective. (For instance, for financial records you need to keep a record of everything you've bought until you sell it or declare it fully depreciated, and then keep those records for N years longer for tax purposes.)
For my work, I don't usually need files much older than 2-3 years, but occasionally I do need to drag out something 10 years old (typically standards documents or RFCs, though), and one of my customers has an access ring that we installed 4-5 years ago and occasionally need to look up things about. In the telecom business, you regularly need to drag up design documents and database schemas for anything that's still in the field, which is sometimes quite antique. (For instance, the data format of a T1 hasn't changed much since the early 80s, and it's mostly the same as the ~1960 original, even though the implementation hardware and software have changed radically over the decades, and robbed-bit has mostly been abandoned. The European E1 standards were more flexible, since they learned some lessons from T1's signalling limitations, but that means that each different telco does some ugly unique cruft that you have to look up.)
Of course, there are extreme cases - my wife had a summer job in college converting a several-year-old database from a hand-rolled format into a then-current IBM database format, just in case the data got subpoenaed in an regulatory lawsuit of some sort (it never was, AFAIK.) But there's still telco data out there that predates the practical viability of the Relational Database...
If they're going to call them dwarf planets, they should name them after dwarves.
Probably some of the dwarves in Norse mythology have names? But certainly there's all the Tolkein dwarves, and the Disney dwarfs.
George Bush The Elder stopped using the term "Voodoo Economics" when Reagan picked him to be VP, but it still applied, and he was happy to continue the practice himself. Dubya Bush's policies were quite similar, except they tended to be more of a "What, Me Worry?" form of it than Reagan's academic "Proof by Vigorous Assertion" approach.
John McSame is still talking to the same political base, because he needs their support, so he's still doing the same thing.
Barack O'Bama, on the other hand, isn't much different - he's pretending that he's not going to raise taxes except for a few rich people who deserve it, and isn't saying how he's going to fix the deficit.
The Democrats are still the Party of Fiscal Responsibility by default, because even in their wildest dreams they're not going to be able to spend money as fast as Bush's military has. And they've got their own version of "Trickle-Down Economics", which is that instead of rich people spending money and having the leftovers trickle down to the little people, the government will spend money and the leftovers will trickle down to the little people. For the most part, I prefer how rich people spend money than how governments spend it, but YMMV.
IPv6 does have a mode where it autoconfigures devices using a munged version of the MAC address as the lower 64 bits of the address. (It's an ugly munge, not simply a 16-bit subnet plus 48-bit MAC, but in some sense it still gives you Netware-like autoconfig.) It's not clear how many people are going to use that mode, as opposed to a DHCP-replacement mode.
But that's not going to leak information about the wireless, because typically nobody outside your building is going to talk to the IP address of the wireless side of your router. Either they're going to talk to the IPv6 address of one of your computers, so they might see the MAC address of your laptop, or they might see the MAC address of the Ethernet side of your firewall, but that's different from the MAC address of the wireless side.
I don't know if Homeland Security has recruiting videos on YouTube, but their whole job is to make people afraid, so they certainly should be banned.
[insert "Old people in Pittsburgh" meme...]
It's only a Federal district court so far, so the Feds can still appeal it if they want. But it's an excellent start.
The stock didn't drop because Google News reported the story. It dropped because people read the story, not very carefully, and started selling in a panic. After that, of course, program trading tends to take over, and five minutes later people had noticed that it was a mistake and started buying again, real cheap, from people who were still panic-selling.
"Buy and Hold" is generally good, but if the stock's going bankrupt, holding it any longer isn't going to do you much good. You've got to know when to fold them.
(I once used a similar technique back during the Boom&Crash years, called "Wasn't paying attention that month", which cost me most of the value of a stock I held too much of - it went from ~60 to ~3, and never recovered past about ~5.)
Either that, or they're just slashdotted...
If this were April 1, I'd have no problem with an announcement that the name's "Jaunty Jackalope". Are we going to end up with unicorns and sidehill goats, or perhaps dragons? Or is that just a placeholder for the _real_ J release?
Google became the dominant search engine for a couple of reasons - not only is it really fast and uncluttered, compared to some of its early competitors (remember Hotbot?), but PageRank did a good job of guessing what pages would be the most relevant and most interesting and displaying them first, and nobody's really caught up with them. On the other hand, they've still only got a bit more than 50% of the market - their two main competitors are staying in business.
In advertising, which is how Google makes most of their money, Google ads are uncluttered and fast, so they're not as annoying as other ads, making web site authors more willing to carry them, and apparently advertisers think Google does a good enough job of targeting ads to readers that they're more effective than their competitors or have a better price per result or something.
And unlike Microsoft, where the tight integration between the OS, device drivers, the mail system, the calendar, and Office makes it difficult to leave once you're addicted, it's easy for anybody to use another search engine instead of Google, or for an advertiser to use a different ad agency, and the reason Google stays on top is because they invest enough development money to keep their quality high.
Their website says they'd be interested to see what people do hacking it, and if you do something cool, please let them know. They say that it wasn't particularly designed to be easy to hack, and they don't know how, so you'll have to figure it out for yourself, but have fun.
If you've had material taken off your YouTube pages, and people who try to access it see that you were allegedly "violating YouTube's Terms of Service", or you've had your YouTube account canceled because the Co$ falsely claimed you were infringing, especially if you had your real name on the YouTube account, then your reputation has suffered (certainly your reputation with YouTube; possibly also with your adoring fanbase if you've got one.)
And maybe you'll only win $1 damages, or $1 + legal costs, but it's going to cost Co$ lawyer time to defend themselves, and losing repeatedly will make it harder for Co$ to get away with false accusations.
If the Co$ is sending people letters saying you're violating the law by infringing on their copyright, and it's not true, and they know it, doesn't that count as libel?
That's probably on Youtube already, but this would let the government post the hai-rez versions.