Evolutionary selection depends on the "less fit" dying.
This is not entirely true. Evolutionary selection depends mainly on
mutation
combination of good solutions (mating) in new generations
A less fit species does not have to die, although it will exist in much lower quantities than those that are more fit.
Because the less fit don't necessarily die out, some qualities they have can be kept in the population for quite a while until a change in external circumstances renders them fit again. Also, although being overall less fit, they still might have some good genes that the more fit do not and mating with them will provide the more fit with good qualities.
Finishing the evolutionary analogy: Debian and Ubuntu will probably coexist for the time being, their popularity fluctuating according to various external factors. They might even eventually depend upon mating with each other in order not to become inbred and thereby more vulnerable to unknown diseases!
This whole article sounds exactly like it is introduced: Something that will sound good to president Bush, who has already made up his mind (feel free to mod down).
Still, the author does put a nice economic sounding spin to his argument.
Risk management catchphrases:
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket",
"diversify your portfolio",
"spread your risk",
Supply and demand:
The most valuable part of the universe is life: not only because life is important, but because life appears to be extremely rare.
This all sounds well and good but I think the author might give "cost-effectiveness" a look.
Cost-effectiveness is "a comparison between the relative expenditure (costs) and outcome (effects) associated with two or more courses of outcome."
The US administration contends that the Koyoto agreement is too costly to implement. How about increasing the value of our current investment (earth) by decreasing the probability that something might go wrong (global warming).
Surely it is more cost-effective to limit Co2 emissions that to burn away and aim for Mars in 2030?
Also, if life is so valuble due to its rarity, why jump the gun and send astronauts out to do what robots can do just as well (and they can for now)?
Investing in artificial intelligence has a higher probability of returning an eventual profit that investing in life support. We're more likely to be able to use AI in various indurstries than we are of making earth inhabitable in the near future.
When we've got the AI technology right, we'll send robots out to colonize and will therefore have to do less research into life support.
So I am reading a book and I come across a word I don't know. What do I do? I take note of it (if I can determine what the sentence is trying to convey without knowing the word) and I go and look it up later.
This RTFM approach to the problem won't solve anything. Why does the phrase "read the fucking manual" exist in the first place? Because people never do!
Whether you look a word up in the dictionary or not depends on how often you see something you don't understand. My first language isn't English and when reading the language, I encounter such words quite frequently. What I usually do is forget the words I don't understand, which happens approx. every other page, and in the end I always manage to follow the story anyway.
This is what the average not-so-computer-literate person is doing except the story they are reading has a few security related twists they miss out on because they encounter the words every other sentence, not every other page.
Yahoo spent $339 on research vs. Google's $139 (where it all went is a mystery though)
Yahoo has 5,500 employees vs. Google's 1,907
Each user spent 4.8 hours on Yahoo per month vs. Google's 0.6
Yahoo gets 119 million unique visitors per month vs. Google's 72 million.
(Data represents four quarters ending Sept. 2004).
Although Yahoo may not be as geek friendly (and therefore Slashdot friendly I guess) as Google, it has a lot of customers and is the starting point for a large part of the web-surfing population.
To me, this seems like very good leverage to squeeze into Google's main revenue source, targeded ads.
Another interesting article on Wiki at Wired, The Book Stops Here, discusses some interesting points regarding the difference between Wikipedia and other more traditional encyclopedias.
The article sheds a light on the interesting "power structure" of wikipedia, i.e. some users have the power to "lock" pages that are changed to often and so on.
One would think that at some stage, a more Linux like "patch accepted/rejected" system would be beneficial. It could be a two tier system, "This article was accepted by Someone" and "This is a new article and hasn't been reviewed". It would be an attepmt to get the best of both worlds, the respectability of traditional encyclopedias and the variety and width of an online wiki.
A crucial part of the wording here is that the judge "tentatively ruled" in favour of Apple.
The article also says that it is a preliminary ruling and that the case is still being argued.
Other than the "respect" we give him for being able to pull it off
I'm not sure if we should give him any "respect" - quotation marks or no.
The article doesn't say anything about how he did it so it might well have been Mitnick style "hacking" , involving tricking people over the phone to give out passwords (also called social engineering which he wrote a book on).
So this might have been a confidence hack rather than a techie hack, although I admit I don't know which it was...
eBay never reveals much data on the amount of fraud that goes on through their site, but according to an article an fraud protection at ebay on CNet, fraudulent transactions on eBay in 2002 amounted to millions of dollars.
It would have to suck being swindled for a car and getting a robotic email reply when trying to find out what went wrong...
Using MSN, searching for "bill gates" returns the mabus anti-christ page in first place in the.uk domain and second place in the.com domain.
Using Google, his homepage appears in first place on both domains.
I agree that I should have used.co.uk or.com in both searches, but I get the sneaking suspicion that the positive result on search.msn.com might be the result of some adventurous if statement;)
Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does
on
Inspecting MSN Search
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It's all well and good, but it is a shame that competitors are having such a hard time producing a product that looks as cool and slick as the iPod.
Compared to the iPod and the mini, these products are just plain ugly. (IMHO). Until the competitors manage to steal or match Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief industrial design talent, the iPod will reign supreme.
Since I'm financially challenged and these products are aesthetically challenged, I'll go without an mp3 player for now.
A good thing about Wikipedia is that it has entries that won't make it to other more "respected" sources until much later. This is good for all sorts of cultural phenomenons, especially web/technical related.
If Wikipedia's entry for the Effect would suffer from it after being discussed here, the world would certainly implode in a puff of poetic logic would it not?
Slashdot Mirror
thinking exponentially
I wish I could think exponentially...
I only manage logarithmically...
Maybe that's why I'm not a "Futurist"... Does that make me a Pastist?
Erm, can I buy airline tickets with it? Or make bids on eBay?
Although the sidebar is nice, stating that it eliminates the need for IE or Firefox is just plain ridiculous...
Or to put it like dictionary.com:
Moon: Slang. The Bared buttocks.
But I guess that would have been buttocks.google.com.
The production of which would undoubtedly cause yet another jump in their stock value.
This is not entirely true. Evolutionary selection depends mainly on
A less fit species does not have to die, although it will exist in much lower quantities than those that are more fit.
Because the less fit don't necessarily die out, some qualities they have can be kept in the population for quite a while until a change in external circumstances renders them fit again. Also, although being overall less fit, they still might have some good genes that the more fit do not and mating with them will provide the more fit with good qualities.
Finishing the evolutionary analogy: Debian and Ubuntu will probably coexist for the time being, their popularity fluctuating according to various external factors. They might even eventually depend upon mating with each other in order not to become inbred and thereby more vulnerable to unknown diseases!
Still, the author does put a nice economic sounding spin to his argument.
Risk management catchphrases:
Supply and demand:
This all sounds well and good but I think the author might give "cost-effectiveness" a look.
Cost-effectiveness is "a comparison between the relative expenditure (costs) and outcome (effects) associated with two or more courses of outcome."
The US administration contends that the Koyoto agreement is too costly to implement. How about increasing the value of our current investment (earth) by decreasing the probability that something might go wrong (global warming).
Surely it is more cost-effective to limit Co2 emissions that to burn away and aim for Mars in 2030?
Also, if life is so valuble due to its rarity, why jump the gun and send astronauts out to do what robots can do just as well (and they can for now)? Investing in artificial intelligence has a higher probability of returning an eventual profit that investing in life support. We're more likely to be able to use AI in various indurstries than we are of making earth inhabitable in the near future.
When we've got the AI technology right, we'll send robots out to colonize and will therefore have to do less research into life support.
This RTFM approach to the problem won't solve anything. Why does the phrase "read the fucking manual" exist in the first place? Because people never do!
Whether you look a word up in the dictionary or not depends on how often you see something you don't understand. My first language isn't English and when reading the language, I encounter such words quite frequently. What I usually do is forget the words I don't understand, which happens approx. every other page, and in the end I always manage to follow the story anyway.
This is what the average not-so-computer-literate person is doing except the story they are reading has a few security related twists they miss out on because they encounter the words every other sentence, not every other page.
Yahoo spent $339 on research vs. Google's $139 (where it all went is a mystery though)
Yahoo has 5,500 employees vs. Google's 1,907
Each user spent 4.8 hours on Yahoo per month vs. Google's 0.6
Yahoo gets 119 million unique visitors per month vs. Google's 72 million.
(Data represents four quarters ending Sept. 2004).
Although Yahoo may not be as geek friendly (and therefore Slashdot friendly I guess) as Google, it has a lot of customers and is the starting point for a large part of the web-surfing population.
To me, this seems like very good leverage to squeeze into Google's main revenue source, targeded ads.
Another interesting article on Wiki at Wired, The Book Stops Here, discusses some interesting points regarding the difference between Wikipedia and other more traditional encyclopedias.
The article sheds a light on the interesting "power structure" of wikipedia, i.e. some users have the power to "lock" pages that are changed to often and so on.
One would think that at some stage, a more Linux like "patch accepted/rejected" system would be beneficial. It could be a two tier system, "This article was accepted by Someone" and "This is a new article and hasn't been reviewed". It would be an attepmt to get the best of both worlds, the respectability of traditional encyclopedias and the variety and width of an online wiki.
A crucial part of the wording here is that the judge "tentatively ruled" in favour of Apple. The article also says that it is a preliminary ruling and that the case is still being argued.
The article doesn't say anything about how he did it so it might well have been Mitnick style "hacking" , involving tricking people over the phone to give out passwords (also called social engineering which he wrote a book on).
So this might have been a confidence hack rather than a techie hack, although I admit I don't know which it was...
eBay never reveals much data on the amount of fraud that goes on through their site, but according to an article an fraud protection at ebay on CNet, fraudulent transactions on eBay in 2002 amounted to millions of dollars.
It would have to suck being swindled for a car and getting a robotic email reply when trying to find out what went wrong...
Using MSN, searching for "bill gates" returns the mabus anti-christ page in first place in the .uk domain and second place in the .com domain.
.co.uk or .com in both searches, but I get the sneaking suspicion that the positive result on search.msn.com might be the result of some adventurous if statement ;)
Using Google, his homepage appears in first place on both domains.
I agree that I should have used
Searching for 'bill gates' in MSN returns the page Bill Gates As Mabus. Apparently this project is dedicated to finding the human manifestation of the anti-Christ.
None of the first 10 results (searching from the uk) return his homepage.
Searching with Google turns up Bill Gates' Web Site - Home Page.
Which means: Stick to Google.
Compared to the iPod and the mini, these products are just plain ugly. (IMHO). Until the competitors manage to steal or match Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief industrial design talent, the iPod will reign supreme.
Since I'm financially challenged and these products are aesthetically challenged, I'll go without an mp3 player for now.
I was actually quite happy that my Mandrake distro contained both, so that I could try each of them out and make up my mind on which to use.
After using both for about a month I ended up with KDE, but being a clueless, ex-Windows user, I'm not quite sure why.
An example is The Slashdot Effect.
If Wikipedia's entry for the Effect would suffer from it after being discussed here, the world would certainly implode in a puff of poetic logic would it not?