I've been trying to short it for, oh, a year or more now, but each time I've checked, there have been no shortable shares available, at least at my brokerage.
FYI, I believe parent actually is the Richard Altman involved in this case. I received an email from the email address listed on the subpoena which refers to this post.
Wow, you have good vision. According to this article, the problem was that "the central region of the mirror was flatter than it should be - by just one-fiftieth of the width of a human hair". I'm impressed you were able to notice that just by looking at picture.
I suspect someone probably *CAN* figure out how to decipher the backup tape of Wikipedia a thousand years from now. We will call that person an archaeologist. Just as today archaeologists recover fragments of paper or papyrus or human femurs, archaeologists a thousand years from now (probably 200 years from now, actually) will recover fragments of disk drives and magnetic tapes and human femurs, and they'll try to figure out all of the same things about us that we're trying to figure out about our predecessors. Resources that have been preserved, like books and Wikipedia histories, will be useful too, just as books from historical times are useful now - but there will certainly be questions that they don't answer.
If there's a huge untapped supply of labor available, why do we want to develop labor-saving technology? It seems that to do so will simply worsen the problem of unemployment, by reducing the demand for labor while the supply is already too large.
Someone's always going to be at the bottom. If you could somehow get rid of all of the illegal immigrants (good luck with that, by the way), there would still be a class of people who produce less than the country's average GDP per capita. And if you got rid of them, that would raise the average, and now there would be a new class of people producing less than the average GDP per capita. And so on and so on until there was only 1 person left.
I don't think GDP per capita is a good measure of quality of life. Rich people hire non-rich people to do their taxes, fix their cars, clean their toilets, pick their fruit, etc. If you got rid of all of the people who do those jobs, the GDP per capita would be higher (at least in the short term) but the quality of life would be lower BOTH for the people who now had to do all of those menial jobs themselves instead of paying someone else AND for the people who were previously doing the jobs and who got expelled to some third-world country.
The argument that illegal immigrants use more social services than they contribute in taxes is probably bunk. If you have a citizen and an illegal alien who both work at the same construction company and do the same amount of work, I don't see any reason to assume that the illegal alien will use more social resources than the citizen. If anything, the illegal alien is going to work pretty damn hard to keep his or her nose clean for fear of deported, whereas the citizen has no such worry. As far as I can see, the *real* political problem here is that the citizen may feel that the illegal alien is a threat to his job.
If you buy something good with lots of room for expansion, and take good care of your computer, you shouldn't have to replace it every 2 years.
Alternatively, if you buy something that is merely adequate, even if it doesn't have much room for expansion, you won't spend as much money, and you can afford to replace it completely that much sooner.
I just drove 450 miles in my Prius and then put $16 of gas into it. The next generation Prius that's supposed to come out in 2007 or 2008 is supposed to get 94 EPA-estimated miles per gallon vs. 55 for the current generation. At that point the price difference per mile is marginal, and I don't have to worry about losing power to dielectric absorption while the car is not in use.
I don't think you have to be strapped for cash in order to not want to buy RHEL. It's really expensive. We've got about a dozen Linux servers here. If we put RHEL on all of them instead of Fedora (or some other free distro), it would cost us more than $4000/year just for updates (the $349 option doesn't actually provide much in the way of actual support). And if I had an extra $4000/year, I'd much rather buy more servers or upgrade existing servers than spend money on updates that I can get for free by using another distribution. Having to upgrade the OS every 2 years or so is mildly annoying, but realistically, a lot of servers get rebuilt on that timescale anyway for totally unrelated reasons (hardware failure, previous function no longer relevant, move to better hardware,...), so the amount of extra work it creates in practice isn't that much.
Hmm, well, if you won't discuss my points just because it's a Monday, they must not be valid. Oh wait. I freely admit that if you're just browsing the web Linux works fine. It is still slower than doing the same thing on Windows, and the fonts don't look as good, but it works. My wife will use it too if that's what I leave running on the computer, because it's not worth the trouble to reboot. She sometimes doesn't even notice that it is Linux, unless of course she wants to use Windows Media Player or iTunes. But I don't really care what she runs on her computer. I want to have a version of Linux that I can run on mine, and like, and I don't, because the X performance bugs me, the Nautilus settings that I can't figure out how to change bug me, the fonts bug me, the crappy wireless support bugs me, and as much as I'd like to have a Linux command line locally rather than having to log into a server over the network every time I need one, it's just not worth the trouble for me at this point.
In a larger sense, you and I and our respective families aren't very relevant. The real key to adoption is to get big companies to go for it. And then there's a whole other host of features that become relevant. You've got to be able to publish applications over the network, and remote X doesn't cut it, especially if they're Windows applications. RDP would work, but as far as I know is not supported. In some environments (e.g. schools), you've got to be able to control what software people can install and run on their machines. You've got to be able to show them that if they stop paying a million dollars a year to Microsoft (sometimes literally) and pay you some much smaller amount instead to maintain the systems, their users won't revolt. And I don't think we're quite there yet, not only because the kinds of problems that I've mentioned would keep me from getting buy-in for a switch here, but also because I don't see a lot of other companies switching either. Are there some? Yes. Many? No.
There's a couple of projects out there that are working on adding it (e.g. Mozilla Lightning), but I'm not sure how active they are or when they'll be ready. I don't think you need calendaring for your personal email, but I predict very few businesses will want to use a mail system that doesn't include it. I don't actually use it all that much even at work, but my coworkers who, unlike me, actually have a lot of meetings really rely on it to keep themselves organized.
I agree. Sometimes they're OK, but a lot of times they look really bad. When I install a new version of Fedora, I usually have to fiddle around with my terminal settings for 10 minutes or so to change the fonts, colors, etc. to something that I like (cf. PuTTY on Windows, which comes up with white on black in a reasonable font in the default install). And Firefox just never looks as good as it does on Windows. A lot of the other GNOME applications are OK, but geez, why does this have to be so hard?
Yes, I do mean Nautilus. And I'm sure it does have an option. But I spent 15 minutes looking for the preferences and couldn't find it. I just looked again and I still can't find it. I have a CS degree and ten years of work experience, I use Linux on a daily basis, and I can't find it. Maybe if I opened up every dotfile in my home directory and looked through them for possibly relevant settings, or read the source code, I could find it. But I don't really have time to do that kind of shit just to get my desktop to work. Sorry.
You're right, I did notice that when I was using Ubuntu, but it slipped my mind. I agree that Ubuntu is definitely better than Red Hat in terms of a desktop system, but it's still quite a hassle. I set up Evolution to access my mail and it ran so slowly that it was unusable (don't ask me why: I ran a packet sniffer on it and still couldn't figure it out). Thunderbird was better, but not as good as Thunderbird on Windows, which in turn is not as good as other mail clients on Windows (eg: no calendaring). Ubuntu's graphics performance also seems to be a bit snappier than Red Hat, but it's still noticeably slower than Windows, which is unfortunate. It seems like a very substantial part of the Linux community just doesn't care about X performance, which is probably because they're not actually using it as a desktop system. But it's baaaad. And that's just local X. Remote X is not even as good as VNC, and VNC is pathetic compared to RDP, which is excellent. Linux columnists like to talk about how Linux is ready for the desktop, but it's just not. The features are pretty close, but as long as the performance is noticeably worse, I don't think it's going to gain much traction.
Either that, or it's just that the Linux desktop isn't that great to begin with. I realize that's an arguable point, but it seems to me that, for example, Firefox running on Linux is significantly slower than Firefox running on Windows on the same hardware. I have to say the Windows desktop looks a lot more polished, too. And the fact that GNOME (at least on the systems that I've used) opens a new folder for every directory instead of replacing the contents of the current window is just really annoying. So I use Windows for my desktop stuff and Linux for development and other real work. YMMV.
I tried "water ice in haddon township, nj". There are three water ice stands within a mile of my house, but none of them are listed here. In fact, none of the places that ARE on this list even sell "water ice". (For those not lucky enough to have had it, water ice is similar to Italian ice - it's a dessert made from flavored ice, mostly fruit flavors.) And if I put my actual address in, it finds the wrong house (wrong side of the street, several houses away from where I actually live).
Of course, unelected judges are not much better, since they can make decisions with which the vast majority of citizens disagree, and you can't even vote them out of office. If you don't elect your judges, their decisions won't be biased by the fear of not getting re-elected, but that doesn't mean they'll be unbiased. In fact, it may very well mean that they'll use their seat on the bench to push their own personal agenda.
If that's the problem, then let them complain "this code has no comments" rather than "this code has no revision history". Sure, it would be easier if they had the revision history, but, well, so what? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
The commerical adoption of open source software has been been a tremendous boon to the open source community. People like Linus Torvalds (and many others) are getting paid to write software instead of doing it in their spare time. That's *really* *good*. We're getting BETTER software that we can use FOR FREE.
Whereas otherwise you could always hope that the process wasn't important to whatever it was the camcorder was doing?
Even if you assume that the process that crashes is bound to be doing something important, you can recover from an isolated crash just by restarting the process. On the other hand, if processes aren't isolated, the defunct process may have corrupted kernel memory, and your system may become unstable in unpredictable ways or even just die (and need a hard reboot to get back online).
On the other hand, it sounds like this thing reboots PDQ, so maybe having to have the user hit the power button twice if something goes wrong is not the end of the world.
Still, memory protection and process isolation contribute powerfully to system stability. You have to really want to squeeze out every possible drop of system performance to be willing to get rid of them (or not know what you're doing, which I doubt is the case here).
Unless I'm mistaken here, this will allow one process to take down the entire machine, just like Windows. I've always said that the problem with Linux is that it needs to be made just as fast and reliable as Windows.
(Before someone mentions it, yes, I know that Windows has memory management. But it also has poor process isolation, of which this design creates a more extreme version.)
Wait, wait, you're joking...
on
MySQL CEO Interview
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Here we have the CEO of a company saying, basically, that his company is going to do well this year.
And just for making that unremarkable statement, he makes the Slashdot homepage?
News flash! It's the CEO's job to promote the company. They all do that. Even Darl.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to short it for, oh, a year or more now, but each time I've checked, there have been no shortable shares available, at least at my brokerage.
FYI, I believe parent actually is the Richard Altman involved in this case. I received an email from the email address listed on the subpoena which refers to this post.
Just out of curiosity, how did they suck? What are you looking for in a PostgreSQL support company?
Wow, you have good vision. According to this article, the problem was that "the central region of the mirror was flatter than it should be - by just one-fiftieth of the width of a human hair". I'm impressed you were able to notice that just by looking at picture.
I suspect someone probably *CAN* figure out how to decipher the backup tape of Wikipedia a thousand years from now. We will call that person an archaeologist. Just as today archaeologists recover fragments of paper or papyrus or human femurs, archaeologists a thousand years from now (probably 200 years from now, actually) will recover fragments of disk drives and magnetic tapes and human femurs, and they'll try to figure out all of the same things about us that we're trying to figure out about our predecessors. Resources that have been preserved, like books and Wikipedia histories, will be useful too, just as books from historical times are useful now - but there will certainly be questions that they don't answer.
I mean... since they don't do any verification anyway... and the customer service is terrible... why does it cost hundreds of dollars?
If there's a huge untapped supply of labor available, why do we want to develop labor-saving technology? It seems that to do so will simply worsen the problem of unemployment, by reducing the demand for labor while the supply is already too large.
Someone's always going to be at the bottom. If you could somehow get rid of all of the illegal immigrants (good luck with that, by the way), there would still be a class of people who produce less than the country's average GDP per capita. And if you got rid of them, that would raise the average, and now there would be a new class of people producing less than the average GDP per capita. And so on and so on until there was only 1 person left.
I don't think GDP per capita is a good measure of quality of life. Rich people hire non-rich people to do their taxes, fix their cars, clean their toilets, pick their fruit, etc. If you got rid of all of the people who do those jobs, the GDP per capita would be higher (at least in the short term) but the quality of life would be lower BOTH for the people who now had to do all of those menial jobs themselves instead of paying someone else AND for the people who were previously doing the jobs and who got expelled to some third-world country.
The argument that illegal immigrants use more social services than they contribute in taxes is probably bunk. If you have a citizen and an illegal alien who both work at the same construction company and do the same amount of work, I don't see any reason to assume that the illegal alien will use more social resources than the citizen. If anything, the illegal alien is going to work pretty damn hard to keep his or her nose clean for fear of deported, whereas the citizen has no such worry. As far as I can see, the *real* political problem here is that the citizen may feel that the illegal alien is a threat to his job.
I just drove 450 miles in my Prius and then put $16 of gas into it. The next generation Prius that's supposed to come out in 2007 or 2008 is supposed to get 94 EPA-estimated miles per gallon vs. 55 for the current generation. At that point the price difference per mile is marginal, and I don't have to worry about losing power to dielectric absorption while the car is not in use.
I don't think you have to be strapped for cash in order to not want to buy RHEL. It's really expensive. We've got about a dozen Linux servers here. If we put RHEL on all of them instead of Fedora (or some other free distro), it would cost us more than $4000/year just for updates (the $349 option doesn't actually provide much in the way of actual support). And if I had an extra $4000/year, I'd much rather buy more servers or upgrade existing servers than spend money on updates that I can get for free by using another distribution. Having to upgrade the OS every 2 years or so is mildly annoying, but realistically, a lot of servers get rebuilt on that timescale anyway for totally unrelated reasons (hardware failure, previous function no longer relevant, move to better hardware, ...), so the amount of extra work it creates in practice isn't that much.
Hmm, well, if you won't discuss my points just because it's a Monday, they must not be valid. Oh wait. I freely admit that if you're just browsing the web Linux works fine. It is still slower than doing the same thing on Windows, and the fonts don't look as good, but it works. My wife will use it too if that's what I leave running on the computer, because it's not worth the trouble to reboot. She sometimes doesn't even notice that it is Linux, unless of course she wants to use Windows Media Player or iTunes. But I don't really care what she runs on her computer. I want to have a version of Linux that I can run on mine, and like, and I don't, because the X performance bugs me, the Nautilus settings that I can't figure out how to change bug me, the fonts bug me, the crappy wireless support bugs me, and as much as I'd like to have a Linux command line locally rather than having to log into a server over the network every time I need one, it's just not worth the trouble for me at this point.
In a larger sense, you and I and our respective families aren't very relevant. The real key to adoption is to get big companies to go for it. And then there's a whole other host of features that become relevant. You've got to be able to publish applications over the network, and remote X doesn't cut it, especially if they're Windows applications. RDP would work, but as far as I know is not supported. In some environments (e.g. schools), you've got to be able to control what software people can install and run on their machines. You've got to be able to show them that if they stop paying a million dollars a year to Microsoft (sometimes literally) and pay you some much smaller amount instead to maintain the systems, their users won't revolt. And I don't think we're quite there yet, not only because the kinds of problems that I've mentioned would keep me from getting buy-in for a switch here, but also because I don't see a lot of other companies switching either. Are there some? Yes. Many? No.
There's a couple of projects out there that are working on adding it (e.g. Mozilla Lightning), but I'm not sure how active they are or when they'll be ready. I don't think you need calendaring for your personal email, but I predict very few businesses will want to use a mail system that doesn't include it. I don't actually use it all that much even at work, but my coworkers who, unlike me, actually have a lot of meetings really rely on it to keep themselves organized.
I agree. Sometimes they're OK, but a lot of times they look really bad. When I install a new version of Fedora, I usually have to fiddle around with my terminal settings for 10 minutes or so to change the fonts, colors, etc. to something that I like (cf. PuTTY on Windows, which comes up with white on black in a reasonable font in the default install). And Firefox just never looks as good as it does on Windows. A lot of the other GNOME applications are OK, but geez, why does this have to be so hard?
Yes, I do mean Nautilus. And I'm sure it does have an option. But I spent 15 minutes looking for the preferences and couldn't find it. I just looked again and I still can't find it. I have a CS degree and ten years of work experience, I use Linux on a daily basis, and I can't find it. Maybe if I opened up every dotfile in my home directory and looked through them for possibly relevant settings, or read the source code, I could find it. But I don't really have time to do that kind of shit just to get my desktop to work. Sorry.
You're right, I did notice that when I was using Ubuntu, but it slipped my mind. I agree that Ubuntu is definitely better than Red Hat in terms of a desktop system, but it's still quite a hassle. I set up Evolution to access my mail and it ran so slowly that it was unusable (don't ask me why: I ran a packet sniffer on it and still couldn't figure it out). Thunderbird was better, but not as good as Thunderbird on Windows, which in turn is not as good as other mail clients on Windows (eg: no calendaring). Ubuntu's graphics performance also seems to be a bit snappier than Red Hat, but it's still noticeably slower than Windows, which is unfortunate. It seems like a very substantial part of the Linux community just doesn't care about X performance, which is probably because they're not actually using it as a desktop system. But it's baaaad. And that's just local X. Remote X is not even as good as VNC, and VNC is pathetic compared to RDP, which is excellent. Linux columnists like to talk about how Linux is ready for the desktop, but it's just not. The features are pretty close, but as long as the performance is noticeably worse, I don't think it's going to gain much traction.
Either that, or it's just that the Linux desktop isn't that great to begin with. I realize that's an arguable point, but it seems to me that, for example, Firefox running on Linux is significantly slower than Firefox running on Windows on the same hardware. I have to say the Windows desktop looks a lot more polished, too. And the fact that GNOME (at least on the systems that I've used) opens a new folder for every directory instead of replacing the contents of the current window is just really annoying. So I use Windows for my desktop stuff and Linux for development and other real work. YMMV.
I tried "water ice in haddon township, nj". There are three water ice stands within a mile of my house, but none of them are listed here. In fact, none of the places that ARE on this list even sell "water ice". (For those not lucky enough to have had it, water ice is similar to Italian ice - it's a dessert made from flavored ice, mostly fruit flavors.) And if I put my actual address in, it finds the wrong house (wrong side of the street, several houses away from where I actually live).
Of course, unelected judges are not much better, since they can make decisions with which the vast majority of citizens disagree, and you can't even vote them out of office. If you don't elect your judges, their decisions won't be biased by the fear of not getting re-elected, but that doesn't mean they'll be unbiased. In fact, it may very well mean that they'll use their seat on the bench to push their own personal agenda.
If that's the problem, then let them complain "this code has no comments" rather than "this code has no revision history". Sure, it would be easier if they had the revision history, but, well, so what? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
It's not good enough to have the actual code, we have to have every version of the code that ever existed in order to do anything...
The commerical adoption of open source software has been been a tremendous boon to the open source community. People like Linus Torvalds (and many others) are getting paid to write software instead of doing it in their spare time. That's *really* *good*. We're getting BETTER software that we can use FOR FREE.
Whereas otherwise you could always hope that the process wasn't important to whatever it was the camcorder was doing?
Even if you assume that the process that crashes is bound to be doing something important, you can recover from an isolated crash just by restarting the process. On the other hand, if processes aren't isolated, the defunct process may have corrupted kernel memory, and your system may become unstable in unpredictable ways or even just die (and need a hard reboot to get back online).
On the other hand, it sounds like this thing reboots PDQ, so maybe having to have the user hit the power button twice if something goes wrong is not the end of the world.
Still, memory protection and process isolation contribute powerfully to system stability. You have to really want to squeeze out every possible drop of system performance to be willing to get rid of them (or not know what you're doing, which I doubt is the case here).
Unless I'm mistaken here, this will allow one process to take down the entire machine, just like Windows. I've always said that the problem with Linux is that it needs to be made just as fast and reliable as Windows.
(Before someone mentions it, yes, I know that Windows has memory management. But it also has poor process isolation, of which this design creates a more extreme version.)
Here we have the CEO of a company saying, basically, that his company is going to do well this year.
And just for making that unremarkable statement, he makes the Slashdot homepage?
News flash! It's the CEO's job to promote the company. They all do that. Even Darl.