The reason that Zero Sum Games are so popular is that there is a point to them. In a day and age where people are without direction and have no idea what they are here for, it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up.
Of course it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up, but our brains work the same way they did thousands of years ago. We still wake, work, eat, shit, and sleep.
Competition has always been a part of life. You compete for work, for accomodation, for attention of the opposite sex, etc. To say life is pointless is pretty lame, sorry.
To get this back on track with some sense of realism, there are people who enjoy mindless entertainment, and today it's easier to find it. Television, Nintendo, PS2, they didn't EXIST back in the day where people lived hand-to-mouth. The games people played then are similar to those played by kindergarten kids the world over - get stuff, pretend it's other stuff, and make your own reality. Sometimes it's just making a stone into a person and playing shop (Barbie dolls, the Simms, lots of other toys considered suited to girls, all sexism aside) sometimes it's making a stone into a person and playing beat-em-up (WWF toys, Action man, Quake, and lots of other toys considered suited to boys, all sexism aside).
Basically, role-play is the oldest, most basic, and most persistent form of game. It just so happens that the role a lot of people (typically young males, actually) would like to play is to go around blowing crap up.
Nothing to do with "pointless" or "meaningful". It's a game. You play it to have fun.
-- We may be human, but we're still animals.
What's more important than "counting votes" is what to do with the count.
The US Collegiate system is a skewed way of dealing with what could be much simpler.
In the UK, they use a system called "First past the post", which means they count all the votes in local elections for local representatives, and whoever gets the most votes wins that seat. The party with the most seats in parliament runs that government, and their leader becomes the Prime Minister.
But even this is not really fair. In Ireland, we use a similar parliamentary seat count to choose the ruling party, but the seats are voted using Proportional Representation which means the most popular guy probably still gets in, but no-one unpopular gets in - said another way, you get to choose your first, second preferences - if your first doesn't qualify, then your vote goes to your second choice, and so on. This way, only the candidates with some measure of universal appeal get in - none of this two-party polarisation.
That leads to the current almost farcical situation of a "rainbow coalition", a multi-party leadership with many differing policies, all in power together.
*sigh* -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
An interface like TAPI or CSTA should not be too difficult to implement - I work a lot with PBX, PABX, un-PBX equipment, and a common request in the current call-centre market is for CT - interoperability between some agent-focussed CRM software, and the best telephony solution out there. Often the best way to go is a little bit of glue code sitting between the two.
The current business world being what it is, Win32 is where the IS team have their expertise, and that is where the direction is forced to go for now, but with the continual expansion of Linux and *BSD into the mainstream, it can't be too long before the big black box makers, Nortel, Lucent, Ericsson, Mitel, Tadiran, Toshiba, Panasonic, start wandering down the reliability route.
Another route worth watching is CTMedia. This is an emerging technology, still in development, but backed by M$. Although touted as an "Open Standard", the idea is based on a M$ OS, but may expand outwards - Dialogic (who make the hardware) have support for Linux currently.
And for something M$ should worry about - an interface they don't have much input into, see this article, specifically the bits about SCSA, although it's a good all-round discussion of various technologies.
/prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
You're making a lot of pretty nasty claims there. Why don't I see any references, links, backup?
If this were a scientific paper, it would be shot down. In flames:-)
If you believe your points, please share. I'd be very interested to agree with you, if you had but a shred of evidence to hold your arguments up. -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
FETs and their relatives MOSFETs use this type of behaviour. Physically the canisters have three (or more) connectors, but electrically only two are in the conductive path - the third provides an electric charge, a field which controls the conduction. Hence, "Field Effect Transistor".
Something like this:
~~~I
---O---
(badly drawn, I know:-)
The charge provided by the I lead affects the field through the "ball", which in a FET is a layered piece of silicon (MOSFET is different, "Metal Oxide Semiconductor"), the width of the layer is effectively controlled by the field, sort of like a water pipe with a magnetically controlled valve: The valve doesn't have to be manually connected, you could just wave a magnet around.
Hope I'm making sense... /prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
First, the support engineer (me) was paid an extra $120 per month for being permanently on call, volume of calls was about 3 - 4 per week. This works out at approx $10 per call
Then calls got more numerous, support staff got increased, so we shifted. We counted our daily calls, average call times, and came up with:
45 mins per call,
8 - 12 calls per day shift per agent (it's a complex software product)
7 Out of hours calls per week
This didn't warrant an extra person, but it did warrant an extra person day per week. We decided that if it grew to any more we would extend the working day by an hour each way, to reduce the out of hours calls.
As you have a 24 hour operation, there may be some munging of numbers, but if you expect 20 - 30 calls per week = 4 calls per day, you might ask for another body to handle the graveyard shift, even if he is sitting on his butt for 3/4 the time. You may even get a CS undergrad to work nights for relatively cheaply:-)
/prak
ps To all CS undergrads: don't take this personally! I would have jumped at the chance for a nighttime helpdesk job in my early days...
I get the impression that UnitedStates.gov places less emphasis on something if it is not going to do something for their defense strategy.
Back in the days when the Big Red USSR had plans and schemes and rockets and ICBMs and stuff, and was commie to boot, they were the heydays of NASA, Star Wars, etc.
Now all we have is Saddam and a few ickle upstarts. It'll be interesting to see what happens when China gets a foothold in space (if such a thing is possible), that last big bastion of red-ity.
/prak
-- We may be human, but we're still animals.
Yeah - nice idea. Collect "mojo" to allow you to download other people's stuff.... stinks of Karma, eh?:-)
So the RIAA sees this, thinks it's a good idea, although Real Bucks could make them Bucks, none of this Mojo stuff... they launch an offensive, succeed in getting a Cease and Desist, and release their own version??
And speaking as a musician... I'd rather be paid in Real Bucks than "mojo"... there are two flaws: according to the article, "it's voluntary... not unlike tipping in restaurants..." kinda like busking online? And secondly, how's "mojo" gonna pay the rent?
Back to playing Monopoly with Monopoly money. Or wait for a sanctioned version of "mojo". No wait, that'll have adverts. Bummer.
/prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
As someone close to the product cycle of a large software product, I can say these guys are going in the right direction.
Their techies are fighting a losing battle: to include a feature, or not. You see, the product/build/whatever manager has to commit to a delivery date so that the marketing, delivery, and sales efforts can come together at a reasonably coherent time.
The techies then have to get nose to the grindstone to match up with the expectations of the product/build/whatever manager, and get the features they promised out the door in time. Even if they have an even cooler feature that didn't make the list, but they feel makes the grade.
By seeing them releasing a "2.96" version of GCC, one which GNU would obviously like to see waiting until a more publicly acceptable major release, they're showing they have a structure in place that favours "release early, release often" more than "wait for the proper product". We're seeing here the coming together of all the best ideas of Open Source, with the best management control. Alan Cox approves, he's even allowing the inclusion of a patch that hasn't made it into the mainstream kernel...
Having said that though... I can't wait for version 7.1:-)
/prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
CRTs may flicker at 60Hz or 90Hz or whatever, but there is some phospor-related "staying power"... how is that done with plasma???
LCD has even MORE staying power, due to the fact that it's a lump of thixotropic stuff flowing around changing phase, rather than a lump of glowing phospor reacting to radiation.
/prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
Having had the "pleasure" of manning a company's stand at some trade shows recently, I can truthfully say plasma screens are not good for your health.
Try standing in front of one of these puppies for a couple of hours, talking punters through all the features of your latest product, staring at this humongous plasma screen - I was more green than the Energis balloon (and it was green).
Has anyone actually sat down in front of one of these to say, watch a movie or something? Do they work??? Without making you vomit, like??
Roll on virtual stereographic glasses...
/prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
As a race, we have pushed further and further along a path away from nature. There are many - for want of a better word - "zealots" who claim to be "for nature" etc. Maybe they are right. Maybe that guy in the article claiming that guars should grow up in guar jungles, surrounded by guar trees and guar babies, maybe he's right. But then he can't see the wood for the trees.
So, thousands and thousands of years ago some clever homonid decided that a stick was better at braining things than his fist. That was against nature, no?
Soon after that, another clever homonid found that rubbing sticks together, or banging a rock off another rock, could start fire, making dead things easier and tastier to eat. Was not that also against nature?
And so on. Man (meant in the non-sexist way:-) has spent all his time since then developing new and better ways to use his surroundings. We have McDonalds, Pepsi, Nike, Ford, etc., all different ways to do the same things we've been doing since before we were we - eating, drinking, getting from place to place. Except now we do it in style.
We have been farming for many thousands of years. Is that not against nature?
Time perhaps for some new-age philosopher to step forth from the ranks and announce the radical thought that maybe man was right to develop the stick. Maybe man was right to develop the wheel, even. And fire. And clothing. And multi-storey homes. And alternative modes of transport. At the rate we're going, heck even another place to live would be handy, as we're apparently ruining this planet as a habitat. But the point is we've had some power over nature for thousands of years, and no-one has drawn the line for us yet. Why stop now?
/prak
-- We may be human, but we're still animals.
Have to admit... haven't tried W2K on this laptop... have NT4 and RH6.2 dual-booting.
Two things:
o W2K may be all wonderful and shiny, but Linux knocks the socks off it for some things, like text processing, some scientific apps and instant stats generation. That's my use for it.
o A lot of the talk about web-pads and other mini-computer-thingies have centred on their using Linux... I haven't heard of any moving towards WinME or CE or any of their other stuff... so caging linux as a "server OS" doesn't swing. Linus publicly played Quake on it... I haven't seen many servers running Quake.
BTW, ESR is getting wadloads without "sucking down the bucks" from a company that doesn't use him... I could name many more. -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
They cite addiction and gambling as reasons to ban?
An acquaintance is now an avid golfer, after spending his life as an alcoholic, and becoming a gambler soon thereafter. Some people need an addiction, some addictions are more socially acceptable than others.
Should addictive pastimes be banned? I don't smoke, I drink to moderation, I/. periodically, most of my vices are irregular... but I am fortunate. I have no "addiction".
Should my acquaintance be banned from golf courses? Should golf courses be banned totally?
The answer is found in treating addictions, not in removing the drug.
-
"Politics is like a drug. It is highly addictive, and frequently hallucinogenic"
- Kevin Myers, the Irish times (slightly paraphrased due to bad memory) -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
So we have a study of performance on NT, ONE study. As anyone who has been following benchmarking issues (c.f. recent IIS vs. Apache on Dell) will know, we can't really guess anything from this test.
What would be VERY nice is if some enterprising lab got together (ArsTechnica, overclockers.com etc.?), played with this beasty with a number of configs, a number of OSs (NT, Linux, BeOS, BSD, etc), and ripped out a few stats.
Hey, even a comparitive IIS vs. Apache on THIS machine would be fun. How would PHP work with all of this code-morphing cache stuff?
Still, I have to wonder how much input Linus has in all - the focus at the press release time was VERY much on NT, except for the embarrassing Quake moment. Anyone know of a publicly available set of Linux tests on one of these?
Can't wait 'til the webpads though. That'll sort out the "debian on iPaq" trolls... -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
*Applauds the bean-counters in their ivory towers*
And so it continues... they will release the films in the cinema. It being a cult showing, everyone will go to see it, fan or not. The fans, film-buffs, and general public will buy the VHS when they release it. The fans and film-buffs will go for the better VCD. The fans will go for the DVD when they release the films one by one at the end of the I, II, III, IV, V, VI sequence.
Remind anyone of the Vinyl/Compact Cassette/CD fiasco of the late seventies and early eighties??? Yay, I had three formats of Brothers in Arms!
I was, oddly enough... I was around for the recent total solar (in Ireland), where everyone who wasn't chained to their desks was standing around looking like a mini festival crowd, only with spangly spectacles.... none of that with a lunar. Last lunar I saw I was working nights anyway... so I got to skive off. Didn't have to use the cheap welding goggles though...
Drat. This one's at nighttime, so no time skiving off to wander around outside the office wearing silly shiny overpriced paper goggles, staring at a heavenly body that's got a chunk ripped out of it.
Greg Bear, who no doubt lots of us know and love, wrote SLANT, which introduces itself by showing us a world of nano-medecine gone wrong. An entire culture based on medical nano, that crashes (no OT M$ Bashing, purleez).
It also discusses Nano used for weoponry... this is the scary part. It uses any available bits around it to manufacture big things that blow up and are very intelligent, etc. etc. You're right. It's scary.
Or Virtuosity, there was an interesting weapon made with nano and any available glass. And intelligence, but that's a whole other ball game.
It's been thought of before, and no doubt the Defense lads will swallow it up before it becomes mainstream, like they've done with numerous other technologies, and will do with many more.
This is starting to get sooooo off-topic, but I couldn't let it lie... Darwin was actually a religious man.. he didn't hate OR deny God. Hi was a botanist who wanted to study how species diverged despite geographical separation. It was accidental that his studies resulted in a theory (that has now been accepted as wrong by anthropologists, incidentally) which didn't agree with the creationist six-day theory. Darwin's work, and more since, solidified the idea of natural selection, which is easily witnessed even by lay-people of today, and this is the whole point of the humour behind the Darwin awards. An example: Two types of butterfly lived in Manchester over a hundred years ago... a pale one, and a dark one. They lived on birches, which are naturally silvery white. Along came the industrial revolution, which polluted the birches into blackness. The white ones suddenly became very visible to predators in their natural habitat, all but died out, having been dominant for many centuries. They were "naturally selected" out of existence. Then the city of Manchester worked on its pollution laws, the silver birches became silver again, and the pale butterflys, now camouflaged, were naturally selected back in again. OK... seriousness aside, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" may not agree with your personal idea of where we came from, but his notions happen to fit very well with the humour in the Darwin awards, and so in a perverse way, the name of said awards satisfies the weak anthropic principle... it exists because the conditions are correct for its existence.
Methinks the 3CD boxset will rise in price if this happens... with an acquisition such as Cygnus, they gain some muscle on their pretty market-friendly figure, and can provide some decent content alongside their CheapBytes-able product. And that justifies the box price, even more so than the support they provide.
Add to that the fact that Cygnus are a respected group amongst geeks: Are RedHat trying to buy their way back into the fold? Looking for any respect they may have lost among the anti-commercial begrudgers?
Maybe it's simply a means to expand their support base. I was working in Cork (Ireland) recently, in the same building they're setting up their European base in. Something scary looking about 4 bare walls with nothing but blue carpet between. It would be sensible to buy into an established Linux support base, instead of headhunting and training up some relative unknowns.
I hope Cygnus don't lose their strengths to the corporate monster we fear in RedHat. Last thing we need is another Big Blue / Big MS / AOL / GE
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up, but our brains work the same way they did thousands of years ago. We still wake, work, eat, shit, and sleep.
Competition has always been a part of life. You compete for work, for accomodation, for attention of the opposite sex, etc. To say life is pointless is pretty lame, sorry.
To get this back on track with some sense of realism, there are people who enjoy mindless entertainment, and today it's easier to find it. Television, Nintendo, PS2, they didn't EXIST back in the day where people lived hand-to-mouth. The games people played then are similar to those played by kindergarten kids the world over - get stuff, pretend it's other stuff, and make your own reality. Sometimes it's just making a stone into a person and playing shop (Barbie dolls, the Simms, lots of other toys considered suited to girls, all sexism aside) sometimes it's making a stone into a person and playing beat-em-up (WWF toys, Action man, Quake, and lots of other toys considered suited to boys, all sexism aside).
Basically, role-play is the oldest, most basic, and most persistent form of game. It just so happens that the role a lot of people (typically young males, actually) would like to play is to go around blowing crap up.
Nothing to do with "pointless" or "meaningful". It's a game. You play it to have fun.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
What's more important than "counting votes" is what to do with the count.
The US Collegiate system is a skewed way of dealing with what could be much simpler.
In the UK, they use a system called "First past the post", which means they count all the votes in local elections for local representatives, and whoever gets the most votes wins that seat. The party with the most seats in parliament runs that government, and their leader becomes the Prime Minister.
But even this is not really fair. In Ireland, we use a similar parliamentary seat count to choose the ruling party, but the seats are voted using Proportional Representation which means the most popular guy probably still gets in, but no-one unpopular gets in - said another way, you get to choose your first, second preferences - if your first doesn't qualify, then your vote goes to your second choice, and so on. This way, only the candidates with some measure of universal appeal get in - none of this two-party polarisation.
That leads to the current almost farcical situation of a "rainbow coalition", a multi-party leadership with many differing policies, all in power together.
*sigh*
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
An interface like TAPI or CSTA should not be too difficult to implement - I work a lot with PBX, PABX, un-PBX equipment, and a common request in the current call-centre market is for CT - interoperability between some agent-focussed CRM software, and the best telephony solution out there. Often the best way to go is a little bit of glue code sitting between the two.
/prak
The current business world being what it is, Win32 is where the IS team have their expertise, and that is where the direction is forced to go for now, but with the continual expansion of Linux and *BSD into the mainstream, it can't be too long before the big black box makers, Nortel, Lucent, Ericsson, Mitel, Tadiran, Toshiba, Panasonic, start wandering down the reliability route.
Another route worth watching is CTMedia. This is an emerging technology, still in development, but backed by M$. Although touted as an "Open Standard", the idea is based on a M$ OS, but may expand outwards - Dialogic (who make the hardware) have support for Linux currently.
And for something M$ should worry about - an interface they don't have much input into, see this article, specifically the bits about SCSA, although it's a good all-round discussion of various technologies.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
You're making a lot of pretty nasty claims there. Why don't I see any references, links, backup?
:-)
If this were a scientific paper, it would be shot down. In flames
If you believe your points, please share. I'd be very interested to agree with you, if you had but a shred of evidence to hold your arguments up.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
FETs and their relatives MOSFETs use this type of behaviour. Physically the canisters have three (or more) connectors, but electrically only two are in the conductive path - the third provides an electric charge, a field which controls the conduction. Hence, "Field Effect Transistor".
:-)
Something like this:
~~~I
---O---
(badly drawn, I know
The charge provided by the I lead affects the field through the "ball", which in a FET is a layered piece of silicon (MOSFET is different, "Metal Oxide Semiconductor"), the width of the layer is effectively controlled by the field, sort of like a water pipe with a magnetically controlled valve: The valve doesn't have to be manually connected, you could just wave a magnet around.
Hope I'm making sense...
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
- First, the support engineer (me) was paid an extra $120 per month for being permanently on call, volume of calls was about 3 - 4 per week. This works out at approx $10 per call
- Then calls got more numerous, support staff got increased, so we shifted. We counted our daily calls, average call times, and came up with:
This didn't warrant an extra person, but it did warrant an extra person day per week. We decided that if it grew to any more we would extend the working day by an hour each way, to reduce the out of hours calls.45 mins per call, 8 - 12 calls per day shift per agent (it's a complex software product) 7 Out of hours calls per week
As you have a 24 hour operation, there may be some munging of numbers, but if you expect 20 - 30 calls per week = 4 calls per day, you might ask for another body to handle the graveyard shift, even if he is sitting on his butt for 3/4 the time. You may even get a CS undergrad to work nights for relatively cheaply
ps To all CS undergrads: don't take this personally! I would have jumped at the chance for a nighttime helpdesk job in my early days...
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
I get the impression that UnitedStates.gov places less emphasis on something if it is not going to do something for their defense strategy.
/prak
Back in the days when the Big Red USSR had plans and schemes and rockets and ICBMs and stuff, and was commie to boot, they were the heydays of NASA, Star Wars, etc.
Now all we have is Saddam and a few ickle upstarts. It'll be interesting to see what happens when China gets a foothold in space (if such a thing is possible), that last big bastion of red-ity.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Have they proven the Arthur C. Clarke idea of there being a large diamond core in there?
:-) spot in the middle, you can see forever...
/prak
If you peer really closely at the red (dark grey?
We can't see any rings in this photo though.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Yeah - nice idea. Collect "mojo" to allow you to download other people's stuff.... stinks of Karma, eh? :-)
/prak
So the RIAA sees this, thinks it's a good idea, although Real Bucks could make them Bucks, none of this Mojo stuff... they launch an offensive, succeed in getting a Cease and Desist, and release their own version??
And speaking as a musician... I'd rather be paid in Real Bucks than "mojo"... there are two flaws: according to the article, "it's voluntary... not unlike tipping in restaurants..." kinda like busking online? And secondly, how's "mojo" gonna pay the rent?
Back to playing Monopoly with Monopoly money. Or wait for a sanctioned version of "mojo". No wait, that'll have adverts. Bummer.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
As someone close to the product cycle of a large software product, I can say these guys are going in the right direction.
:-)
Their techies are fighting a losing battle: to include a feature, or not. You see, the product/build/whatever manager has to commit to a delivery date so that the marketing, delivery, and sales efforts can come together at a reasonably coherent time.
The techies then have to get nose to the grindstone to match up with the expectations of the product/build/whatever manager, and get the features they promised out the door in time. Even if they have an even cooler feature that didn't make the list, but they feel makes the grade.
By seeing them releasing a "2.96" version of GCC, one which GNU would obviously like to see waiting until a more publicly acceptable major release, they're showing they have a structure in place that favours "release early, release often" more than "wait for the proper product". We're seeing here the coming together of all the best ideas of Open Source, with the best management control. Alan Cox approves, he's even allowing the inclusion of a patch that hasn't made it into the mainstream kernel...
Having said that though... I can't wait for version 7.1
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Are they subject to higher flicker pass-thru?
CRTs may flicker at 60Hz or 90Hz or whatever, but there is some phospor-related "staying power"... how is that done with plasma???
LCD has even MORE staying power, due to the fact that it's a lump of thixotropic stuff flowing around changing phase, rather than a lump of glowing phospor reacting to radiation.
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Having had the "pleasure" of manning a company's stand at some trade shows recently, I can truthfully say plasma screens are not good for your health.
Try standing in front of one of these puppies for a couple of hours, talking punters through all the features of your latest product, staring at this humongous plasma screen - I was more green than the Energis balloon (and it was green).
Has anyone actually sat down in front of one of these to say, watch a movie or something? Do they work??? Without making you vomit, like??
Roll on virtual stereographic glasses...
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Eudora have a new browser with a moodwatch feature that uses an amusing chilli rating (three chillis for flaming hot :-)
It claims to spot potentially flame-worthy mails before they get sent... or arriving. It doesn't even need to have any rude words in.
Personally, I prefer screaming matches over the phone. At least they're instantaneous, and you can't mess up the tone of voice thing.
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
As a race, we have pushed further and further along a path away from nature. There are many - for want of a better word - "zealots" who claim to be "for nature" etc. Maybe they are right. Maybe that guy in the article claiming that guars should grow up in guar jungles, surrounded by guar trees and guar babies, maybe he's right. But then he can't see the wood for the trees.
:-) has spent all his time since then developing new and better ways to use his surroundings. We have McDonalds, Pepsi, Nike, Ford, etc., all different ways to do the same things we've been doing since before we were we - eating, drinking, getting from place to place. Except now we do it in style.
/prak
So, thousands and thousands of years ago some clever homonid decided that a stick was better at braining things than his fist. That was against nature, no?
Soon after that, another clever homonid found that rubbing sticks together, or banging a rock off another rock, could start fire, making dead things easier and tastier to eat. Was not that also against nature?
And so on. Man (meant in the non-sexist way
We have been farming for many thousands of years. Is that not against nature?
Time perhaps for some new-age philosopher to step forth from the ranks and announce the radical thought that maybe man was right to develop the stick. Maybe man was right to develop the wheel, even. And fire. And clothing. And multi-storey homes. And alternative modes of transport. At the rate we're going, heck even another place to live would be handy, as we're apparently ruining this planet as a habitat. But the point is we've had some power over nature for thousands of years, and no-one has drawn the line for us yet. Why stop now?
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Have to admit... haven't tried W2K on this laptop... have NT4 and RH6.2 dual-booting.
Two things:
o W2K may be all wonderful and shiny, but Linux knocks the socks off it for some things, like text processing, some scientific apps and instant stats generation. That's my use for it.
o A lot of the talk about web-pads and other mini-computer-thingies have centred on their using Linux... I haven't heard of any moving towards WinME or CE or any of their other stuff... so caging linux as a "server OS" doesn't swing. Linus publicly played Quake on it... I haven't seen many servers running Quake.
BTW, ESR is getting wadloads without "sucking down the bucks" from a company that doesn't use him... I could name many more.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
They cite addiction and gambling as reasons to ban?
/. periodically, most of my vices are irregular... but I am fortunate. I have no "addiction".
An acquaintance is now an avid golfer, after spending his life as an alcoholic, and becoming a gambler soon thereafter. Some people need an addiction, some addictions are more socially acceptable than others.
Should addictive pastimes be banned? I don't smoke, I drink to moderation, I
Should my acquaintance be banned from golf courses? Should golf courses be banned totally?
The answer is found in treating addictions, not in removing the drug.
- "Politics is like a drug. It is highly addictive, and frequently hallucinogenic"
- Kevin Myers, the Irish times (slightly paraphrased due to bad memory)
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
So we have a study of performance on NT, ONE study. As anyone who has been following benchmarking issues (c.f. recent IIS vs. Apache on Dell) will know, we can't really guess anything from this test.
What would be VERY nice is if some enterprising lab got together (ArsTechnica, overclockers.com etc.?), played with this beasty with a number of configs, a number of OSs (NT, Linux, BeOS, BSD, etc), and ripped out a few stats.
Hey, even a comparitive IIS vs. Apache on THIS machine would be fun. How would PHP work with all of this code-morphing cache stuff?
Still, I have to wonder how much input Linus has in all - the focus at the press release time was VERY much on NT, except for the embarrassing Quake moment. Anyone know of a publicly available set of Linux tests on one of these?
Can't wait 'til the webpads though. That'll sort out the "debian on iPaq" trolls...
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
*Applauds the bean-counters in their ivory towers*
And so it continues... they will release the films in the cinema. It being a cult showing, everyone will go to see it, fan or not.
The fans, film-buffs, and general public will buy the VHS when they release it.
The fans and film-buffs will go for the better VCD.
The fans will go for the DVD when they release the films one by one at the end of the I, II, III, IV, V, VI sequence.
Remind anyone of the Vinyl/Compact Cassette/CD fiasco of the late seventies and early eighties??? Yay, I had three formats of Brothers in Arms!
Me, I'll wait.
I was, oddly enough... I was around for the recent total solar (in Ireland), where everyone who wasn't chained to their desks was standing around looking like a mini festival crowd, only with spangly spectacles.... none of that with a lunar. Last lunar I saw I was working nights anyway... so I got to skive off. Didn't have to use the cheap welding goggles though...
Drat. This one's at nighttime, so no time skiving off to wander around outside the office wearing silly shiny overpriced paper goggles, staring at a heavenly body that's got a chunk ripped out of it.
I'll be in bed.
Greg Bear, who no doubt lots of us know and love, wrote SLANT, which introduces itself by showing us a world of nano-medecine gone wrong. An entire culture based on medical nano, that crashes (no OT M$ Bashing, purleez).
It also discusses Nano used for weoponry... this is the scary part. It uses any available bits around it to manufacture big things that blow up and are very intelligent, etc. etc. You're right. It's scary.
Or Virtuosity, there was an interesting weapon made with nano and any available glass. And intelligence, but that's a whole other ball game.
It's been thought of before, and no doubt the Defense lads will swallow it up before it becomes mainstream, like they've done with numerous other technologies, and will do with many more.
This is starting to get sooooo off-topic, but I couldn't let it lie...
Darwin was actually a religious man.. he didn't hate OR deny God. Hi was a botanist who wanted to study how species diverged despite geographical separation. It was accidental that his studies resulted in a theory (that has now been accepted as wrong by anthropologists, incidentally) which didn't agree with the creationist six-day theory.
Darwin's work, and more since, solidified the idea of natural selection, which is easily witnessed even by lay-people of today, and this is the whole point of the humour behind the Darwin awards.
An example: Two types of butterfly lived in Manchester over a hundred years ago... a pale one, and a dark one. They lived on birches, which are naturally silvery white. Along came the industrial revolution, which polluted the birches into blackness. The white ones suddenly became very visible to predators in their natural habitat, all but died out, having been dominant for many centuries. They were "naturally selected" out of existence.
Then the city of Manchester worked on its pollution laws, the silver birches became silver again, and the pale butterflys, now camouflaged, were naturally selected back in again.
OK... seriousness aside, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" may not agree with your personal idea of where we came from, but his notions happen to fit very well with the humour in the Darwin awards, and so in a perverse way, the name of said awards satisfies the weak anthropic principle... it exists because the conditions are correct for its existence.
Rant over. Let the games continue.
/Prak
Methinks the 3CD boxset will rise in price if this happens... with an acquisition such as Cygnus, they gain some muscle on their pretty market-friendly figure, and can provide some decent content alongside their CheapBytes-able product. And that justifies the box price, even more so than the support they provide.
Add to that the fact that Cygnus are a respected group amongst geeks: Are RedHat trying to buy their way back into the fold? Looking for any respect they may have lost among the anti-commercial begrudgers?
Maybe it's simply a means to expand their support base. I was working in Cork (Ireland) recently, in the same building they're setting up their European base in. Something scary looking about 4 bare walls with nothing but blue carpet between. It would be sensible to buy into an established Linux support base, instead of headhunting and training up some relative unknowns.
I hope Cygnus don't lose their strengths to the corporate monster we fear in RedHat. Last thing we need is another Big Blue / Big MS / AOL / GE
/me