HP and Dell offer Linux, but do check, instead of costing less and offering more choice, they cost more and offer less choice of configuration. This is why it is not yet flying.
Sorry, I had no choice. I have no say in the make, model, much less components or software packages of the PC I receive for work. If you have never worked for a 5000+ employee company or institution you wouldn't know that this is fairly standard. I have worked for several and this was always my experience.
Note that the option of putting Linux on the machine afterwards is approved by administration. They even make it very easy and give you a disk image. They still pay for the two Microsoft license that you are not going to use anyway.
This is in fact evidence that the market is still completely overwhelmed by Microsoft, since this sort of option is not yet a bargaining point. In fact now PCs for companies should come with no software installed whatsoever, but this is by and large not the case at all.
Not everywhere on the planet. Not if your employer has negociated with a vendor that does not offer this service, and very few do. Like I said, monopoly effect.
OK this is a company doing it, and they are doing it at the IVF step. However people have been screening their babies for a while now. It is standard procedure to test for some genetic and physical defects in all Western countries, be it by an ultrasound or genetic testing. Most couples faced with the news of a Down syndrome or Spina Bifida simply abort.
I'm not shocked by the screening of eye or hair colour. If parents want to be stupid and think it matters they are probably going to be stupid, overbearing, objectifying parents anyway, and my god, think of the children!
The good thing is that their children will probably learn that their parents "designed them" and this is going to be used against them come adolescence, count on it.
As for screening for things like smarts, athletic capacity & whatnot it will perhaps come in due time, but it's not a simple issue. Parents prone to screening for these things probably are not going to get what they are looking for, i.e. a child that does what they want.
In addition I believe this is going to be a very low-key trend, as IVF is not fun, unlike sex.
People can install whatever O/S they want on their PC, but they still need to pay the MS tax, don't they? I never use Windows at work, I put Linux on my PC there as soon as I got it. Yet my workplace payed for *two* licences : the Vista licence it came with when ordered, and the XP site licence.
Other example : we wanted to buy a MSI wind for travel. However the Linux version, while theoretically available, was offered but with no ETA. We got the XP version and promptly put Linux on it. If it sounds like the 20th century, it is. Pretty much the only real way not to pay the MS tax is to buy a Mac or components for a self-build PC.
That is not success, that is extortion, and that is the hallmark of a monopoly still not under control.
It depends how it's presented. If you are requiring freshmen to do actual-frontier-of-science experiments then there will be a lot of failures and frustration. The result should also not just be a good mark but a publishable paper. Needless to say this is a little ambitious.
At the other extreme there is the follow-a-recipe project where everything is pretty much avaiable off the shelves, and this is not as much fun, but still good if not a lot of time is available.
In between you have projects where the teacher know there exists a solution, but the students must figure it out by themselves. These are good because the students learn a lot yet the risk of failure is low if enough time is available. Example ? build a CO2 laser from scratch. All sorts of experiments in materials science, like build the lightest bridge of a given span that can support a person, etc.
- Develop and maintain quality software for editing, typesetting and desktop publishing. This is essential for technical work! who is going to write software for typesetting equations, I ask you, if not the big publishing houses?
That is indeed not what the LF report is saying. They say that between 700 and 900 people are paid to contribute to the Linux kernel regularly. I would surmise that only a small portion of them work on this project full-time.
On the other hand, there is a lot more involved in writing the kernel than worrying about O(1) schedulers, say. There are tons of drivers to maintain. If you have ever submitted a bug report to Canonical or Redhat, at least a couple of engineers eventually talk to you and it is often a driver issue. More often than not it does get fixed and this is kernel work.
I agree mostly to what you write, but there is one point. Apple is extremely secretive and that does not mesh well with either research or OSS. They give the impression of leeching off OSS because they don't develop in an open way. Similarly, I'm sure all sort of innovative R&D things are going on inside Apple but they are not sharing it. I understand this attitude. So far it is successful but I think it will eventually bite them in the ass.
Actually what MS need is not less marketing but a whole lot better and smarter marketing.
The Seinfeld story was a disaster and they have had no answer to "I'm a Mac/a PC" adds by Apple, which have been running for *years*. Not to mention the color scheme of the Zune and the multi-versionning, death of 1000 cuts of Vista. Just sell ONE OS, Microsoft, perhaps two if you need a backroom server one, just like in the days of NT4. Linux is vibrant proof that the same OS can run on embedded systems or mainframes.
Just look a lot less greedy and a lot more friendly and people will come.
I like your point about comparing Xerox and Microsoft.
Xerox is still around number 100 in the Fortune 500 listing. Strangely they sell laser printers (very good colour ones if you ask me). That's not too bad.
The lesson here is that Xerox had gold on their hand and didn't realize it, because their management didn't know how to recognize truly innovative advances with products potential.
I would hope that the Microsoft execs all know about Xerox mismanagement of technology. It may be that Microsoft research is mishandled in a different way. I know for certain that some really interesting projects are going on inside Microsoft, involving computer vision for example. However this may simply not be mature enough.
I think Microsoft research is very advanced in some areas and that it will take time before it delivers.
According to this article, there are over 70 companies in the Forture 500 listing that are older than the US civil war. The oldest was founded in 1781.
Impossible because in order to swallow something, the BH needs to have an event horizon larger than that something. A BH created in the LHC would have the weight of the Higgs at most because this is what the LHC is designed to create, i.e. that of a few thousand neutrons. The even horizon for such BH is incredibly tiny, much smaller than the radius of a neutron. Hence not even a neutron can enter it.
If it were created and did not evaporate, even as it fell towards the center of the Earth, it would not be able to swallow anything. Such a BH might be a problem for a neutron star but not to a body with the density of the Earth.
Even if all the energy spent by the LHC over an entire decade were somehow turned into matter, and that matter were somehow turned into a black hole, that black hole would have a minuscule event horizon, much smaller than the radius of a proton.
Assuming the BH does not evaporate, it would never be able to swallow more than whatever elementary particle crosses its path directly.
It would indeed fall to the center of the Earth and go out the other side. Even the densest matter at the center of the Earth would be like vacuum to it. It would fall up and down, in a very narrow orbit about the center of the Earth in about 90 minutes.
It is not very difficult to compute how many elementary particles it would be able to swallow at each trip, and the answer is *extremely few* because at the scale of the BH matter is extremely sparse and hardly respond to even intense gravity.
So we would have an extremely small BH, weighing far less than a few micrograms, orbiting inside the Earth, not able to do much really except swallow a proton or a neutron from time to time.
In reality any BH created would be of extremely low weight and would evaporate.
These calculation are probably not so bogus because they agree with basic thermodynamics. We think that even black holes have to obey thermodynamics.
The Hawkins radiation mechanism is only a means to an end: the BH has to have a temperature. If you agree with this rather simple hypothesis then BH must evaporate.
but the collisions happen in the vacuum inside the LHC, not on the LHC's walls. Anyway it doesn't matter since you can make the same argument with the Moon, which is plenty dense, yet has not been swallowed in any black holes in the last 4B+ years that it has existed.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be very very cool. Surely they have an ISP ?
Not Attali, Michel Rocard.
A political hero, one of the extremely few.
In fact human faces can be compressed very effectively. The top 20 features from eigenfaces are more than enough for recognition, so forget polygons.
A couple of decades ago? Then patents will expire soon.
HP and Dell offer Linux, but do check, instead of costing less and offering more choice, they cost more and offer less choice of configuration. This is why it is not yet flying.
Sorry, I had no choice. I have no say in the make, model, much less components or software packages of the PC I receive for work. If you have never worked for a 5000+ employee company or institution you wouldn't know that this is fairly standard. I have worked for several and this was always my experience.
Note that the option of putting Linux on the machine afterwards is approved by administration. They even make it very easy and give you a disk image. They still pay for the two Microsoft license that you are not going to use anyway.
This is in fact evidence that the market is still completely overwhelmed by Microsoft, since this sort of option is not yet a bargaining point. In fact now PCs for companies should come with no software installed whatsoever, but this is by and large not the case at all.
Not everywhere on the planet. Not if your employer has negociated with a vendor that does not offer this service, and very few do. Like I said, monopoly effect.
OK this is a company doing it, and they are doing it at the IVF step. However people have been screening their babies for a while now. It is standard procedure to test for some genetic and physical defects in all Western countries, be it by an ultrasound or genetic testing. Most couples faced with the news of a Down syndrome or Spina Bifida simply abort.
I'm not shocked by the screening of eye or hair colour. If parents want to be stupid and think it matters they are probably going to be stupid, overbearing, objectifying parents anyway, and my god, think of the children!
The good thing is that their children will probably learn that their parents "designed them" and this is going to be used against them come adolescence, count on it.
As for screening for things like smarts, athletic capacity & whatnot it will perhaps come in due time, but it's not a simple issue. Parents prone to screening for these things probably are not going to get what they are looking for, i.e. a child that does what they want.
In addition I believe this is going to be a very low-key trend, as IVF is not fun, unlike sex.
People can install whatever O/S they want on their PC, but they still need to pay the MS tax, don't they? I never use Windows at work, I put Linux on my PC there as soon as I got it. Yet my workplace payed for *two* licences : the Vista licence it came with when ordered, and the XP site licence.
Other example : we wanted to buy a MSI wind for travel. However the Linux version, while theoretically available, was offered but with no ETA. We got the XP version and promptly put Linux on it. If it sounds like the 20th century, it is. Pretty much the only real way not to pay the MS tax is to buy a Mac or components for a self-build PC.
That is not success, that is extortion, and that is the hallmark of a monopoly still not under control.
It depends how it's presented. If you are requiring freshmen to do actual-frontier-of-science experiments then there will be a lot of failures and frustration. The result should also not just be a good mark but a publishable paper. Needless to say this is a little ambitious.
At the other extreme there is the follow-a-recipe project where everything is pretty much avaiable off the shelves, and this is not as much fun, but still good if not a lot of time is available.
In between you have projects where the teacher know there exists a solution, but the students must figure it out by themselves. These are good because the students learn a lot yet the risk of failure is low if enough time is available. Example ? build a CO2 laser from scratch. All sorts of experiments in materials science, like build the lightest bridge of a given span that can support a person, etc.
You forgot
- Develop and maintain quality software for editing, typesetting and desktop publishing. This is essential for technical work! who is going to write software for typesetting equations, I ask you, if not the big publishing houses?
Are you a sysadmin?
That is indeed not what the LF report is saying. They say that between 700 and 900 people are paid to contribute to the Linux kernel regularly. I would surmise that only a small portion of them work on this project full-time.
On the other hand, there is a lot more involved in writing the kernel than worrying about O(1) schedulers, say. There are tons of drivers to maintain. If you have ever submitted a bug report to Canonical or Redhat, at least a couple of engineers eventually talk to you and it is often a driver issue. More often than not it does get fixed and this is kernel work.
[citation required], sorry. Don't think this is true.
I agree mostly to what you write, but there is one point. Apple is extremely secretive and that does not mesh well with either research or OSS. They give the impression of leeching off OSS because they don't develop in an open way. Similarly, I'm sure all sort of innovative R&D things are going on inside Apple but they are not sharing it. I understand this attitude. So far it is successful but I think it will eventually bite them in the ass.
Actually what MS need is not less marketing but a whole lot better and smarter marketing.
The Seinfeld story was a disaster and they have had no answer to "I'm a Mac/a PC" adds by Apple, which have been running for *years*. Not to mention the color scheme of the Zune and the multi-versionning, death of 1000 cuts of Vista. Just sell ONE OS, Microsoft, perhaps two if you need a backroom server one, just like in the days of NT4. Linux is vibrant proof that the same OS can run on embedded systems or mainframes.
Just look a lot less greedy and a lot more friendly and people will come.
Which goes to prove that
1- unions are good
2- productivity is not improved by long hours
That was your point, right :-)
I agree, these decisions make no sense at all.
I like your point about comparing Xerox and Microsoft.
Xerox is still around number 100 in the Fortune 500 listing. Strangely they sell laser printers (very good colour ones if you ask me). That's not too bad.
The lesson here is that Xerox had gold on their hand and didn't realize it, because their management didn't know how to recognize truly innovative advances with products potential.
I would hope that the Microsoft execs all know about Xerox mismanagement of technology. It may be that Microsoft research is mishandled in a different way. I know for certain that some really interesting projects are going on inside Microsoft, involving computer vision for example. However this may simply not be mature enough.
I think Microsoft research is very advanced in some areas and that it will take time before it delivers.
According to this article, there are over 70 companies in the Forture 500 listing that are older than the US civil war. The oldest was founded in 1781.
Impossible because in order to swallow something, the BH needs to have an event horizon larger than that something. A BH created in the LHC would have the weight of the Higgs at most because this is what the LHC is designed to create, i.e. that of a few thousand neutrons. The even horizon for such BH is incredibly tiny, much smaller than the radius of a neutron. Hence not even a neutron can enter it.
If it were created and did not evaporate, even as it fell towards the center of the Earth, it would not be able to swallow anything. Such a BH might be a problem for a neutron star but not to a body with the density of the Earth.
Even if all the energy spent by the LHC over an entire decade were somehow turned into matter, and that matter were somehow turned into a black hole, that black hole would have a minuscule event horizon, much smaller than the radius of a proton.
Assuming the BH does not evaporate, it would never be able to swallow more than whatever elementary particle crosses its path directly.
It would indeed fall to the center of the Earth and go out the other side. Even the densest matter at the center of the Earth would be like vacuum to it. It would fall up and down, in a very narrow orbit about the center of the Earth in about 90 minutes.
It is not very difficult to compute how many elementary particles it would be able to swallow at each trip, and the answer is *extremely few* because at the scale of the BH matter is extremely sparse and hardly respond to even intense gravity.
So we would have an extremely small BH, weighing far less than a few micrograms, orbiting inside the Earth, not able to do much really except swallow a proton or a neutron from time to time.
In reality any BH created would be of extremely low weight and would evaporate.
These calculation are probably not so bogus because they agree with basic thermodynamics. We think that even black holes have to obey thermodynamics.
The Hawkins radiation mechanism is only a means to an end: the BH has to have a temperature. If you agree with this rather simple hypothesis then BH must evaporate.
but the collisions happen in the vacuum inside the LHC, not on the LHC's walls. Anyway it doesn't matter since you can make the same argument with the Moon, which is plenty dense, yet has not been swallowed in any black holes in the last 4B+ years that it has existed.
They could still sell the extra anti-reflexive coating for that price and people wouldn't even complain.