The parent didn't say first chair violonist, he said first violonist, i.e. any of the 20-30 or so violonists who play the first violin part in any orchestral work.
Rest assured that the first chair violonist from one of the major orchestra in the world makes a whole lot more than this, and this is just the salary. Then there are guest works here and there, lessons, whatever.
Actually, the salary in major orchestras is quite high. The starting salary in San Francisco for example is $99,000 a year. In most of the major symphony orchestra, the starting salary is between about 90,000-95,000 to I think 115,000 for the Metropolitan Orchestra. The salary info is available through AFM, possibly even on their website. These salaries are for section jobs.
Science never answers to the question "why". Science proposes models (theories) that allow scientists to make predictions accurate to some degree, that is all.
The Coulomb law is such a model, but it is as similar in accuracy with respect to the way electrons really behave as Newtonian mechanics is to the way gravity really works -- i.e. you can make very good predictions from the Coulomb law (Ohm's law, macroscopic electric fields, etc), but you can't predict lighwaves. The next level up would be the Maxwell equations, but still you don't get the "why".
You can derive the Maxwell equations from the relativistic equations of motion of a single electron, so they are pretty fundamental, but that doesn't answer your question. One of the things you can can derive from the Maxwell equations is that magnetic fields and electric fields behave in fundamentally different ways. In particular both fields are oriented (so you should expect positive and negative charged particles, and those particles behave in opposite ways in magnetic fields), but while you can have electrically charged particles, Maxell's equations tell you you can't have magnetic particles. Magnetic monopoles are impossible, they always come in pairs.
Why? we don't know. That's just how things are. However QM, since Dirac, predicts that Magnetic monopole should exist (they have never been observed).
At any rate, the Coulomb law and the Maxwell equations break down at the quantum level. You can look up more fundamental models, which for electrons today would be QED (quantum electro-dynamics), the theory for which Feynman, Swinger and Tomonaga got their Nobel in the 60s, or more generally the Standard Model. In these, electromagnetic interactions occur through the exchange of photons (virtual or real).
But still they would not answer to the question "why". At best you have a model of "how" things work.
We do know the standard model breaks down in some instances, so even if you understood it perfectly, still you wouldn't have a perfectly accurate model of "how" things really work, and you would get no closer of the "why" answer.
I may be the odd one out here, as I type this from my iBook under OS/X, but I miss the simplicity and (yes!) speed of X11. If Linux wasn't running so poorly on this hardware I'd already have switched. The lack of driver for the airport card is the main roadblock here.
Aqua is a huge CPU hog and has too few applications running for it. My CPU meter never dips below 15% usage even when doing nothing. Many commercial apps are in fact still Carbon and don't integrate well, and suck yet more. As it is it is almost impossible to get a consistent desktop under OS/X. Since I like the FOSS apps I also have to run a number of X11 apps, which do integrate even less with Aqua.
I do in fact enjoy more consistency under Linux. To me aqua is a huge disappointment.
Shor's algorithm doesn't give us much of a handle on prime numbers, it's more like a brute force approach on a type of computer architecture that makes certain brute force approaches theoretically feasible.
This is interesting, but factorization is very far away from being the hardest math problem the Human species has been able to think up.
In the realm of number theory, problems like the Riemann hypothesis are far more difficult and interesting, yet a QC will not help.
There is a general perception that QC will make solving other hard problems easy, such as NP-complete problems like the travelling salesman, etc. This is not the case. Factorization is not even an NP-complete problem.
Yet there are much harder problems than NP-complete problems. Playing a perfect game of Chess is harder than any NP-complete problem.
At the theoretical end, it is not even known whether QC are in fact useful, since we do not know whether P = NP.
To be fair there are also a lot of Americans who interpret the actions of European governments and call them stupid and/or somehow communist.
One major difference, even evident in your reply ("big enough to take it away") is that a majority of people in the US do not trust their government to any great degree ; when that feeling is not echoed in Europe.
Europeans do not believe that their own government will turn against them, although it has happened many times in the past with catastrophic consequences. Many governments in Europe have turn fascist, communist and generally dictatorial, but they all failed rather rapidly. Apparently Europeans in their optimism believe that it won't happen again, or perhaps that if it does happen again the unfortunate experience will be short lived, or perhaps finally they believe that, as in the past, the people will rise and defeat their oppressive governments.
Could the US gov turn against its own people ? I don't know. What I do know is that many times in Europe did the people turn against its own government. This is the more interesting alternative, as govs can indeed become nasty after a while. Could the US population come up with its own revolution, after so many years ? I don't know. I'd like to think that it is at least a possibility.
Certainly this is becoming a more distant possibility in Europe with the European Union construction, but it is never an impossibility.
On the other hand the US population generally believe that a small government with as little power as possible is a good thing, and that a general populace with a few restrictions and as much liberty as possible is a good thing.
What is interesting though is that in spite of the fundamental difference in approach, the end results on both sides of the Atlantic is not that different.
Democratic institutions and safeguards, general levels of taxing and public accounting are more or less comparable with few exceptions. What seems apparently obvious, i.e. that a US politician would not survive in Europe and vice-versa, but I'm not so sure. After all a politician is a politician.
One final thing I'd like to point out is that you are comparing the governments of many different countries (say the 25 members of the EU) with a single US federal government. When you add up all the actions and powers of local, state and federal governments in the US you end up with a pretty overbearing government too.
If you compare the US federal government with that of the EU, you'd find that the EU's gov is extremely tenuous and weak. It does have a parliament, an executive and a court of justice, but its area of power is very tightly constrained. It doesn't even have an army.
One thing that can be said, in spite of everything, for Viet-Nam is that they invaded Cambodia in 1979, at the height of the Pol-Pot terror reign, while the West was doing nothing to stem the killings that were taking place under that regime.
That pretty much ended the Khmer Rouge madness, which had already killed 1.7 million in a country of only 7 millions! Eventually the Vietnamese army left after about 10 years of occupation and civil war, and elections were held in 1993 in a free Cambodia.
I'm not sure Vietnam's actions were righteous, but they ended up doing the right thing. In a similar vein we'll see what the US invasion of Iraq will lead to.
The Geneva convention does define what "unlawful combattants" are but goes on to say that
Even if there is doubt about how such people should be classified (as POW or to be set free), article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal"
Perhaps (i'm not the parent) on the fact that Apple now releases cheap computers ?
Since the Mac mini, the retail value of a lot of used macs has taken a plunge. Why buy an old machine when a new one is cheaper, faster and comes with an Apple warranty ?
There were very few consumers back then (compared to today), so maybe those that did buy computers were more savvy to start with. There was very little software to run and to be confused about anyway.
Perhaps, but thanks to the change in the Wine license the code will be there for all to see, and therefore the same stuff will run on Linux.
OS/X has a nice interface, but if all you do is running Windows programs, what's the point ? Might as well stick to Windows throughout.
There are very few programs of any importance that run on OS/X only. A good WINE would mean developers could continue to develop for Windows only and have their stuff run almost everywhere with no extra effort. If anything it will reduce the incentive to develop for Linux and/or OS/X.
Remember that Linux vendors have to support a lot of different hardware, whereas OS/X just runs on Macs. A lot of effort goes in making sure Linux just runs.
Furthermore many drivers in Linux are reverse-engineered because hardware specs are not publicly available (although this is changing).
Today's RH desktop is miles from the 4.1 days. We have a much more consistent UI, accelerated 3D, generalized antialiasing, much more software (4 CDs instead of just 1), Gnome and KDE, a faster and more efficient kernel, 64-bit throughout (unlike OS/X BTW), serious contenders for office software, and much much more. In RH4.1 days people were still running FVWM as their advanced windows manager.
Linux is today much better than OpenStep ever was, and in many areas, in particular better use of those hardware resources that Linux does support, it is ahead of OS/X.
I had OpenStep on my PC in 1995, alongside RH (slackware!) and SCO and after a few month I found I was ONLY using Linux. Back then it was much more efficient already.
I'm running OS/X as I type this. Really the big things that OS/X offers is hardware support and integration. I don't like the interface all that much (very resources intensive, no way to turn off eye candy), I like the developer tools but they are not compatible with anything else than themselves, so I can't use them.
All the tools I build run way way slower on OS/X than on anything else.
In other words, stuff the OS/X interface, it really gets in the way of power users. Linux vendors must continue to support most of the hardware that is out there, this has been, is, and will be their main focus, and there is nothing wrong there.
Try London-Sydney. Well over 24h *flight* in two legs, plus a couple-hour stopover somewhere in SE Asia. Then try this with young kids who get bored after 20 minutes in the air.
First OS/X will only run on approved hardware, this will not interest people who buy Dells.
Second at worst Linux *vendors* have healthy competition. If it turns out that all that prevent people from adopting a new O/S is a bit of marketing, then all is well. It is much easier to move to Linux from OS/X than from Windows.
I don't know why Jobs said what he did, but I don't think it was derogatory or anything.
Most likely he was talking to a large bunch of smart and educated young people and telling them that today was the first day of the rest of their life, i.e. getting an expensive education is not the end. Some people do not have the same level of education as they do, yet can be successful and smart too. Doubtlessly in the audience there were people who graduated because their parents had money.
At a college like Standford with the degree also comes the network of peers. It would be a mistake to think that because suddently they are part of a high-level clique they are more intelligent and deserving than others. They still have to go to work and achieve something on their own to deserve any significant accolade.
In Europe we have some prestigious schools too. At one of them the president was a military man, and always made some speech at graduation. He was fond of telling his graduating students that (1) there are stupid people everywhere and (2) the more educated they are, the more dangerous they are.
My own university president was fond of quoting movies. There is a classic French movie called "a taxi for Tobruk", a war movie with great dialog, where a couple of people are in a jeep who breaks down in the desert. The two people are a grunt and an officer. The officer decides to stay near the jeep and wait, while the grunt decides to walk and find help. The officer tells him he'll soon die, but the grunt replies "un con qui marche va toujours plus loin qu'un intellectuel assis".
An idiot who walks always goes further than a seated intellectual.
Perhaps this is not very different from the Jobs attitude.
The lack of versionning is in fact a problem if you want to run some non-OSS software (wicked, I know). You will almost certainly run into library conflicts because you have the newest and greatest, but the 2-year-old binary expects version 5 of the libc++ library or whatnot.
Also realize that all distributions improve, even binary only ones. I have fewer problems with newer versions of FC than earlier RH distributions, as a rule.
Slashdot Mirror
XCode is only interesting if you code for Cocoa. Otherwise stick with your IDE of choice (or vi, emacs, etc).
Coding for Cocoa for Sun is kind of hard at the moment, although Sun did support OpenStep about 10 years ago...
Rest assured that the first chair violonist from one of the major orchestra in the world makes a whole lot more than this, and this is just the salary. Then there are guest works here and there, lessons, whatever.
from this link
Science never answers to the question "why". Science proposes models (theories) that allow scientists to make predictions accurate to some degree, that is all.
The Coulomb law is such a model, but it is as similar in accuracy with respect to the way electrons really behave as Newtonian mechanics is to the way gravity really works -- i.e. you can make very good predictions from the Coulomb law (Ohm's law, macroscopic electric fields, etc), but you can't predict lighwaves. The next level up would be the Maxwell equations, but still you don't get the "why".
You can derive the Maxwell equations from the relativistic equations of motion of a single electron, so they are pretty fundamental, but that doesn't answer your question. One of the things you can can derive from the Maxwell equations is that magnetic fields and electric fields behave in fundamentally different ways. In particular both fields are oriented (so you should expect positive and negative charged particles, and those particles behave in opposite ways in magnetic fields), but while you can have electrically charged particles, Maxell's equations tell you you can't have magnetic particles. Magnetic monopoles are impossible, they always come in pairs.
Why? we don't know. That's just how things are. However QM, since Dirac, predicts that Magnetic monopole should exist (they have never been observed).
At any rate, the Coulomb law and the Maxwell equations break down at the quantum level. You can look up more fundamental models, which for electrons today would be QED (quantum electro-dynamics), the theory for which Feynman, Swinger and Tomonaga got their Nobel in the 60s, or more generally the Standard Model. In these, electromagnetic interactions occur through the exchange of photons (virtual or real).
But still they would not answer to the question "why". At best you have a model of "how" things work.
We do know the standard model breaks down in some instances, so even if you understood it perfectly, still you wouldn't have a perfectly accurate model of "how" things really work, and you would get no closer of the "why" answer.
I'm not sure this helps...
Thanks for your opinion.
I may be the odd one out here, as I type this from my iBook under OS/X, but I miss the simplicity and (yes!) speed of X11. If Linux wasn't running so poorly on this hardware I'd already have switched. The lack of driver for the airport card is the main roadblock here.
Aqua is a huge CPU hog and has too few applications running for it. My CPU meter never dips below 15% usage even when doing nothing. Many commercial apps are in fact still Carbon and don't integrate well, and suck yet more. As it is it is almost impossible to get a consistent desktop under OS/X. Since I like the FOSS apps I also have to run a number of X11 apps, which do integrate even less with Aqua.
I do in fact enjoy more consistency under Linux. To me aqua is a huge disappointment.
Yes but the Darwin drivers would. Those are open-source.
You can put Darwin on your beige PC box right now if you want.
The state of the art was 7 in 2001 and 14 today, so it looks like it increases by one every 6 months or so. Still time to update your law...
Shor's algorithm doesn't give us much of a handle on prime numbers, it's more like a brute force approach on a type of computer architecture that makes certain brute force approaches theoretically feasible.
This is interesting, but factorization is very far away from being the hardest math problem the Human species has been able to think up.
In the realm of number theory, problems like the Riemann hypothesis are far more difficult and interesting, yet a QC will not help.
There is a general perception that QC will make solving other hard problems easy, such as NP-complete problems like the travelling salesman, etc. This is not the case. Factorization is not even an NP-complete problem.
Yet there are much harder problems than NP-complete problems. Playing a perfect game of Chess is harder than any NP-complete problem.
At the theoretical end, it is not even known whether QC are in fact useful, since we do not know whether P = NP.
Well, one is local (GRT) and the other is not (QFT). Can't get more fundamentally incompatible than that.
There is a lot more to feeling native than a mere skin. Native dialog boxes and shortcuts for a start.
At least the "metal" skin does not falsely advertise.
Really ?
Personnally I do all my DTP with Scribus, the Gimp, and Inkscape, all X11 apps of the highest quality.
No more overpriced CS suite for me (that use carbon anyway)
To be fair there are also a lot of Americans who interpret the actions of European governments and call them stupid and/or somehow communist.
One major difference, even evident in your reply ("big enough to take it away") is that a majority of people in the US do not trust their government to any great degree ; when that feeling is not echoed in Europe.
Europeans do not believe that their own government will turn against them, although it has happened many times in the past with catastrophic consequences. Many governments in Europe have turn fascist, communist and generally dictatorial, but they all failed rather rapidly. Apparently Europeans in their optimism believe that it won't happen again, or perhaps that if it does happen again the unfortunate experience will be short lived, or perhaps finally they believe that, as in the past, the people will rise and defeat their oppressive governments.
Could the US gov turn against its own people ? I don't know. What I do know is that many times in Europe did the people turn against its own government. This is the more interesting alternative, as govs can indeed become nasty after a while. Could the US population come up with its own revolution, after so many years ? I don't know. I'd like to think that it is at least a possibility.
Certainly this is becoming a more distant possibility in Europe with the European Union construction, but it is never an impossibility.
On the other hand the US population generally believe that a small government with as little power as possible is a good thing, and that a general populace with a few restrictions and as much liberty as possible is a good thing.
What is interesting though is that in spite of the fundamental difference in approach, the end results on both sides of the Atlantic is not that different.
Democratic institutions and safeguards, general levels of taxing and public accounting are more or less comparable with few exceptions. What seems apparently obvious, i.e. that a US politician would not survive in Europe and vice-versa, but I'm not so sure. After all a politician is a politician.
One final thing I'd like to point out is that you are comparing the governments of many different countries (say the 25 members of the EU) with a single US federal government. When you add up all the actions and powers of local, state and federal governments in the US you end up with a pretty overbearing government too.
If you compare the US federal government with that of the EU, you'd find that the EU's gov is extremely tenuous and weak. It does have a parliament, an executive and a court of justice, but its area of power is very tightly constrained. It doesn't even have an army.
One thing that can be said, in spite of everything, for Viet-Nam is that they invaded Cambodia in 1979, at the height of the Pol-Pot terror reign, while the West was doing nothing to stem the killings that were taking place under that regime.
That pretty much ended the Khmer Rouge madness, which had already killed 1.7 million in a country of only 7 millions! Eventually the Vietnamese army left after about 10 years of occupation and civil war, and elections were held in 1993 in a free Cambodia.
I'm not sure Vietnam's actions were righteous, but they ended up doing the right thing. In a similar vein we'll see what the US invasion of Iraq will lead to.
The Geneva convention does define what "unlawful combattants" are but goes on to say that
Read the reference
There hasn't been any trial in Guantanamo Bay yet.
Those trials have been announced for a long time but none have taken place yet.
Perhaps (i'm not the parent) on the fact that Apple now releases cheap computers ?
Since the Mac mini, the retail value of a lot of used macs has taken a plunge. Why buy an old machine when a new one is cheaper, faster and comes with an Apple warranty ?
There were very few consumers back then (compared to today), so maybe those that did buy computers were more savvy to start with. There was very little software to run and to be confused about anyway.
Perhaps, but thanks to the change in the Wine license the code will be there for all to see, and therefore the same stuff will run on Linux.
OS/X has a nice interface, but if all you do is running Windows programs, what's the point ? Might as well stick to Windows throughout.
There are very few programs of any importance that run on OS/X only. A good WINE would mean developers could continue to develop for Windows only and have their stuff run almost everywhere with no extra effort. If anything it will reduce the incentive to develop for Linux and/or OS/X.
Remember that Linux vendors have to support a lot of different hardware, whereas OS/X just runs on Macs. A lot of effort goes in making sure Linux just runs.
Furthermore many drivers in Linux are reverse-engineered because hardware specs are not publicly available (although this is changing).
Today's RH desktop is miles from the 4.1 days. We have a much more consistent UI, accelerated 3D, generalized antialiasing, much more software (4 CDs instead of just 1), Gnome and KDE, a faster and more efficient kernel, 64-bit throughout (unlike OS/X BTW), serious contenders for office software, and much much more. In RH4.1 days people were still running FVWM as their advanced windows manager.
Linux is today much better than OpenStep ever was, and in many areas, in particular better use of those hardware resources that Linux does support, it is ahead of OS/X.
I had OpenStep on my PC in 1995, alongside RH (slackware!) and SCO and after a few month I found I was ONLY using Linux. Back then it was much more efficient already.
I'm running OS/X as I type this. Really the big things that OS/X offers is hardware support and integration. I don't like the interface all that much (very resources intensive, no way to turn off eye candy), I like the developer tools but they are not compatible with anything else than themselves, so I can't use them.
All the tools I build run way way slower on OS/X than on anything else.
In other words, stuff the OS/X interface, it really gets in the way of power users. Linux vendors must continue to support most of the hardware that is out there, this has been, is, and will be their main focus, and there is nothing wrong there.
Actually NeXT had distributed objects in Objective C way before CORBA and COM became popular. I was using them in 1993 to great effect.
They are pervasive in OS/X as well and they work very well.
Try London-Sydney. Well over 24h *flight* in two legs, plus a couple-hour stopover somewhere in SE Asia. Then try this with young kids who get bored after 20 minutes in the air.
First OS/X will only run on approved hardware, this will not interest people who buy Dells.
Second at worst Linux *vendors* have healthy competition. If it turns out that all that prevent people from adopting a new O/S is a bit of marketing, then all is well. It is much easier to move to Linux from OS/X than from Windows.
*my* iBook (1GHz, 768MB) loads & heats up when I simply browse the web. WTF is wrong with this kernel?
Compiling anything on this lappy is a right pain.
I like the interface but the scheduler is appalling.
> From 1965-2005 the average dividend yield was about 3%
Good point, thanks.
The average compound return from 1965 to 2005 on the Dow Jones is a little under 7%.
Dow Jones in 1965 = 800 (approx)
Dow Jones in 2005 = 11000 (approx)
factor = 11000 / 800 = 13.8
now we have
(1 + x) ^ 40 = 13.8
1 + x = 13.8^(1/40) = 1.067817
x = 0.068 = 6.8 %
I agree with you that it looks very good, however you have to substract inflation from that good return, and in the 70s inflation was well over 15%.
clicky
I don't know why Jobs said what he did, but I don't think it was derogatory or anything.
Most likely he was talking to a large bunch of smart and educated young people and telling them that today was the first day of the rest of their life, i.e. getting an expensive education is not the end. Some people do not have the same level of education as they do, yet can be successful and smart too. Doubtlessly in the audience there were people who graduated because their parents had money.
At a college like Standford with the degree also comes the network of peers. It would be a mistake to think that because suddently they are part of a high-level clique they are more intelligent and deserving than others. They still have to go to work and achieve something on their own to deserve any significant accolade.
In Europe we have some prestigious schools too. At one of them the president was a military man, and always made some speech at graduation. He was fond of telling his graduating students that (1) there are stupid people everywhere and (2) the more educated they are, the more dangerous they are.
My own university president was fond of quoting movies. There is a classic French movie called "a taxi for Tobruk", a war movie with great dialog, where a couple of people are in a jeep who breaks down in the desert. The two people are a grunt and an officer. The officer decides to stay near the jeep and wait, while the grunt decides to walk and find help. The officer tells him he'll soon die, but the grunt replies "un con qui marche va toujours plus loin qu'un intellectuel assis".
An idiot who walks always goes further than a seated intellectual.
Perhaps this is not very different from the Jobs attitude.
Cheers.
The lack of versionning is in fact a problem if you want to run some non-OSS software (wicked, I know). You will almost certainly run into library conflicts because you have the newest and greatest, but the 2-year-old binary expects version 5 of the libc++ library or whatnot.
Also realize that all distributions improve, even binary only ones. I have fewer problems with newer versions of FC than earlier RH distributions, as a rule.