These are chaotic systems:
Granted.
the future can't be predicted, not even probablilistically
I predict Christmas will be at least 5 degrees colder than the Fourth of July this year in Madison, Wisconsin. Since you allege that I can make no predictions whatsover, you will take me up when I give you odds. Five will get you twenty.
Weather prediction and climate prediction are different things. I made a climate prediction there, not a weather prediction.
Take my bet or admit that your argument is nonsense.
It would be a good idea if someone were to write a book on the excesses and gullibility of the environmental "movement" but this isn't it. Rather this book actually tends to attack legitimate environmental science.
In the area where I have the most background, climate change, it takes the usual corporate apologists' position, that the outcome will be at the (IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) consensus level or more benign, and then piles up evidence on the more benign side.
Well, the thing about the consensus opinion is that it is based on the entire pile of evidence, not just half of it. By the definition of best estimate, for each piece of evidence showing a more benign outcome there is a less benign outcome.
Now here's the sticky part - the consensus is the median estimate of physical changes due to human alterations of the environment. It's not an average and it's certainly not a cost-weighted average. As I used to try to argue endlessly on sci.environment, the right policy is based on the economic risk, which is weighted toward worst-case scenarios. Cost increases nonlinearly with perturbation, and small perturbations may have negligible costs. This means that the sound and economically valid response should be weighted more heavily toward more pessimistic scenarios. It's simple cost/benefit risk analysis.
When I make this argument, "environmentalists" don't buy it because risk analysis often doesn't match their preconceptions. They have come to the point where they distrust basing any decisions on statistical analysis of evidence, which of course is a completely idiotic position. On the other hand the "wisdom of the free market" forces don't buy a risk analysis of climate change because, well, it inconveniently argues to interventionist policies, and they have a preconception (equally idiotic) that no rational analysis can ever point to government intervention in the marketplace, so there has to be something wrong with the rational argument since it reaches the wrong conclusion.
The point here isn't that there is no book to be written about political correctness, sheepish credulity and factual wrongheadedness among environmentalists. There is one, just as there is another to be written about their opponents. Politics is not science, though, and apparently political books sell better than science books that threaten preconceptions on all sides.
The problem is that this book appears to be just one more piece of trash on the vast heap of conclusion-first polemics, not a cure for it.
didn't jean-louis gasse (former ceo of be) testify during the ms case?
If I recall correctly, no. As I recall it, Gasse' wanted to testify, and believed that the exclusive contracts with the OEMs would probably constitute a stronger case of monopoly abuse than the browser issue, but the the prosecutors didn't want to fight the war on two fronts.
It's been a long time since you could walk into a computer store and expect to have any options on a PC besides Microsoft ones. IANAL, so I have no strong opinion whether this is illegal abuse of monopoly power but it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that it was a result of exercise of monopoly power, and that it did the consumer no good. Hell, even IBM wouldn't preinstall OS/2 on their commodity boxes when it was still a live IBM product!
I hope Be's position that Microsoft is liable holds in court.
Meanwhile I'm just shaking my head in amazement than anyone finds it unlikely or surprising, as a matter of fact rather than of law, that Microsoft has used its dominance of the market in essentially the way Gasse' describes. What other explanation is conceivable for the disappearance of OS/2 from IBM's commodity PCs while it was still being developed and promoted?
I don't buy it. A non-capitalist democracy requires centralized control of the economy. This means that the individual has no say in the function of the
economic system. This is fundamentally opposite to the principal of democracy.
A capitalist dictatorship is also a self-contradiction. A dictatorship means rule of man instead of rule of law. This means the invisible hand of the market
cannot operate.
Just because you don't 'buy' it doesn't mean it isn't there. A brief excursion into actual history of the past century rather than whatever subset you find convenient will show numerous cases of tyrrany combined with some people getting rich and many others allowed to compete vigorously as long as they don't rock the boat. The fascist states come to mind immediately: not just Nazi Germany but fascist Italy and Franco's Spain.
Similarly, for non-capitalist democracies, look at Sweden, France, and Kerala, places where there is freedom of expression and information, and tremendous and enthusiastic support for an economy that is predominantly and closely state-controlled. (Of course, such places are at something of a competitive disadvantage with less regulated competitors, but they freely choose to pay that price.)
Of course, you need not "buy" the evidence. Based on the subset of facts one is able and willing to be exposed to, one can believe just about anything. That's the whole problem here. At least you have a choice which inconvenient information to ignore, such as this report that the most unregulated democracy is exactly the one which is providing the expertise to enforce Chinese suppression of free expression.
The Chinese don't have such a choice except outside their legal system.
If this quite plausible story turns out to be true, we see that the unregulated US marketplace treats the repressive Chinese legal system as a customer to the extent that the system can afford services. In other words, this amounts to a collaboration of the most and the least regulated systems to suppress freedom, whether that fits your preconceived notions or not.
I love the use of the expression 'I don't buy it' in expressing market libertarian preconceptions about the world. Facts are among the things that are not commodities for sale in real life.
HP used to be the *best* electronic products around. I guess they spun their talent off into something called Agilent and are now producing marginally functional mass market garbage, living off their declining good name (and presumably not forever).
I understand that Folger's used to be a renowned coffee shop. (in SF I think?) Procter & Gamble decided to get market share of low end coffee so they bought the coffee shop for the name. Then they canned dreadful low end robusta beans that taste like last week's newspaper under that name. They apparently got a leg up in the lousy coffee market because people had some vague memory of some coffee lover saying nice things about something called "Folger's".
I fell for it. I have an HP printer whose feed mechanism died after three months of light use, and I'm typing this on a Pavilion which I had to ship back to Oregon to replace the installed hard drive, because no one could replace it under warrantee within 1500 miles of here.
Meanwhile my HP RPN calculator from 1983 is still working fine. Wierd, huh? It's just a name now, what we are seeing is not the real HP.
If Carly succeeds in getting Compaq after they succeeded in getting DEC, three former quality brands will go down in one ugly mess of goodwill mining. Are there any reliable brands left, or have they all been sucked of their value by the ineffable brilliance of day traders and quarterly profit reports?
Nope. Microsoft will never give up a significant revenue stream. They need to support their P/E ratio before they do anything else. Their stock price is predicated on them continuing to grow, and the shareholders are the ultimate authority.
If the share price ever drops into line with revenue then Microsoft can start thinking long term. Until then they are pretty much legally constrained to be an extremely hungry company.
I don't believe the inner circle has a majority interest anymore, so the company is theirs to do with as they wish only as long as they preserve value for the shareholders. Which means they are committed to growth.
I realize this eventually becomes absurd, (Microsoft will never exceed the entire economy in size!) but that's the central issue with them. That's why security and stability take a back seat to features and backward compatibility, and that's why their improved products are never quite improved enough. It's structural, not just cultural.
It's all about short term revenue growth, and until the bubble actually bursts they have no choice but to keep on that path. That means they hold on to every dime they can, and raise prices every bit they can.
there's an important piece of information missing.
In looking at this I'd appreciate some knowledge of the physical scale of the phenomenon, not in arc-seconds of sky image but in kilometers of extent of the feature.
This works nicely on very simple HTML (tables, images, font sizes and blockquotes), and is open source. I use it for purposes similar to those requested by the submitter. I write HTML in HotMetal (an easy to use Dreamweaverish thing on Windows) then run it through htmldoc on linux to get a PDF. As far as I can tell you have to settle for Times Roman, Helvetica and/or Courier in the text output. It handles jpegs and non-transparent gifs as well.
It seems to be abandonware, but it's a handy tool to have around.
Well, that's being generous, actually. I would have enjoyed it more if it were a lovely fantasy travelog with a weak story as you suggest. Alas, that doesn't account for all the battle scenes, which in addition to being trite and dull were also unrelentingly ugly.
See _Ran_ for battles which are tragically beautiful rather than comically ugly. Kurosawa this ain't.
In other words, your summary doesn't account for all the orcs.
While there were parts of the movie that were amazing, overall I didn't like it as much as most. Here are some of my reasons
1) Orcs, orcs, orcs. Too much hacking and slashing. At times it felt like a Schwarzenegger double feature. The ugly cave troll sequence was particularly pointless. I'd have preferred more atmospherics and less heroics.
2) The trick of the movie is making the journey seem long. The length of the journey and the distance from home is central to the theme of the story, and the movie totally failed at this. Trying to get so many events in paradoxically made everything seem short. The events in the movie felt as if they had taken place over the course of a week.
3) Gandalf was overplayed, seemed more like Dumbledore. Boromir was a pointless bore. I kept wanting him to die alredy. (The rest of the Fellowship was well cast, though I could have done without some of Frodo's ligering facial expressions.) As others have pointed out, there was no time to develop the fellowship among the Fellowship. Too busy slaying orcs.
4) Lord of the Rings is the source of so much, so this is hardly fair, but much of it felt oddly unoriginal and derivative. I was particularly struck by how much the Balrog sequence reminded me of Shreck without the jokes.
5) Orcs, orcs orcs. Did I mention how bored I was by the orcs?
6) Ignoring the niceties of language. While my favorite LotR words "eleventy-first" and "unmade" both made an appearance, they waited for several appearances of "destroyed" and "hundred eleventh".
7) Biggest gripe - damaging the story arc. The whole point of the story is that it starts out light in the shire and gets darker and darker. Only gradually do the hobbits get the idea of what a serious business they are messed up in, and the reader is pulled along. By starting with the history of the ring, this effect is totally spoiled. Similarly, the disappearance of Gandalf was supposed to be mysterious.
I really wish people wouldn't assume that they can spot an elementary error in published science upon five minutes thought. You'll invaribaly find that they have already thought of and dealt with your show-stopper.
It's widely believed that climate change models "don't account for water vapor", too. It amazes me that people can convince themselves that scientists can work on a project for years and still miss things that are obvious to amateurs.
There's plenty wrong with science these days, but still it's just about impossible to be transparently wrong in the hard sciences. Subtly wrong, sure, nut not obviously wrong.
This posting was basically a nice question, but something about the way it was asked bothers me a lot.
In this thread and the recent one about a fast-track CS degree, we see confusion about the value of age and experience.
I'm pretty old for a slashdot reader, and have been coding as a main career activity since the 70s. I'm a solid coder, but I've known four great programmers. At least two of them achieved their greatness before they were twenty. Each of them is worth ten of me, and I'm not bad at all.
The fact that one can reach greatness as a coder before the age of 20 implies to me that coding ability is predominantly about a flavor of innate intelligence, and only secondarily about theoretical knowledge or experience. On the other hand, both of these precocious geniuses were CS undergrads at top-flight schools, so the firehose effect counts for something as well.
On the other hand, I've been a manager and a business owner. I know that raw talent isn't all there is to doing a job well. One person I supervised, not one of the greats but a solid talent, was under 20, and holding his first real job. Unrealistic expectations about the nature of private sector employment caused big problems. Inability to take hints and make compromises caused big problems. It wasn't that he was under 20, it was that he was unseasoned in dealing with groups and collaborations.
Your value added to your employer isn't only your core professional talent. Your ability to participate effectively in group efforts has a lot to do with it as well.
Of course, there isn't enough information about the original poster to know if non-core people skills are really the problem, rather than age per se. There are a couple of clues beyond age that incline me to suspect so, though.
Anyway, I've never known anyone at the age of 20 to have profound 10-times-better-than-47-year-old-me people skills though. That's a domain where experience counts for a lot.
For the original poster and other wunderkinds, I recommend tempering your pride with a dash of humility. Raw technical ability isn't everything.
Argh, I hate having such a neat argument spoiled by facts.
Anyway, thanks for that pointer, I will probably get something like that myself. Kudos to Dell for doing this as far as they did.
Nevertheless, they aren't promoting this as a commodity box. Hit the home/small office section of their site and you'll never see it. So my argument, though weakened a bit, stands.
The junk mail I see from Dell never says "Save a hundred and fifty bucks and never have to deal with that ghastly XP thing!" I keep wondering why not. All the serious non-professional computer users I know are very suspicious of XP, and they bring it up to me, not the other way around.
I continue to believe that the problems linux has in entering the mass market have nothing to do with the lousy software, because it is only competing with other lousy software.
Webexcess alleged:
The last time I checked, the #1 reason Linux on the desktop is going nowhere is because there is no Linux version of MS Office.
It's convenient for Microsoft that so many people believe this on 2 counts: 1) it gives MS credit where they don't especially deserve it: few Word or Excel users lack for stories of exasperating misfeatures, and don't let's get started about Outlook. 2) it absolves MS of blame where they probably really deserve it.
imho the main reason the linux desktop hasn't caught on outside of coders and sysadmins is that no major manufacturer promotes and ships an inexpensive commodity box with linux pre-installed, even as a dual-boot option. Most people will not risk their time and their data installing a new OS.
Jean-Louis Gasse has expressed an opinion as to why this is, so I needn't stick my neck out repeating it. It may relate to why IBM, while continuing to develop OS/2, essentially manufactured, promoted and shipped only Win95 boxes in quantity. It may relate to why Dell, after stating their support for linux with some fanfare, never shipped it (to my knowledge) on a box costing less than $2500. It may relate to why the dual boot of BeOS was hidden on the only commodity machine it ever shipped on.
I agree with Webexcess that the problem with mass acceptance of any new OS probably does have something to do with Microsoft.
I don't need to do those things because my payroll service does those things and files all the reports. I tell them each employee's gross for each pay period and they work out the details, same as Quickbooks used to, and they fill out the forms, same as I used to. Unlike me, they don't forget how it all goes every quarter, either.
All that's left to me as an LLC is income taxes, and for those purposes, all those categories are expenses. So I don't need to take the trouble to break it down. Even if I'm wrong and I ever do need to, I have neat consistent records produced by people whose business is payroll.
"track changes across 50 states"... how parochial.
Yes, payroll is what makes these packages huge and awkward. Ignore it. Use a payroll service. Then you can enter your payroll costs in three lines: paychecks, taxes withheld, payroll service expenses. All the complicated stuff and most of the compliance stuff is handled outside your program and outside your accounting system.
Saves wear and tear on you, your accountant and your software. Enables you to use open source software.
It's hard for me to imagine an open source product dealing with the tedium of the employment regulations of every imaginable jurisdiction. It's tedious, uninteresting work that no one would do except for a lot of money.
The emerging Linux alternative for small business appears to be Star Office, Mozilla, SQLedger, and outsourced payroll.
Regulated monopoly works as well as the regulators work. National and regional publicly owned or closely regulated monopoly telephone, rail, gas, electric and postal services have been known to deliver excellent service.
Microsoft and the RBOC's like Verizon give us the worst of both worlds: few of the benefits of competition and few of the benefits of regulation either.
Why the CBC continues to be unavailable as broadcast in the US continues to baffle me.
It would take a while for the CBC's better offerings to catch on (their worst offerings being so mind-bogglingly bad wouldn't help) but the potential audience would be multiplied tenfold.
When I need a fix of old Montreal, though, there's always streaming audio at cbc.ca .
I would GREATLY appreciate a useful reference or link on this material.
Neither the link you provided nor google have gotten me very far. I am consulting in a situation where the problem you identify is severe. It would be helpful to making waves higher in the heirarchy of that organization to have specific research to quote.
Your right, they would have bought it under the academic pricing model which is like 1/4th the retail price if not less.
Duh
Exactly. So, at most, they should only get 25% credit toward a settlement for their contribution, since they are already giving away 75% of it. In fact, they often give away 100% of it to poorer nonprofits already.
It's in Microsoft's interests to donate huge amounts of software and modest amounts of hardware to schools anyway. The valuing of software at retail for current purposes is one of the most brazen pieces of manipulation MIcrosoft has ever tried to pull off.
The poorer schools would never have bought Microsoft software at retail anyway. The cost to Microsoft is, therefore, not the retail price nor even the cost to sell at retail, but just the cost of the CD and its packaging, which, judging by the 47 distinct AOL CDs I have mounted on my wall, is probably well under a dollar.
But that's the least of it. Microsoft has been diligent in making contributions to non-profits that might otherwise use free software. Anyone who thinks this is entirely because they are such kind souls is invited to purchase some (slightly damp) land in Florida that I have for sale. Microsoft generosity is intended to prevent people who spend time on computers at nonprofit institutions from discovering alternatives. This is because many of them will eventually end up as computer professionals or paying end users of one sort or another.
Maybe competing with free software by giving proprietary software away to nonprofits is fair play. I don't know. But it isn't a penalty at all, never mind a penalty of the proportions they are claiming. They would be doing this anyway.
Hydrogen is a clean fuel, in that it can be burned without harmful emissions. Because water is plentiful, hydrogen is also a sort of a battery. Electrical current can be used to separate it from water molecules, and some of this energy can be recovered in fuel cells.
Hydrogen extracted from fossil fuels necessarily produces less energy than the raw fuels themselves. Hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis is an energy sink.
Hydrogen may be extracted from water by using solar energy. That is solar energy, not hydrogen energy.
Whether hydrogen is a suitable fuel for vehicles depends on whether the energy costs are worth the emissions benefits. If so, this will make energy more scarce, because of the inefficiencies of converting energy in some other form into the energy of electrolysis.
Whether electrolysis of water is the right method for storage of solar energy depends on the comparative costs, risks and benefits of alternative storage technologies.
In neither case is hydrogen competing with fossil fuels as an energy source. It is competing with fossil fuels and batteries and flywheels and passive heating media as an energu storage system in both cases.
There are no significant pools of free hydrogen on the planet that can be used as an energy source.
Hydrogen is an energy storage strategy and not an energy supply strategy. It may have its uses as the former. Proposing it as a replacement for fossil or nuclear energy is complete nonsense.
All the above should be fully understood by anyone trying to venture an opinion on this subject.
Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who misses this point is one of the following: 1) not seriously interested in the subject 2) incompetent or 3) dishonest.
in a continent, on an ocean... There's one at the top of Green Bay. Is that the most levels?
More to the point: Since everyone is making the same joke about running emulators in emulators, what's the record for number of OSes running inside other OSes? Has anyone actually hit the fourth level, say?
From that moment on I was an encouragable student...
Apparently, but were you incorrigible as well?
As one of my high-school cohort put it, honor is its own punishment. Still, I survived being a good kid and ended up understanding my own language pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict Christmas will be at least 5 degrees colder than the Fourth of July this year in Madison, Wisconsin. Since you allege that I can make no predictions whatsover, you will take me up when I give you odds. Five will get you twenty.
Weather prediction and climate prediction are different things. I made a climate prediction there, not a weather prediction.
Take my bet or admit that your argument is nonsense.
In the area where I have the most background, climate change, it takes the usual corporate apologists' position, that the outcome will be at the (IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) consensus level or more benign, and then piles up evidence on the more benign side.
Well, the thing about the consensus opinion is that it is based on the entire pile of evidence, not just half of it. By the definition of best estimate, for each piece of evidence showing a more benign outcome there is a less benign outcome.
Now here's the sticky part - the consensus is the median estimate of physical changes due to human alterations of the environment. It's not an average and it's certainly not a cost-weighted average. As I used to try to argue endlessly on sci.environment, the right policy is based on the economic risk, which is weighted toward worst-case scenarios. Cost increases nonlinearly with perturbation, and small perturbations may have negligible costs. This means that the sound and economically valid response should be weighted more heavily toward more pessimistic scenarios. It's simple cost/benefit risk analysis.
When I make this argument, "environmentalists" don't buy it because risk analysis often doesn't match their preconceptions. They have come to the point where they distrust basing any decisions on statistical analysis of evidence, which of course is a completely idiotic position. On the other hand the "wisdom of the free market" forces don't buy a risk analysis of climate change because, well, it inconveniently argues to interventionist policies, and they have a preconception (equally idiotic) that no rational analysis can ever point to government intervention in the marketplace, so there has to be something wrong with the rational argument since it reaches the wrong conclusion.
The point here isn't that there is no book to be written about political correctness, sheepish credulity and factual wrongheadedness among environmentalists. There is one, just as there is another to be written about their opponents. Politics is not science, though, and apparently political books sell better than science books that threaten preconceptions on all sides.
The problem is that this book appears to be just one more piece of trash on the vast heap of conclusion-first polemics, not a cure for it.
If I recall correctly, no. As I recall it, Gasse' wanted to testify, and believed that the exclusive contracts with the OEMs would probably constitute a stronger case of monopoly abuse than the browser issue, but the the prosecutors didn't want to fight the war on two fronts.
It's been a long time since you could walk into a computer store and expect to have any options on a PC besides Microsoft ones. IANAL, so I have no strong opinion whether this is illegal abuse of monopoly power but it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that it was a result of exercise of monopoly power, and that it did the consumer no good. Hell, even IBM wouldn't preinstall OS/2 on their commodity boxes when it was still a live IBM product!
I hope Be's position that Microsoft is liable holds in court.
Meanwhile I'm just shaking my head in amazement than anyone finds it unlikely or surprising, as a matter of fact rather than of law, that Microsoft has used its dominance of the market in essentially the way Gasse' describes. What other explanation is conceivable for the disappearance of OS/2 from IBM's commodity PCs while it was still being developed and promoted?
A capitalist dictatorship is also a self-contradiction. A dictatorship means rule of man instead of rule of law. This means the invisible hand of the market cannot operate.
Just because you don't 'buy' it doesn't mean it isn't there. A brief excursion into actual history of the past century rather than whatever subset you find convenient will show numerous cases of tyrrany combined with some people getting rich and many others allowed to compete vigorously as long as they don't rock the boat. The fascist states come to mind immediately: not just Nazi Germany but fascist Italy and Franco's Spain.
Similarly, for non-capitalist democracies, look at Sweden, France, and Kerala, places where there is freedom of expression and information, and tremendous and enthusiastic support for an economy that is predominantly and closely state-controlled. (Of course, such places are at something of a competitive disadvantage with less regulated competitors, but they freely choose to pay that price.)
Of course, you need not "buy" the evidence. Based on the subset of facts one is able and willing to be exposed to, one can believe just about anything. That's the whole problem here. At least you have a choice which inconvenient information to ignore, such as this report that the most unregulated democracy is exactly the one which is providing the expertise to enforce Chinese suppression of free expression.
The Chinese don't have such a choice except outside their legal system.
If this quite plausible story turns out to be true, we see that the unregulated US marketplace treats the repressive Chinese legal system as a customer to the extent that the system can afford services. In other words, this amounts to a collaboration of the most and the least regulated systems to suppress freedom, whether that fits your preconceived notions or not.
I love the use of the expression 'I don't buy it' in expressing market libertarian preconceptions about the world. Facts are among the things that are not commodities for sale in real life.
It's the Folger's syndrome.
HP used to be the *best* electronic products around. I guess they spun their talent off into something called Agilent and are now producing marginally functional mass market garbage, living off their declining good name (and presumably not forever).
I understand that Folger's used to be a renowned coffee shop. (in SF I think?) Procter & Gamble decided to get market share of low end coffee so they bought the coffee shop for the name. Then they canned dreadful low end robusta beans that taste like last week's newspaper under that name. They apparently got a leg up in the lousy coffee market because people had some vague memory of some coffee lover saying nice things about something called "Folger's".
I fell for it. I have an HP printer whose feed mechanism died after three months of light use, and I'm typing this on a Pavilion which I had to ship back to Oregon to replace the installed hard drive, because no one could replace it under warrantee within 1500 miles of here.
Meanwhile my HP RPN calculator from 1983 is still working fine. Wierd, huh? It's just a name now, what we are seeing is not the real HP.
If Carly succeeds in getting Compaq after they succeeded in getting DEC, three former quality brands will go down in one ugly mess of goodwill mining. Are there any reliable brands left, or have they all been sucked of their value by the ineffable brilliance of day traders and quarterly profit reports?
Nope. Microsoft will never give up a significant revenue stream. They need to support their P/E ratio before they do anything else. Their stock price is predicated on them continuing to grow, and the shareholders are the ultimate authority.
If the share price ever drops into line with revenue then Microsoft can start thinking long term. Until then they are pretty much legally constrained to be an extremely hungry company.
I don't believe the inner circle has a majority interest anymore, so the company is theirs to do with as they wish only as long as they preserve value for the shareholders. Which means they are committed to growth.
I realize this eventually becomes absurd, (Microsoft will never exceed the entire economy in size!) but that's the central issue with them. That's why security and stability take a back seat to features and backward compatibility, and that's why their improved products are never quite improved enough. It's structural, not just cultural.
It's all about short term revenue growth, and until the bubble actually bursts they have no choice but to keep on that path. That means they hold on to every dime they can, and raise prices every bit they can.
there's an important piece of information missing.
In looking at this I'd appreciate some knowledge of the physical scale of the phenomenon, not in arc-seconds of sky image but in kilometers of extent of the feature.
It must be enormous, but how enormous? Anyone?
This works nicely on very simple HTML (tables, images, font sizes and blockquotes), and is open source. I use it for purposes similar to those requested by the submitter. I write HTML in HotMetal (an easy to use Dreamweaverish thing on Windows) then run it through htmldoc on linux to get a PDF. As far as I can tell you have to settle for Times Roman, Helvetica and/or Courier in the text output. It handles jpegs and non-transparent gifs as well.
It seems to be abandonware, but it's a handy tool to have around.
----
Well, that's being generous, actually. I would have enjoyed it more if it were a lovely fantasy travelog with a weak story as you suggest. Alas, that doesn't account for all the battle scenes, which in addition to being trite and dull were also unrelentingly ugly.
See _Ran_ for battles which are tragically beautiful rather than comically ugly. Kurosawa this ain't.
In other words, your summary doesn't account for all the orcs.
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While there were parts of the movie that were amazing, overall I didn't like it as much as most. Here are some of my reasons
1) Orcs, orcs, orcs. Too much hacking and slashing. At times it felt like a Schwarzenegger double feature. The ugly cave troll sequence was particularly pointless. I'd have preferred more atmospherics and less heroics.
2) The trick of the movie is making the journey seem long. The length of the journey and the distance from home is central to the theme of the story, and the movie totally failed at this. Trying to get so many events in paradoxically made everything seem short. The events in the movie felt as if they had taken place over the course of a week.
3) Gandalf was overplayed, seemed more like Dumbledore. Boromir was a pointless bore. I kept wanting him to die alredy. (The rest of the Fellowship was well cast, though I could have done without some of Frodo's ligering facial expressions.) As others have pointed out, there was no time to develop the fellowship among the Fellowship. Too busy slaying orcs.
4) Lord of the Rings is the source of so much, so this is hardly fair, but much of it felt oddly unoriginal and derivative. I was particularly struck by how much the Balrog sequence reminded me of Shreck without the jokes.
5) Orcs, orcs orcs. Did I mention how bored I was by the orcs?
6) Ignoring the niceties of language. While my favorite LotR words "eleventy-first" and "unmade" both made an appearance, they waited for several appearances of "destroyed" and "hundred eleventh".
7) Biggest gripe - damaging the story arc. The whole point of the story is that it starts out light in the shire and gets darker and darker. Only gradually do the hobbits get the idea of what a serious business they are messed up in, and the reader is pulled along. By starting with the history of the ring, this effect is totally spoiled. Similarly, the disappearance of Gandalf was supposed to be mysterious.
8) Too many orcs.
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I really wish people wouldn't assume that they can spot an elementary error in published science upon five minutes thought. You'll invaribaly find that they have already thought of and dealt with your show-stopper.
It's widely believed that climate change models "don't account for water vapor", too. It amazes me that people can convince themselves that scientists can work on a project for years and still miss things that are obvious to amateurs.
There's plenty wrong with science these days, but still it's just about impossible to be transparently wrong in the hard sciences. Subtly wrong, sure, nut not obviously wrong.
This posting was basically a nice question, but something about the way it was asked bothers me a lot.
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In this thread and the recent one about a fast-track CS degree, we see confusion about the value of age and experience.
I'm pretty old for a slashdot reader, and have been coding as a main career activity since the 70s. I'm a solid coder, but I've known four great programmers. At least two of them achieved their greatness before they were twenty. Each of them is worth ten of me, and I'm not bad at all.
The fact that one can reach greatness as a coder before the age of 20 implies to me that coding ability is predominantly about a flavor of innate intelligence, and only secondarily about theoretical knowledge or experience. On the other hand, both of these precocious geniuses were CS undergrads at top-flight schools, so the firehose effect counts for something as well.
On the other hand, I've been a manager and a business owner. I know that raw talent isn't all there is to doing a job well. One person I supervised, not one of the greats but a solid talent, was under 20, and holding his first real job. Unrealistic expectations about the nature of private sector employment caused big problems. Inability to take hints and make compromises caused big problems. It wasn't that he was under 20, it was that he was unseasoned in dealing with groups and collaborations.
Your value added to your employer isn't only your core professional talent. Your ability to participate effectively in group efforts has a lot to do with it as well.
Of course, there isn't enough information about the original poster to know if non-core people skills are really the problem, rather than age per se. There are a couple of clues beyond age that incline me to suspect so, though.
Anyway, I've never known anyone at the age of 20 to have profound 10-times-better-than-47-year-old-me people skills though. That's a domain where experience counts for a lot.
For the original poster and other wunderkinds, I recommend tempering your pride with a dash of humility. Raw technical ability isn't everything.
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Argh, I hate having such a neat argument spoiled by facts.
Anyway, thanks for that pointer, I will probably get something like that myself. Kudos to Dell for doing this as far as they did.
Nevertheless, they aren't promoting this as a commodity box. Hit the home/small office section of their site and you'll never see it. So my argument, though weakened a bit, stands.
The junk mail I see from Dell never says "Save a hundred and fifty bucks and never have to deal with that ghastly XP thing!" I keep wondering why not. All the serious non-professional computer users I know are very suspicious of XP, and they bring it up to me, not the other way around.
I continue to believe that the problems linux has in entering the mass market have nothing to do with the lousy software, because it is only competing with other lousy software.
It's convenient for Microsoft that so many people believe this on 2 counts: 1) it gives MS credit where they don't especially deserve it: few Word or Excel users lack for stories of exasperating misfeatures, and don't let's get started about Outlook. 2) it absolves MS of blame where they probably really deserve it.
imho the main reason the linux desktop hasn't caught on outside of coders and sysadmins is that no major manufacturer promotes and ships an inexpensive commodity box with linux pre-installed, even as a dual-boot option. Most people will not risk their time and their data installing a new OS.
Jean-Louis Gasse has expressed an opinion as to why this is, so I needn't stick my neck out repeating it. It may relate to why IBM, while continuing to develop OS/2, essentially manufactured, promoted and shipped only Win95 boxes in quantity. It may relate to why Dell, after stating their support for linux with some fanfare, never shipped it (to my knowledge) on a box costing less than $2500. It may relate to why the dual boot of BeOS was hidden on the only commodity machine it ever shipped on.
I agree with Webexcess that the problem with mass acceptance of any new OS probably does have something to do with Microsoft.
Someone is releasing a commodity platform with Linux preinstalled!
Now where's the PS2 keyboard in and the XGA out?
I don't need to do those things because my payroll service does those things and files all the reports. I tell them each employee's gross for each pay period and they work out the details, same as Quickbooks used to, and they fill out the forms, same as I used to. Unlike me, they don't forget how it all goes every quarter, either.
All that's left to me as an LLC is income taxes, and for those purposes, all those categories are expenses. So I don't need to take the trouble to break it down. Even if I'm wrong and I ever do need to, I have neat consistent records produced by people whose business is payroll.
What am I missing?
"track changes across 50 states"... how parochial.
Yes, payroll is what makes these packages huge and awkward. Ignore it. Use a payroll service. Then you can enter your payroll costs in three lines: paychecks, taxes withheld, payroll service expenses. All the complicated stuff and most of the compliance stuff is handled outside your program and outside your accounting system.
Saves wear and tear on you, your accountant and your software. Enables you to use open source software.
It's hard for me to imagine an open source product dealing with the tedium of the employment regulations of every imaginable jurisdiction. It's tedious, uninteresting work that no one would do except for a lot of money.
The emerging Linux alternative for small business appears to be Star Office, Mozilla, SQLedger, and outsourced payroll.
Regulated monopoly works as well as the regulators work. National and regional publicly owned or closely regulated monopoly telephone, rail, gas, electric and postal services have been known to deliver excellent service.
Microsoft and the RBOC's like Verizon give us the worst of both worlds: few of the benefits of competition and few of the benefits of regulation either.
Why the CBC continues to be unavailable as broadcast in the US continues to baffle me.
It would take a while for the CBC's better offerings to catch on (their worst offerings being so mind-bogglingly bad wouldn't help) but the potential audience would be multiplied tenfold.
When I need a fix of old Montreal, though, there's always streaming audio at cbc.ca .
I would GREATLY appreciate a useful reference or link on this material.
Neither the link you provided nor google have gotten me very far. I am consulting in a situation where the problem you identify is severe. It would be helpful to making waves higher in the heirarchy of that organization to have specific research to quote.
Your right, they would have bought it under the academic pricing model which is like 1/4th the retail price if not less.
Duh
Exactly. So, at most, they should only get 25% credit toward a settlement for their contribution, since they are already giving away 75% of it. In fact, they often give away 100% of it to poorer nonprofits already.
I'm not clear what "duh" means in this context.
The poorer schools would never have bought Microsoft software at retail anyway. The cost to Microsoft is, therefore, not the retail price nor even the cost to sell at retail, but just the cost of the CD and its packaging, which, judging by the 47 distinct AOL CDs I have mounted on my wall, is probably well under a dollar.
But that's the least of it. Microsoft has been diligent in making contributions to non-profits that might otherwise use free software. Anyone who thinks this is entirely because they are such kind souls is invited to purchase some (slightly damp) land in Florida that I have for sale. Microsoft generosity is intended to prevent people who spend time on computers at nonprofit institutions from discovering alternatives. This is because many of them will eventually end up as computer professionals or paying end users of one sort or another.
Maybe competing with free software by giving proprietary software away to nonprofits is fair play. I don't know. But it isn't a penalty at all, never mind a penalty of the proportions they are claiming. They would be doing this anyway.
Hydrogen is a clean fuel, in that it can be burned without harmful emissions. Because water is plentiful, hydrogen is also a sort of a battery. Electrical current can be used to separate it from water molecules, and some of this energy can be recovered in fuel cells.
Hydrogen extracted from fossil fuels necessarily produces less energy than the raw fuels themselves. Hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis is an energy sink.
Hydrogen may be extracted from water by using solar energy. That is solar energy, not hydrogen energy.
Whether hydrogen is a suitable fuel for vehicles depends on whether the energy costs are worth the emissions benefits. If so, this will make energy more scarce, because of the inefficiencies of converting energy in some other form into the energy of electrolysis.
Whether electrolysis of water is the right method for storage of solar energy depends on the comparative costs, risks and benefits of alternative storage technologies.
In neither case is hydrogen competing with fossil fuels as an energy source. It is competing with fossil fuels and batteries and flywheels and passive heating media as an energu storage system in both cases.
There are no significant pools of free hydrogen on the planet that can be used as an energy source.
Hydrogen is an energy storage strategy and not an energy supply strategy. It may have its uses as the former. Proposing it as a replacement for fossil or nuclear energy is complete nonsense.
All the above should be fully understood by anyone trying to venture an opinion on this subject.
Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who misses this point is one of the following: 1) not seriously interested in the subject 2) incompetent or 3) dishonest.
in a continent, on an ocean... There's one at the top of Green Bay. Is that the most levels?
More to the point: Since everyone is making the same joke about running emulators in emulators, what's the record for number of OSes running inside other OSes? Has anyone actually hit the fourth level, say?
Just idle curiosity...
Apparently, but were you incorrigible as well?
As one of my high-school cohort put it, honor is its own punishment. Still, I survived being a good kid and ended up understanding my own language pretty well.