Those are very good points, and very well presented.
However, although I did not mention this explicitly:
a) I am a software developer and am intimiately familiar with the problems you are talking about b) I already took all of that in consideration in my rant
Yes, what you say would be a big problem for Microsoft. But even given that, they still do a pretty piss-poor job given what they have to work with.
They aren't losers in the sense of making money, but they are losers in the sense of being poor engineers.
No, I don't think the priority should be a new version of paint. You are completely missing the point. I am saying that with the resources Microsoft has, they should be able to produce a very, very good operating system, cutting edge and advanced in almost every way, and STILL have enough money left over to do things like update Paint. And after all that, still have $billions of dollars in the bank.
If MS Windows came with a good image manipulation program, there still wouldn't be anything preventing you from buying a better one if you wanted to. And, if Microsoft didn't suck at writing operating systems so badly, it would be a very easy to set option to decide at install time what features you wanted and what you didn't.
Are you saying that having NO choice is better than having SOME choice? Or that Microsoft's productivity *isn't* pathetic given their resources?
But Microsoft has soooooo much money. How can they not be able to do this?
The thing that always amazes me about Windows is not how half-assed it is, but how half-assed it is given the amount of resources that Microsoft has to throw at the problem. You'd think that they'd have the money to fund tons of cool pieces of software to go with a Windows installation. I mean Windows Paint is a pathetic application that does almost nothing, a team of open source developers could better it in a week. But Microsoft doesn't improve it, or any of the utilities that come with Windows, nor does it ever add any really good or useful ones.
That's just the start. Why didn't Microsoft implement some really awesome tools to assist with driver and hardware management? What they have is so basic! They have BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars and this is the best that they can do?
Honestly, Windows XP isn't terrible as an operating system; if you stick to simple stuff and don't expect too much, it can serve you well. But in terms of bang-for-the-buck, it must be the worst piece of software *ever*. Because if it's the best that a company can do with more money than most countries, well that just says that the company in question is pathetic.
With the amount of money they have, I would think they could afford to fund 10 separate teams in parallel, each developing the next generation of Windows from scratch, and pick the best of the 10 when they're done. And yet they can't even muster enough skill to produce *one* decent next-generation product? What a bunch of losers!
Crybabies like yourself show up whenever there is an article involving a catastophe and the inevitable jokes that ensue.
The dude made a joke. He didn't hurt anyone at all. Unless hurting your feelings counts, which from what you've written, seems like it must happen pretty often.
Grow a thicker skin man, otherwise you're going to spend alot of your life being sick at the fact that there is humor to be found even in the worst catastophe.
I actually saw some episodes of Long Way Round when the were on TV. To be honest, I was not impressed. Some of what they did was interesting, but they a) had at least one support vehicle, which I think is pretty lame; real men do it without support vehicles, and b) were pretty whiny and wimpy. Those two factors kind of ruined my enjoyment of the series.
I haven't seen the Race to Dakar one though. I'll bet those guys are much tougher and more respectable.
You're probably right. With training I would think you could do it, but it would be difficult. When I go on long trips the first day I have trouble sitting 6 hours in the saddle. By the third or fourth day I can do 10 hours. But 32 hours would be really, really difficult.
They have 24 hour endurance races on motorcycles and they split it between three riders so each only has to do 8 hours. One hour on, two hours rest. Then again, those guys are driving 120 - 150 mph on twisty race tracks and pushing it to the edge for the entire hour they are out there. This cross-country dude just has to go 100 - 110 on the highway, after less than an hour I am sure you would acclimate to it and it wouldn't feel any faster than 65 does normally.
1. In my experience you get about twice the mileage in a bike as a car (obviously depends alot on the type of car and type of bike, but considering the guy is driving an M5, it wouldn't be hard to get twice the mileage on even a very powerful bike), but have 1/4 the tank size, so you end up with about half the range with the bike.
2. You can add an extra tank to both vehicles, but the bike gets twice the mileage out of each additional pound of fuel added. I think in the end the bike will end up getting a bit more advantage out of the extra tank, but still the range of the bike will only end up being a bit better than half the range of the car.
3. You can refuel a bike much faster than a car. You don't even have to get off. This buys you maybe 30 seconds per refuel. Probably still not enough to make back the difference given the extra stops you have to make, but it will help.
There must be a safer way to compensate for your small penis than endangering people on the highway across the entire USA.
I have done my share of speeding on U.S. highways and have gotten my share of tickets too. But I don't claim to be anything other than an ass myself when it comes to driving. At least I did it mostly on a motorcycle and likely would only take myself out, which somehow to me seems a little more considerate.
If he really wants to break the record he should do it on a motorcycle. You can bypass any traffic situation entirely with ease. You can even split through traffic going 75+ at 90 if you want to, which I did on a long straight hot boring trip down highway 5 in northern CA on the way back from Oregon. Of course I got a speeding ticket too, from a rather irate cop who couldn't catch me for miles because I kept splitting through traffic (even though I wasn't trying to outrun him, I didn't even know he was there). Like I said, I am an ass too. And I know when when I see one. And that dude is an ass.
Well Mr. Derek Lyons, until you provide even the slightest explanation for your attacks on his statements, it looks like *you* are the one spouting bullshit here.
In other words - it's not very interesting when you just say to someone "you are wrong." It's much more interesting when you give *reasons* for disagreeing.
They work for organizations trying to discover the truth, not push a political agenda. But of course you'll just deny this without any facts to back up your opinion. I've read several of your posts on this topic and you clearly have made your mind up already and would consider the opinion of any scientist who didn't agree with you, no matter how impeccable their credentials, to be not based on sound science but instead on a political agenda. You'll have no evidence this but you'll say it repeatedly anyway.
There really is no worth arguing with people like you, I don't know why I even bothered to write this.
This is the same reason that, despite my constant grumblings about kdawson, I haven't blocked him. Even he posts some good stories sometimes, and I'd hate to miss those. I did block him for a little while but then got paranoid that I was missing something so I put him back in.
You can generalize the argument about why not to block kdawson even though you don't like him, to Slashdot as a whole. Why read Slashdot if only a fraction of the stories are interesting to you? Because there is a certain acceptable level of cruft to have to sift through to find the good stuff. Slashdot on average is above the threshold of acceptability in this regard (although some days it dips below, unfortunately more and more frequently). But kdawson's contribution is rarely above the threshold. This means that if you want to see the occasional good story, you have to wade through alot of his crap.
I also would have liked to have seen taco's response to this question. However, I did have a private email exchange with him that basically confirmed my suspicion that one of kdawson's duties is to post stuff even when it's a slow news day, just to keep the content flowing. So if there are no good news stories, then there still needs to be a certain number of articles posted to Slashdot every day, and kdawson gets the job of posting the crap just to keep the story count up. And during slow news times (apparently summer time in the northern hemisphere and just after that), kdawson works overtime on this.
As to his poor editing, there really is no excuse for that. But he's not even the worst in that regards, Zonk is much worse.
Whatever happened to the "Ask a person" articles?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
This is the first "Ask a person" article that I have seen on Slashdot in some time. It was always one of my favorite segments of Slashdot and it just kind of disappeared several years ago. Why hasn't more effort been put into these segments recently? It's not like there haven't been tons of high-profile geeks in the news just begging to be "Asked by Slashdot". I would love to see more of these segments return - and this one is a great start.
How do people like you miss the umpteen million posts in response to every Slashdot story about the OLPC project that point out that these are being targeted at poor students who are not starving and dying, but who need better educational opportunities? Don't you read ANYTHING that anyone says in response to these articles? I've only skimmed through responses on several occasions and I've already been reminded many times that arguments like yours are completely specious. Not to mention that the OLPC project's web site addresses your question already, so RTFA already.
You are very welcome to form your own group devoting millions of dollars of effort to improving the living standards of poor children in your own way if you like to.
As it stands, you are just a whiner who hasn't done anything, complaining about those who are doing something,
"She had 400 CDs at one point!!!!!!! They just sued the shit out of one of their best customers!"
I suppose the RIAA can look at that one of two ways:
a. She is a great customer who spends lots of money on CDs. b. She has the potential to upload 400 CDs worth of copyrighted music for others to illegally share.
I don't think they'd be entirely wrong if their feelings more closely aligned with (b) than (a).
However, I think that $220,000 is an absurd amount of damages for something like this, even if she was guilty, which the linked-to article suggests isn't even clear cut. Something like $5,000 to $10,000 damages would be much more reasonable.
I am not convinced that people want music to sound like "the original", whatever that is.
People want music to sound "good" - this is to say, to give them enjoyment in listening to it - and I doubt that it is based, for most people, on the concept of sounding more like a live performance. I know that it isn't for me. I enjoy the music that I enjoy because I like the way it sounds, and for two versions of a song, the one that sounded more like a live performance probably wouldn't be the one that I picked as my favorite.
For example, many people (and I find this really annoying myself, but that's a side topic) really like to listen to music with a very heavy bass component. So heavy that there probably isn't any "live" instrument known to man that could make that sound. In many cases they are probably artificially boosting the strength of the bass frequencies, and they like it better that way. They are specifically trying to make it sound *different* than it sounded when it was recorded, or mastered, or even as it would sound after all of these processes, on an unmodified playback system. They are selectively distorting the sound because they like it better.
That example is just one of many that discredits the notion that people objectively feel that sound reproduction systems that give a sound more like a "real instrument" are better.
If by "pretty awful" you mean "perfectly enjoyable by anyone who isn't obsessive-compulsively fixated on perfect sound reproduction", then I agree with you.
While I don't dispute in any way what you say, I'd like to point out that 'numactl' is not the most obvious terminology for a feature that applies to all platforms, NUMA or not. If it really is so general purpose as to support what the Intel guy is talking about on all platforms, then it should either be renamed, or there should at least be another interface with a more approprate name whose implementation calls into the numactl interface.
Obviously if what you say about numactl is true, then this Intel guy should have found out about it before asking for this kind of functionality, regardless of how confusingly termed it may be, so that's not really an excuse for him.
Well keep in mind that you're comparing an urban city (London) to a suburban area (the SF bay area). Probably the most expensive apartment rentals in the USA are in Manhattan (New York), and in 1998 my wife and I paid $2,000 per month for a 400 sq ft/37 sq meter apartment in SoHo (New York, not SoHo London!). I'll bet that the prices have gone up since then, let's estimate $2,600 per month USD for that place. That is approximately 1,300 British pounds per month, or about 325 pounds per week, and that's pretty low end in that area (you can't get too much smaller than 37 sq meters in a one bedroom apartment).
And on the high end, there are certainly places in NYC that you can rent for the equivalent of 1000 GBP per week (or more).
That being said, even New York doesn't have as high a cost of living as London, all factors considered.
The United States is just a really inexpensive place to live, relative to salaries earned; if you take almost any region of the USA and match it up against a comparable region in just about any European country, the USA would have a much lower cost of living. This is why so many people immigrate to the USA; you can make alot of money relatively easily and the cost of living is relatively low. I think that many people mistakenly believe that people move to the USA because they want "freedom", or something like that. But really it's all about economics for the vast majority of immigrants. If people could make the same amount of money in their home countries as they could in the USA, 95% of immigration into the USA would stop. It's as simple as that.
Of course I moved to New Zealand partly because I have a feeling that something is gonna "break" really soon in the USA and things are going to get much worse. I think that housing market is the first indicator of this, but I could be wrong. With my luck I'll wait a couple of years, decide that things must not be as bad as I thought, and move back just in time for the shit to really hit the fan.
Anyway I'm praying for the US dollar to continue to plummet (and continue to fall against the NZD) so that I can return, should I choose to, with more than I left with.
> Sadly, I fell foul of their Gestapo-like HR department, who decided not to give me the job because, > during one of the interviews over the phone to a woman in Texas, I didn't sound 'positive enough'.
Sorry, that is really rough. I had a similar problem once where I got to the final stages of the interview process, the guys I interviewed with were all ready to hire me, but just because I *asked* the HR interview person if in the future the company would be considering allowing employees the occasional work-at-home day (not that I expected to work at home at all, but was thinking about the future when I might have kids).
I think it's really stupid that technology companies let their interview process get hamstrung by HR departments. They should not have HR interviews at all. If the people you're going to work with like you, the HR department really ought not to have any say in it at all.
I'll try. These figures are for the Bay Area, CA (pretty much the epicenter of IT in the USA if not the world). And I'll keep it in Euros to make the comparison easier, using today's exchange rate of 1 Euro = 1.41 USD.
Taxes on salary in various 'slices' (this is federal income tax + social security tax):
16.2% for 0 to 5,354 Euro 21.2% for 5,355 to 21,737 Euro 31.2% for 21,738 to 52,624 Euro 34.2% for 52,625 - 67,286 Euro 28% + 4,171 Euro for 67,287 - 109,787 Euro 33% + 4,171 Euro for 109,788 - 238,688 Euro 35% + 4,171 Euro for 238,689 Euro and the remainder above
(the reason for the last three amounts is that social security tax is only on salary up to 67,286 Euros, salary in excess of that is not assessed social security tax)
You also have to add in state tax, which in CA is between 1% and 9%, depending on how much you make. It's too much trouble to work that into the table above, because the ranges are all different, but if you make more than 28,616 Euros (which just about any person working in IT would), it's 9.3%. So add that makes the tax rates closer to 40% - 50% total for the medium to high tax brackets.
Furthermore, there are small taxes assessed for things like state disability insurance, but these don't sum up to more than 1% usually.
State sales tax: 7.25% (if I rememer correctly)
- Medical insurance: free (paid for by employer) if you have a decent job, anywhere from 350 - 900 Euros per month (depending on the size of your family and your age) if you do not. I personally have never had to pay for medical insurance, and most IT workers would be the same. - Childcare: ~5 Euro/hour - Gasoline: 0.56 Euro/liter (= 3.00 Dollar/gallon) - Public transport: about 3 Euro for 25KM by train, or 6 Euro for a 25KM with a return ticket (I am basing this on $4.00 USD for Caltrain between two "zones", which I am guessing is about 25 KM)
As to new cars, they are much cheaper in the USA and there are no additional taxes beyond state sales tax (although I have never bought a new car, I am just assuming this is true). That E 32,840 car probably would only cost E 22,000 total in the USA.
As you can see, the USA income tax rate is not so much different from your rate, when you factor in all income taxes paid (we pay alot of individual taxes in the USA - federal, state, local (sometimes - in New York City you have to also pay a local income tax!), social security, disability, etc, etc) the rate is typically somewere around 33% total in the USA (if you have a good I.T. job and are making $80,000+ USD per year), whereas it looks like around 40% in your country.
The difference is that sales tax (you call it VAT) is higher in your country (20% vs. 7.25%) and most individual items probably cost more in your country (the cost of gasoline, childcare, and a car demonstrate this).
One big factor you did not mention is the cost of buying a house or renting an apartment. In the Bay Area a modest size family home is at least $700,000 USD (about E 500,000), and renting a moderate apartment is about $1,800 per month (E 1,300). Owning a home in the Bay Area is very, very expensive (compare to homes in Canton, Ohio where my mom lives - houses there are about $150,000 USD, or about E 100,000).
In general, the USA is a very inexpensive place to live.
I have been living in New Zealand for almost a year now and I'd say that it's somewhere between the USA and your country in taxes and cost of living; more expensive than the USA but not as expensive as Europe.
I think his point is that Microsoft could continue to support XP indefinitely; and if they continued to sell XP, then they wouldn't be in the situation you are talking about. They'd be making money off of an operating system they are selling, and providing ongoing support for it.
I haven't put a PC together for a few years, and I know that I am going to do everything in my power to install XP on my next PC instead of Vista. If I can't do that, I will probably skip the PC entirely and just get a Mac (instead of getting a PC *and* a Mac which is my current plan).
> According to our current understanding of physics, it is impossible, even in principle, > to travel to some parts of the universe. Given that the universe is expanding and will > expand forever (exponentially, according to most recent measurements), and that you cannot > travel faster than the speed of light, there are regions of the universe sufficiently > distant that a local observer cannot ever reach them. Thus our observation volume is > finite, even if the universe is infinite. Yet no one objects to statements about the laws > of physics being the same beyond that observational barrier (or about galaxies existing > there, etc.).
But viewed in this way, there would be nothing that could ever be called unfalsifiable. Because we could never test the laws of physics in every single point in space in order to be "absolutely sure" that physical law is the same everywhere. And also we'd never be able to falsify the claim that the laws of physics don't change over time because we'd never be able to test these laws at all points in time, ad infinitum, and in every part of space.
In my limited understanding, falsifiable just means whether or not an experiment could be carried out which could test the validity of a theory. Many universes (and I'm referring to the idea of there really being alternate parallel realities, I think maybe we are miscommunicating on this) cannot be experimentally tested for, so are not falsifiable by this definition.
Someone else pointed out that physical law isn't even a theory, it's an axiom of physics and so isn't subject to the question of falsification. I fully admit that you have to have some basic axioms that stand on faith and without requiring experimental validation, and physical law and the very basic observable phenomenon (such as the existence of time and space and such) fall into that camp for me and pretty much everyone else.
And I think you make a good point; we've been talking about somewhat different things. You are talking about a model for explaining unitary quantum mechanics using a single global wavefunction with local observers and such all operating on a quantum scale. I'm talking about "parallel universes" and time travel and other such nonsense that I think many people believe in and want to scrape up some kind of "scientific" justification for. Perhaps no real scientist actually believes in the parallel universes idea, but I remember reading Stephen Hawkin's "A Brief History of Time" and convincing myself that this is what he believed, but I very well may have just been misunderstanding his writing.
Is the axiom that physical law is the same everywhere in the universe really unfalsifiable?
I mean, practically speaking, we are unlikely to ever go to some other distant galaxy and to verify physics there. But there is nothing in the laws of science that prevent us from doing that. It is "practically" impossible to falsify the axiom, but not theoretically impossible.
The many universes theory, is, on the other hand, impossible to falsify in every way (theoretically and practically). The universes are disjoint. We could never travel to them. We could never exchange information between two disjoint universes such to communicate the truth or falseness of the axiom of physical law.
This I think is the real definition of non-falsifiable, and for this reason, I think that theories like the many universes theories are science fiction and not even remotely scientific. Also they're a ridiculous waste of time; I didn't read the comments to this Slashdot article because I think that many universes is an interesting theory, I just wanted to be amused by how the misinformed attempt to justify it.
Don't take that the wrong way - your post was informative and interesting. But people who really believe in stuff like multiple universes and time travel and think it's all very scientific just really make me laugh out loud.
But Bemopolis clearly didn't misplace his index card with the Slashbot boilerplate for attacking anyone in the music industry for anything that they ever say or do.
I'm not quite sure what the story is here though. The CEO of a company wants his company to make more money? What a shocker.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are very good points, and very well presented.
However, although I did not mention this explicitly:
a) I am a software developer and am intimiately familiar with the problems you are talking about
b) I already took all of that in consideration in my rant
Yes, what you say would be a big problem for Microsoft. But even given that, they still do a pretty piss-poor job given what they have to work with.
They aren't losers in the sense of making money, but they are losers in the sense of being poor engineers.
No, I don't think the priority should be a new version of paint. You are completely missing the point. I am saying that with the resources Microsoft has, they should be able to produce a very, very good operating system, cutting edge and advanced in almost every way, and STILL have enough money left over to do things like update Paint. And after all that, still have $billions of dollars in the bank.
If MS Windows came with a good image manipulation program, there still wouldn't be anything preventing you from buying a better one if you wanted to. And, if Microsoft didn't suck at writing operating systems so badly, it would be a very easy to set option to decide at install time what features you wanted and what you didn't.
Are you saying that having NO choice is better than having SOME choice? Or that Microsoft's productivity *isn't* pathetic given their resources?
But Microsoft has soooooo much money. How can they not be able to do this?
The thing that always amazes me about Windows is not how half-assed it is, but how half-assed it is given the amount of resources that Microsoft has to throw at the problem. You'd think that they'd have the money to fund tons of cool pieces of software to go with a Windows installation. I mean Windows Paint is a pathetic application that does almost nothing, a team of open source developers could better it in a week. But Microsoft doesn't improve it, or any of the utilities that come with Windows, nor does it ever add any really good or useful ones.
That's just the start. Why didn't Microsoft implement some really awesome tools to assist with driver and hardware management? What they have is so basic! They have BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars and this is the best that they can do?
Honestly, Windows XP isn't terrible as an operating system; if you stick to simple stuff and don't expect too much, it can serve you well. But in terms of bang-for-the-buck, it must be the worst piece of software *ever*. Because if it's the best that a company can do with more money than most countries, well that just says that the company in question is pathetic.
With the amount of money they have, I would think they could afford to fund 10 separate teams in parallel, each developing the next generation of Windows from scratch, and pick the best of the 10 when they're done. And yet they can't even muster enough skill to produce *one* decent next-generation product? What a bunch of losers!
Crybabies like yourself show up whenever there is an article involving a catastophe and the inevitable jokes that ensue.
The dude made a joke. He didn't hurt anyone at all. Unless hurting your feelings counts, which from what you've written, seems like it must happen pretty often.
Grow a thicker skin man, otherwise you're going to spend alot of your life being sick at the fact that there is humor to be found even in the worst catastophe.
I actually saw some episodes of Long Way Round when the were on TV. To be honest, I was not impressed. Some of what they did was interesting, but they a) had at least one support vehicle, which I think is pretty lame; real men do it without support vehicles, and b) were pretty whiny and wimpy. Those two factors kind of ruined my enjoyment of the series.
I haven't seen the Race to Dakar one though. I'll bet those guys are much tougher and more respectable.
You're probably right. With training I would think you could do it, but it would be difficult. When I go on long trips the first day I have trouble sitting 6 hours in the saddle. By the third or fourth day I can do 10 hours. But 32 hours would be really, really difficult.
They have 24 hour endurance races on motorcycles and they split it between three riders so each only has to do 8 hours. One hour on, two hours rest. Then again, those guys are driving 120 - 150 mph on twisty race tracks and pushing it to the edge for the entire hour they are out there. This cross-country dude just has to go 100 - 110 on the highway, after less than an hour I am sure you would acclimate to it and it wouldn't feel any faster than 65 does normally.
Three points:
1. In my experience you get about twice the mileage in a bike as a car (obviously depends alot on the type of car and type of bike, but considering the guy is driving an M5, it wouldn't be hard to get twice the mileage on even a very powerful bike), but have 1/4 the tank size, so you end up with about half the range with the bike.
2. You can add an extra tank to both vehicles, but the bike gets twice the mileage out of each additional pound of fuel added. I think in the end the bike will end up getting a bit more advantage out of the extra tank, but still the range of the bike will only end up being a bit better than half the range of the car.
3. You can refuel a bike much faster than a car. You don't even have to get off. This buys you maybe 30 seconds per refuel. Probably still not enough to make back the difference given the extra stops you have to make, but it will help.
There must be a safer way to compensate for your small penis than endangering people on the highway across the entire USA.
I have done my share of speeding on U.S. highways and have gotten my share of tickets too. But I don't claim to be anything other than an ass myself when it comes to driving. At least I did it mostly on a motorcycle and likely would only take myself out, which somehow to me seems a little more considerate.
If he really wants to break the record he should do it on a motorcycle. You can bypass any traffic situation entirely with ease. You can even split through traffic going 75+ at 90 if you want to, which I did on a long straight hot boring trip down highway 5 in northern CA on the way back from Oregon. Of course I got a speeding ticket too, from a rather irate cop who couldn't catch me for miles because I kept splitting through traffic (even though I wasn't trying to outrun him, I didn't even know he was there). Like I said, I am an ass too. And I know when when I see one. And that dude is an ass.
Well Mr. Derek Lyons, until you provide even the slightest explanation for your attacks on his statements, it looks like *you* are the one spouting bullshit here.
In other words - it's not very interesting when you just say to someone "you are wrong." It's much more interesting when you give *reasons* for disagreeing.
Try to be a little more interesting, ok?
They work for organizations trying to discover the truth, not push a political agenda. But of course you'll just deny this without any facts to back up your opinion. I've read several of your posts on this topic and you clearly have made your mind up already and would consider the opinion of any scientist who didn't agree with you, no matter how impeccable their credentials, to be not based on sound science but instead on a political agenda. You'll have no evidence this but you'll say it repeatedly anyway.
There really is no worth arguing with people like you, I don't know why I even bothered to write this.
This is the same reason that, despite my constant grumblings about kdawson, I haven't blocked him. Even he posts some good stories sometimes, and I'd hate to miss those. I did block him for a little while but then got paranoid that I was missing something so I put him back in.
You can generalize the argument about why not to block kdawson even though you don't like him, to Slashdot as a whole. Why read Slashdot if only a fraction of the stories are interesting to you? Because there is a certain acceptable level of cruft to have to sift through to find the good stuff. Slashdot on average is above the threshold of acceptability in this regard (although some days it dips below, unfortunately more and more frequently). But kdawson's contribution is rarely above the threshold. This means that if you want to see the occasional good story, you have to wade through alot of his crap.
I also would have liked to have seen taco's response to this question. However, I did have a private email exchange with him that basically confirmed my suspicion that one of kdawson's duties is to post stuff even when it's a slow news day, just to keep the content flowing. So if there are no good news stories, then there still needs to be a certain number of articles posted to Slashdot every day, and kdawson gets the job of posting the crap just to keep the story count up. And during slow news times (apparently summer time in the northern hemisphere and just after that), kdawson works overtime on this.
As to his poor editing, there really is no excuse for that. But he's not even the worst in that regards, Zonk is much worse.
This is the first "Ask a person" article that I have seen on Slashdot in some time. It was always one of my favorite segments of Slashdot and it just kind of disappeared several years ago. Why hasn't more effort been put into these segments recently? It's not like there haven't been tons of high-profile geeks in the news just begging to be "Asked by Slashdot". I would love to see more of these segments return - and this one is a great start.
How do people like you miss the umpteen million posts in response to every Slashdot story about the OLPC project that point out that these are being targeted at poor students who are not starving and dying, but who need better educational opportunities? Don't you read ANYTHING that anyone says in response to these articles? I've only skimmed through responses on several occasions and I've already been reminded many times that arguments like yours are completely specious. Not to mention that the OLPC project's web site addresses your question already, so RTFA already.
You are very welcome to form your own group devoting millions of dollars of effort to improving the living standards of poor children in your own way if you like to.
As it stands, you are just a whiner who hasn't done anything, complaining about those who are doing something,
"She had 400 CDs at one point!!!!!!! They just sued the shit out of one of their best customers!"
I suppose the RIAA can look at that one of two ways:
a. She is a great customer who spends lots of money on CDs.
b. She has the potential to upload 400 CDs worth of copyrighted music for others to illegally share.
I don't think they'd be entirely wrong if their feelings more closely aligned with (b) than (a).
However, I think that $220,000 is an absurd amount of damages for something like this, even if she was guilty, which the linked-to article suggests isn't even clear cut. Something like $5,000 to $10,000 damages would be much more reasonable.
I am not convinced that people want music to sound like "the original", whatever that is.
People want music to sound "good" - this is to say, to give them enjoyment in listening to it - and I doubt that it is based, for most people, on the concept of sounding more like a live performance. I know that it isn't for me. I enjoy the music that I enjoy because I like the way it sounds, and for two versions of a song, the one that sounded more like a live performance probably wouldn't be the one that I picked as my favorite.
For example, many people (and I find this really annoying myself, but that's a side topic) really like to listen to music with a very heavy bass component. So heavy that there probably isn't any "live" instrument known to man that could make that sound. In many cases they are probably artificially boosting the strength of the bass frequencies, and they like it better that way. They are specifically trying to make it sound *different* than it sounded when it was recorded, or mastered, or even as it would sound after all of these processes, on an unmodified playback system. They are selectively distorting the sound because they like it better.
That example is just one of many that discredits the notion that people objectively feel that sound reproduction systems that give a sound more like a "real instrument" are better.
If by "pretty awful" you mean "perfectly enjoyable by anyone who isn't obsessive-compulsively fixated on perfect sound reproduction", then I agree with you.
While I don't dispute in any way what you say, I'd like to point out that 'numactl' is not the most obvious terminology for a feature that applies to all platforms, NUMA or not. If it really is so general purpose as to support what the Intel guy is talking about on all platforms, then it should either be renamed, or there should at least be another interface with a more approprate name whose implementation calls into the numactl interface.
Obviously if what you say about numactl is true, then this Intel guy should have found out about it before asking for this kind of functionality, regardless of how confusingly termed it may be, so that's not really an excuse for him.
Well keep in mind that you're comparing an urban city (London) to a suburban area (the SF bay area). Probably the most expensive apartment rentals in the USA are in Manhattan (New York), and in 1998 my wife and I paid $2,000 per month for a 400 sq ft/37 sq meter apartment in SoHo (New York, not SoHo London!). I'll bet that the prices have gone up since then, let's estimate $2,600 per month USD for that place. That is approximately 1,300 British pounds per month, or about 325 pounds per week, and that's pretty low end in that area (you can't get too much smaller than 37 sq meters in a one bedroom apartment).
And on the high end, there are certainly places in NYC that you can rent for the equivalent of 1000 GBP per week (or more).
That being said, even New York doesn't have as high a cost of living as London, all factors considered.
The United States is just a really inexpensive place to live, relative to salaries earned; if you take almost any region of the USA and match it up against a comparable region in just about any European country, the USA would have a much lower cost of living. This is why so many people immigrate to the USA; you can make alot of money relatively easily and the cost of living is relatively low. I think that many people mistakenly believe that people move to the USA because they want "freedom", or something like that. But really it's all about economics for the vast majority of immigrants. If people could make the same amount of money in their home countries as they could in the USA, 95% of immigration into the USA would stop. It's as simple as that.
Of course I moved to New Zealand partly because I have a feeling that something is gonna "break" really soon in the USA and things are going to get much worse. I think that housing market is the first indicator of this, but I could be wrong. With my luck I'll wait a couple of years, decide that things must not be as bad as I thought, and move back just in time for the shit to really hit the fan.
Anyway I'm praying for the US dollar to continue to plummet (and continue to fall against the NZD) so that I can return, should I choose to, with more than I left with.
> Sadly, I fell foul of their Gestapo-like HR department, who decided not to give me the job because,
> during one of the interviews over the phone to a woman in Texas, I didn't sound 'positive enough'.
Sorry, that is really rough. I had a similar problem once where I got to the final stages of the interview process, the guys I interviewed with were all ready to hire me, but just because I *asked* the HR interview person if in the future the company would be considering allowing employees the occasional work-at-home day (not that I expected to work at home at all, but was thinking about the future when I might have kids).
I think it's really stupid that technology companies let their interview process get hamstrung by HR departments. They should not have HR interviews at all. If the people you're going to work with like you, the HR department really ought not to have any say in it at all.
I'll try. These figures are for the Bay Area, CA (pretty much the epicenter of IT in the USA if not the world). And I'll keep it in Euros to make the comparison easier, using today's exchange rate of 1 Euro = 1.41 USD.
Taxes on salary in various 'slices' (this is federal income tax + social security tax):
16.2% for 0 to 5,354 Euro
21.2% for 5,355 to 21,737 Euro
31.2% for 21,738 to 52,624 Euro
34.2% for 52,625 - 67,286 Euro
28% + 4,171 Euro for 67,287 - 109,787 Euro
33% + 4,171 Euro for 109,788 - 238,688 Euro
35% + 4,171 Euro for 238,689 Euro and the remainder above
(the reason for the last three amounts is that social security tax is only on salary up to 67,286 Euros, salary in excess of that is not assessed social security tax)
You also have to add in state tax, which in CA is between 1% and 9%, depending on how much you make. It's too much trouble to work that into the table above, because the ranges are all different, but if you make more than 28,616 Euros (which just about any person working in IT would), it's 9.3%. So add that makes the tax rates closer to 40% - 50% total for the medium to high tax brackets.
Furthermore, there are small taxes assessed for things like state disability insurance, but these don't sum up to more than 1% usually.
State sales tax: 7.25% (if I rememer correctly)
- Medical insurance: free (paid for by employer) if you have a decent job, anywhere from 350 - 900 Euros per month (depending on the size of your family and your age) if you do not. I personally have never had to pay for medical insurance, and most IT workers would be the same.
- Childcare: ~5 Euro/hour
- Gasoline: 0.56 Euro/liter (= 3.00 Dollar/gallon)
- Public transport: about 3 Euro for 25KM by train, or 6 Euro for a 25KM with a return ticket (I am basing this on $4.00 USD for Caltrain between two "zones", which I am guessing is about 25 KM)
As to new cars, they are much cheaper in the USA and there are no additional taxes beyond state sales tax (although I have never bought a new car, I am just assuming this is true). That E 32,840 car probably would only cost E 22,000 total in the USA.
As you can see, the USA income tax rate is not so much different from your rate, when you factor in all income taxes paid (we pay alot of individual taxes in the USA - federal, state, local (sometimes - in New York City you have to also pay a local income tax!), social security, disability, etc, etc) the rate is typically somewere around 33% total in the USA (if you have a good I.T. job and are making $80,000+ USD per year), whereas it looks like around 40% in your country.
The difference is that sales tax (you call it VAT) is higher in your country (20% vs. 7.25%) and most individual items probably cost more in your country (the cost of gasoline, childcare, and a car demonstrate this).
One big factor you did not mention is the cost of buying a house or renting an apartment. In the Bay Area a modest size family home is at least $700,000 USD (about E 500,000), and renting a moderate apartment is about $1,800 per month (E 1,300). Owning a home in the Bay Area is very, very expensive (compare to homes in Canton, Ohio where my mom lives - houses there are about $150,000 USD, or about E 100,000).
In general, the USA is a very inexpensive place to live.
I have been living in New Zealand for almost a year now and I'd say that it's somewhere between the USA and your country in taxes and cost of living; more expensive than the USA but not as expensive as Europe.
I think his point is that Microsoft could continue to support XP indefinitely; and if they continued to sell XP, then they wouldn't be in the situation you are talking about. They'd be making money off of an operating system they are selling, and providing ongoing support for it.
I haven't put a PC together for a few years, and I know that I am going to do everything in my power to install XP on my next PC instead of Vista. If I can't do that, I will probably skip the PC entirely and just get a Mac (instead of getting a PC *and* a Mac which is my current plan).
> According to our current understanding of physics, it is impossible, even in principle,
> to travel to some parts of the universe. Given that the universe is expanding and will
> expand forever (exponentially, according to most recent measurements), and that you cannot
> travel faster than the speed of light, there are regions of the universe sufficiently
> distant that a local observer cannot ever reach them. Thus our observation volume is
> finite, even if the universe is infinite. Yet no one objects to statements about the laws
> of physics being the same beyond that observational barrier (or about galaxies existing
> there, etc.).
But viewed in this way, there would be nothing that could ever be called unfalsifiable. Because we could never test the laws of physics in every single point in space in order to be "absolutely sure" that physical law is the same everywhere. And also we'd never be able to falsify the claim that the laws of physics don't change over time because we'd never be able to test these laws at all points in time, ad infinitum, and in every part of space.
In my limited understanding, falsifiable just means whether or not an experiment could be carried out which could test the validity of a theory. Many universes (and I'm referring to the idea of there really being alternate parallel realities, I think maybe we are miscommunicating on this) cannot be experimentally tested for, so are not falsifiable by this definition.
Someone else pointed out that physical law isn't even a theory, it's an axiom of physics and so isn't subject to the question of falsification. I fully admit that you have to have some basic axioms that stand on faith and without requiring experimental validation, and physical law and the very basic observable phenomenon (such as the existence of time and space and such) fall into that camp for me and pretty much everyone else.
And I think you make a good point; we've been talking about somewhat different things. You are talking about a model for explaining unitary quantum mechanics using a single global wavefunction with local observers and such all operating on a quantum scale. I'm talking about "parallel universes" and time travel and other such nonsense that I think many people believe in and want to scrape up some kind of "scientific" justification for. Perhaps no real scientist actually believes in the parallel universes idea, but I remember reading Stephen Hawkin's "A Brief History of Time" and convincing myself that this is what he believed, but I very well may have just been misunderstanding his writing.
Is the axiom that physical law is the same everywhere in the universe really unfalsifiable?
I mean, practically speaking, we are unlikely to ever go to some other distant galaxy and to verify physics there. But there is nothing in the laws of science that prevent us from doing that. It is "practically" impossible to falsify the axiom, but not theoretically impossible.
The many universes theory, is, on the other hand, impossible to falsify in every way (theoretically and practically). The universes are disjoint. We could never travel to them. We could never exchange information between two disjoint universes such to communicate the truth or falseness of the axiom of physical law.
This I think is the real definition of non-falsifiable, and for this reason, I think that theories like the many universes theories are science fiction and not even remotely scientific. Also they're a ridiculous waste of time; I didn't read the comments to this Slashdot article because I think that many universes is an interesting theory, I just wanted to be amused by how the misinformed attempt to justify it.
Don't take that the wrong way - your post was informative and interesting. But people who really believe in stuff like multiple universes and time travel and think it's all very scientific just really make me laugh out loud.
But Bemopolis clearly didn't misplace his index card with the Slashbot boilerplate for attacking anyone in the music industry for anything that they ever say or do.
I'm not quite sure what the story is here though. The CEO of a company wants his company to make more money? What a shocker.