Sounds right to me. It's most well known as the Knapsack Problem. It's also known as the mail carrier problem, finding the most efficient route to deliver mail.
Little did they know in 1971 that the answer was "Hire cheap labor from foreign countries". For P=NP, if P=customer service, NP = India.
... do we stop glorifying formerly brilliant inventors as sages? Just because you were once brilliant does not mean everything you do is brilliant.
I give you Donald Trump as an example. Crazy is crazy is crazy, and Woz is going grumpy senile fast. He thinks he has all the answers to children's education and now patents. So he made a successful computer. That was decades ago. Now, everytime he whines, he get's a/. story. Drop him in the spam bin already!
Incorrect. It was pointed out yesterday on NPR's "All Things Considered". Now, if you said "nobody in the mainstream media", you might be right, but I ignore most of them if I can help it.
...nobody in the media has noticed that Osama chose to hide out in a city named after a British colonial overlord.
FTA, only has installs for Nexus One and Nexus X, and installer comes in Windows, OSX, and Linux... and it looks like they're all 64bit installs only. Very limited. And there is DroidWall, which is available on the market, but I believe you need a rooted phone (which is probably true for any decent firewall). I use DroidWall and it's fantastic. It let's you choose to allow not just an app, but how it connects. You can, for instance, block Pandora on 3G, but not Wifi.
Anonymous Cowards is almost correct. That's from the PROPOSED budget for 2012. What Anonymous coward forgot was that Social Security and Medicare is only 44% of the next proposed budget. The final 35% is discretionary, down from around 38% in 2008.
The 44% is nearly non-negotiable mandated spending. You can't really cut mandated spending except to streamline the programs. You can't just cut parts out you don't like. Not in the budgetary process, at least (or they're not supposed to, anyways).
The defense budget is entirely different. It is not mandatory, but it is not discretionary either. You CAN cut parts out you don't like with the wave of a budgetary wand... you just piss representatives off who lose military and defense contractor jobs in their districts. On the whole, military spending has no real "net gain". There is no financial return on $1 million Tomahawk missiles, whether fired or sitting in storage. It's therefore harder to justify investments in technology.
This doesn't mean such investments aren't needed. What liberals rail at is that we spend more than all of NATO combined on our military, and more than any single country. Our military spending is so large that it makes even China look minuscule. Conservatives point out that the reason our allies don't spend as much is that they rely on us for their security for the most part. Nobody is invading France, Britain, or Germany without having to deal with us.
However, as history tells us, spending too much on your military and not enough on your economy will lead to your downfall. While Sparta eventually defeated Athens, it was unable to take on the economic burden left by the spoils of war which lead to its downfall.
We could be the next Spartans, and China the next Athens. Sure, we can whip their ass, but in 30 years if we're paying $5 a gallon because we didn't go all electirc, and China did... who cares?
Nukes were supposed to level the field. It's not like we're going to have a ground war with any other nuclear power. We'll all glow in the dark long before then.
Sometimes, you have to change, or die. The old way of doing window'd systems can't last forever. Yeah, it's different. But it's not bad, and all uber geek tools are still there.
I have Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity running on my work production system and on a personal netbook. It was a shock at first, because I didn't know it was coming. I used Compiz, so to see all my 3D goodness evaporate, I was heartbroken.
But after using it a while, I realize, it is actually better, and I'm starting to love it... even though I still spend considerable time in my trusty terminal window.
Realize when it's time to change. People on Windows have not seen much real change, and what change they have seen is not for the better. But when something comes across that's "Not as good as it was in MY day!" then you are probably being passed on the highway of progress.
I didn't like the iPhone. Touch screens seemed like a fad to me. But I knew I'd have to change. And now, couldn't live with a phone without a touch screen. It's still not an iPhone, but I'm certainly not on my BlackBerry Curve anymore. Unity is looking like it's getting touch screen ready. It's also allowing more real estate. As anyone who has used a touch screen device, regular old windows is not the best choice.
In other words, stop whining and be proactive if you value your privacy over convenience because others value the convenience and aren't disturbed except when they lose services because of your whining. We're talking to you, Blur-many.
Why? Seriously, why? The shareholders vote the board, the board votes the salary. Who's hurt here? We're not even talking banks here, but every corporation down to little mom-pop run ones where the shareholders are family. Who cares what the CEO makes? You wanna pay less, buy stock, and vote to pay less.
But, you say, rich shareholders put in rich friends, and everyone votes everyone else up. Well... yeah. Cause they OWN the company. If I own a company, I'll pay myself whatever I please, tyvm.
It's called the "windows key". It has a little windows flag on it. It was placed on keyboards for the purpose of slowing down, crashing, mutilating, and annihilating data centers, desktops, laptops, and phones.
There's one area in which iOS/Android cannot even touch the BlackBerry - security.
You're right. Google nor Apple, to my knowledge, has yet to sell me on "unbreakable" encryption and then turned around and made a deal with a foreign government to provide the tools to break said unbreakable encryption. Yep, my DroidX can't touch that. Well, I can call using RedPhone, and completely encrypt my voice calls, use Orbot (Tor) to anonymize and onion route my phone's communications, and I can use any number of private crypto messengers.
Oh wait, did I mention that the folks at Whispersys.com (makers of RedPhone) also make WhisperCore 0.2? From the link: "Device and data security for Android. WhisperCore integrates with the underlying Android OS to protect everything you keep on your phone. This initial beta tech-demo features full disk encryption and basic platform management tools for Nexus S phones. WhisperCore presents a simple and unobstrusive interface to users, while providing powerful security and management APIs for developers."
So... what were you saying about BlackBerry faux-security again?
You're right. The GP has this idea that OSX isn't all about "user experience". Every last Apple product is user experience first, all else second. If they can't do it "right", they don't do it.
I honestly don't like Apple. But not because they don't try. I'm nowhere near the middle of the Apple user experience bell curve. But jeez, for someone to go Apple, then blast the "experience" metric is mind blowing. Good response, parent.
Chasing Apple on services? Yeah, sorta, if you're talking music and apps. Chasing Google if you mean web based services. Chasing Amazon if you mean cloud computing. Chasing microsoft... heh, just kidding.
But let's not chalk it all up to Apple. Nobody chased Apple into mp3 players, rather, it was the other way around. The same with PDA/Smartphones. Apple is not an innovator, it is a refiner. And if you want to make the point that Ubuntu is moving away from trying to reinvent the wheel into just refining it, then you're absolutely correct.
I just find it hilarious when Apple fanboys talk about chasing Apple. Apple switched to a nix architecture, but now we're going to say Ubuntu is chasing Apple? HAHA! That's like claiming Palm was chasing Apple with its phone. Palm cornered the PDA market. All they did was add a cell radio to the same thing they'd always been doing. Which is why it failed, imho. But Apple was chasing Palm, RIM, and Nokia. But what they really did was refine, and they did it better than anyone else. But chase? I think not. You can't chase a company who always waits at least 1 generation behind cutting edge tech.
Apple is very good at refining. I think Canonical has done well too. I just upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 this morning. At first I had the "WTF!" experience. Then I gave it some time, and realized that for many users, this will be so much better. Once I found my administration programs, and swallowed the vomit that had risen in my throat at finding the WORST features of OSX on my updated desktop, I realized that the positive outweighed the good... and I can still customize what I want.
People paid for the Playstation Network. They walked into a store and paid a LOT more than $50 for a box. I don't hear any of them lauding the uber awesome privacy of pay-vs-free.
Free doesn't include your credit card number. How's that for privacy?
This may be useful for sales, marketting, or management. As for IT, it's just annoying. I eat at my computer. Occasionally I'll go pick something up with a fellow IT worker, and discuss some issue, but even then, I don't pow-wow with anyone while I eat my burger. People call me all day long, bitching and wanting me to fix something. I don't answer the phone, and unless it's an emergency, I won't get up until I'm done. And it's not like I stopped working. I'm still thinking about what I'm working on, coming up with ideas, etc.
But for the love of man, just leave me the hell alone for 15 minutes!
You have the right to refuse a right was the point, not that you are forced to refuse a right. Sure, you can shut up later. But on the other hand, once you make a plea bargain, that's it. You signed the paper forever signing off that right to trial in that case. You can still go to court, and maybe reverse something, but that's not the same thing. I think we both agree on that.
In that transaction, the states forfeited their rights to absolute sovereignty. And the state representatives signed it. It can be undone, but so can an AT&T contract. You're not forced to keep service with them.
And that's the point. You have a choice. You can agree with their terms, or you can not do business with them. At at the end of the day, it's the people going, "OMG, AT&T IS FORCING US TO....!"
But the truth is that they're not. You have a right to sue AT&T. But AT&T wants to do business with people who agree with certain terms. You can opt-out at any time. You can leave the contract. But what happened under contract is covered by contract. You can leave AT&T, and then if they somehow still screw you, you can sue.
It absolutely kills me that people want the benefits of the service/business, but don't want to give companies any benefits in return.
People wonder why we don't have fiber broadband everywhere. Ignoring the fact that we are a giant, sprawling country where that's not financially feasible at this point, it's also a fact that these companies pay for armies of lawyers just to protect itself from its own customers. 1 customer can sue them for billions under class action for some $30 charge. They're already regulated, and if we want "punishment" then "We the People" should give the FCC more power.
But AT&T doesn't print money. If they lose a billion dollars, they're going to take it out of their own customers' asses later in higher fees. They're not just going to sit idly by on their losses. So there's no "win" for the customers via class action in that case.
I'm not against class action. I think used against employers is a positive thing. Employment contracts for the poor are far less "optional" than signing up for an iPhone. But to simply say that it's all wrong to enforce a contract... that needs to be decided by legislatures... and the point the Supreme Court made was, guess what, there is a federal arbitration law, so legislation did speak, and the class action is thrown out because "We the People" said we favor arbitration via our federal representatives.
And "We the People" can undo it with a single vote. It was a voluntary choice to choose an alternative right, and it can be undone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds right to me. It's most well known as the Knapsack Problem. It's also known as the mail carrier problem, finding the most efficient route to deliver mail.
Little did they know in 1971 that the answer was "Hire cheap labor from foreign countries". For P=NP, if P=customer service, NP = India.
... do we stop glorifying formerly brilliant inventors as sages? Just because you were once brilliant does not mean everything you do is brilliant.
I give you Donald Trump as an example. Crazy is crazy is crazy, and Woz is going grumpy senile fast. He thinks he has all the answers to children's education and now patents. So he made a successful computer. That was decades ago. Now, everytime he whines, he get's a /. story. Drop him in the spam bin already!
Incorrect. It was pointed out yesterday on NPR's "All Things Considered". Now, if you said "nobody in the mainstream media", you might be right, but I ignore most of them if I can help it.
...nobody in the media has noticed that Osama chose to hide out in a city named after a British colonial overlord.
rj
Writing code is easy. Writing good code is hard. Optimizing good code is hard and expensive.
And before someone tells me that GPL is optimized and free, its a trade off of costs, but the price is still high. Optimizing free code costs passion.
Mod up Parent
FTA, only has installs for Nexus One and Nexus X, and installer comes in Windows, OSX, and Linux... and it looks like they're all 64bit installs only. Very limited. And there is DroidWall, which is available on the market, but I believe you need a rooted phone (which is probably true for any decent firewall). I use DroidWall and it's fantastic. It let's you choose to allow not just an app, but how it connects. You can, for instance, block Pandora on 3G, but not Wifi.
...and by $5, I meant $50.
Anonymous Cowards is almost correct. That's from the PROPOSED budget for 2012. What Anonymous coward forgot was that Social Security and Medicare is only 44% of the next proposed budget. The final 35% is discretionary, down from around 38% in 2008.
The 44% is nearly non-negotiable mandated spending. You can't really cut mandated spending except to streamline the programs. You can't just cut parts out you don't like. Not in the budgetary process, at least (or they're not supposed to, anyways).
The defense budget is entirely different. It is not mandatory, but it is not discretionary either. You CAN cut parts out you don't like with the wave of a budgetary wand... you just piss representatives off who lose military and defense contractor jobs in their districts. On the whole, military spending has no real "net gain". There is no financial return on $1 million Tomahawk missiles, whether fired or sitting in storage. It's therefore harder to justify investments in technology.
This doesn't mean such investments aren't needed. What liberals rail at is that we spend more than all of NATO combined on our military, and more than any single country. Our military spending is so large that it makes even China look minuscule. Conservatives point out that the reason our allies don't spend as much is that they rely on us for their security for the most part. Nobody is invading France, Britain, or Germany without having to deal with us.
However, as history tells us, spending too much on your military and not enough on your economy will lead to your downfall. While Sparta eventually defeated Athens, it was unable to take on the economic burden left by the spoils of war which lead to its downfall.
We could be the next Spartans, and China the next Athens. Sure, we can whip their ass, but in 30 years if we're paying $5 a gallon because we didn't go all electirc, and China did... who cares?
Nukes were supposed to level the field. It's not like we're going to have a ground war with any other nuclear power. We'll all glow in the dark long before then.
The birds won't help. The NSA has completed all levels of Angry Birds, with 3 stars, and found all the hidden golden eggs!
Sometimes, you have to change, or die. The old way of doing window'd systems can't last forever. Yeah, it's different. But it's not bad, and all uber geek tools are still there.
I have Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity running on my work production system and on a personal netbook. It was a shock at first, because I didn't know it was coming. I used Compiz, so to see all my 3D goodness evaporate, I was heartbroken.
But after using it a while, I realize, it is actually better, and I'm starting to love it... even though I still spend considerable time in my trusty terminal window.
Realize when it's time to change. People on Windows have not seen much real change, and what change they have seen is not for the better. But when something comes across that's "Not as good as it was in MY day!" then you are probably being passed on the highway of progress.
I didn't like the iPhone. Touch screens seemed like a fad to me. But I knew I'd have to change. And now, couldn't live with a phone without a touch screen. It's still not an iPhone, but I'm certainly not on my BlackBerry Curve anymore. Unity is looking like it's getting touch screen ready. It's also allowing more real estate. As anyone who has used a touch screen device, regular old windows is not the best choice.
In other words, stop whining and be proactive if you value your privacy over convenience because others value the convenience and aren't disturbed except when they lose services because of your whining. We're talking to you, Blur-many.
Why? Seriously, why? The shareholders vote the board, the board votes the salary. Who's hurt here? We're not even talking banks here, but every corporation down to little mom-pop run ones where the shareholders are family. Who cares what the CEO makes? You wanna pay less, buy stock, and vote to pay less.
But, you say, rich shareholders put in rich friends, and everyone votes everyone else up. Well... yeah. Cause they OWN the company. If I own a company, I'll pay myself whatever I please, tyvm.
Yeah, but some dumbasses started throwing eggs at Bieber, and Bin Laden was instantly old news.
Sounds like you are on the verge of a major teenage rebellion. Gonna die your hair green, turn up your speakers, and cruise the mall parking lot?
That's what GI Joe and NBC keep telling me.
It's called the "windows key". It has a little windows flag on it. It was placed on keyboards for the purpose of slowing down, crashing, mutilating, and annihilating data centers, desktops, laptops, and phones.
Ok, stage 1 complete... discussion has rapidly degraded into religious diatribe... Prepare for stage 2... Cue Nazi references in 3... 2... 1...
There's one area in which iOS/Android cannot even touch the BlackBerry - security.
You're right. Google nor Apple, to my knowledge, has yet to sell me on "unbreakable" encryption and then turned around and made a deal with a foreign government to provide the tools to break said unbreakable encryption. Yep, my DroidX can't touch that. Well, I can call using RedPhone, and completely encrypt my voice calls, use Orbot (Tor) to anonymize and onion route my phone's communications, and I can use any number of private crypto messengers.
Oh wait, did I mention that the folks at Whispersys.com (makers of RedPhone) also make WhisperCore 0.2? From the link: "Device and data security for Android. WhisperCore integrates with the underlying Android OS to protect everything you keep on your phone. This initial beta tech-demo features full disk encryption and basic platform management tools for Nexus S phones. WhisperCore presents a simple and unobstrusive interface to users, while providing powerful security and management APIs for developers."
So... what were you saying about BlackBerry faux-security again?
You're right. The GP has this idea that OSX isn't all about "user experience". Every last Apple product is user experience first, all else second. If they can't do it "right", they don't do it.
I honestly don't like Apple. But not because they don't try. I'm nowhere near the middle of the Apple user experience bell curve. But jeez, for someone to go Apple, then blast the "experience" metric is mind blowing. Good response, parent.
Chasing Apple on services? Yeah, sorta, if you're talking music and apps. Chasing Google if you mean web based services. Chasing Amazon if you mean cloud computing. Chasing microsoft... heh, just kidding.
But let's not chalk it all up to Apple. Nobody chased Apple into mp3 players, rather, it was the other way around. The same with PDA/Smartphones. Apple is not an innovator, it is a refiner. And if you want to make the point that Ubuntu is moving away from trying to reinvent the wheel into just refining it, then you're absolutely correct.
I just find it hilarious when Apple fanboys talk about chasing Apple. Apple switched to a nix architecture, but now we're going to say Ubuntu is chasing Apple? HAHA! That's like claiming Palm was chasing Apple with its phone. Palm cornered the PDA market. All they did was add a cell radio to the same thing they'd always been doing. Which is why it failed, imho. But Apple was chasing Palm, RIM, and Nokia. But what they really did was refine, and they did it better than anyone else. But chase? I think not. You can't chase a company who always waits at least 1 generation behind cutting edge tech.
Apple is very good at refining. I think Canonical has done well too. I just upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 this morning. At first I had the "WTF!" experience. Then I gave it some time, and realized that for many users, this will be so much better. Once I found my administration programs, and swallowed the vomit that had risen in my throat at finding the WORST features of OSX on my updated desktop, I realized that the positive outweighed the good... and I can still customize what I want.
People paid for the Playstation Network. They walked into a store and paid a LOT more than $50 for a box. I don't hear any of them lauding the uber awesome privacy of pay-vs-free.
Free doesn't include your credit card number. How's that for privacy?
This may be useful for sales, marketting, or management. As for IT, it's just annoying. I eat at my computer. Occasionally I'll go pick something up with a fellow IT worker, and discuss some issue, but even then, I don't pow-wow with anyone while I eat my burger. People call me all day long, bitching and wanting me to fix something. I don't answer the phone, and unless it's an emergency, I won't get up until I'm done. And it's not like I stopped working. I'm still thinking about what I'm working on, coming up with ideas, etc.
But for the love of man, just leave me the hell alone for 15 minutes!
But can I get an understandable car analogy here?
15 cars tried to transform into Voltron but instead turned into Snarf.
It has built in sync to other "palms" and can be used for system defense. However, it has a tendency to be used mostly for porn.
You have the right to refuse a right was the point, not that you are forced to refuse a right. Sure, you can shut up later. But on the other hand, once you make a plea bargain, that's it. You signed the paper forever signing off that right to trial in that case. You can still go to court, and maybe reverse something, but that's not the same thing. I think we both agree on that.
In that transaction, the states forfeited their rights to absolute sovereignty. And the state representatives signed it. It can be undone, but so can an AT&T contract. You're not forced to keep service with them.
And that's the point. You have a choice. You can agree with their terms, or you can not do business with them. At at the end of the day, it's the people going, "OMG, AT&T IS FORCING US TO....!"
But the truth is that they're not. You have a right to sue AT&T. But AT&T wants to do business with people who agree with certain terms. You can opt-out at any time. You can leave the contract. But what happened under contract is covered by contract. You can leave AT&T, and then if they somehow still screw you, you can sue.
It absolutely kills me that people want the benefits of the service/business, but don't want to give companies any benefits in return.
People wonder why we don't have fiber broadband everywhere. Ignoring the fact that we are a giant, sprawling country where that's not financially feasible at this point, it's also a fact that these companies pay for armies of lawyers just to protect itself from its own customers. 1 customer can sue them for billions under class action for some $30 charge. They're already regulated, and if we want "punishment" then "We the People" should give the FCC more power.
But AT&T doesn't print money. If they lose a billion dollars, they're going to take it out of their own customers' asses later in higher fees. They're not just going to sit idly by on their losses. So there's no "win" for the customers via class action in that case.
I'm not against class action. I think used against employers is a positive thing. Employment contracts for the poor are far less "optional" than signing up for an iPhone. But to simply say that it's all wrong to enforce a contract... that needs to be decided by legislatures... and the point the Supreme Court made was, guess what, there is a federal arbitration law, so legislation did speak, and the class action is thrown out because "We the People" said we favor arbitration via our federal representatives.
And "We the People" can undo it with a single vote. It was a voluntary choice to choose an alternative right, and it can be undone.