I've always questioned the logic of buying an open source company. What do you really get? You don't get the IP since that's open sourced anyway. You don't get the employees since they can always leave. You maybe get some customers, but then those guys can always switch to a fork of the project. Potentially a fork that's being run by the same developers responsible for the original project.
I was thinking of machines that don't need a ton of capacity but place a premium on performance and aren't willing to put up with lots of noise. In a server environment if you want capacity *and* performance you can go with a RAID setup using mechanical drives, but I wouldn't want that kind of racket in my office. I also don't need a lot of capacity. So, for me, SSDs are ideal (except for the price premium, but I'm willing to pay that.)
Some context would be nice. It may be that SSDs end up replacing conventional hard drives on, say, all laptops. Or all personal desktops that don't also double as servers. Or we may see a two-tier situation develop where SSDs are used for day-to-day operations in the enterprise and hard drives used for storing backups, or storing infrequently accessed archival data.
Based on the summary, I don't see evidence that his decision was a failure. The results prove that the vast majority of traffic to the sites was from non-subscribers, and that these users aren't willing to pay. Okay. Less traffic means less ability to sell advertising on the web site, which means less revenue. But was the web site profitable to begin with? How much can be saved in reduced web development work and lower operating costs due to the vastly smaller amount of visitors?
If the web site was profitable before and now isn't, or is less so, then yes this was a failure. But if it was losing money before and is now losing less, despite having so many fewer visitors, then maybe its a net win.
I guess we'll find out if/when he decides to reverse that decision. Bottom line, dude is in it for the money. If this is hurting his bottom line he'll recant.
...and the situation seemed more worrisome than this article suggests. I assumed that, eventually, people will shift to all-electric vehicles as opposed to hybrids. Below are the numbers I used. Did I flub the math? Because these calculations sure seem to suggest an electricity crunch as we move off petroleum:
Total miles driven in the U.S. yearly: 3x10^12 mi http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/us-vehicle-mile.html
Electricity use per mile for a fully electric car: 0.17 to 0.37 kWh/mi (mean: 0.27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Energy_efficiency
Total electricity needed to support all miles driven by fully-electric vehicles: 3x10^12 mi * 0.27 kWh/mi = 8.1x10^11 kWh
Total yearly electricity production of the U.S. (2007): 4.157x10^9 kWh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation
In other words, if we assume that hybrid/electric vehicles currently account for an insignificant portion of total miles driven, and we were to covert all vehicles to be fully electric, U.S. electricity production would have to increase by a factor of 194 in order to support the additional load.
Whatever this test measures, which may not be creativity per se, it detected a steady increase up until 1990 and a decrease since. Something caused this change, and I'm curious what. Your theory, "schools kill creativity", isn't very convincing unless we can pinpoint something that changed in the mid-to-late 1980s. Of course, this assumes that the groups of kids whose scores they're comparing (over time) are actually similar. If the selection process has changed over time then that alone might explain the lower scores since 1990.
While I agree with you that kids TV programming sucks...that's been the case since...oh...as long as I can remember. I find that explanation a little lacking for the purposes of explaining the drop in creativity starting in 1990. Maybe TV usage has increased significantly since then. But I doubt it.
While I agree with you that the "ease" of cheating is bolstered by the mass-production style of education where you have 500 people taking a test at the same time, I'm not so sure reducing the test-taking cohorts to 30 students would be more cost effective than the technological solutions they're currently pursuing.
They probably picked Brazil to win, meaning they thought Brazil had the best chance. They would probably also admit that "the best chance" is still pretty small. So, the fact that their pick to win was eliminated really isn't a blemish on their prediction ability, given our sample size is "one".
...because their parents are disproportionately willing, compared to other parents, to force their children to spend untold hours performing rote memorization tasks that have highly questionable utility. E.g. memorizing how to spell words.
A competing theory that explained the observed relationships between species without common ancestry would be as amazing a thing as a theory that explained the orbits of planets and galaxies without gravitational attraction - there would be a heck of a lot of explaining to do.
What about "common designer" instead of "common ancestry"? I mean, if I were some super-intelligent race of space aliens and was going to design life on earth, I'd probably establish the basic mechanisms as a platform, then diversify on top of that. Tweak it here, tweak it there.
Well, for instance, Pages seems to do a lot of calculation "on the fly" while the user is typing. I'm not sure if its spell-checking, grammar-checking, changing the page layout or what. But, this gets so bad sometimes (even on a Core2 system) that I'll type half a line of characters only to see them pop up one by one, about a half-second apart. Then I'll stop typing and Pages will eventually "catch up".
teaching creationism is the advancement of specific religious belief by the government. This is quite plainly unconstitutional.
This wasn't unconstitutional, generally speaking, until after Everson vs. Board of Education (1947), in which the establishment clause of the 1st amendment was incorporated against the states. Even given that, I can envision scenarios where "teaching creationism" would not be considered unconstitutional. For example, if creation theory were examined critically and compared to evolutionary theory, with the former clearly described as a fringe view (among scientists) and the latter clearly described as the consensus view.
The theory of gravity is trivially reproducible. The grand theory of evolution...not so much. Sure, we can observe things happening on a more limited scale, but you can't exactly reproduce "the totality of life on earth has its origins in the primordial soup". Its the difference between theorizing about "this is the way things work" (e.g. gravity) vs. "this is what happened a long time ago" (e.g. evolution, cosmology, etc.)
So, generally speaking, I don't find the ID arguments very convincing. That said, I find part of this article's summary, and a common refrain from the anti-ID crowd (i.e. most everyone) to be troubling. Namely that ID "isn't science".
It seems pretty obvious to me that one could "scientifically" go about determining whether something was "designed" or not. Suppose a meteor lands on earth with some "interesting" properties. Maybe it has a particularly regular stucture. Maybe its engraved with the prime numbers expressed in binary. Etc. Are we going to say its impossible to scientifically approach the problem of determining whether this object was "intelligently designed" or "naturally occurring"?
It may well be that ID arrives at wrong conclusions for ideological reasons, but it also seems like the scientific establishment is overstating its case when it dismisses the entire problem of "design detection" (for lack of a better word) as "not science".
Personally I've found Pages/Numbers and OO//Calc to be pretty terrible compared to MS Office. That said, at the last company I was at our Receptionist / Office Manager used a Mac and had no problems. So its doable.
It was shorthand. The meaning I meant to convey was: "If you personally pirate movies/music/software then it would be hypocritical of you to complain about these guys stealing your pics."
The assumption being that some of the people crying foul about the pic stealing do, in fact, pirate music/movies/software, and are thereby acting hypocritically when they lament the pic stealing.
Doesn't information want to be free? If you're going to download movies and music without paying, why can't they scrape your images and serve them up to "whoever"?
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I've always questioned the logic of buying an open source company. What do you really get? You don't get the IP since that's open sourced anyway. You don't get the employees since they can always leave. You maybe get some customers, but then those guys can always switch to a fork of the project. Potentially a fork that's being run by the same developers responsible for the original project.
I was thinking of machines that don't need a ton of capacity but place a premium on performance and aren't willing to put up with lots of noise. In a server environment if you want capacity *and* performance you can go with a RAID setup using mechanical drives, but I wouldn't want that kind of racket in my office. I also don't need a lot of capacity. So, for me, SSDs are ideal (except for the price premium, but I'm willing to pay that.)
Some context would be nice. It may be that SSDs end up replacing conventional hard drives on, say, all laptops. Or all personal desktops that don't also double as servers. Or we may see a two-tier situation develop where SSDs are used for day-to-day operations in the enterprise and hard drives used for storing backups, or storing infrequently accessed archival data.
No 'predator' tag?
Based on the summary, I don't see evidence that his decision was a failure. The results prove that the vast majority of traffic to the sites was from non-subscribers, and that these users aren't willing to pay. Okay. Less traffic means less ability to sell advertising on the web site, which means less revenue. But was the web site profitable to begin with? How much can be saved in reduced web development work and lower operating costs due to the vastly smaller amount of visitors?
If the web site was profitable before and now isn't, or is less so, then yes this was a failure. But if it was losing money before and is now losing less, despite having so many fewer visitors, then maybe its a net win.
I guess we'll find out if/when he decides to reverse that decision. Bottom line, dude is in it for the money. If this is hurting his bottom line he'll recant.
...and the situation seemed more worrisome than this article suggests. I assumed that, eventually, people will shift to all-electric vehicles as opposed to hybrids. Below are the numbers I used. Did I flub the math? Because these calculations sure seem to suggest an electricity crunch as we move off petroleum:
Total miles driven in the U.S. yearly: 3x10^12 mi
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/us-vehicle-mile.html
Electricity use per mile for a fully electric car: 0.17 to 0.37 kWh/mi (mean: 0.27)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Energy_efficiency
Total electricity needed to support all miles driven by fully-electric vehicles: 3x10^12 mi * 0.27 kWh/mi = 8.1x10^11 kWh
Total yearly electricity production of the U.S. (2007): 4.157x10^9 kWh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation
In other words, if we assume that hybrid/electric vehicles currently account for an insignificant portion of total miles driven, and we were to covert all vehicles to be fully electric, U.S. electricity production would have to increase by a factor of 194 in order to support the additional load.
Whatever this test measures, which may not be creativity per se, it detected a steady increase up until 1990 and a decrease since. Something caused this change, and I'm curious what. Your theory, "schools kill creativity", isn't very convincing unless we can pinpoint something that changed in the mid-to-late 1980s. Of course, this assumes that the groups of kids whose scores they're comparing (over time) are actually similar. If the selection process has changed over time then that alone might explain the lower scores since 1990.
While I agree with you that kids TV programming sucks...that's been the case since...oh...as long as I can remember. I find that explanation a little lacking for the purposes of explaining the drop in creativity starting in 1990. Maybe TV usage has increased significantly since then. But I doubt it.
Then why did we only start seeing a decline in 1990? Did the school system change significantly in the mid-to-late 1980s?
While I agree with you that the "ease" of cheating is bolstered by the mass-production style of education where you have 500 people taking a test at the same time, I'm not so sure reducing the test-taking cohorts to 30 students would be more cost effective than the technological solutions they're currently pursuing.
...its their public key. :)
They probably picked Brazil to win, meaning they thought Brazil had the best chance. They would probably also admit that "the best chance" is still pretty small. So, the fact that their pick to win was eliminated really isn't a blemish on their prediction ability, given our sample size is "one".
I was mostly referring to ID, which specifies design but not a designer. Could be God, gods, aliens, you name it.
...because their parents are disproportionately willing, compared to other parents, to force their children to spend untold hours performing rote memorization tasks that have highly questionable utility. E.g. memorizing how to spell words.
What about "common designer" instead of "common ancestry"? I mean, if I were some super-intelligent race of space aliens and was going to design life on earth, I'd probably establish the basic mechanisms as a platform, then diversify on top of that. Tweak it here, tweak it there.
Well, for instance, Pages seems to do a lot of calculation "on the fly" while the user is typing. I'm not sure if its spell-checking, grammar-checking, changing the page layout or what. But, this gets so bad sometimes (even on a Core2 system) that I'll type half a line of characters only to see them pop up one by one, about a half-second apart. Then I'll stop typing and Pages will eventually "catch up".
OO just felt slow and bloated compared to Word.
This wasn't unconstitutional, generally speaking, until after Everson vs. Board of Education (1947), in which the establishment clause of the 1st amendment was incorporated against the states. Even given that, I can envision scenarios where "teaching creationism" would not be considered unconstitutional. For example, if creation theory were examined critically and compared to evolutionary theory, with the former clearly described as a fringe view (among scientists) and the latter clearly described as the consensus view.
The theory of gravity is trivially reproducible. The grand theory of evolution...not so much. Sure, we can observe things happening on a more limited scale, but you can't exactly reproduce "the totality of life on earth has its origins in the primordial soup". Its the difference between theorizing about "this is the way things work" (e.g. gravity) vs. "this is what happened a long time ago" (e.g. evolution, cosmology, etc.)
So, generally speaking, I don't find the ID arguments very convincing. That said, I find part of this article's summary, and a common refrain from the anti-ID crowd (i.e. most everyone) to be troubling. Namely that ID "isn't science".
It seems pretty obvious to me that one could "scientifically" go about determining whether something was "designed" or not. Suppose a meteor lands on earth with some "interesting" properties. Maybe it has a particularly regular stucture. Maybe its engraved with the prime numbers expressed in binary. Etc. Are we going to say its impossible to scientifically approach the problem of determining whether this object was "intelligently designed" or "naturally occurring"?
It may well be that ID arrives at wrong conclusions for ideological reasons, but it also seems like the scientific establishment is overstating its case when it dismisses the entire problem of "design detection" (for lack of a better word) as "not science".
Addendum: she wasn't using Office for the Mac. Given that's an option, that mitigates most reasons not to use a Mac.
Personally I've found Pages/Numbers and OO//Calc to be pretty terrible compared to MS Office. That said, at the last company I was at our Receptionist / Office Manager used a Mac and had no problems. So its doable.
Parenting fail.
I'd say exposure to a unix-like environment is important. You can get that with OS X.
It was shorthand. The meaning I meant to convey was: "If you personally pirate movies/music/software then it would be hypocritical of you to complain about these guys stealing your pics."
The assumption being that some of the people crying foul about the pic stealing do, in fact, pirate music/movies/software, and are thereby acting hypocritically when they lament the pic stealing.
Doesn't information want to be free? If you're going to download movies and music without paying, why can't they scrape your images and serve them up to "whoever"?