We fat people are jolly. We're only merry for a little time around Christmas, until we realize just how much more weight we've gained from chocolates and candy canes.
Doesn't anyone get it? VA left some $270/share on the table!
People at VA own most of the shares of VA. If it had IPO'ed at $300, they might not have even sold all the shares. If you're VA, sell the IPO shares for less than the expected short-term market value, and the feeding frenzy may raise your remaining shares. Then use your shares to fund purchases of companies that actually make money. (At least that way when it returns to earth, the stock drop won't hit anyone too hard.)
First, there's an excellent article on www.gnu.org which documents a psychology study on how much of a dis-incentive "incentives" are.
GNU reports a trivial observation: that people doing something for the love of it do better than people who are just doing it for the money. Yay rah. If we use this as our mantra, then instead of hiring people to clean toilets, we should just ask for people who just love cleaning toilets to do it for us. It isn't going to work, is it? Even if there were sufficient numbers of people who actually enjoy cleaning toilets, those people have to make a living, so instead of dropping into our bathrooms, they'd have to get another job to make a living.
I enjoy programming, or at least some aspects of it. But in the meantime, I've got to eat. So unless there's some other way to get me what I need to live on, I'll need to trade a huge hunk of my free time for a salary. Fortunately I still get to do something I usually enjoy doing, and thus will do more than necessary for the paycheck; unfortunately, the people paying the salary may find that they need to do things like close the source I create in order for them to make a living.
Professor Graeme Clark developed the bionic ear, also called the Cochlear Implant, in the 1970s.
My wife has one of these. With tiny electrodes planted in her cochlea, a woman who without it would have trouble hearing a 747 landing on her can hear at a pretty serviceable level.
The Washington Post has an interesting article about rich vs. poor medicine, with the rich being U.S. pharmaceutical companies and the poor being Africans with AIDS. African countries could manufacture AIDS treatment drugs for much cheaper than they could buy them from U.S. companies, but doing so would subject them to sanctions. So "closed-source" medicine lets people die who we might save. (On the other hand, without the money from sales the drugs probably not have been developed yet, so not allowing medicines to be patented might mean even more people die.)
Note that if you assume a Windows system (I suppose you could have a way of checking), you could simply store whatever data you need somewhere on that partition regarding what hardware you have, etc. Heck, you could look at the Windows files and probably find out at least some of the hardware, and perhaps dial-up networking or TCP/IP settings. And lots of the hardware you don't care about (scanners and printers, for two).
Not at all. Think about it, you've got thousands of computer geeks who have been given Windows apps from their well-meaning but non-techno savvy relatives who have little or no idea about the differences between Linux and Windows. So they return "Pokemon Print Studio" and "Tomb Raider: The Implants Are Leaking*", or pull out gift certificate from other relative who realized they didn't know what to get, and what can they buy, but Quake III.
Heck, a bunch of geeks will return stuff they *can* use, just to get Quake 3...
--- * Other possible tag lines: "It's Just a Padded Bra", "The Lawsuit Against Dow Corning", and no doubt many more...
Interesting. I don't see why that would be... each program just loads the file into memory and then it's done with it until, for example, you save the file.
But what if the file is larger than memory? And do you really want to load the whole file before you start playing it? (For example, what if your file is a DVD video file?) Copying to memory makes sense for read-only access to smallish files, and that's what Visual C++ does. But I don't think it's using any innate OS support to do so. For large files or for apps that try to have a small footprint, locking the file against writing by other apps is a reasonable move.
You might think, but Intel has shown interest in *helping* Linux, and I think there are a couple of motivations for this. First, although Microsoft software has pulled Intel to the top of the semiconductor heap, Microsoft has been the dominating force in Wintel. Second, reducing the cost of software makes for more machines being sold, which is good for Intel. Intel doesn't just want to sell PCs, they also want to move into the Personal organizer market. Make Linux a viable competitor with WinCE and PalmOS, and Intel has a point of entry. Notice how Linus has been talking about embedded OS machines recently? (The weirdness there is that Transmeta is an Intel micro-competitor -- I don't see them working together.)
I don't think it's so much Microsoft as Jobs himself.
I suggest that in response to this, we should no longer mention *his* name, just refer to him as "the Apple interim CEO." Sauce for the goose?
My name is on a commercial product. It seems a fitting show of respect for the several years where most of my creative energies have been spent improving it.
...it seems that the two things that increase the rate of new technologies are wars and exploration.
I disagree. U.S. military spending has gone down significantly, and we don't have any significant exploration going on, but we do have plenty of technological innovations ongoing. Has the development of the PC slowed since the end of the Cold War? I'm not seeing any slowdown; if anything, it's accelerated.
Space exploration does get you technological developments, but they tend to be focussed towards tech needed for space exploration (duh), and it's not surprising you would get some simply from the large amounts of money being spent. If that money was focussed directly on general research of high utility to humanity, I think you would find the human condition improved more than putting a couple of footprints on Mars would do.
And heck, those of you talking about a permanent Mars base: what about Luna? If we establish a permanent moonbase, we could set up an enormous linear motor tunnel that would make flights to Mars more practical and safer. With no atmosphere, such an accelerator could accelerate objects to very high speeds for escaping the gravity well.
One of my off-the-wall ideas is the idea of a "mouse" keyboard. Controllers like the spaceball work not by having the controller move (much), but by interpreting forces exterted on them as motion. Build a keyboard with a wristrest, with depressions in them where the heel of the hand goes. Then have mouse moves correspond to the user pushing with the heel of the hand(s), forwards or backwards for up and down, left and right for the mouse to move left or right.
Unless you're playing rogue or something, I can't see being able to switch quickly between up and down being much of an issue. I personally find having page up/page down/home/end together with the cursor control keys (when numlock is off) makes for extremely fast navigation. I rarely have to enter many numbers though. My preferred keyboard would probably have both a numeric keypad and an eight key cursor navigation pad.
Alternatively I'd consider a chord keyboard or gesture glove for one hand and a mouse for the other.
It was also the fastest aircraft of World War II, with the exception of some (but not all) jet aircraft.
Uh, no. The Mosquito was quite a nice plane, but even the fastest one -- the prototype -- had a top speed of 429 MPH. This could be exceeded by quite a number of piston-engined fighters on both sides. It was able to make quick raids, however, and in the absence of extremely quick reactions by air defense, it could escape most of the time. (Note that its top speed *is* higher than that of the modern jet-powered A-10 Warthog tank destroyer...)
It was faster than the in-service fighters, such as the Spitfire Mark I and the BF-109D, that were in service when the Mosquito took its first flight. That may be how this whole myth started.
The fastest propeller-driven aircraft of the war was probably the Dornier Do335, which had a reported top speed of 475 MPH. This unusual plane had a propellor at the front and the back, thus minimizing drag relative to wing-mounted engines like the Mosquito or twin-boom aircraft like the P-38. The Me-262, a jet plane, had a top speed of 540 MPH.
The Mosquito's top speed was considerably greater than that of any other propellor-powered aircraft of the time, with early models reaching speeds around 500 mph, or higher.
Last I saw, the world speed record for propellor aircraft was just under 500 MPH, set by a heavily modified P-51.
(All speed ratings based on level flight, dive speeds could be considerably greater.)
now in this case nothing illegal has occurred... he was not charged with anything, the FBI _asked_ the ISP to take down the site, the ISP prob had a clause in the contract that allowed them to do so at anytime, provided they handed back that month's money or whatever... and that is what happened.
Read the bleepin' article.
'When Z. refused to pull his site, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office contacted Z.'s host, BECamation, the next day. And that was all it took. "I had no choice but to pull the site down completely or I would have lost my business," says Mark Wieger, BECamation's president, who feared that his own ISP would cut him off.'
The ISP didn't want to take it down, it FEARED the consequences of government action.
This is why its bad to hurt M$, the only winners will be the bottom feeding scum sucking lawyers.
I'm thinking of trying to organize an anti-outrageous class-action lawyer fee system.
Basically, the idea would be something like "The undersigned refuse to be considered the member of any class in a class action lawsuit unless the lawyers agree to the following fee schedule, based on total cash payments to class members: 30% of damages up to $200,000, %20 of damages from $200,000 to $1,000,000, %10 of damages from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000, 5% of damages from $2,000,000 to $50,000,000, and 1% of damages above that $50 M. (All this working like tax schedules, so for $500,000 in damages, it would be 30% of $200,000 + 20% of $300,000.) For coupons or vouchers, fees would be based on half of the amount of coupons actually redeemed within one year of issuance."
If very large numbers of people signed such a statement and it was given legal weight, the bottom-feeders wouldn't get so rich and would have to work towards getting actual money for their clients, not just useless coupons that no one redeems.
McDonalds serves (served?) their coffee at a higher temperature (180 vs 150-160 degrees fahrenheit) than other drivethroughs. If you're going to serve coffee in that way, you (as a business) should take reasonable precautions to prevent these sorts of accidents, especially after HUNDREDS of other incidents. Serve it at a lower temperature, make the cups as strong and secure as possible, possibly put the cup in an additional safe container, etc. If you as a company can't prevent grevious injuries from mishaps which even intelligent people will have, then you shouldn't serve coffee through the drivethrough.
The Walkthrough project at UNC-Chapel Hill uses (used? It's been a few years) a treadmill with bicycle-style handlebars to steer. It's certainly not a perfect simulation, but the primary goal of the project is to give people a reasonable sense of virtual spaces. The treadmill is much more effective for this than (for example) joysticks or other hand-manipulated input devices. One thing that makes life a little easier in this goal is that the brain will often imagine some of the sensory phenomenon even when they aren't there. Georgia Tech has used VR simulations to help people overcome fear of heights, despite problems with parallax (even with headmounted displays, lag means that the visual feedback is out of sync with the head motion) and the absence of focal depth.
He does make a reasonably good case for why the GPL dissuades certain types of forks
I'd say he makes a better case that open source dissuades forks, or encourages remerging of forks. Specifically singling out the GPL is inappropriate, since there is no example given of a BSD-Licensed app having problems with a proprietary fork.
The part that's wrong is the fact that nobody cares if an average Joe kills himself.
My understanding is that something like 10,000 people kill themselves every year. If I wept for each, I'd be grieving approximately once an hour. Add in all the other unfortunates who die prematurely for whatever reason, and I'd be crippled if I expressed grief for each of them.
Grief doesn't help the deceased. I think the real priority is getting us to care about the living.
Yeah that's kinda like Casey Kasem doing Shaggy in Scooby Doo. Who had any idea that was him? Amazing.
I did, but what's really fun is playing "which minor characters are also voiced by Casey Kasem." Cops, bank managers, sales clerks -- his (altered) voice is everywhere in the show. It's fun to play "identify the voice talent" for other animated shows too, although many times the actors just use their normal voice so it's easier to tell who's who. (For example, Jason "George Costanza" Alexander played Catbert's voice on the most recent Dilbert. I always wanted him for Wally, but oh well.)
"Doctor Who" is the only example I can think of, where this has been done and been remotely successful.
I assume you're talking about actor replacement. "Bewitched" would probably qualify as a success; its end was from Elizabeth Montgomery wanting to quit, not bad ratings. Woody Harrelson replaced "Coach" (use IMDB if you need the actor's name" on Cheers successfully, Kirstie Alley replaced Shelly Long somewhat less successfully.
It really depends how pivotal she was to the show.
Hmm. I looked at that site, and it *looks* like they expect authors to use Word to enter documents. It talks about putting words in italics, which doesn't make much sense for pure ASCII editing. It's not particularly clear, though; will they accept a tagged HTML document?
Also, quick dummy's question: what is the situation with HTML and Unicode? I've always assumed the HTML docs were ASCII, but presumably our international friends have some nicer way to work with HTML and different alphabets.
Slashdot Mirror
Another IPO? Expect to see a flurry of people trying to get their names in a few of the contributor lists so they can get the "letter" this time.
:-)
Hmm, what could *I* fix...
Well, it's as they say: fat people are merrier.
What a horrible, evil, incorrect stereotype!
We fat people are jolly. We're only merry for a little time around Christmas, until we realize just how much more weight we've gained from chocolates and candy canes.
Get it straight, ok?
Doesn't anyone get it? VA left some $270/share on the table!
People at VA own most of the shares of VA. If it had IPO'ed at $300, they might not have even sold all the shares. If you're VA, sell the IPO shares for less than the expected short-term market value, and the feeding frenzy may raise your remaining shares. Then use your shares to fund purchases of companies that actually make money. (At least that way when it returns to earth, the stock drop won't hit anyone too hard.)
First, there's an excellent article on www.gnu.org which documents a psychology study on how much of a dis-incentive "incentives" are.
GNU reports a trivial observation: that people doing something for the love of it do better than people who are just doing it for the money. Yay rah. If we use this as our mantra, then instead of hiring people to clean toilets, we should just ask for people who just love cleaning toilets to do it for us. It isn't going to work, is it? Even if there were sufficient numbers of people who actually enjoy cleaning toilets, those people have to make a living, so instead of dropping into our bathrooms, they'd have to get another job to make a living.
I enjoy programming, or at least some aspects of it. But in the meantime, I've got to eat. So unless there's some other way to get me what I need to live on, I'll need to trade a huge hunk of my free time for a salary. Fortunately I still get to do something I usually enjoy doing, and thus will do more than necessary for the paycheck; unfortunately, the people paying the salary may find that they need to do things like close the source I create in order for them to make a living.
Professor Graeme Clark developed the bionic ear, also called the Cochlear Implant, in the 1970s.
My wife has one of these. With tiny electrodes planted in her cochlea, a woman who without it would have trouble hearing a 747 landing on her can hear at a pretty serviceable level.
The Washington Post has an interesting article about rich vs. poor medicine, with the rich being U.S. pharmaceutical companies and the poor being Africans with AIDS. African countries could manufacture AIDS treatment drugs for much cheaper than they could buy them from U.S. companies, but doing so would subject them to sanctions. So "closed-source" medicine lets people die who we might save. (On the other hand, without the money from sales the drugs probably not have been developed yet, so not allowing medicines to be patented might mean even more people die.)
Note that if you assume a Windows system (I suppose you could have a way of checking), you could simply store whatever data you need somewhere on that partition regarding what hardware you have, etc. Heck, you could look at the Windows files and probably find out at least some of the hardware, and perhaps dial-up networking or TCP/IP settings. And lots of the hardware you don't care about (scanners and printers, for two).
Not at all. Think about it, you've got thousands of computer geeks who have been given Windows apps from their well-meaning but non-techno savvy relatives who have little or no idea about the differences between Linux and Windows. So they return "Pokemon Print Studio" and "Tomb Raider: The Implants Are Leaking*", or pull out gift certificate from other relative who realized they didn't know what to get, and what can they buy, but Quake III.
Heck, a bunch of geeks will return stuff they *can* use, just to get Quake 3...
---
* Other possible tag lines: "It's Just a Padded Bra", "The Lawsuit Against Dow Corning", and no doubt many more...
Interesting. I don't see why that would be... each program just loads the file into memory and then it's done with it until, for example, you save the file.
But what if the file is larger than memory? And do you really want to load the whole file before you start playing it? (For example, what if your file is a DVD video file?) Copying to memory makes sense for read-only access to smallish files, and that's what Visual C++ does. But I don't think it's using any innate OS support to do so. For large files or for apps that try to have a small footprint, locking the file against writing by other apps is a reasonable move.
You might think, but Intel has shown interest in *helping* Linux, and I think there are a couple of motivations for this. First, although Microsoft software has pulled Intel to the top of the semiconductor heap, Microsoft has been the dominating force in Wintel. Second, reducing the cost of software makes for more machines being sold, which is good for Intel. Intel doesn't just want to sell PCs, they also want to move into the Personal organizer market. Make Linux a viable competitor with WinCE and PalmOS, and Intel has a point of entry. Notice how Linus has been talking about embedded OS machines recently? (The weirdness there is that Transmeta is an Intel micro-competitor -- I don't see them working together.)
I don't think it's so much Microsoft as Jobs himself.
I suggest that in response to this, we should no longer mention *his* name, just refer to him as "the Apple interim CEO." Sauce for the goose?
My name is on a commercial product. It seems a fitting show of respect for the several years where most of my creative energies have been spent improving it.
...it seems that the two things that increase the rate of new technologies are wars and exploration.
I disagree. U.S. military spending has gone down significantly, and we don't have any significant exploration going on, but we do have plenty of technological innovations ongoing. Has the development of the PC slowed since the end of the Cold War? I'm not seeing any slowdown; if anything, it's accelerated.
Space exploration does get you technological developments, but they tend to be focussed towards tech needed for space exploration (duh), and it's not surprising you would get some simply from the large amounts of money being spent. If that money was focussed directly on general research of high utility to humanity, I think you would find the human condition improved more than putting a couple of footprints on Mars would do.
And heck, those of you talking about a permanent Mars base: what about Luna? If we establish a permanent moonbase, we could set up an enormous linear motor tunnel that would make flights to Mars more practical and safer. With no atmosphere, such an accelerator could accelerate objects to very high speeds for escaping the gravity well.
One of my off-the-wall ideas is the idea of a "mouse" keyboard. Controllers like the spaceball work not by having the controller move (much), but by interpreting forces exterted on them as motion. Build a keyboard with a wristrest, with depressions in them where the heel of the hand goes. Then have mouse moves correspond to the user pushing with the heel of the hand(s), forwards or backwards for up and down, left and right for the mouse to move left or right.
Unless you're playing rogue or something, I can't see being able to switch quickly between up and down being much of an issue. I personally find having page up/page down/home/end together with the cursor control keys (when numlock is off) makes for extremely fast navigation. I rarely have to enter many numbers though. My preferred keyboard would probably have both a numeric keypad and an eight key cursor navigation pad.
Alternatively I'd consider a chord keyboard or gesture glove for one hand and a mouse for the other.
It was also the fastest aircraft of World War II, with the exception of some (but not all) jet aircraft.
Uh, no. The Mosquito was quite a nice plane, but even the fastest one -- the prototype -- had a top speed of 429 MPH. This could be exceeded by quite a number of piston-engined fighters on both sides. It was able to make quick raids, however, and in the absence of extremely quick reactions by air defense, it could escape most of the time. (Note that its top speed *is* higher than that of the modern jet-powered A-10 Warthog tank destroyer...)
It was faster than the in-service fighters, such as the Spitfire Mark I and the BF-109D, that were in service when the Mosquito took its first flight. That may be how this whole myth started.
The fastest propeller-driven aircraft of the war was probably the Dornier Do335, which had a reported top speed of 475 MPH. This unusual plane had a propellor at the front and the back, thus minimizing drag relative to wing-mounted engines like the Mosquito or twin-boom aircraft like the P-38. The Me-262, a jet plane, had a top speed of 540 MPH.
The Mosquito's top speed was considerably greater than that of any other propellor-powered aircraft of the time, with early models reaching speeds around 500 mph, or higher.
Last I saw, the world speed record for propellor aircraft was just under 500 MPH, set by a heavily modified P-51.
(All speed ratings based on level flight, dive speeds could be considerably greater.)
Another relevant site is here
now in this case nothing illegal has occurred... he was not charged with anything, the FBI _asked_ the ISP to take down the site, the ISP prob had a clause in the contract that allowed them to do so at anytime, provided they handed back that month's money or whatever... and that is what happened.
Read the bleepin' article.
'When Z. refused to pull his site, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office contacted Z.'s host, BECamation, the next day. And that was all it took. "I had no choice but to pull the site down completely or I would have lost my business," says Mark Wieger, BECamation's president, who feared that his own ISP would cut him off.'
The ISP didn't want to take it down, it FEARED the consequences of government action.
This is why its bad to hurt M$, the only winners will be the bottom feeding scum sucking lawyers.
I'm thinking of trying to organize an anti-outrageous class-action lawyer fee system.
Basically, the idea would be something like "The undersigned refuse to be considered the member of any class in a class action lawsuit unless the lawyers agree to the following fee schedule, based on total cash payments to class members: 30% of damages up to $200,000, %20 of damages from $200,000 to $1,000,000, %10 of damages from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000, 5% of damages from $2,000,000 to $50,000,000, and 1% of damages above that $50 M. (All this working like tax schedules, so for $500,000 in damages, it would be 30% of $200,000 + 20% of $300,000.) For coupons or vouchers, fees would be based on half of the amount of coupons actually redeemed within one year of issuance."
If very large numbers of people signed such a statement and it was given legal weight, the bottom-feeders wouldn't get so rich and would have to work towards getting actual money for their clients, not just useless coupons that no one redeems.
IT WAS COFFEE. IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE HOT
McDonalds serves (served?) their coffee at a higher temperature (180 vs 150-160 degrees fahrenheit) than other drivethroughs. If you're going to serve coffee in that way, you (as a business) should take reasonable precautions to prevent these sorts of accidents, especially after HUNDREDS of other incidents. Serve it at a lower temperature, make the cups as strong and secure as possible, possibly put the cup in an additional safe container, etc. If you as a company can't prevent grevious injuries from mishaps which even intelligent people will have, then you shouldn't serve coffee through the drivethrough.
The Walkthrough project at UNC-Chapel Hill uses (used? It's been a few years) a treadmill with bicycle-style handlebars to steer. It's certainly not a perfect simulation, but the primary goal of the project is to give people a reasonable sense of virtual spaces. The treadmill is much more effective for this than (for example) joysticks or other hand-manipulated input devices. One thing that makes life a little easier in this goal is that the brain will often imagine some of the sensory phenomenon even when they aren't there. Georgia Tech has used VR simulations to help people overcome fear of heights, despite problems with parallax (even with headmounted displays, lag means that the visual feedback is out of sync with the head motion) and the absence of focal depth.
He does make a reasonably good case for why the GPL dissuades certain types of forks
I'd say he makes a better case that open source dissuades forks, or encourages remerging of forks. Specifically singling out the GPL is inappropriate, since there is no example given of a BSD-Licensed app having problems with a proprietary fork.
The part that's wrong is the fact that nobody cares if an average Joe kills himself.
My understanding is that something like 10,000 people kill themselves every year. If I wept for each, I'd be grieving approximately once an hour. Add in all the other unfortunates who die prematurely for whatever reason, and I'd be crippled if I expressed grief for each of them.
Grief doesn't help the deceased. I think the real priority is getting us to care about the living.
You won't understand the words, and the subtitles are a translation, and thus lose any clever wordplay that was in the native version.
"You cannot truly understand Dilbert unless you read it in the original Klingon."
--Top 10 things heard spoken by a Klingon programmer
Hmm, I think i just dated myself :)
"Well, it's not like you're dating anyone else." --Dogbert
Yeah that's kinda like Casey Kasem doing Shaggy in Scooby Doo. Who had any idea that was him? Amazing.
I did, but what's really fun is playing "which minor characters are also voiced by Casey Kasem." Cops, bank managers, sales clerks -- his (altered) voice is everywhere in the show. It's fun to play "identify the voice talent" for other animated shows too, although many times the actors just use their normal voice so it's easier to tell who's who. (For example, Jason "George Costanza" Alexander played Catbert's voice on the most recent Dilbert. I always wanted him for Wally, but oh well.)
"Doctor Who" is the only example I can think of, where this has been done and been remotely successful.
I assume you're talking about actor replacement. "Bewitched" would probably qualify as a success; its end was from Elizabeth Montgomery wanting to quit, not bad ratings. Woody Harrelson replaced "Coach" (use IMDB if you need the actor's name" on Cheers successfully, Kirstie Alley replaced Shelly Long somewhat less successfully.
It really depends how pivotal she was to the show.
Hmm. I looked at that site, and it *looks* like they expect authors to use Word to enter documents. It talks about putting words in italics, which doesn't make much sense for pure ASCII editing. It's not particularly clear, though; will they accept a tagged HTML document?
Also, quick dummy's question: what is the situation with HTML and Unicode? I've always assumed the HTML docs were ASCII, but presumably our international friends have some nicer way to work with HTML and different alphabets.
Surely that's the first one on my list ?
It is, but don't call me Shirley.
(Ok, it makes more sense as a verbal gag.)