Their motivation is to be doubted in the first place; why would a think tank that aligns itself with SMALL businesses care about SUV?
Because of an amazingly stupid tax break granted to SUV owners who can claim that they are needed for their small business. The theory is that it makes it easier for small businesses to have trucks, but the law is written so that any small business qualifies. Just how much hauling do doctors and lawyers do anyway?
I doubt that Microsoft created these so-called "think tanks" (I haven't seen much evidence of thought in much of their material), but they have found organizations whose opinions jibe with their own and amplified their voices by giving them funding. The interesting thing to note is that the "pro-Microsoft" voices are moving to the periphery. As a result, Microsoft is funding less mainstream material and more from "think tanks" which support extreme points of view. I wonder how long it will take for the pro-Microsoft stance to be associated primarily with these fringe viewpoints.
Because you are mistaken about the nature of computer languages. Machine code (which you refer to as binary) is not a language.
I suppose that's a matter of opinion, although Webster's seems to explicitly include machine code. In any case, I'm just using standard terminology; to reference FOLDOC:
They start with FORTRAN, so they leave off the whole second generation of computer languages which was Assembler. (First generation was, of course, binary.) I remember my dad -- who was kind of a proto-geek -- talking about how excited they were when they got in a terrific new product. It was so intuitive that it was almost like talking to the computer.
The Motley Fool published a good article about SCO's latest quarterly results. They've been increasingly dubious about SCO's claims and this article has pretty much crossed the line to outright contempt for SCO's activities. Choice quotes include calling SCO "something of a laughingstock" and referring to SCOSource as "the Linux users' shakedown program." They have a few things to say about Darl's skills as CEO too.
Remember, these aren't techies talking about the technical merits of the case. These are financial guys commenting about SCO's quality as an investment. It nice to see someone other than technical folk scoffing at this sideshow.
So my current client has had over 109,807 lines of shell, awk, SQR and P-SQL code written for this project so far. Of course, that's not counting the XML or stored procs. But, to be fair, there were two of us.
Good grief. Granted, this stuff is not as esoteric as writing an OS, but is there a half-decent programmer out there who can't bang out 10,000 lines of code in a year?
I long ago gave up on complicated passwords as being too hard to remember and turned to using a simple one. The trick is that I pump it through a process that exists only in the dark recesses of my brain to make a complex password. For example, suppose I want to have an account at First National Bank. My base password is simple: it's "First". Then comes the construction part.
For example, I dredge up the number 42 (the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything) and some nonsense word. Let's say it's "snert". Pump it through the construction process and I come up with "first47snertt". Not exactly intuitive, but I'm just adding the number of letters in "first" (5) to my number and the last letter ("t") to the end of the nonsense word.
The result is a pretty strong password. No cracking program is going to have the word in it's dictionary and knowing my password to First National isn't going to tell you that my password to Discover is "discover50snertr". Since "snert" is nonsense anyway, there's no way to tell where the letters come from; you could be sticking the third letter in "Discover" onto the beginning and your nonsense word could be "nertr". There are no rules to how to construct the password, but you want to have an obscure way for the base password to modify the gibberish in the rest so knowing one password will not give you the rest. It saves me the trouble of remembering a lot of strong passwords. Of course, if someone got ahold of several of my passwords and spent enough time on them, they could probably figure out the routine, but that's not as dangerous as using the same password.
And yes, that's just an example. It's not the process I use to construct my own passwords. Trust me, you don't want to know.
So they get more than a quarter of their original investment back in cash and still have common stock they can sell off if SCO (*cough*) recovers. Under the circumstances, I'm kind of surprised SCO came up with such generous terms. If they had stuck to the contract they wouldn't have had to come up with nearly that amount. I'd be willing to bet that SCO said some things in negotiating the deal that they shouldn't have and that Baystar effectively blackmailed them by saying they'd let all those indiscretions come out in court.
As far as I can tell, you pose a question regarding paprika or cinnamon (aka: step 3) and stop.
This raises the question of what distinguishes art from science. To my mind, a major part of the distinction occurs during the hypothesis stage. Even formulating the "paprika versus cinnamon" question assumes that you've already made a gut decision on what your diner will prefer based on experience and an understanding of how flavors interract. Doing trial and error with every jar in the spice rack in different combinations and in varying amounts is simply not practical. Once you've formulated your hypothesis, the rest is easy. And once the experiment proves that the result is tasty, who cares what the original hypothesis was?
In science the reverse is true. Anybody can formulate a hypothesis (the world is round/flat), but the hard part occurs in creating a experiment which tests the hypothesis. And a single experiment won't do; it has to be replicated. But once you get to that point, you may want to revisit the original hypothesis to see if a different hypothesis would explain the results. On top of that, further experiments might come up with an alternate explanation which disproves the original hypothesis. The hypothesis is just the beginning.
The other distinction between art and science occurs at the evaluation stage. The evaluation of art is subjective whereas in science is objective. Food that's good in Mexico will be too hot for most of the US. But science (at least good science) is based on some form of objective measurement.
"Everything in food is science," Brown says. "The only subjective part is when
you eat it."
True only if you never leave the cookbook. As with any art, a
creative cook is trying to obtain an emotional experience; make the observer (i.e., diner) say
"This is good." Since the buttons you're trying to push are deep within the brain's wiring,
you're working with a complex system, so intuition often serves better than empirical knowledge.
Will paprika work better here, or cinnamon? The answer is often not what would be expected
by rational analysis.
Understanding the science behind cookery does not eliminate the art.
Computers can generate sonnets which are grammatically and syntactically perfect, but they're
not worth reading. Painting can be reduced to a science as well, but only if you limit
it to paint-by-numbers.
Yankee Group analyst Lindsay Schroth considers that reasonable. Why shouldn't the companies that built and run the Internet pipes feeding the home be able to capitalize on their
investments?
Uh, maybe because I'm paying for their services? I'm not paying them to mess with my connection to their own advantage. If they started doing this I'd be on my way to another provider in a heartbeat.
Of course, this is the Yankee Group we're talking about, so logical analysis is not to be expected.
This is the same bunch of boneheads that has Didio doing their "analysis" of the SCO lawsuits.
The 1 billion acres number hasn't changed much in 80+ years. Machines simply allow more farming by fewer people.
It is possible to increase the number of farmable acres if we change what we farm. Currently, ethanol is largely produced from corn, which requires a lot of land and cultivation. Other crops, such as the sunchoke (a.k.a. Jerusalem artichoke) used to grow as weeds but are a viable base product for producing alcohol.
Re:What about alcohol?
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Also, it would take very little to no modification to get a petrol car to run on grain alcohol.
The problem is that alcohol is not as efficient as gasoline when used as a combustion fuel. If you'll recall the "gasohol" stuff that was produced in the 70's, it barely dented gas consumption and was eventually scrapped.
More promising is using alcohol in fuel cells rather than gaseous hydrogen. Alcohol is not as good at combustion as gasoline, but it has more hydrogen and less carbon. If you use a Direct Methano Fuel Cell
like the one that powered Daimler Chrysler's NECAR 5
on it's recent cross-country trek, you get roughly the same mileage on alcohol that you get on
gasoline, but with a liquid fuel from a renewable source. Add it to the mileage improvements
suggested by the mechanical changes from General Motor's AUTOnomy
project, and automotive fuel cells become a viable option.
Reminds me of SCO's spin on a VARBusiness article
back in October. Here's SCO's version.
Now check out the original article.
SCO did indeed rate in the top four. Out of five.
It really does sound like you're describing a PDA, but you just want an ultra-cheap one that's little more than a memo pad. If so, you might try the Rolodex line from Franklin Electronic Publishers. Even new, they're only about thirty or forty bucks and can be had on eBay for even less. If part of the requirement is to get it into your PC without typing, you'll need one with a PC-sync feature, which not all of them have.
If you want to try a little hands-on experimentation, check out your local Staples, which carries at least some of the line, but calls them "Electronic Organizers" rather than PDAs.
The author C.S. Lewis wrote a paper which addresses these same issues called "Religion and Rocketry" which is published in a collection of his short works called The World's Last Night. In addition to the speculative piece, he also references Augustine's response when asked about the spiritual status of such half-humans a fauns and satyrs. Augustine's response was that it might be better to find out if such things exist before giving the matter too much attention.
But that's not what the article says. While the header says they're going to tax "custom software" the article says that the issue is really licensed software. He's trying to erase the distinction between software that is sold and that which is licensed and is proposing to tax the licensing fees. There is currently no tax on licensing fees.
Wow. The New York Times has discovered IRC. What an amazing
discovery. What are they going to discover next? Pennsylvania?
I'd love to hear their hard-hitting expose about Pittsburgh.
No, they're not. It's bulk email, but it's not unsolicited. Looking into my junk mail folder -- the one that picks up the bulk email -- I see updates from ParentCenter.com, HomeDepot.com and PublicKnowledge.org. These are all organizations that I signed up for to send me regular updates, so it's not unsolicited email. But the company spam filter doesn't know that, so it sweeps them into my junk mail folder along with the Viagra and penis enlargement crap. If these companies were on a white list of companies that post a bond $20k against a promise to only send "opt-in" bulk email, the mail filter could be programmed to assume they're legitimate and I wouldn't have to keep checking to see how much legitimate mail I'm losing.
Looks like Microsoft has found another way to make money, this time from spam.
Microsoft isn't getting paid for this. They joined IronPort's program, they didn't make one of their own.
I especially like the nice naming for spammers, calling them 'marketers' sounds so much more legitimate.
The purpose of the whitelist is to separate marketers from spammers. If a marketer sends unsolicited email (a.k.a. "spam") they forfeit the $20k bond they posted. It's a way to keep legitimate bulk email from being picked up by spam filters.
By the time Longhorn comes out I would imagine that it is a pretty normal requirment.
The reason it's a big deal is that it keeps the "normal" price for a computer unnecessarily high. If the average user can get everything done he needs with a quarter of that computing power, why should he buy an OS that requires him to buy the mega-computer? Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that Microsoft created these so-called "think tanks" (I haven't seen much evidence of thought in much of their material), but they have found organizations whose opinions jibe with their own and amplified their voices by giving them funding. The interesting thing to note is that the "pro-Microsoft" voices are moving to the periphery. As a result, Microsoft is funding less mainstream material and more from "think tanks" which support extreme points of view. I wonder how long it will take for the pro-Microsoft stance to be associated primarily with these fringe viewpoints.
Incidently, my dad started with computers before first level languages; back when they still *shudder* had to move the wires.
Unless you need an excuse to buy a 40" monitor, in which case, just forget I said anything.
He was referring to Assembler.
Remember, these aren't techies talking about the technical merits of the case. These are financial guys commenting about SCO's quality as an investment. It nice to see someone other than technical folk scoffing at this sideshow.
$ cat *.sh ../etc/*.awk ../sqr/*.sqr ../sql/*.sql | wc -l
109807
So my current client has had over 109,807 lines of shell, awk, SQR and P-SQL code written for this project so far. Of course, that's not counting the XML or stored procs. But, to be fair, there were two of us.
Good grief. Granted, this stuff is not as esoteric as writing an OS, but is there a half-decent programmer out there who can't bang out 10,000 lines of code in a year?
For example, I dredge up the number 42 (the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything) and some nonsense word. Let's say it's "snert". Pump it through the construction process and I come up with "first47snertt". Not exactly intuitive, but I'm just adding the number of letters in "first" (5) to my number and the last letter ("t") to the end of the nonsense word.
The result is a pretty strong password. No cracking program is going to have the word in it's dictionary and knowing my password to First National isn't going to tell you that my password to Discover is "discover50snertr". Since "snert" is nonsense anyway, there's no way to tell where the letters come from; you could be sticking the third letter in "Discover" onto the beginning and your nonsense word could be "nertr". There are no rules to how to construct the password, but you want to have an obscure way for the base password to modify the gibberish in the rest so knowing one password will not give you the rest. It saves me the trouble of remembering a lot of strong passwords. Of course, if someone got ahold of several of my passwords and spent enough time on them, they could probably figure out the routine, but that's not as dangerous as using the same password.
And yes, that's just an example. It's not the process I use to construct my own passwords. Trust me, you don't want to know.
Any takers?
In science the reverse is true. Anybody can formulate a hypothesis (the world is round/flat), but the hard part occurs in creating a experiment which tests the hypothesis. And a single experiment won't do; it has to be replicated. But once you get to that point, you may want to revisit the original hypothesis to see if a different hypothesis would explain the results. On top of that, further experiments might come up with an alternate explanation which disproves the original hypothesis. The hypothesis is just the beginning.
The other distinction between art and science occurs at the evaluation stage. The evaluation of art is subjective whereas in science is objective. Food that's good in Mexico will be too hot for most of the US. But science (at least good science) is based on some form of objective measurement.
Understanding the science behind cookery does not eliminate the art. Computers can generate sonnets which are grammatically and syntactically perfect, but they're not worth reading. Painting can be reduced to a science as well, but only if you limit it to paint-by-numbers.
Of course, this is the Yankee Group we're talking about, so logical analysis is not to be expected. This is the same bunch of boneheads that has Didio doing their "analysis" of the SCO lawsuits.
More promising is using alcohol in fuel cells rather than gaseous hydrogen. Alcohol is not as good at combustion as gasoline, but it has more hydrogen and less carbon. If you use a Direct Methano Fuel Cell like the one that powered Daimler Chrysler's NECAR 5 on it's recent cross-country trek, you get roughly the same mileage on alcohol that you get on gasoline, but with a liquid fuel from a renewable source. Add it to the mileage improvements suggested by the mechanical changes from General Motor's AUTOnomy project, and automotive fuel cells become a viable option.
The Chinese moon mission? Didn't that involve a really, really big human pyramid?
Reminds me of SCO's spin on a VARBusiness article back in October. Here's SCO's version. Now check out the original article. SCO did indeed rate in the top four. Out of five.
If you want to try a little hands-on experimentation, check out your local Staples, which carries at least some of the line, but calls them "Electronic Organizers" rather than PDAs.
The author C.S. Lewis wrote a paper which addresses these same issues called "Religion and Rocketry" which is published in a collection of his short works called The World's Last Night. In addition to the speculative piece, he also references Augustine's response when asked about the spiritual status of such half-humans a fauns and satyrs. Augustine's response was that it might be better to find out if such things exist before giving the matter too much attention.
Wow. The New York Times has discovered IRC. What an amazing discovery. What are they going to discover next? Pennsylvania? I'd love to hear their hard-hitting expose about Pittsburgh.