That is a common misunderstanding. Given a large enough sample, choosen to carefully reflect the divisions in the target group, the result will be pretty close to the one you would get using the whole target group in your survey. That is basic math, and works well in many areas.
The TV networks, for instance, have a very good idea of how many people are watching each one of them at any given time of the day. You do not think your TV set have a secret backdoor sending information back to the network, do you?
Usually, when a survey touchs political sensitive matters, this argument is heard over and over. Unfortunatelly, repetition doesn't make the argument more correct, as math is generally oblivious to human wishes.
I could not find any evidence that Artificial Intelligence NV, the creators of HAL, has "closed its gates".
Their site is up, the Machine Learning Challenge is still under way and there is even a new article about HAL, with logs of HAL's interactions with its teachers.
Since no link was supplied, I think it is safe to assume for now the original poster is just misinformed.
Unfortunately I don't have any pictures right now, and my digital camera is not here also. But here are some details:
- The door size is 2m X 0.9m, it was in use when we bought this house. We changed most of the doors, and kept this one to eventually make a table. But many things at our house, including some windows and doors, were found in demolition sites (where you can buy some amazing itens very cheap).
- The glass covers the whole door panel, and is 1 cm thick, shatterproof. It was made to order, not terribly expensive but not cheap also (I don't have the exact price, my wife deals with all this strange stuff related to money:)).
- The table legs were bought in a "do-it-yourself" store.
- At this point there are two CPUs (one in use, one being slowly retrofitted into a new computer from spare parts sitting around) and a monitor on the table.
The table I am working on right now is made from an old wooden door, covered with a thick blade of transparent glass. The many layers of paint, some of them decades old, were sttripped out almost, but not quite, back to the original wood.
Inside the door carvings there are 5 1/4" disks of various colours, some memory chips, a internal modem, some other unidentified chips, some serail and paralel ports. There are also other raw eletronic components.
Offtopic but otherwise worth of notice, you just missed the opportunity to use the right expression in this case, "tanj", There Ain't No Justice, the four letter word the substitutes "f**k" in Larry Niven's RingWorld series.
I have been running a Mandrake 8 KDE machine for a week now, up from Red Hat 7.1. PIII 800/128 MB RAM.
It doesn't run, it flies very, very fast.
I really think one of the main positive points of Linux is allowing one to configure a good system regarless of the underlying hardware. There are options. Lots of them. If one will not fit your needs or your machine, try another. For free. As in beer and freedom...:)
The obvious connection between Brazil (and Latin America) and Rio de Janeiro, while natural, is not very helpful to the would-be Linux tourist in Brazil.
Most of the present key Linux places are located elsewhere. What follows is an incomplete list of the major places to contact about the state of Linux in Brazil:
- Conectiva is the largest South Amrican Linux distribution. Largely based in Red-Hat, they have made a large effort to translate lots of applications interfaces into Portuguese and Spanish. Conectiva distribution is today one of the top Linux distributions in the world. Their main office is in Curitiba, a southern, beachless city.
-Popular Computer Project, an under U$200 computer using a stripped down version of KDE (containing basically Konqueror, KOffice and the supporting apps). This is being developed by the University of Minas Gerais, Minas Gerais being one of the few brazilian states without direct access to the sea.
Projeto Software Livre, the project of the state of Rio Grande do Sul government (the southernmost brazilian state), to promote the use of free software in the state. This was the most publicized government project in this area, and the first time a state government declared anything about free software in Brazil.
As a sad note, today I got the news that the Federal government buying a large number of computers to brazilian schools throughout the country. They will be buying only Windows machines.
When I grew up I couldn't have the real LEGOs, because they were not sold in Brazil and my parents couldn't afford the price of imported toys. I had to do with cheap local imitations that never worked like they were supposed to.
When, in my teens, I discovered the real thing, I was amazed by the sheer quality a LEGO piece irradiates.
Shortly after my son was born we started giving him LEGOs. Now he is 10 and has buckets upon crates of all different lines. They are all interoperable. They are all backward compatible. The 0-3 years old set can be used seamlessly with the Mindstorms set.
And I don't know if it is just chance or upbringing, but while my son has all the modern toys the article blames for LEGOs recent problems (GBA, Nintendo 64, a K6 II etc), he still spends many hours with LEGO, and he is not alone. He has some friends who will come to visit or stay overnight and they will cover the bedroom floor with all different kinds of pieces and build things for hours.
So I can not agree with the article from personal experience. I do not think the kids are to blame for not being interested in free form play anymore. More likely the parents are to blame for not giving their kids the right toys. A two-year old that gets started with LEGO will probably be interested in LEGO forever.
It may not be clear to rest of the Slashdot audience that they are asking questions to a legend of the field. The FORTH language could easily have been what C became, and only luck decided the fate of each language.
I was truly amazed when I first found a FORTH compiler for the Apple II. It was so alien to everything else available, yet so advanced, so ahead of the pack.
So, as for a question, do you think the growth of the appliance and handheld markets can give FORTH a chance to achieve a mainstream status? What steps are being taken to bring FORTH compilers to Palm OS, Windows CE and such?
The Brazilian (ok, Brazil is not a third world country, but we are far from rich) popular computer project uses a AMD K6II 500 with 64 MB of RAM. Why? Probably because huge projects can not depend on the availability of out-of-line parts.
And the builders of this system agree with your third point also. They made an easy to install stripped down distribution based solely on a stripped down KDE (only Konqueror and KOffice, plus the supporting packges and apps). The workstation is diskless, with a 16 MB flashcard to boot from. All in all, it end up being a nice Internet/Office machine.
128 MB works fine for me and I do some serious development down here. Nowadays this means that RAM sits inside a PIII/800 box with giga upon giga of hard disk space.
I have SQL Server, MySQL Tomcat and Apache running together in the Windows partition. And it compiles my java (thousands of lines, not hundreds) very very fast.
The Mandrake partition runs Apache, MySQL and Tomcat. I have not yet made Konqueror work with SSL, else I would use it more.
But this is for development. The RAM will be doubling next month, because I want to try Visual Age again (that app IBM designed to rival Outlook in memory usage).
A normal user will install Java for the same reason they will install Real, QuickTime, etc. To see some content, to use an application.
Notice that those are all huge downloads.
Also, some comercial software will simply ship the JRE and install it from CD.
It is "medium" because hysteria won't help us
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's been already shown that Code Red will not bring the Internet down. And it was never very much of a mortal threat to the majority of the users out there, because those are not running IIS (or any http server, for that matter). And until the more recent versions, the worm was not even a menace the files in the infected system (the recent versions, by installing a backdoor, would allow for a malicious invader to do a lot more damage).
The kind editor should also remember his math and Netcraft nice figures. IIS installations represent some 25% of the servers out there. Most of those are already patched by now. Even when they were not patched Code Red got only 6-7% of them (considering 4 million servers/250 thounsand infected).
Code Red is certainly a local problem in networks where it finds a nice ecologival niche. Cable modem networks are likey to suffer due to their archtecture and their own flaws. Other networks will suffer down the road.
But the main point is that this particular the worm is out of the way for nmost of us (if it ever was in the way) and will only affect the bandwidth locally.
It is almost time to reduce its risk rating to low.
...as the company behind my pet favorite OS has...
My lab can barely manage to keep his tooth away from the furniture. He doesn't even know how to turn a computer on, much less what an OS is. Having a favourite OS is beyond his wildest dreams.
Or is your pet a chimp, a dolphin or a mouse? That would certanly explain it.
Yes. Jean-Louis was the real decision maker during some time after Jobs dismissal. But he never attained "CEOhood", his higher post at Apple was VP.
Their "wonderful technology" won't get wasted
on
Be Buyout Looms Closer
·
· Score: 5, Funny
It will serve as the basis for the MacOS B, whose development will start in aproximatelly 5 years, as soon as Jean-Louis regains the Apple CEO post.
:))
(as a side note, I really, really wonder how much revenue have the late sales and marketing departments bougth into the company).
I am not American but, if your senators are anything like ours, you started to lose him when you wrote the word "kernel" and lost him for good at "(called an "interrupt")".
Not that he will ever see this. But what are the chances on the Senatorial Clerk For Web-Based Reading Affairs being much better? Remember, the SCFWBRA is probably a very young, very green, too greedy, very just-out-of-college lawyer.
I think that if you want a good standing chance of being read, understood and even taken into account, you should imagine a world where the only operating system in existence is Windows 98 and the only applications ever written were those in Microsoft Office. There are plenty of examples just as good as the one you used. Even better ones, considering the havoc a kid with VBA and Outlook can wreck.
And by using expressions like "UNIX box", "ssh" and "analyzing the signal" you just marked yourself as the kind of hacker the lawmaker want to see in jail. Funny world, isn't it?
Please do not criticize the editor innacurately. All the words you quote are from the original news sender, Lars Mooseantlers. michael is probably far from flawless, but you are completely wrong here.
I assume you aware that China has a totalitarian government that arrests, prosecutes and condemn its citizen at will. I also assume you have not forgotten the Celestial Peace Square incident, when the chinese govvernment used tanks and army troops against unarmed civilians.
So I can not really figure why you you think the chinese could really protest against the arrest of americans without jeopardizing their own safety.
Please do not assume the whole world lives under the same legal protections and human rights garantees you do. Why do you think the International Amnesty members never write letters to their own governments?
Along with the Creationist debate, this gun problem seems to be a typical American nonsense. And they are similar at least in a point, both base their claims in an ancient text written in a complete different context. Both groups will also invent all kinds of rationalizations and outright lies to mantain their faces (see the source of the statistic quoted out of context here, originating this debate: the figures are the result of a method change - url in a comment bellow).
I really have laugh when a gun nut say he/she has weapons to defend their homes from the evil government (and in Waco we all have seem how well guns will defend your home when the evil government wants in).
I am also amazed by poorly trained civilians thinking they can defend themselves from criminals for whom guns are everyday professional tools.
As for "if guns are banned only criminals will have guns", it makes a neat slogan but also a neat instance of double-talk. The whole point of the exercise is to make sure only criminals have guns! So, when the police spot a gun they don't need any other clue, they know they are in front of a criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a common misunderstanding. Given a large enough sample, choosen to carefully reflect the divisions in the target group, the result will be pretty close to the one you would get using the whole target group in your survey. That is basic math, and works well in many areas.
The TV networks, for instance, have a very good idea of how many people are watching each one of them at any given time of the day. You do not think your TV set have a secret backdoor sending information back to the network, do you?
Usually, when a survey touchs political sensitive matters, this argument is heard over and over. Unfortunatelly, repetition doesn't make the argument more correct, as math is generally oblivious to human wishes.
I could not find any evidence that Artificial Intelligence NV, the creators of HAL, has "closed its gates".
Their site is up, the Machine Learning Challenge is still under way and there is even a new article about HAL, with logs of HAL's interactions with its teachers.
Since no link was supplied, I think it is safe to assume for now the original poster is just misinformed.
Isn't it good when the patch announcement comes in the same paragraph of the bug announcement?
:)
They must be charging millions for this kind of responsive support...
Unfortunately I don't have any pictures right now, and my digital camera is not here also. But here are some details:
- The door size is 2m X 0.9m, it was in use when we bought this house. We changed most of the doors, and kept this one to eventually make a table. But many things at our house, including some windows and doors, were found in demolition sites (where you can buy some amazing itens very cheap).
- The glass covers the whole door panel, and is 1 cm thick, shatterproof. It was made to order, not terribly expensive but not cheap also (I don't have the exact price, my wife deals with all this strange stuff related to money:)).
- The table legs were bought in a "do-it-yourself" store.
- At this point there are two CPUs (one in use, one being slowly retrofitted into a new computer from spare parts sitting around) and a monitor on the table.
The table I am working on right now is made from an old wooden door, covered with a thick blade of transparent glass. The many layers of paint, some of them decades old, were sttripped out almost, but not quite, back to the original wood.
:)
Inside the door carvings there are 5 1/4" disks of various colours, some memory chips, a internal modem, some other unidentified chips, some serail and paralel ports. There are also other raw eletronic components.
The final effect is very good.
He said "Any suficient advanced technology is undistinguishable from magic" :)
Any suficient advanced magic is indistinguishable
from technology
Offtopic but otherwise worth of notice, you just missed the opportunity to use the right expression in this case, "tanj", There Ain't No Justice, the four letter word the substitutes "f**k" in Larry Niven's RingWorld series.
I have been running a Mandrake 8 KDE machine for a week now, up from Red Hat 7.1. PIII 800/128 MB RAM.
:)
It doesn't run, it flies very, very fast.
I really think one of the main positive points of Linux is allowing one to configure a good system regarless of the underlying hardware. There are options. Lots of them. If one will not fit your needs or your machine, try another. For free. As in beer and freedom...
Nice to know other brazilians noticed also. It is about time we start teaching the government about Free Software :)
The obvious connection between Brazil (and Latin America) and Rio de Janeiro, while natural, is not very helpful to the would-be Linux tourist in Brazil.
Most of the present key Linux places are located elsewhere. What follows is an incomplete list of the major places to contact about the state of Linux in Brazil:
- Conectiva is the largest South Amrican Linux distribution. Largely based in Red-Hat, they have made a large effort to translate lots of applications interfaces into Portuguese and Spanish. Conectiva distribution is today one of the top Linux distributions in the world. Their main office is in Curitiba, a southern, beachless city.
-Popular Computer Project, an under U$200 computer using a stripped down version of KDE (containing basically Konqueror, KOffice and the supporting apps). This is being developed by the University of Minas Gerais, Minas Gerais being one of the few brazilian states without direct access to the sea.
Projeto Software Livre, the project of the state of Rio Grande do Sul government (the southernmost brazilian state), to promote the use of free software in the state. This was the most publicized government project in this area, and the first time a state government declared anything about free software in Brazil.
As a sad note, today I got the news that the Federal government buying a large number of computers to brazilian schools throughout the country. They will be buying only Windows machines.
When I grew up I couldn't have the real LEGOs, because they were not sold in Brazil and my parents couldn't afford the price of imported toys. I had to do with cheap local imitations that never worked like they were supposed to.
When, in my teens, I discovered the real thing, I was amazed by the sheer quality a LEGO piece irradiates.
Shortly after my son was born we started giving him LEGOs. Now he is 10 and has buckets upon crates of all different lines. They are all interoperable. They are all backward compatible. The 0-3 years old set can be used seamlessly with the Mindstorms set.
And I don't know if it is just chance or upbringing, but while my son has all the modern toys the article blames for LEGOs recent problems (GBA, Nintendo 64, a K6 II etc), he still spends many hours with LEGO, and he is not alone. He has some friends who will come to visit or stay overnight and they will cover the bedroom floor with all different kinds of pieces and build things for hours.
So I can not agree with the article from personal experience. I do not think the kids are to blame for not being interested in free form play anymore. More likely the parents are to blame for not giving their kids the right toys. A two-year old that gets started with LEGO will probably be interested in LEGO forever.
It may not be clear to rest of the Slashdot audience that they are asking questions to a legend of the field. The FORTH language could easily have been what C became, and only luck decided the fate of each language.
I was truly amazed when I first found a FORTH compiler for the Apple II. It was so alien to everything else available, yet so advanced, so ahead of the pack.
So, as for a question, do you think the growth of the appliance and handheld markets can give FORTH a chance to achieve a mainstream status? What steps are being taken to bring FORTH compilers to Palm OS, Windows CE and such?
Or even, specially not in the third world.
The Brazilian (ok, Brazil is not a third world country, but we are far from rich) popular computer project uses a AMD K6II 500 with 64 MB of RAM. Why? Probably because huge projects can not depend on the availability of out-of-line parts.
And the builders of this system agree with your third point also. They made an easy to install stripped down distribution based solely on a stripped down KDE (only Konqueror and KOffice, plus the supporting packges and apps). The workstation is diskless, with a 16 MB flashcard to boot from. All in all, it end up being a nice Internet/Office machine.
128 MB works fine for me and I do some serious development down here. Nowadays this means that RAM sits inside a PIII/800 box with giga upon giga of hard disk space.
I have SQL Server, MySQL Tomcat and Apache running together in the Windows partition. And it compiles my java (thousands of lines, not hundreds) very very fast.
The Mandrake partition runs Apache, MySQL and Tomcat. I have not yet made Konqueror work with SSL, else I would use it more.
But this is for development. The RAM will be doubling next month, because I want to try Visual Age again (that app IBM designed to rival Outlook in memory usage).
WinK2 problems are more related to phisical memory available than to processor power.
Give it 128 MB of phisical RAM and a large drive to swap to and forget about it.
A normal user will install Java for the same reason they will install Real, QuickTime, etc. To see some content, to use an application.
Notice that those are all huge downloads.
Also, some comercial software will simply ship the JRE and install it from CD.
It's been already shown that Code Red will not bring the Internet down. And it was never very much of a mortal threat to the majority of the users out there, because those are not running IIS (or any http server, for that matter). And until the more recent versions, the worm was not even a menace the files in the infected system (the recent versions, by installing a backdoor, would allow for a malicious invader to do a lot more damage).
The kind editor should also remember his math and Netcraft nice figures. IIS installations represent some 25% of the servers out there. Most of those are already patched by now. Even when they were not patched Code Red got only 6-7% of them (considering 4 million servers/250 thounsand infected).
Code Red is certainly a local problem in networks where it finds a nice ecologival niche. Cable modem networks are likey to suffer due to their archtecture and their own flaws. Other networks will suffer down the road.
But the main point is that this particular the worm is out of the way for nmost of us (if it ever was in the way) and will only affect the bandwidth locally.
It is almost time to reduce its risk rating to low.
My lab can barely manage to keep his tooth away from the furniture. He doesn't even know how to turn a computer on, much less what an OS is. Having a favourite OS is beyond his wildest dreams.
Or is your pet a chimp, a dolphin or a mouse? That would certanly explain it.
Yes. Jean-Louis was the real decision maker during some time after Jobs dismissal. But he never attained "CEOhood", his higher post at Apple was VP.
It will serve as the basis for the MacOS B, whose development will start in aproximatelly 5 years, as soon as Jean-Louis regains the Apple CEO post.
:))
(as a side note, I really, really wonder how much revenue have the late sales and marketing departments bougth into the company).
I am not American but, if your senators are anything like ours, you started to lose him when you wrote the word "kernel" and lost him for good at "(called an "interrupt")".
Not that he will ever see this. But what are the chances on the Senatorial Clerk For Web-Based Reading Affairs being much better? Remember, the SCFWBRA is probably a very young, very green, too greedy, very just-out-of-college lawyer.
I think that if you want a good standing chance of being read, understood and even taken into account, you should imagine a world where the only operating system in existence is Windows 98 and the only applications ever written were those in Microsoft Office. There are plenty of examples just as good as the one you used. Even better ones, considering the havoc a kid with VBA and Outlook can wreck.
And by using expressions like "UNIX box", "ssh" and "analyzing the signal" you just marked yourself as the kind of hacker the lawmaker want to see in jail. Funny world, isn't it?
maggard writes:
Please don't editorialize innacurately.
Please do not criticize the editor innacurately. All the words you quote are from the original news sender, Lars Mooseantlers. michael is probably far from flawless, but you are completely wrong here.
I assume you aware that China has a totalitarian government that arrests, prosecutes and condemn its citizen at will. I also assume you have not forgotten the Celestial Peace Square incident, when the chinese govvernment used tanks and army troops against unarmed civilians.
So I can not really figure why you you think the chinese could really protest against the arrest of americans without jeopardizing their own safety.
Please do not assume the whole world lives under the same legal protections and human rights garantees you do. Why do you think the International Amnesty members never write letters to their own governments?
Along with the Creationist debate, this gun problem seems to be a typical American nonsense. And they are similar at least in a point, both base their claims in an ancient text written in a complete different context. Both groups will also invent all kinds of rationalizations and outright lies to mantain their faces (see the source of the statistic quoted out of context here, originating this debate: the figures are the result of a method change - url in a comment bellow).
I really have laugh when a gun nut say he/she has weapons to defend their homes from the evil government (and in Waco we all have seem how well guns will defend your home when the evil government wants in).
I am also amazed by poorly trained civilians thinking they can defend themselves from criminals for whom guns are everyday professional tools.
As for "if guns are banned only criminals will have guns", it makes a neat slogan but also a neat instance of double-talk. The whole point of the exercise is to make sure only criminals have guns! So, when the police spot a gun they don't need any other clue, they know they are in front of a criminal.