Turns out that line of research ran into a dead end five years ago. People don't go back and publish "oh, btw, we were wrong".
For a long time, too, I've thought that careful documentation of what does not work and why is just as important as what does work and why.
Publication of "How Great Idea Blah Doesn't Really Work" is vitally important to preventing other creative, thinking-outside-the-box people from chasing down the same dead end in the maze of symptoms of the truth.
However, if you expend a little effort you can find out many of these things in two ways:
At the leading edge, talk to people at conferences. Let them know what you're thinking and see what they say. Talk to several people, too. Of course you need to take debunking of your idea on a professional and not personal level. Also you have to be reasonably trusting that not everyone is out to scoop your great ideas.
Look carefully at the written articles in your field of interest. Many times in the introductions and conclusions there are little sentences that hint at why some things are not practical; often these sentences help to round out arguments that would other suggest that some harebrained scheme would cure the world's problems.
Well, to have any semblance of control over the process of proving one's identity, I think smart cards are a better than just keeping all the retina patterns, fingerprints, DNA signatures in a database. If no one can positively identify me unless I carry the smart card that correlates the biometric data with all of the other information, then I have control. If the authorities can just transmit the scanned retinal image over the network to some big database to search, then a card is irrelevant.
You can see that the "card" is pretty much for off-line use.
Practically, face-recognition software will be used more and more, not just for "anti-terrorist" measures at the airport ticket counter, but for "targeted demographic profiling" at your Costco, Walmart, BestBuy, etc.
I'm just glad that I have a constitution with some provisions for my protection in it and for my ability to vote to change my government.
Imagine this technology being applied in Iraq, North Korea and China. Their "problems" of political dissent will be substantially reduced by the introduction of this kind of technology.
Make some training videos and ship them out overnight.
Have people at the remote site view the tapes together in front of a big TV and then have stragglers checkout the tapes on loan.
It still wouldn't hurt if you or some of your staff went to a couple big remote sites to see how they play in real life and how they could be improved, answer the FAQs, etc.
That long term outlook is gone from HP now, with the Carly (and Curly) gang in charge.
I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that the demands on company management and the incentives they receive are not well balanced.
I can see where shareholders want to see EPS increases from quarter to quarter, come hell or high water.
Executive perks in terms of stock options tend to be for the short term.
But I can cut costs in the short term by firing the research department, getting rid of quality control and subcontracting maintenance and support to a call center in a blighted urban area.
As long as I get to bail before the cows come to roost in a couple of years, I'm a golden executive at the shareholder's meeting.
Now if they only made sure the stock options given to executives could not be redeemed for at least 5 to 7 years. Their decisions really impact the long term - make their rewards reflect their true impact.
...then Itanium will take over completely. Same will happen to Alpha.
If I were one of the HP engineers working on PA-RISC, it would be a bitter blow to concede defeat to Itanium while PA-RISC currently trounces it. (I know, I know, some HP people worked on Merced, too. But PA-RISC seems like a better product right now and for the foreseeable future.)
Likewise, anyone at Compaq (DEC) that puts together Alpha servers has got to know that they beat Itanium to pieces. Might as well throw in the towel before the EV8 sees the light of day.
I guess there's consistency between the two companies on their willingness to concede defeat to Intel in their 64 bit RISC lines.
No, that's not a typo, these graphics cards cost as much as a nice Athlon system.
I don't care. It's still a lot cheaper than a top of the line SGI workstation.
The ratio of costs for all the parts in a typical PC (motherboard:CPU:disk:powersupply:OS:graphicscard)
have shifted some over the years. More accurately, though, as the performnce of certain keys pieces has increased to adequately fulfill the needs of the users, it's natural to start looking to satisfy unmet needs.
An OpenGL card like this would be wonderful for scientific visualization, CAD, CAM, etc.
While the price is an important point, in my market $600-$900 is not a big deal.
Our large company decided that the old fashioned financial system we had was uncool. It was essentially custom-made to fit our business needs, which are not exactly like a Widget Factory, Inc.
We'll replace all that hard to modify custom software running on mainframes with a sleek new system using industrial strength standards like Oracle databases. Commodity. Off the shelf. High performance. Easier to find people that know how to fiddle with it. Etc.
Well, they spent a fsckwad of money adapting it to meet our business needs. It took a lot more time and money to get this shoe to fit than the original proponents had said.
Oracle is a pretty high performing database.
But, selling a "transition to Oracle" on the basis of "cost savings" ranked as much of a laugh as other IT "Enterprise" related sales hoaxes.
Like when Disney makes you watch a preview for their new movie every time you watch the DVD you bought, and you can't fast-forward through it or skip it or whatever...
That forced feed preview feature of DVDs represents a theft of my time.
I'm sure that DVD preview section is only going to grow larger over time, until it starts to dwarf the 7 previews and 2 advertisements that take up the front end of most VHS rental tapes.
"Honey, put on the DVD and the mute button so after dinner we can watch the movie!"
Your TV Imperiled by Pirates Thu May 2, 9:42 AM ET
By Joe Dweeb Slashdot World News
WASHINGTON, April 29
Network executives were caught scrambling Wednesday as news broke that many commercial advertisers were losing revenue as their audiences fled for the stalls.
"It's a shocking development and terrible problem!", said one vice-president who declined to be identified.
"Our biggest advertisers have been on the phone all night, asking if I had any idea how extensive this problem was."
"I had to tell them that I had no idea. I believe that most Americans are patriotic and have learned to `hold it' until the end."
"Our advertisers rely on the contract we have with our viewers to watch commercials. If the viewers violate that trust by running to the bathroom between shows, then we won't be able to foot the bill to support all of the programming that America has come to love and respect."
"It's a tragedy! My congressional representative was brought to our headquarters at 7:00 am this morning for a three hour ten-on-one meeting to be briefed about the severity of the problem."
"We're proposing legislation requiring a technological solution to the problem that will be transparent, convenient and easy to use."
"All toilets are to be fitted with electroshock devices to prevent their use in unauthorized ways that are in violation of the EULA to which TV viewers are implicitly agreeing by "click^H^H^H^H^H watching through".
"We feel that this will provide an agreeable solution that should meet everyone's needs for the preservation of high quality programming on television."
If they thought "Wintel" was creeping up their food chain, "Lintel" is lower priced still and hungrier for the UNIX market.
Sun needs to capitalize on its UNIX experience and to become part of the Linux solution, rather than reactively viewing circumstances as the Linux problem. They've made some good moves already, in terms of StarOffice acquisition and having some developers work on Gnome. But they need a coordinated vision that puts everything together. E15K database ervers working well with Linux server appliances which interact well through all the built-up Unix infrastructure (NFS, etc.)
IBM and HP have already seen the handwriting on the wall and are doing things to take advantage of the shifts going on in the marketplace.
Sun certainly has a lot to offer, they should put someone in charge who knows how to leverage that UNIX experience and to grow new markets based on their existing network of sales staff.
Java could figure prominently in such a strategy; but promoting Linux on SPARC seems to be more of an uphill battle, AFAICT.
I'll defend to the death, the rights of a content creator, to control how s/he chooses to redistribute their content.
I'll second that [except for the death part:)]
Realistically, though, I don't know what the big deal is here.
It seems to me that the newspaper in question merely needs to have a little more talent to fix the "problem" from a technical perspective. Just make up temporary fast-rotting links for news stories.
It's their right to do whatever they please with their content and how they organize it.
Likewise, it's my right to dislike a site that redirects me through 3 pages of advertising before I get to what I wanted to see or redirects a stale link into the front page.
Like other web site authors, I'll learn not to link into their news site and therebyybannoy my readers, thereby depriving them of the audience share they would otherwise gain from my link into their site.
If they and their advertisers are cool with that loss of audience, that's their perogative.
Personally, I'd settle for any audience I could get. Fact is, the ads will be exposed to a greater number of people than if they adopt a policy of fascistly redirecting deep links into AnnoyanceLand.
I'm getting a Samsung 240T. It's more expensive, but HDTV wide (I think 24" diagonal).
The TMDS hardware on the latest video cards seems to be honestly able to drive 1920x1200 digitally insetad of only 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, I'm ready for a flat panel.
This makes sense, in the same way that small current loops used to measure magnetic field cause very small disturbances in the overall field. The whole assembly of currents, fields have to be a consistent solution of Maxwell's equations.
It gets me to thinking, though, that our audio language is probably not completely optimized yet, in terms of maximizing information flow.
That is, if you were to transmit maximum information in bits/second over the same frequency range as the human ear is capable of processing, it's probably a lot more than the fastest intelligible human speech (~400 words per minute).
Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.
Considering the hassles users experience thrashing between versions of Word (and exchanging Word documents between platforms), that's not exactly a ringingly strict infimum of compatility.
But hey, it's probably a whole better than catdoc, so I won't complain too loudly.
I don't remember its name, but a while back I saw a freshmeat posting for free software that helped to run a veterinary clinic. I think it handled scheduling and perhaps simple billing.
But other posters are correct: a general MySQL database really needs a lot of work to hone it into something that front office people can use productively.
I've seen my dentist's office use some kind of Windows based software that nicely integrates patient records (show teeth and point out cavities, X-ray images), examination records, appointments, billings, sending out reminders of appointments, helping to concoct the right insurance claim submission. Very impressive.
For the record I'm totally against the DMCA and this similar abomination in the EU.
That said, would not overly restrictive legislation like this provide strong incentive for consumers to adopt freely available formats that are not encumbered?
If all the big-name commercially-produced for-pay video and audio comes locked up with so many chains, and I can produce my own audio and video in an open format that gets distributed for free without restriction, won't people naturally want viewers for the free formats and content creators for the free formats (a la home movies, etc?)
I mean, a free open standard has worked pretty well for HTML.
Some server-based scanners will helpfully send a return email to anyone who sent a virus containing email so that they can fix their system.
Tell me about it.
I get such "helpful replies" all the time on openssh-unix-dev and from multiple flavors of autoresponding viri checkers. Not to mention the one from my company's scanner indicating that someone sent me a suspicious attachment. I don't run Outlook or Windows, so it's never been a problem even when those things did arrive in my inbox file.
But I look at it as the latest great annoyance after hoax virus warnings (or hoax alerts to kidnapped kids).
7337 kiddiez nudge a big list and then cackle while general populace gets sprayed back by dozens of reacting scanners.
Kind of like planting lit cigarettes under smoke detectors in large public buildings.
Imagine the cost savings when full physics experiments can be carried out with computers!
Yes, in many cases.
But I think generally it's over-hyped.
In the good old days, before computers were available for these kinds of calculations, scientists had to scrimp and scratch their way using classical tools of mathematical analysis.
These days, everyone runs to the computer before they have the problem properly defined.
Not to belittle this accomplishment. I think it's still possible to milk a great deal of insight from computational simulations. It's just that most of the time what's milked is a glossy viewgraph to get the next phase of funding...
I suppose the rate at which new links are created is roughly a positive coefficient that outweighs the negative coefficient associated with death of a link.
Reminds me of calculations for population growth with k_growth and k_death.
So, two questions:
What about deliberately short-lived links like the kind of md5-flavored arguments I get from my favorite news sites hoping to track my usage? How do those affect link life statistics?
Yes, there's a lot of great open source software out there that many average people could find useful.
But there's a lot out there, too, that are just the 240th way to catalog MP3 titles.
What's needed is for the collection to be a subset of the OSS universe, applications which have been tested for being relevant, useful and reliable.
A well integrated CD like this could do wonders.
One of the hindrances that we contend with is fragmentation of a finite user community, in the sense that given 10 users of a specific kind application such as a Word-like WYSIWYG document preparation system, 2 will be doing Abiword, 2 will be doing KWord, 1 doing LyX, 4 doing StarOffice, etc.
The CD integrator has to be brave enough to choose one good application of each kind to build a complete, but minimal system. End users appreciate that orthogonality. [Not limiting them in any way - advanced users will find out about the alternatives and their benefits and limitations all by themselves.]
But most importantly, there's likely to be a larger community of people that can help new users with any particular application and also more developers furthering the particular application because of big marquee glory for something that's used by tens of thousands of users.
Maybe so. But you'd be surprised at just how insufficiently educated most people are about personal finance.
Many people learn from their parents, who, chances are, are among the 90% of the population that are debtors rather than creditors.
It's kind of like parenting skills. It only takes half a brain and some willingness to invest some effort in learning how to be a parent in order to be a good one, but most people just "wing it" and tend to pass on a comparable ratio of personal dysfunctional habits to their children.
You just didn't WANT to.
More like, they just didn't think it was important to learn how to properly manage personal finances.
Well, it's important.
It's a hard lesson to learn by way of severe salaray reduction, but it will be good lesson.
Apart from the necessity of saving 3-6 months salary as an emergency contingency fund, they'll probably also start paying attention to a few other basics, such as not paying credit card interest, saving for kid's college, and really saving heavily for retirement because actual social security benefits are going to be paltry.
From a pure business perspective, it looks as if AOL made the most of its inflated market value in buying TW at the time. AOL executives get an "A" for that, while their TW counterparts get a "D".
Other dotcom oneday wonders should beat themselves for not taking advantage of the situation.
If I was in charge of Cisco in 1999 I would have thought about trading market value shares for something of more enduring value that investor expectations of high growth rates. [Although I'll have to give them due credit for staying away from some of telecoms (Worldcom, Lucent, Qwest,...) that have recently been cratering.]
So, of course, our pay raises during the latter half of the 1990s, while good, were beans compared to what you could get in the.com boom. I seriously was looking to increase my salary by 40-50% by making the move.
Now, of course, I'm more content with the job security aspect of my position. Sure, the money doesn't follow the high peaks, but neither does it scrape the bottoms of the troughs the way it seems to be doing at this outfit in Chicago.
In that kind of market, you really need to build up some buffer of savings in the fat years to make up for the thin. If the company can't afford to do a 5 year running average for your salary, but does a 5 month running average instead, then it's pretty much up to you to do your own averaging to get an income level that you can depend upon.
I don't mean to sound callous, cause I'm sure that 90% of people adjust their expenditures to fit 105% of their income (it's the American way), but that seems to be the reality AFAICT.
Slashdot Mirror
Turns out that line of research ran into a dead end five years ago. People don't go back and publish "oh, btw, we were wrong".
For a long time, too, I've thought that careful documentation of what does not work and why is just as important as what does work and why.
Publication of "How Great Idea Blah Doesn't Really Work" is vitally important to preventing other creative, thinking-outside-the-box people from chasing down the same dead end in the maze of symptoms of the truth.
However, if you expend a little effort you can find out many of these things in two ways:
Well, to have any semblance of control over the process of proving one's identity, I think smart cards are a better than just keeping all the retina patterns, fingerprints, DNA signatures in a database. If no one can positively identify me unless I carry the smart card that correlates the biometric data with all of the other information, then I have control. If the authorities can just transmit the scanned retinal image over the network to some big database to search, then a card is irrelevant.
You can see that the "card" is pretty much for off-line use.
Practically, face-recognition software will be used more and more, not just for "anti-terrorist" measures at the airport ticket counter, but for "targeted demographic profiling" at your Costco, Walmart, BestBuy, etc.
I'm just glad that I have a constitution with some provisions for my protection in it and for my ability to vote to change my government.
Imagine this technology being applied in Iraq, North Korea and China. Their "problems" of political dissent will be substantially reduced by the introduction of this kind of technology.
Make some training videos and ship them out overnight.
Have people at the remote site view the tapes together in front of a big TV and then have stragglers checkout the tapes on loan.
It still wouldn't hurt if you or some of your staff went to a couple big remote sites to see how they play in real life and how they could be improved, answer the FAQs, etc.
That long term outlook is gone from HP now, with the Carly (and Curly) gang in charge.
I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that the demands on company management and the incentives they receive are not well balanced.
I can see where shareholders want to see EPS increases from quarter to quarter, come hell or high water.
Executive perks in terms of stock options tend to be for the short term.
But I can cut costs in the short term by firing the research department, getting rid of quality control and subcontracting maintenance and support to a call center in a blighted urban area.
As long as I get to bail before the cows come to roost in a couple of years, I'm a golden executive at the shareholder's meeting.
Now if they only made sure the stock options given to executives could not be redeemed for at least 5 to 7 years. Their decisions really impact the long term - make their rewards reflect their true impact.
If I were one of the HP engineers working on PA-RISC, it would be a bitter blow to concede defeat to Itanium while PA-RISC currently trounces it. (I know, I know, some HP people worked on Merced, too. But PA-RISC seems like a better product right now and for the foreseeable future.)
Likewise, anyone at Compaq (DEC) that puts together Alpha servers has got to know that they beat Itanium to pieces. Might as well throw in the towel before the EV8 sees the light of day.
I guess there's consistency between the two companies on their willingness to concede defeat to Intel in their 64 bit RISC lines.
No, that's not a typo, these graphics cards cost as much as a nice Athlon system.
I don't care. It's still a lot cheaper than a top of the line SGI workstation.
The ratio of costs for all the parts in a typical PC)
(motherboard:CPU:disk:powersupply:OS:graphicscard
have shifted some over the years. More accurately, though, as the performnce of certain keys pieces has increased to adequately fulfill the needs of the users, it's natural to start looking to satisfy unmet needs.
An OpenGL card like this would be wonderful for scientific visualization, CAD, CAM, etc.
While the price is an important point, in my market $600-$900 is not a big deal.
That's certainly been my experience.
Our large company decided that the old fashioned financial system we had was uncool. It was essentially custom-made to fit our business needs, which are not exactly like a Widget Factory, Inc.
We'll replace all that hard to modify custom software running on mainframes with a sleek new system using industrial strength standards like Oracle databases. Commodity. Off the shelf. High performance. Easier to find people that know how to fiddle with it. Etc.
Well, they spent a fsckwad of money adapting it to meet our business needs. It took a lot more time and money to get this shoe to fit than the original proponents had said.
Oracle is a pretty high performing database.
But, selling a "transition to Oracle" on the basis of "cost savings" ranked as much of a laugh as other IT "Enterprise" related sales hoaxes.
Like when Disney makes you watch a preview for their new movie every time you watch the DVD you bought, and you can't fast-forward through it or skip it or whatever...
That forced feed preview feature of DVDs represents a theft of my time.
I'm sure that DVD preview section is only going to grow larger over time, until it starts to dwarf the 7 previews and 2 advertisements that take up the front end of most VHS rental tapes.
"Honey, put on the DVD and the mute button so after dinner we can watch the movie!"
Your TV Imperiled by Pirates
Thu May 2, 9:42 AM ET
By Joe Dweeb Slashdot World News
WASHINGTON, April 29
Network executives were caught scrambling Wednesday as news broke that many commercial advertisers were losing revenue as their audiences fled for the stalls.
"It's a shocking development and terrible problem!", said one vice-president who declined to be identified.
"Our biggest advertisers have been on the phone all night, asking if I had any idea how extensive this problem was."
"I had to tell them that I had no idea. I believe that most Americans are patriotic and have learned to `hold it' until the end."
"Our advertisers rely on the contract we have with our viewers to watch commercials. If the viewers violate that trust by running to the bathroom between shows, then we won't be able to foot the bill to support all of the programming that America has come to love and respect."
"It's a tragedy! My congressional representative was brought to our headquarters at 7:00 am this morning for a three hour ten-on-one meeting to be briefed about the severity of the problem."
"We're proposing legislation requiring a technological solution to the problem that will be transparent, convenient and easy to use."
"All toilets are to be fitted with electroshock devices to prevent their use in unauthorized ways that are in violation of the EULA to which TV viewers are implicitly agreeing by "click^H^H^H^H^H watching through".
"We feel that this will provide an agreeable solution that should meet everyone's needs for the preservation of high quality programming on television."
Sun is facing an inexorable onslaught.
If they thought "Wintel" was creeping up their food chain, "Lintel" is lower priced still and hungrier for the UNIX market.
Sun needs to capitalize on its UNIX experience and to become part of the Linux solution, rather than reactively viewing circumstances as the Linux problem. They've made some good moves already, in terms of StarOffice acquisition and having some developers work on Gnome. But they need a coordinated vision that puts everything together. E15K database ervers working well with Linux server appliances which interact well through all the built-up Unix infrastructure (NFS, etc.)
IBM and HP have already seen the handwriting on the wall and are doing things to take advantage of the shifts going on in the marketplace.
Sun certainly has a lot to offer, they should put someone in charge who knows how to leverage that UNIX experience and to grow new markets based on their existing network of sales staff.
Java could figure prominently in such a strategy; but promoting Linux on SPARC seems to be more of an uphill battle, AFAICT.
I'll defend to the death, the rights of a content creator, to control how s/he chooses to redistribute their content.
I'll second that [except for the death part:)]
Realistically, though, I don't know what the big deal is here.
It seems to me that the newspaper in question merely needs to have a little more talent to fix the "problem" from a technical perspective. Just make up temporary fast-rotting links for news stories.
It's their right to do whatever they please with their content and how they organize it.
Likewise, it's my right to dislike a site that redirects me through 3 pages of advertising before I get to what I wanted to see or redirects a stale link into the front page.
Like other web site authors, I'll learn not to link into their news site and therebyybannoy my readers, thereby depriving them of the audience share they would otherwise gain from my link into their site.
If they and their advertisers are cool with that loss of audience, that's their perogative.
Personally, I'd settle for any audience I could get. Fact is, the ads will be exposed to a greater number of people than if they adopt a policy of fascistly redirecting deep links into AnnoyanceLand.
I'm getting a Samsung 240T. It's more expensive, but HDTV wide (I think 24" diagonal).
The TMDS hardware on the latest video cards seems to be honestly able to drive 1920x1200 digitally insetad of only 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, I'm ready for a flat panel.
I sure could use a good nap.
Absolutely!
I swear my after lunch productivity is pretty well shot.
If my workplace would "shutdown" for a 3 hour lunch and provide comfortable places to sleep, I think my overall productivity would increase.
Unfortunately, I think managements gets tight-assed about the whole concept because "it won't project the image we seek to foster"
This makes sense, in the same way that small current loops used to measure magnetic field cause very small disturbances in the overall field. The whole assembly of currents, fields have to be a consistent solution of Maxwell's equations.
It gets me to thinking, though, that our audio language is probably not completely optimized yet, in terms of maximizing information flow.
That is, if you were to transmit maximum information in bits/second over the same frequency range as the human ear is capable of processing, it's probably a lot more than the fastest intelligible human speech (~400 words per minute).
Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.
Considering the hassles users experience thrashing between versions of Word (and exchanging Word documents between platforms), that's not exactly a ringingly strict infimum of compatility.
But hey, it's probably a whole better than catdoc, so I won't complain too loudly.
I don't remember its name, but a while back I saw a freshmeat posting for free software that helped to run a veterinary clinic. I think it handled scheduling and perhaps simple billing.
But other posters are correct: a general MySQL database really needs a lot of work to hone it into something that front office people can use productively.
I've seen my dentist's office use some kind of Windows based software that nicely integrates patient records (show teeth and point out cavities, X-ray images), examination records, appointments, billings, sending out reminders of appointments, helping to concoct the right insurance claim submission. Very impressive.
For the record I'm totally against the DMCA and this similar abomination in the EU.
That said, would not overly restrictive legislation like this provide strong incentive for consumers to adopt freely available formats that are not encumbered?
If all the big-name commercially-produced for-pay video and audio comes locked up with so many chains, and I can produce my own audio and video in an open format that gets distributed for free without restriction, won't people naturally want viewers for the free formats and content creators for the free formats (a la home movies, etc?)
I mean, a free open standard has worked pretty well for HTML.
Some server-based scanners will helpfully send a return email to anyone who sent a virus containing email so that they can fix their system.
Tell me about it.
I get such "helpful replies" all the time on openssh-unix-dev and from multiple flavors of autoresponding viri checkers. Not to mention the one from my company's scanner indicating that someone sent me a suspicious attachment. I don't run Outlook or Windows, so it's never been a problem even when those things did arrive in my inbox file.
But I look at it as the latest great annoyance after hoax virus warnings (or hoax alerts to kidnapped kids).
7337 kiddiez nudge a big list and then cackle while general populace gets sprayed back by dozens of reacting scanners.
Kind of like planting lit cigarettes under smoke detectors in large public buildings.
Imagine the cost savings when full physics experiments can be carried out with computers!
Yes, in many cases.
But I think generally it's over-hyped.
In the good old days, before computers were available for these kinds of calculations, scientists had to scrimp and scratch their way using classical tools of mathematical analysis.
These days, everyone runs to the computer before they have the problem properly defined.
Not to belittle this accomplishment. I think it's still possible to milk a great deal of insight from computational simulations. It's just that most of the time what's milked is a glossy viewgraph to get the next phase of funding...
Tsk, tsk.
Next thing you know you'll be talking about zombie processes showing up.
Seriously, though, when Jim Henson died the world lost a wonderful human being.
I suppose the rate at which new links are created is roughly a positive coefficient that outweighs the negative coefficient associated with death of a link.
Reminds me of calculations for population growth with k_growth and k_death.
So, two questions:
Yes, there's a lot of great open source software out there that many average people could find useful.
But there's a lot out there, too, that are just the 240th way to catalog MP3 titles.
What's needed is for the collection to be a subset of the OSS universe, applications which have been tested for being relevant, useful and reliable.
A well integrated CD like this could do wonders.
One of the hindrances that we contend with is fragmentation of a finite user community, in the sense that given 10 users of a specific kind application such as a Word-like WYSIWYG document preparation system, 2 will be doing Abiword, 2 will be doing KWord, 1 doing LyX, 4 doing StarOffice, etc.
The CD integrator has to be brave enough to choose one good application of each kind to build a complete, but minimal system. End users appreciate that orthogonality. [Not limiting them in any way - advanced users will find out about the alternatives and their benefits and limitations all by themselves.]
But most importantly, there's likely to be a larger community of people that can help new users with any particular application and also more developers furthering the particular application because of big marquee glory for something that's used by tens of thousands of users.
It is not hard to figure out the "money" thing.
Maybe so. But you'd be surprised at just how insufficiently educated most people are about personal finance.
Many people learn from their parents, who, chances are, are among the 90% of the population that are debtors rather than creditors.
It's kind of like parenting skills. It only takes half a brain and some willingness to invest some effort in learning how to be a parent in order to be a good one, but most people just "wing it" and tend to pass on a comparable ratio of personal dysfunctional habits to their children.
You just didn't WANT to.
More like, they just didn't think it was important to learn how to properly manage personal finances.
Well, it's important.
It's a hard lesson to learn by way of severe salaray reduction, but it will be good lesson.
Apart from the necessity of saving 3-6 months salary as an emergency contingency fund, they'll probably also start paying attention to a few other basics, such as not paying credit card interest, saving for kid's college, and really saving heavily for retirement because actual social security benefits are going to be paltry.
From a pure business perspective, it looks as if AOL made the most of its inflated market value in buying TW at the time. AOL executives get an "A" for that, while their TW counterparts get a "D".
Other dotcom oneday wonders should beat themselves for not taking advantage of the situation.
If I was in charge of Cisco in 1999 I would have thought about trading market value shares for something of more enduring value that investor expectations of high growth rates. [Although I'll have to give them due credit for staying away from some of telecoms (Worldcom, Lucent, Qwest, ...) that have recently been cratering.]
I work close to the .gov sector.
So, of course, our pay raises during the latter half of the 1990s, while good, were beans compared to what you could get in the .com boom. I seriously was looking to increase my salary by 40-50% by making the move.
Now, of course, I'm more content with the job security aspect of my position. Sure, the money doesn't follow the high peaks, but neither does it scrape the bottoms of the troughs the way it seems to be doing at this outfit in Chicago.
In that kind of market, you really need to build up some buffer of savings in the fat years to make up for the thin. If the company can't afford to do a 5 year running average for your salary, but does a 5 month running average instead, then it's pretty much up to you to do your own averaging to get an income level that you can depend upon.
I don't mean to sound callous, cause I'm sure that 90% of people adjust their expenditures to fit 105% of their income (it's the American way), but that seems to be the reality AFAICT.