Consider the supervolcanoes, like the one under Yellowstone, on a 600,000 year cycle and due to blow RSN, geologically speaking.
The last recent supervolcano class eruption was 70,000 years ago in Tova, which wiped out such a huge fraction of the human race that genetic historians note a bottleneck in the gene pool arising from that time.
Because if you read the whole thing in context you can clearly see that when we bombed Osama out of Afghanistan he would have up and moved his training and operations right into Iraq.
Moved to Iraq? Not likely.
bin Ladin would have been more likely to do exactly what he did anyway - move next door into tribal-controlled areas of Pakistan
Sudan and Yemen, too, probably would have been higher up on the potential post-Taliban safe haven list for Osama. Iraq would have been way down the list near Syria.
So, given the events are basically just a joint press conference, infotainment at its best and worst, what exactly about the debates will convince undecided swing voters (demographic profiles?) to swing one way or another?
The bloggers from either side are pretty much just preaching to their respective choirs
Something like this came out about a year ago from the Pew Trust.
Basically, viewers of certain TV networks were less informed than viewers of other networks - not naming any names here, mind you - and people who got their news from other sources, such as radio and newspapers tended to be more informed than people who got their news just from TV.
Such polls don't give proper credit to the tough job that some of those TV hosts have on their hands, the challenges they must confront to educate their viewers.
But picking on viewers of certains shows is like picking on special ed teachers for the abilities of their class - those teachers have a tough job on their hands and people need to cut them some slack. Here they are, working selflessly for little compensation to educate the common man, and people ridicule them for mistakes of their students.
No, what I really would like to see, is Windows coming with a selection of browsers
I'm coming to believe that flavors of Windows will be offered like this. You'll have AOL/Windows, MSN/Windows, Corporate/Windows, HPConsumer/Windows, ThirdWorld/Windows, etc.
"Windows" is regarded as an essential commodity ingredient, just like a CPU. The price will be capped, MS will be paid something, but the brand will have lost all meaning and any cachet.
The situation will be like VISA cards that come from different banks. A "VISA card" doesn't mean anything but "credit card" to anyone. Fringe players like Mastercard, Discover, AMEX, and Diners Club play like yipping dogs around that behemoth - no serious competition exists and the transaction fees are non-negotiable.
I create graphs using Grace to put into LaTeX documents and anywhere else. IMHO, its quality is among the best; exports PS, EPS, PDF, MIF, etc.
LaTeX can't be beat for mathematics and quality type-setting. Plus, the input files are good for decades.
Its only shortcoming, for me, is that it gets ponderous for preparing highly visual presentations with drawings, boxes, etc.
One of these years I'd like to see an SVG based authoring tool that, for MathML rendering, used TeX as the underlying engine just for little boxes of equations (ignoring the multi-page layout) and paragraphs.
High quality math typesetting, with scalable vector graphics, in an open XML language, on the web, would be the ultimate in expression.
I'd dump my word processor and presentation software in a millisecond and just use such a tool.
Open source shouldn't content itself with stealing good ideas
No, but it's a good way to start. Rejecting ideas because they were NIH is a bad way to start.
Plus, it paves the migration path to the point where Windows users have an easier time on modern Linux desktops than I do, having spent signficant sentences suffering under twm, CDE, etc. on UNIX systems.
When I need help with OpenOffice on my Linux box at home, I ask my wife, who uses Word on Windows.
Taking advantage of the built-in bias of computer training towards Microsoft products is a good strategy for recruiting converts.
Maybe throw in a few ominous warnings about how the FBI and Interpol investigates and prosecutes copyright violations to the most severe extent you can possibly imagine.
I say, get those infernal laws to work for the little man and not just the big content distributors.
Of a stripped Windows version, like the sans media-player version Microsoft might well have to release, depending on the outcome of EU commission rulings that are coming up soon.
I didn't see any recommendation for shorter terms for exclusive monopoly rights that I think would help cure this problem on many fronts.
The 17 year term might have been justifiable in the 18th century when trading ships took many weeks to cross the Atlantic, but now, overall progress would be improved if the terms were reduced to something more like 2 years.
And, while we're at IP reform, copyrights should be cut down to a shorter period as well. This 75 year mouse extension is ridiculous, especially when Disney mines fairy tales in the public domain (Snow White, Cinderella, etc.) for their cartoon movie ideas.
But, once the artificial market is created, the vested interests (owners of IP, litigators of IP) don't want to see it go away.
So just reduce terms of exclusivity gradually, a year at a time, until things become sane again.
A comparison of the same "poor" people in the U.S over time leads to the conclusion that they are getting richer, not poorer.
Slowly, yes, the poorest 20% of Americans are getting richer. Slowly. Much more slowly than the richest 20% of Americans. And there is reason to believe the official measures of poverty based on 3x the minimum needed for food developed in the 1960's is harsher than it was when it was developed because of the relative costs of food to housing.
And, yes, the poorest Americans will appear rich compared to residents of Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa. But the standard of living is not so drastically higher among the American poor as income might suggest: in an agricultural economy, Haitians can buy food for much less money than what the urban poor are charged in the stores in America. Rental costs for a dwelling are signficantly higher in America than elsewhere.
You do realize that relative to much of the rest of the world, most "poor" Americans are among the super wealthy, right?
Right. I was delayed getting into work today because of the crowds of poor people demonstrating in joy about just lucky super wealthy they were compared to beggars in Calcutta.
The net result of the rich getting rich faster than the poor get richer is a unhealthy stratification in society (cf the Gini index). In a democracy, the median voter that perceives increasing inequality alongside what are still fairly desperate conditions will be more likely to choose candidates and economic policies that redistribute wealth in ways that are not in the best long term interests of the economy as a whole. If you think progressive income taxes are a tough pill to swallow, then think about trade tariffs and expropriation of private property that gets nationalized.
not giving raises that at least pace with cost of living.
There's no guarantee that corporate earnings will keep up with the cost of living. Just ask trucking companies and airlines that have taken it in the shorts for fuel costs lately, but been afraid to raise prices in a competitive market.
Recent improvements in U.S. worker productivity have not translated into correspondingly higher wages but have instead been retained as corporate earnings.
In the past, productivity improvements were the only non-inflationary justification for higher wages and salaries. Increasing wages without a corresponding improvement in productivity just feeds an inflationary spiral. Greenspan agrees and the Fed chairman is more responsible for the economy than any President.
Greenspan noted the curious lag in wage and salary growth coming out of this recession but predicted they would pick up soon. This news item might be indicative of a longer term trend, but only time will tell.
Yes, such reasoning is a fallacy if applied without thought.
Once in a while, though, Bob really isn't a true adherent of XYZ. Bob and one of his friends might call Bob a vegetarian, but the rest of us watching him scarf down a BigMac would conclude otherwise.
As Linux server deployments become more widespread, there are going to be more and more system administrators and fly-by-night ISPs that will fall into a category we'll call "The Lowest 1% of Linux Providers".
Just like Windows admins, medical doctors, cable TV repairment, someone has to graduate at the bottom of their class and it's time we recognize that bottom of the barrel Linux admins can and will exist, too. Complaints about paper MCSE's and CCNA's can extend into the Linux world, too. We've grown beyond a small community of enlighted hackers on a mountaintop.
The bigger issue with the original story is that it is an anecdote, a sampling of a widely varying phenomena where induction of general principles from one point can lead to erroneous conclusions. Or not. We need lots of stories, randomly sampled. Being chosen as "newsworthy" suggests something less than random sampling, however.
That the migration costs from Linux are not large.
This means that investing in Linux does not paint you into a corner and lock you into a single vendor. It's not a big deal to go Windows if you think it might work better for you.
That's an advantage of using Linux.
Now go ask your friends with significant investment in Windows whether they could migrate to any alternative for a reasonable cost.
Even just a small standardized piece of that infrastructure, perhaps?
Oh, it's all together and hard to separate out into standard components without breaking some other thing?
P.S. Note that Oracle is not the only SQL option on Linux.
Read the Heritage Foundation as one data point, then look also over here at EPI for an alternative viewpoint that suggests the official poverty line has stagnated so that people below are much worse off than people below the poverty line 30-40 years ago.
In the same way, the minimum wage stagnation.
The harsh reality is that global wage competition means the rest of the world gets to catch up while wages in the developing world stay stagnant or decline in real terms.
Currently, it's more important to own appreciating assets, stock, real estate, etc., than to work for wages, which are taxed much more heavily.
They can't do that if your vehicle is purely battery powered, you can charge it at home or work.
Unless you can cheaply generate electricity locally at home or work, then the power companies still have some slack in which to charge you money.
MyElectricMonopoly charges about US$0.10/kW-hr, while solar PV panels, IIRC, come out several times that much. I think they are economical in remote areas with lots of sunshine.
Given the homeland security issues associated with a centralized electrical generating plant going offline as a catastrophic single point of failure, some accelerated depreciation tax credits for PV panels on homeowners' roofs might spur the industry and reduce the costs further.
Going out on a limb here, but it's just possible this might be a better long term energy strategy than sending dollars and blood over to people in sandy wastelands that hate our guts.
and just buy your standard Windows GDI implementation from a different vendor that is more responsive to your needs and more willing to negotiate and work with you on cost discounts for flaws in their product.
I mean, isn't that what you're supposed to do when a supplier feeds you something substandard?
Slashdot Mirror
OOP advantage is best seen in large projects.
OOP can be a life saver if applied judiciously.
For for sheer agony, there's nothing like a large project to show just how awesome a muddy hole you can create with OOP.
Consider the supervolcanoes, like the one under Yellowstone, on a 600,000 year cycle and due to blow RSN, geologically speaking.
The last recent supervolcano class eruption was 70,000 years ago in Tova, which wiped out such a huge fraction of the human race that genetic historians note a bottleneck in the gene pool arising from that time.
Because if you read the whole thing in context you can clearly see that when we bombed Osama out of Afghanistan he would have up and moved his training and operations right into Iraq.
Moved to Iraq? Not likely.
bin Ladin would have been more likely to do exactly what he did anyway - move next door into tribal-controlled areas of Pakistan
Sudan and Yemen, too, probably would have been higher up on the potential post-Taliban safe haven list for Osama. Iraq would have been way down the list near Syria.
So, given the events are basically just a joint press conference, infotainment at its best and worst, what exactly about the debates will convince undecided swing voters (demographic profiles?) to swing one way or another?
The bloggers from either side are pretty much just preaching to their respective choirs
How many Windows licenses go unused because Linux got installed on some old x86 box that came with Windows pre-installed?
Thanks for the correction - it was PIPA, not Pew that conducted the poll.
Only those who mostly get their news from print media have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention.
I really wish the upcoming debates in the U.S. were completely closed to TV and radio broadcast.
Imagine if the candidates answers were transcribed into print and then published in the newspaper for readers to evaluate.
Most criminals are idiots.
We're weeding them out and, through evolutionary forces, hoping to create a new, more formidable and sophisticated criminal.
Looking around, I'd say we're succeeding beyond our wildest dreams.
Something like this came out about a year ago from the Pew Trust.
Basically, viewers of certain TV networks were less informed than viewers of other networks - not naming any names here, mind you - and people who got their news from other sources, such as radio and newspapers tended to be more informed than people who got their news just from TV.
Such polls don't give proper credit to the tough job that some of those TV hosts have on their hands, the challenges they must confront to educate their viewers.
But picking on viewers of certains shows is like picking on special ed teachers for the abilities of their class - those teachers have a tough job on their hands and people need to cut them some slack. Here they are, working selflessly for little compensation to educate the common man, and people ridicule them for mistakes of their students.
Let's "Leave No Viewer Behind."
No, what I really would like to see, is Windows coming with a selection of browsers
I'm coming to believe that flavors of Windows will be offered like this. You'll have AOL/Windows, MSN/Windows, Corporate/Windows, HPConsumer/Windows, ThirdWorld/Windows, etc.
"Windows" is regarded as an essential commodity ingredient, just like a CPU. The price will be capped, MS will be paid something, but the brand will have lost all meaning and any cachet.
The situation will be like VISA cards that come from different banks. A "VISA card" doesn't mean anything but "credit card" to anyone. Fringe players like Mastercard, Discover, AMEX, and Diners Club play like yipping dogs around that behemoth - no serious competition exists and the transaction fees are non-negotiable.
1/100th the size and 1/28th the power. Now if that isn't a beautiful thing, I don't know what is.
1/100th the cost?
There are excellent graphing programs out there
I create graphs using Grace to put into LaTeX documents and anywhere else. IMHO, its quality is among the best; exports PS, EPS, PDF, MIF, etc.
LaTeX can't be beat for mathematics and quality type-setting. Plus, the input files are good for decades.
Its only shortcoming, for me, is that it gets ponderous for preparing highly visual presentations with drawings, boxes, etc.
One of these years I'd like to see an SVG based authoring tool that, for MathML rendering, used TeX as the underlying engine just for little boxes of equations (ignoring the multi-page layout) and paragraphs.
High quality math typesetting, with scalable vector graphics, in an open XML language, on the web, would be the ultimate in expression.
I'd dump my word processor and presentation software in a millisecond and just use such a tool.
Open source shouldn't content itself with stealing good ideas
No, but it's a good way to start. Rejecting ideas because they were NIH is a bad way to start.
Plus, it paves the migration path to the point where Windows users have an easier time on modern Linux desktops than I do, having spent signficant sentences suffering under twm, CDE, etc. on UNIX systems.
When I need help with OpenOffice on my Linux box at home, I ask my wife, who uses Word on Windows.
Taking advantage of the built-in bias of computer training towards Microsoft products is a good strategy for recruiting converts.
So copyright collected works of data about yourself. You know, like correlations between your name and your phone number, address, etc.
And be sure to put a little addendum when you fill out forms:
© N Harmon 2004. All rights reserved. Copying and duplication by any means without express permission is prohibited. This notice must be preserved on any and all copies.
Maybe throw in a few ominous warnings about how the FBI and Interpol investigates and prosecutes copyright violations to the most severe extent you can possibly imagine.
I say, get those infernal laws to work for the little man and not just the big content distributors.
brought up the issues he felt were most gregarious
Aw, I know you meant egregious, but your word, too, seems to fit in this discussion...
Of a stripped Windows version, like the sans media-player version Microsoft might well have to release, depending on the outcome of EU commission rulings that are coming up soon.
I didn't see any recommendation for shorter terms for exclusive monopoly rights that I think would help cure this problem on many fronts.
The 17 year term might have been justifiable in the 18th century when trading ships took many weeks to cross the Atlantic, but now, overall progress would be improved if the terms were reduced to something more like 2 years.
And, while we're at IP reform, copyrights should be cut down to a shorter period as well. This 75 year mouse extension is ridiculous, especially when Disney mines fairy tales in the public domain (Snow White, Cinderella, etc.) for their cartoon movie ideas.
But, once the artificial market is created, the vested interests (owners of IP, litigators of IP) don't want to see it go away.
So just reduce terms of exclusivity gradually, a year at a time, until things become sane again.
A comparison of the same "poor" people in the U.S over time leads to the conclusion that they are getting richer, not poorer.
Slowly, yes, the poorest 20% of Americans are getting richer. Slowly. Much more slowly than the richest 20% of Americans. And there is reason to believe the official measures of poverty based on 3x the minimum needed for food developed in the 1960's is harsher than it was when it was developed because of the relative costs of food to housing.
And, yes, the poorest Americans will appear rich compared to residents of Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa. But the standard of living is not so drastically higher among the American poor as income might suggest: in an agricultural economy, Haitians can buy food for much less money than what the urban poor are charged in the stores in America. Rental costs for a dwelling are signficantly higher in America than elsewhere.
You do realize that relative to much of the rest of the world, most "poor" Americans are among the super wealthy, right?
Right. I was delayed getting into work today because of the crowds of poor people demonstrating in joy about just lucky super wealthy they were compared to beggars in Calcutta.
The net result of the rich getting rich faster than the poor get richer is a unhealthy stratification in society (cf the Gini index). In a democracy, the median voter that perceives increasing inequality alongside what are still fairly desperate conditions will be more likely to choose candidates and economic policies that redistribute wealth in ways that are not in the best long term interests of the economy as a whole. If you think progressive income taxes are a tough pill to swallow, then think about trade tariffs and expropriation of private property that gets nationalized.
not giving raises that at least pace with cost of living.
There's no guarantee that corporate earnings will keep up with the cost of living. Just ask trucking companies and airlines that have taken it in the shorts for fuel costs lately, but been afraid to raise prices in a competitive market.
Recent improvements in U.S. worker productivity have not translated into correspondingly higher wages but have instead been retained as corporate earnings.
In the past, productivity improvements were the only non-inflationary justification for higher wages and salaries. Increasing wages without a corresponding improvement in productivity just feeds an inflationary spiral. Greenspan agrees and the Fed chairman is more responsible for the economy than any President.
Greenspan noted the curious lag in wage and salary growth coming out of this recession but predicted they would pick up soon. This news item might be indicative of a longer term trend, but only time will tell.
Yes, such reasoning is a fallacy if applied without thought.
Once in a while, though, Bob really isn't a true adherent of XYZ. Bob and one of his friends might call Bob a vegetarian, but the rest of us watching him scarf down a BigMac would conclude otherwise.
As Linux server deployments become more widespread, there are going to be more and more system administrators and fly-by-night ISPs that will fall into a category we'll call "The Lowest 1% of Linux Providers".
Just like Windows admins, medical doctors, cable TV repairment, someone has to graduate at the bottom of their class and it's time we recognize that bottom of the barrel Linux admins can and will exist, too. Complaints about paper MCSE's and CCNA's can extend into the Linux world, too. We've grown beyond a small community of enlighted hackers on a mountaintop.
The bigger issue with the original story is that it is an anecdote, a sampling of a widely varying phenomena where induction of general principles from one point can lead to erroneous conclusions. Or not. We need lots of stories, randomly sampled. Being chosen as "newsworthy" suggests something less than random sampling, however.
Why not just bundle everything up nicely?
Why not indeed!
If the Ximian Red Carpet or rpm binary update thing isn't your style, you might want to take a look at garnome.
That the migration costs from Linux are not large.
This means that investing in Linux does not paint you into a corner and lock you into a single vendor. It's not a big deal to go Windows if you think it might work better for you.
That's an advantage of using Linux.
Now go ask your friends with significant investment in Windows whether they could migrate to any alternative for a reasonable cost.
Even just a small standardized piece of that infrastructure, perhaps?
Oh, it's all together and hard to separate out into standard components without breaking some other thing?
P.S. Note that Oracle is not the only SQL option on Linux.
Then she gets pregnant and has a baby.
Yeah, dammit. If she's such a damn fool to get pregnant and think she can have a family and work hard at my business, then it's her own damn fault.
As hardworking Republican small business owner I'd tell her that her ass is grass unless she gets an abortion right now.
At leas the men around here are responsible enough not to go around getting pregnant. Sheesh.
The Heritage Foundation is just one particular source of sponsored information.
Read the Heritage Foundation as one data point, then look also over here at EPI for an alternative viewpoint that suggests the official poverty line has stagnated so that people below are much worse off than people below the poverty line 30-40 years ago.
In the same way, the minimum wage stagnation.
The harsh reality is that global wage competition means the rest of the world gets to catch up while wages in the developing world stay stagnant or decline in real terms.
Currently, it's more important to own appreciating assets, stock, real estate, etc., than to work for wages, which are taxed much more heavily.
They can't do that if your vehicle is purely battery powered, you can charge it at home or work.
Unless you can cheaply generate electricity locally at home or work, then the power companies still have some slack in which to charge you money.
MyElectricMonopoly charges about US$0.10/kW-hr, while solar PV panels, IIRC, come out several times that much. I think they are economical in remote areas with lots of sunshine.
Given the homeland security issues associated with a centralized electrical generating plant going offline as a catastrophic single point of failure, some accelerated depreciation tax credits for PV panels on homeowners' roofs might spur the industry and reduce the costs further.
Going out on a limb here, but it's just possible this might be a better long term energy strategy than sending dollars and blood over to people in sandy wastelands that hate our guts.
and just buy your standard Windows GDI implementation from a different vendor that is more responsive to your needs and more willing to negotiate and work with you on cost discounts for flaws in their product.
I mean, isn't that what you're supposed to do when a supplier feeds you something substandard?