Oops. You overconstrained the problem to where my solution won't work!
I was going to suggest surgical alteration, to have the devices implanted, but those unsightly rectangular lumps under the skin sure do make people stare.
The cell-phone shaped ears are a particular problem because they attract attention visually and when they ring and, again, when I hit the answer button inside of my head.
Don't even get me started about changing batteries in public.
Engineering went into the toilet, and now while Sun's still good at a few things, all but their most insanely-priced hardware is nothing better
I disagree.
Sun's hardware is expensive, but generally pretty reliable. Up until a few years ago, it was worth the money. And still is, but only for a decreasing number of high-end niche areas (64-way systems hooked up to big SANs).
The difference in quality between Sun hardware and PC hardware is not as great now as it was 10 years ago. Back then, people paid for Sun hardware because it gave back performance and reliability that was a joke in the PC world.
But PC hardware is now "good enough" in terms of performance and reliability and the low price clinches it. CPU's are cheap enough you can afford redundant arrays of computing capacity for many applications.
This is not Sun's first near-death experience, though. The SPARC chip and migration away from the Motorola 680x0 was a risk they took that paid off. A lot of folks weren't too pleased with the big shift from BSD to SysV from SunOS 4 to 5, either.
But developing a high-performance RISC chip costs too much relative to what the returns are from selling a few specialized systems. Why should I buy an UltraSPARC V, Power 5, PA-RISC 8700, MIPS 14000 (or even Itanium 2) when I can buy a rack of x86 systems?
Sun's current ventures, Mad Hatter for one, are risky, too. But, realistically, even if they can prove their technology is good enough and cheaper than what Windows offers, they're still competing in a fierce low-margin market with Linux distro makers and, more importantly, with the established base of old Windows PC's which are "good enough".
By not recognizing and planning well for this trend 3-5 years ago, Sun's management has made a mistake. Now, they don't have the time and money they need to make the kinds of changes in a large organization that need to be made.
It sounds like some of Sun's good people are leaving: I hope they can flourish and contribute in new ways in their new environments It will be interesting to see which company does pick up the pieces, though. I'm betting it will be either IBM or Dell.
plastics are composed of hydrogen and carbon atoms only
Not exclusively.
While carbon and hydrogen make up simple polymers like polyethylene, there are others like polystyrene, PTFE, PVC that include other elements, including oxygen, chlorine, flourine, etc.
"Organic" is a term with many meanings, depending on context, but in chemistry, I think carbon is the only requirement. In the 19th century there was some excitement that a lot of compounds from living organisms contained carbon.
small differences in the initial data manifest themselves as large-scale phenomena down the road.
A good point to emphasize when people are blindly clamoring for more computer power.
Lyapunov exponents for portions of phase space for a nonlinear system will cause this divergence.
So, yes, no matter how many bits of floating point mantissa you carry, or how precise your measure your initial conditions, exp(at) will inevitably grow if a > 0.
And, just in case anyone's proud of their accurate code and precise initial conditions, there's still Heisenberg to prevent you from measuring too much accurate information at the same time.
IIRC, someone once determined that a pencil, balanced on its point, would always fall within 22 seconds because of the inherent uncertainty in position and momentum that could be established initially.
Congressmen having the same retirement plan and health care as the rest of us
Their retirement plan is tolerable. Other retirement plans have more attractive terms (multipliers higher than 1.0% in the benefits formula), but a lot of workers in the private sector are losing defined-benefit pensions and having to rely more heavily upon defined-contribution plans like 401k's (201k's after the Y2K equity bust:).
it is important to remember that jobs are lost due to OSS
Some, yes.
If you look are the overall picture, though, there is progress.
Your company's costs of doing business have decreased and your productivity has gone up. Increased productivity is the key to economic expansion and is a necessary ingredient for increased earnings and/or increased wages.
You're also in a position where you may need services from IT professionals capable of keeping up with all of that OSS. Despite it's reliabiltiy, you may want security patches from time to time, upgrades for increased capacity, new applications installed, you may even decide that your business needs an application developed that is not ready made avaiable from freshmeat.net. The nice thing is that you have more money available to devote to getting customized services and paying less for commodities like OS's and other standard applications that are used by millions of people.
I'm not denying that some of the people currently employed in the software industry will need to find different things to do. I'm saying that there will be things for them to do, software related things to do, and that overall the economy benefits as a result of the extreme commoditization from FOSS.
To put it in perspective, consider the loss of jobs in the carriage making business when automobiles were introduced.
Yes, some highly-skilled carriage makers had to find different things to do [my great-great grandfather was one of them], but it happenned. And the economy overall benefitted as a different mode of transportation was introduced.
You've already had some brushes with a critical ingredient: those people that are willing to pay money for your product. Names, phone numbers, and people that are willing to say they'd pay X for your product that does Y.
If you're talented and have some background in marketing, you can pursue this further, because it needs to be done. Finding out what your customers really want is not as easy as it sounds.
If you're a rational, intelligent person not in need of frequent ego inflation, then you know which subject areas you're good at - say, programming - and which areas you're not familiar with. That's OK; there are specialists for every craft, including marketing. The next step is to get someone on board who knows marketing, preferably of software and preferably with a background in the same areas that your customers interests lie.
From what I understand, one of the big problems for libraries is that mass produced paper in the last 150 years or so is acidic and degrades the paper. I've looked at 100 year old newspapers in local libraries that were practically crumbling.
Leave a newspaper out in the sun a couple of weeks and you'll get the idea of what happens in a shorter time frame.
I've heard of efforts to treat books with a base to help balance the pH and halt degradation, but I think it's somewhat expensive.
Sometimes I've thought that some of my old comic books might better be treated with a base or else stored in a freezer. Meanwhile, they're yellowing with age.
It will be interesting to see how the Indian government goes on this one.
TDIL has value in making computers more accessible to much of their population. For some, this is a money-making opportunity to charge for access to the technology that will be deployed to a billion potential customers. For others, this is an opportunity to speed up introduction of technology to the country. It could be both.
They could go with something like a GPL on TDIL that MS would detest, but would enable free software development in India, which later could be used as a platform by commercial firms in India for specific applications. But the government would not reap any immediate financial gain from this; only the long term gains from an increased tax base of a larger, faster growing economy in general.
They could go with selling out to MS entirely, which would give the government more money in the short term, but would impede internal software development because it would necessitate all the Indian software developers acquiring MS specific tools to do their jobs and to compete with MS. Deployment of IT in the country would be less because it would be limited to those who could afford it.
Possibly going with a BSD license would provide the biggest initial boost in software development in India, but the long term benefits are less clear.
Personally, I'd welcome the many intelligent Indian programmers to the world of FOSS. Their contributions would help to make for improved quality and continued low cost for free software. Indigenous businesses in India would be in a better position to take more advantage of information technology and its productivity gains if there was both free software and many local programmers available for customizing it for business needs.
As an example of the kind of behind-the-scenes influence that large vendors have, Geer cited his efforts to find an academic security expert or two to sign on to the paper on software diversity. After contacting nine people and striking out each time, he gave up.
"All of them said it was too hot for their position," Geer said. "They enjoy the free speech benefits of tenure but not necessarily those of funding."
His experience is interesting; it shows just how there are limits, even in academia, to how far people are willing to go in their pursuit of the truth.
Microsoft might not have an irresponsible security record due to business practices, but the hypothesis put forward by Geer and the others should be examined carefully and openly both for where it might errors, and where their hypothesis fits the facts. That's the way all scientific progress is made.
And he's right, too, about a phone call not being necessary. Conditioning, and seeing what happens to people that take a stand in opposition to some powerful force, is enough to convince most people that self-censorship, if not the better part of valor, is certainly the better expedient for maintaining your comfort.
I can just see my private property trash joining together with all the other private property trash down at the landfill and declaring themselves a commune.
Either that, or else I'll be sued by someone whose private property trash was injured in a scuffle with my private property trash in the back of dumpster somewhere.
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
It doesn't let all people make that choice.
Only those people with lots of money get to make that choice.
If you lived a month as a poor person you'd notice that your "choices" and your "opportunities" are rather more limited than what you've enjoyed to this point in your own life.
Many wealthy people will choose to keep their money rather than give it away. If the proposed changes in the estate tax laws are instituted you can guarantee that a signficantly larger number of wealthy people will exercise their free choice to give money to their own offspring rather than some charity. Count on it.
I prefer equal opportunity for everyone, so that anyone exercising the same hard work and intelligence gets the same pay off. But if you're not lucky enough to be born to the right parents then your "choices" and your "opportunities" are a lot different.
Yes, I earn my money. But it was in a society that provided me with a tax-sponsored public education system and government-guaranteed student loans (which, yes, I did pay back) that would not have existed but for taxes raised by the government.
Yes, wealth transfer schemes like welfare can breed a sick culture of dependence. If there's a good way to cut down on welfare fraud without instituting a bureaucracy, then you ought to let your elected representatives know the solution.
But if you eliminate welfare altogether, you'll start to see more beggars on the street dying from hunger and lack of medical attention. We can live just like they do in Brazil, which has private charities and gangs of five year old abandoned children running around the slums scavenging food.
I am one taxpayer that has benefitted substantially from the recent Bush tax cut and it disgusts me that such a tax cut is instituted at the same time that we're compounding the federal deficit at a record rate.
While the rest of the masses two decades in the future try to pay off the interest on that federal debt, the rich folks like you and me can simply sit back and collect interest on our T-bills. After all, we deserve it.
There's a correlation with the distribution of wealth that figures significantly into how much terrorism (rebellion, radicalism, whatever you want to call it) occurs.
If you look at the distribution of wealth of between the top 1% of the citizens and, say, the bottom 50%, you've got an index of volatility. Sometimes the people believe that it's a fair situation (the wealthy really are just smart, hard-working, or God blesses them), but once a heavy police state is instituted to keep the status quo, it's a sign of things about to break down.
The USA is becoming more stratified than it used to be several decades ago (and more stratified than Japan or northern European countries are currently), but it isn't anywhere near the extremes of Latin America.
Saudi Arabia is a very interesting case to consider in wealth distribution. While Wahhabism has inflamed a lot of the poorer members of that society and the ruling class has tried to leverage it to divert attention from themselves and point to Western influences, I'm sure a lot of the poor citizens perceive unfairness in the way that wealth flows to people by virtue of birth.
You're a much hardier soul than I if you'd be willing to live for extended periods of time without electric refrigeration to keep food from spoiling quickly. I suppose we could go back to the days of ice delivery, but I doubt the cost per Joule would be less than what on-site refrigeration costs.
Where I live I've been afflicted with enough blackouts that I absolutely have a UPS for my computer, just to insure an orderly shutdown and to keep the cordless phone running.
I have to wonder whether my regulated monopoly provider of electric service is required to provide any level of quality of service for the money I pay. How many times and for how long are they allowed to charge me the same full price if there are significant gaps due to blackouts, or even lower quality power where the voltage waveform isn't within specs?
If things get bad enough I'll probably get a propane powered generator (since I already use gas for heat and cooking already) to provide backup.
If the electricity were taxed enough, it would shift the balance in favor of deploying other technologies (photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries) which are not currently competitive except in areas far from the power grid.
We could simply let the free market play out, such as it is, but new and alternative technologies wouldn't be developed until the very last minute.
I have to wonder if the Windows source has been made squeaky clean in the way of comments. IIRC, the Linux codebase had some interesting comments that gave you some insight into the mood of the developer when they were writing some chunk of code.
I can just see the puzzled expressions when they find things in the Windows source:
/* I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto!
Yes, I know the stupid conditional should always be false, but shit happens. */
Windows itself has improved the base widget set, though most Windows apps still look like they were designed for Windows 95 and very few of these new widgets are used there.
An important lesson in this is that Windows end users have less to learn by a slowly varying widget tool kit.
Users hate gratuitous learning curves and the FOSS world will need to do two somewhat distasteful things:
GUI's that behave much like Windows
GUI's that don't change much with time once widespread desktop deployment begins.
There's always a better technology, and things can be done much better now than they could in the late 1980's when X was developed, but there are other, non-technical considerations, too.
Living in conditions that you perceive as less than acceptable.
Believing that the fundamental cause of those conditions is due to $THEM.
One man's terrorist is another's valiant freedom-fighter.
It's all based on perception.
Until we address the root problem of living conditions (as well as - and not just - their perception) and the belief systems that blame others we'll always get new terrorists to replace the old ones that get killed off.
And, yes, we have to examine our own self interests in the cold light of logic, because a lot of times the perception of less than acceptable conditions is somewhat correct and the belief that someone else is responsible is somewhat correct.
But the world is still not ready to adequately address either the issues of commercial freedom and of religious freedom. Until then, we're propagating the problem and treating symptoms instead of root causes.
[I know, the whole story is a troll in the best traditions of fishing for bottom feeders.]
I'm sure you can look at the entire group of users of any product, even products that might not have the greatest reputation around (eg, Yugo's, Corvairs, old Pinto's, etc.) and find that some small fraction of them that switched from other brands switched from brands with better reputations. Does it imply that a Yugo is a better car than a Mercedes?
It's all part of
the statistics of the ecosystem,
these users' learning experience (ask the same people in 3 years how they like their licensing terms),
possibly their independence from financial constraints (think a small cog in a large company or government) and,
as others have already mentioned, the magic discount avaiable from mentioning Linux.
So where does this leave the Itanium (IA-64) product line? Officially, this is Intel's 64 bit chip, despite it not selling very well.
And will the P-V have the nice smooth transition path from IA-32, which Itanium lacks relative to AMD's K8 line?
Given cheap Pentium 4's or Athlon XPs to make clusters with good interconnects, any significant architecture change has to offer substantially great performance for the price to make any inroads. Otherwise, there's little incentive to change.
The film ceased to be a film and was more like a window into reality
Living deep within a windowless cubicle farm might not be so bad if I had ultra high resolution, > 60 fps window to a nature scene (forests, surf, etc.)
It would sure help decrease the stress level.
If you remember, the breakfast table scene in Total Recall (ironic title, considering current events), there's a backdrop of a nature scene on a high resolution monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. You overconstrained the problem to where my solution won't work!
I was going to suggest surgical alteration, to have the devices implanted, but those unsightly rectangular lumps under the skin sure do make people stare.
The cell-phone shaped ears are a particular problem because they attract attention visually and when they ring and, again, when I hit the answer button inside of my head.
Don't even get me started about changing batteries in public.
Engineering went into the toilet, and now while Sun's still good at a few things, all but their most insanely-priced hardware is nothing better
I disagree.
Sun's hardware is expensive, but generally pretty reliable. Up until a few years ago, it was worth the money. And still is, but only for a decreasing number of high-end niche areas (64-way systems hooked up to big SANs).
The difference in quality between Sun hardware and PC hardware is not as great now as it was 10 years ago. Back then, people paid for Sun hardware because it gave back performance and reliability that was a joke in the PC world.
But PC hardware is now "good enough" in terms of performance and reliability and the low price clinches it. CPU's are cheap enough you can afford redundant arrays of computing capacity for many applications.
This is not Sun's first near-death experience, though. The SPARC chip and migration away from the Motorola 680x0 was a risk they took that paid off. A lot of folks weren't too pleased with the big shift from BSD to SysV from SunOS 4 to 5, either.
But developing a high-performance RISC chip costs too much relative to what the returns are from selling a few specialized systems. Why should I buy an UltraSPARC V, Power 5, PA-RISC 8700, MIPS 14000 (or even Itanium 2) when I can buy a rack of x86 systems?
Sun's current ventures, Mad Hatter for one, are risky, too. But, realistically, even if they can prove their technology is good enough and cheaper than what Windows offers, they're still competing in a fierce low-margin market with Linux distro makers and, more importantly, with the established base of old Windows PC's which are "good enough".
By not recognizing and planning well for this trend 3-5 years ago, Sun's management has made a mistake. Now, they don't have the time and money they need to make the kinds of changes in a large organization that need to be made.
It sounds like some of Sun's good people are leaving: I hope they can flourish and contribute in new ways in their new environments It will be interesting to see which company does pick up the pieces, though. I'm betting it will be either IBM or Dell.
plastics are composed of hydrogen and carbon atoms only
Not exclusively.
While carbon and hydrogen make up simple polymers like polyethylene, there are others like polystyrene, PTFE, PVC that include other elements, including oxygen, chlorine, flourine, etc.
"Organic" is a term with many meanings, depending on context, but in chemistry, I think carbon is the only requirement. In the 19th century there was some excitement that a lot of compounds from living organisms contained carbon.
small differences in the initial data manifest themselves as large-scale phenomena down the road.
A good point to emphasize when people are blindly clamoring for more computer power.
Lyapunov exponents for portions of phase space for a nonlinear system will cause this divergence.
So, yes, no matter how many bits of floating point mantissa you carry, or how precise your measure your initial conditions, exp(at) will inevitably grow if a > 0.
And, just in case anyone's proud of their accurate code and precise initial conditions, there's still Heisenberg to prevent you from measuring too much accurate information at the same time.
IIRC, someone once determined that a pencil, balanced on its point, would always fall within 22 seconds because of the inherent uncertainty in position and momentum that could be established initially.
Congressmen having the same retirement plan and health care as the rest of us
Their retirement plan is tolerable. Other retirement plans have more attractive terms (multipliers higher than 1.0% in the benefits formula), but a lot of workers in the private sector are losing defined-benefit pensions and having to rely more heavily upon defined-contribution plans like 401k's (201k's after the Y2K equity bust:).
Their compensation is beyond what appears on the GS charts, though.
it is important to remember that jobs are lost due to OSS
Some, yes.
If you look are the overall picture, though, there is progress.
Your company's costs of doing business have decreased and your productivity has gone up. Increased productivity is the key to economic expansion and is a necessary ingredient for increased earnings and/or increased wages.
You're also in a position where you may need services from IT professionals capable of keeping up with all of that OSS. Despite it's reliabiltiy, you may want security patches from time to time, upgrades for increased capacity, new applications installed, you may even decide that your business needs an application developed that is not ready made avaiable from freshmeat.net. The nice thing is that you have more money available to devote to getting customized services and paying less for commodities like OS's and other standard applications that are used by millions of people.
I'm not denying that some of the people currently employed in the software industry will need to find different things to do. I'm saying that there will be things for them to do, software related things to do, and that overall the economy benefits as a result of the extreme commoditization from FOSS.
To put it in perspective, consider the loss of jobs in the carriage making business when automobiles were introduced.
Yes, some highly-skilled carriage makers had to find different things to do [my great-great grandfather was one of them], but it happenned. And the economy overall benefitted as a different mode of transportation was introduced.
IANAHEP, but is there anypossibility that an electron and a positron could orbit one another with a reasonably long half-life?
Exactly.
Some of the PR folks would have greater credibility if they and all of the upper management were committed [1] to their words.
A couple of examples come to mind that have been a local problem:
[1] In the "Bacon and egg breakfast" sense. The chicken was involved while the pig was committed.
You've already had some brushes with a critical ingredient: those people that are willing to pay money for your product. Names, phone numbers, and people that are willing to say they'd pay X for your product that does Y.
If you're talented and have some background in marketing, you can pursue this further, because it needs to be done. Finding out what your customers really want is not as easy as it sounds.
If you're a rational, intelligent person not in need of frequent ego inflation, then you know which subject areas you're good at - say, programming - and which areas you're not familiar with. That's OK; there are specialists for every craft, including marketing. The next step is to get someone on board who knows marketing, preferably of software and preferably with a background in the same areas that your customers interests lie.
From what I understand, one of the big problems for libraries is that mass produced paper in the last 150 years or so is acidic and degrades the paper. I've looked at 100 year old newspapers in local libraries that were practically crumbling.
Leave a newspaper out in the sun a couple of weeks and you'll get the idea of what happens in a shorter time frame.
I've heard of efforts to treat books with a base to help balance the pH and halt degradation, but I think it's somewhat expensive.
Sometimes I've thought that some of my old comic books might better be treated with a base or else stored in a freezer. Meanwhile, they're yellowing with age.
My apologies to Verizon; they're a home a phone to Verisign, unfortunately, and it tripped me up before I drank my cough fee.
have purely and simply given themselves all unassigned names for ...
Remind me again, exactly how much Verizon had to pay for all of these names compared to what others pay for their assigned names?
It will be interesting to see how the Indian government goes on this one.
TDIL has value in making computers more accessible to much of their population. For some, this is a money-making opportunity to charge for access to the technology that will be deployed to a billion potential customers. For others, this is an opportunity to speed up introduction of technology to the country. It could be both.
They could go with something like a GPL on TDIL that MS would detest, but would enable free software development in India, which later could be used as a platform by commercial firms in India for specific applications. But the government would not reap any immediate financial gain from this; only the long term gains from an increased tax base of a larger, faster growing economy in general.
They could go with selling out to MS entirely, which would give the government more money in the short term, but would impede internal software development because it would necessitate all the Indian software developers acquiring MS specific tools to do their jobs and to compete with MS. Deployment of IT in the country would be less because it would be limited to those who could afford it.
Possibly going with a BSD license would provide the biggest initial boost in software development in India, but the long term benefits are less clear.
Personally, I'd welcome the many intelligent Indian programmers to the world of FOSS. Their contributions would help to make for improved quality and continued low cost for free software. Indigenous businesses in India would be in a better position to take more advantage of information technology and its productivity gains if there was both free software and many local programmers available for customizing it for business needs.
As an example of the kind of behind-the-scenes influence that large vendors have, Geer cited his efforts to find an academic security expert or two to sign on to the paper on software diversity. After contacting nine people and striking out each time, he gave up.
"All of them said it was too hot for their position," Geer said. "They enjoy the free speech benefits of tenure but not necessarily those of funding."
His experience is interesting; it shows just how there are limits, even in academia, to how far people are willing to go in their pursuit of the truth.
Microsoft might not have an irresponsible security record due to business practices, but the hypothesis put forward by Geer and the others should be examined carefully and openly both for where it might errors, and where their hypothesis fits the facts. That's the way all scientific progress is made.
And he's right, too, about a phone call not being necessary. Conditioning, and seeing what happens to people that take a stand in opposition to some powerful force, is enough to convince most people that self-censorship, if not the better part of valor, is certainly the better expedient for maintaining your comfort.
I can just see my private property trash joining together with all the other private property trash down at the landfill and declaring themselves a commune.
Either that, or else I'll be sued by someone whose private property trash was injured in a scuffle with my private property trash in the back of dumpster somewhere.
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
It doesn't let all people make that choice.
Only those people with lots of money get to make that choice.
If you lived a month as a poor person you'd notice that your "choices" and your "opportunities" are rather more limited than what you've enjoyed to this point in your own life.
Many wealthy people will choose to keep their money rather than give it away. If the proposed changes in the estate tax laws are instituted you can guarantee that a signficantly larger number of wealthy people will exercise their free choice to give money to their own offspring rather than some charity. Count on it.
I prefer equal opportunity for everyone, so that anyone exercising the same hard work and intelligence gets the same pay off. But if you're not lucky enough to be born to the right parents then your "choices" and your "opportunities" are a lot different.
Yes, I earn my money. But it was in a society that provided me with a tax-sponsored public education system and government-guaranteed student loans (which, yes, I did pay back) that would not have existed but for taxes raised by the government.
Yes, wealth transfer schemes like welfare can breed a sick culture of dependence. If there's a good way to cut down on welfare fraud without instituting a bureaucracy, then you ought to let your elected representatives know the solution.
But if you eliminate welfare altogether, you'll start to see more beggars on the street dying from hunger and lack of medical attention. We can live just like they do in Brazil, which has private charities and gangs of five year old abandoned children running around the slums scavenging food.
I am one taxpayer that has benefitted substantially from the recent Bush tax cut and it disgusts me that such a tax cut is instituted at the same time that we're compounding the federal deficit at a record rate.
While the rest of the masses two decades in the future try to pay off the interest on that federal debt, the rich folks like you and me can simply sit back and collect interest on our T-bills. After all, we deserve it.
societies become wealthier, terrorism declines
As a whole, certainly.
There's a correlation with the distribution of wealth that figures significantly into how much terrorism (rebellion, radicalism, whatever you want to call it) occurs.
If you look at the distribution of wealth of between the top 1% of the citizens and, say, the bottom 50%, you've got an index of volatility. Sometimes the people believe that it's a fair situation (the wealthy really are just smart, hard-working, or God blesses them), but once a heavy police state is instituted to keep the status quo, it's a sign of things about to break down.
The USA is becoming more stratified than it used to be several decades ago (and more stratified than Japan or northern European countries are currently), but it isn't anywhere near the extremes of Latin America.
Saudi Arabia is a very interesting case to consider in wealth distribution. While Wahhabism has inflamed a lot of the poorer members of that society and the ruling class has tried to leverage it to divert attention from themselves and point to Western influences, I'm sure a lot of the poor citizens perceive unfairness in the way that wealth flows to people by virtue of birth.
we need power for our luxuries
You're a much hardier soul than I if you'd be willing to live for extended periods of time without electric refrigeration to keep food from spoiling quickly. I suppose we could go back to the days of ice delivery, but I doubt the cost per Joule would be less than what on-site refrigeration costs.
Where I live I've been afflicted with enough blackouts that I absolutely have a UPS for my computer, just to insure an orderly shutdown and to keep the cordless phone running.
I have to wonder whether my regulated monopoly provider of electric service is required to provide any level of quality of service for the money I pay. How many times and for how long are they allowed to charge me the same full price if there are significant gaps due to blackouts, or even lower quality power where the voltage waveform isn't within specs?
If things get bad enough I'll probably get a propane powered generator (since I already use gas for heat and cooking already) to provide backup.
If the electricity were taxed enough, it would shift the balance in favor of deploying other technologies (photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries) which are not currently competitive except in areas far from the power grid.
We could simply let the free market play out, such as it is, but new and alternative technologies wouldn't be developed until the very last minute.
I have to wonder if the Windows source has been made squeaky clean in the way of comments. IIRC, the Linux codebase had some interesting comments that gave you some insight into the mood of the developer when they were writing some chunk of code.
I can just see the puzzled expressions when they find things in the Windows source:
Yes, I know the stupid conditional should always be false, but shit happens. */
Windows itself has improved the base widget set, though most Windows apps still look like they were designed for Windows 95 and very few of these new widgets are used there.
An important lesson in this is that Windows end users have less to learn by a slowly varying widget tool kit.
Users hate gratuitous learning curves and the FOSS world will need to do two somewhat distasteful things:
- GUI's that behave much like Windows
- GUI's that don't change much with time once widespread desktop deployment begins.
There's always a better technology, and things can be done much better now than they could in the late 1980's when X was developed, but there are other, non-technical considerations, too.Perl is actually an exception in that it was originally developed to scan HTTP logs
IIRC, Perl predates HTTP.
I had thought Larry Wall the sysadmin just wanted a turbo-charged awk and wrote it.
Thinking like a terrorist involves two things:
- Living in conditions that you perceive as less than acceptable.
- Believing that the fundamental cause of those conditions is due to $THEM.
One man's terrorist is another's valiant freedom-fighter.It's all based on perception.
Until we address the root problem of living conditions (as well as - and not just - their perception) and the belief systems that blame others we'll always get new terrorists to replace the old ones that get killed off.
And, yes, we have to examine our own self interests in the cold light of logic, because a lot of times the perception of less than acceptable conditions is somewhat correct and the belief that someone else is responsible is somewhat correct.
But the world is still not ready to adequately address either the issues of commercial freedom and of religious freedom. Until then, we're propagating the problem and treating symptoms instead of root causes.
[I know, the whole story is a troll in the best traditions of fishing for bottom feeders.]
I'm sure you can look at the entire group of users of any product, even products that might not have the greatest reputation around (eg, Yugo's, Corvairs, old Pinto's, etc.) and find that some small fraction of them that switched from other brands switched from brands with better reputations. Does it imply that a Yugo is a better car than a Mercedes?
It's all part of
So where does this leave the Itanium (IA-64) product line? Officially, this is Intel's 64 bit chip, despite it not selling very well.
And will the P-V have the nice smooth transition path from IA-32, which Itanium lacks relative to AMD's K8 line?
Given cheap Pentium 4's or Athlon XPs to make clusters with good interconnects, any significant architecture change has to offer substantially great performance for the price to make any inroads. Otherwise, there's little incentive to change.
The film ceased to be a film and was more like a window into reality
Living deep within a windowless cubicle farm might not be so bad if I had ultra high resolution, > 60 fps window to a nature scene (forests, surf, etc.)
It would sure help decrease the stress level.
If you remember, the breakfast table scene in Total Recall (ironic title, considering current events), there's a backdrop of a nature scene on a high resolution monitor.