Like many humorists, he was most funny when he made a splash on the screen.
I remember in the mid 1980's enjoying Dave Barry's columns that people would transcribe into email for the benefit of readers like me that didn't get his local newspaper out of the midwest. I really looked forward to reading those columns (such as the one about doing home improvement projects with wood chisels as screwdrivers, etc.)
The same observation seems to apply to every generation of comics: Voltaire, Ambrose Bierce, Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Tim Allen, Dave Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno...
Currently I kind of like the writing of P.J. O'Rourke in the Atlantic. I'll probably grow tired of it eventually, but his last piece on Bill Clinton's post-presidency had me in tears.
Palladium could create 'a closed system, in which each piece of knowledge in the world is identified with a particular owner, and that owner has a right to resist its copying, modification, and redistribution.
I know, I know. You were worried. Don't be.
Be assured that information about you, such as your medical history, and any transaction history you have in the databases of direct marketers will be copyrighted by someone other than you, relieving you of this onerous burden.
"Too much power" sounds like a value judgement that probably depends on whether you're a member of a highly populated area or a sparsely populated area.
The recent election of GWB showed the critical importance of getting votes from the sparsely populated states, since he was able to gain an electoral majority despite garnering slightly less of the popular vote than his opponent.
I think the time-tested best strategy depends on two things: a strong showing in the earliest primaries, and a financially robust campaign organization.
Given those two ingredients, it's all pretty much reduced to a beauty contest for striking an emotional reaction with the voters. You'll need hair on the top of your head, not on your face, no glasses, a friendly smile, etc. Good actors have an advantage.
Actually, if you look for the research of Wolford, you'll find that his theory is that underclocking the body's metabolism by limiting caloric intake is critically important to increasing life span.
He's done experiments with mice and he's living his own theory, too.
Personally, I find his lifestyle too difficult - I'm addicted to food.
the whole debate reminds me of the scene in Risky Business where Tom Cruise the neophyte pimp is warned by the established pimp "not to mess with another man's livelihood":)
Gangsta's all around, no honor among thieves, etc.
I hope they figure out some experiment for determining a little bit more about the dark matter and the dark energy (which I hadn't heard about before).
According to the article, they can place more accurate estimates on the proportions of dark matter and dark energy relative to what we can see, but it still begs the question of exactly what this stuff is.
"I was a happy Apple user until corporate IT said that we had to standardize on a single platform, and since PCs were in the majority, that's what we standardized on.
"I'm not sure how much our IT costs have come down, but certainly now, after the transition, I'm resigned, I'm unhappy and, with medication, I can tolerate the crap that MS puts on my monitor at least 40% of the time."
Well, cheap compared to fiber channel, I guess. But the 1000bsx ethernet at my workplace wasn't too cheap to put, as I recall. I'm sure it will get cheaper faster than FC, though, just do to the economies of scale of Ethernet deployment.
Despite the fantastic potential bandwidth of gigabit ethernet (assuming big frames), I still wonder if latency issues won't become more important in a NAS environment full of iSCSI devices.
From what very little I understand, gcc has years of infrastructure focused on multiple machine instruction sets.
I'm pleasantly surprised gcc can do as well as it does considering that it can be built and run on some very unusual and dated pieces of hardware (although, from the recent release notes, it looks like some of the most obscure ones are slipping into oblivion.)
That if the United States had an effective judiciary and the means for correcting monopolistic behavior, then perhaps the EU action would have never bubbled up. The EU action is effectively saying "the U.S. has not effectively dealt with the behavior of this multinational corporation.", despite years of court proceedings, consent decrees, etc.
Still, even if the U.S. had dealt rationally with the anti-trust issue for Microsoft, the privacy implications of technology would still be a source of contention, as Europeans seem to be taking this much more seriously than the Americans.
Well, OK, not exactly. Americans are taking privacy issues seriously - they're ignoring the benefits of their constitutional rights to unreasonable search and seizure and passing gems of legislations like the Patriot Act, soon to be followed by the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. These pretty much belong in the same category as the Alien and Sedition Act and will be just as admired centuries from now by historians.
I've thought the only way for a new entity to establish a trust relationship is to tie into some existing entity with a surety bond.
If rw2 CAnonical Enterprises, Inc. could convince me that some chunk of money backed up any and all claims of their identity, then I'd be willing to transact business using them.
But I don't see how to do this unless the existing entity is a bank. From what I understand, becoming a bank is no trivial task.
what things safely can be put into the black box, and when.
Later, a project might come along where something in the black box should be taken out, exposed and given attention.
It behooves you to learn about everything on your project as much as time permits so you can help define your own black boxes, because the people around you and in charge of you have only an inkling of what is assumable and what is not.
I've used the web to do geneological research and really was in favor of the free "rootsweb" concept when it came out.
Last I heard, though, they were struggling financially and I think they got bought up by ancestry.com, which tends to charge for access to their database if you want everything you can get. Some limited access is free.
When my relatives thought of putting up our family tree on the web, my first thought was "No way do I want anyone in the world to be able to know this much about me and my family."
When I mentioned this to my father and cousin, they agreed. Since they didn't have the know-how to setup a special SSL site, we more or less don't have an official web site and use an obscure URL.
But it's really a shame that I cannot find some way to share my geneological research with other responsible researchers that could benefit from my work to expand their own family trees - and vice versa.
This is really a good example of where you need metrics for the web of trust and a mechanism for systematically excluding more information the less you can trust someone.
However, I suspect the problem can be reduced to the same problem that applies to the distribution of copyrighted material - they wan't some control over the distribution of the information.
It would be enough for me if anyone with access posted a surety bond at PayPal - but if they re-released the information over the net, there'd be no certain way to know which of the people disclosed the information (assuming they were smart enough to munge any digital watermarks).
I am sure what will come of this is every copy of software will have licensing that will print out and the user must sign it and give it to the cashier before they are alowed to take it home.
I bet you're right. Sign this credit card receipt here and sign this long contract here.
Reminds me of the last time I bought a DirecTV receiver (my old one got fried by lightning).
I had to sign a piece of paper stating that I would absolutely sign up and use DirecTV service for a minimum of 6 months or a year. I had my old access card and I was planning on continuing the service anyway, so it was no skin off my nose to sign the contract.
But it goes to show you. I can only guess they must have been having problems with people buying the receivers and then inserting counterfeit access cards.
Re:Get Facts Straight.
on
XML Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Smaller numbers to the left of larger numbers are subtracted instead of summed.
Good thing tax returns are in Arabic. The Romans would not have tolerated these kinds of arithmetic mistakes,
give us Linux benchmarks that reflect real life computer code!
You have a good point, although it could be argued that all benchmarks are artificial, never to be seen outside the controlled laboratory environment. That being the case, you'll need to develop the same sense of skepticism and comparison between
the hardware you're running now, with Linux
the benchmarks for "similar" software on Windows on the same dated hardware
in order to get an estimate of how well the new hardware will perform on your mix of Linux applications.
But your point is a good one in one sense.
Linux is comparitively dirt cheap relative to buying all those Windows licenses, so that the proportion of your overall IT costs going to hardware is greater. That being the case, Linux users really want to get the best price/performance hardware they can.
OTOH, you could just as well argue that the Windows IT shops are so strapped for case having to shell out for Software Assurance whatnot, that they are particularly starved of funds and really have to find the best deal on hardware they can get.
I'd be curious if there's any correlation between what OS is running on what brand/age of hardware in the big co-lo shops.
Anyone?
Get Facts Straight.
on
XML Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Well, even though "XML" doesn't obey proper grammatical rules, this Roman figures it to add up to one thousand forty.
Plus, most people know that 1040 is associated with April 15 (at least in the USA)..
[Sorry I burned my Moderator Points earlier today.]
You are exactly right on.
The reason for the bandwidth is not to better enable current applications, though that can be a side-effect, but rather to make possible applications that were inconceivable without that kind of connectivity.
Much of the naysaying reminds me of what people might have said about the early IBM PC not needing any more processing power or memory because Lotus 1-2-3 updates fast enough for 99% of the cases.
Once the corporate market starts to utilize candy apple live video applications that home users want to have, then you'll start to see more serious pressure put on the local carriers to move off their rears. I still shake my head at the whole fiasco that could have been ISDN, but which was no more than a slo-mo train wreck.
If the land line providers don't move on this, then be assured that cellular wireless connectivity will overtake them and eat their lunch.
I can just see the latest edition of "Soldier of Fortune" with advertisements in the back for "733t h4Xor5" to DDOS the 8 servers that comprise the Iraqi Ministry of Disinformation.
They'll probably have a lurid cover photo showing "actual damage done" to such a server.
"Eeewww - look at the smoking wires just hanging out of the CD drive bay!"
Credit ratings are in fact accurate. If you have bad credit it is because you are not creditworthy or trustworthy in financial matters.
Credit reports are not perfectly accurate; stories abound of how bad credit reports cause people no end of hassles.
Credit reports should be treated as "a data point" on the road to assessing credit worthiness. They should be taken as only a very rough guide to indicating who will make a good employee. [I have a relative that is a phenomenally great wafer processor, but his personal finances are always about 0.13 microns away from the abyss. Poor finances; excellent employee - go figure.]
Indeed, the most creditworthy people, such as you yourself are well on your way to becoming, and such as very wealthy people without the need to avail themselves of credit frequently - have short, sketchy or nonexistent credit ratings!
You could become a victim of your own admirable fiscal responsibility in the future as your credit report shrinks to almost nothing. That could be a disaster should you ever need to borrow; but your nest egg should take care of 99% of the emergencies.
Be warned, though, that if you ever do have a change of heart about risk-pool averaging say, due to the onset of sudden kidney or liver disease requiring a $250K operation, that you won't find much sympathy among those who have heard your above-mentioned philosophy. They'll comfort you by just repeating your arguments back to your face:)
I'm willing to believe that clumsiness and poor web page maintenance had a lot to do with this problem more than some conspiracy to "get Opera", which has probably two orders of magnitude fewer users compared to IE. MS doesn't feel genuinely threatened, but like all web site developers, they'll make sure they look right on 90% of the client browsers, then on the 99% of the client browsers the week after, if they have spare time, then on 99.9% of the client browsers, if they have spare time two weeks later, after the content gets refreshed, etc.
The most alarming problem, though, is that MS controls both a large web site that server content on the one hand, and controls a large population of browsers that are clients on the other hand.
That being the case, it would be quite possible for them to leave the W3C in the dust and create completely proprietary protocols between their MSN services and IE clients.
MS could trot out its old chestnuts about "innovation" and "improving the user experience" and no one would stop them.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many humorists, he was most funny when he made a splash on the screen.
I remember in the mid 1980's enjoying Dave Barry's columns that people would transcribe into email for the benefit of readers like me that didn't get his local newspaper out of the midwest. I really looked forward to reading those columns (such as the one about doing home improvement projects with wood chisels as screwdrivers, etc.)
The same observation seems to apply to every generation of comics: Voltaire, Ambrose Bierce, Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Tim Allen, Dave Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno...
Currently I kind of like the writing of P.J. O'Rourke in the Atlantic. I'll probably grow tired of it eventually, but his last piece on Bill Clinton's post-presidency had me in tears.
Or does it seem like PHP has been afflicted with a lot of vulnerabilities lately?
Maybe the number of news worthy PHP vulnerabilities is a testament to how widely the language is deployed. And, MySQL has had its share, too.
But the Apache and Linux components of "LAMP" seem to have been relatively secure by comparison.
Palladium could create 'a closed system, in which each piece of knowledge in the world is identified with a particular owner, and that owner has a right to resist its copying, modification, and redistribution.
I know, I know. You were worried. Don't be.
Be assured that information about you, such as your medical history, and any transaction history you have in the databases of direct marketers will be copyrighted by someone other than you, relieving you of this onerous burden.
Thanks for the update.
Last I heard, neutrinoes represented the best bet for dark matter, but measurements didn't seem to collect as many as were thought should be captured.
"Too much power" sounds like a value judgement that probably depends on whether you're a member of a highly populated area or a sparsely populated area.
The recent election of GWB showed the critical importance of getting votes from the sparsely populated states, since he was able to gain an electoral majority despite garnering slightly less of the popular vote than his opponent.
I think the time-tested best strategy depends on two things: a strong showing in the earliest primaries, and a financially robust campaign organization.
Given those two ingredients, it's all pretty much reduced to a beauty contest for striking an emotional reaction with the voters. You'll need hair on the top of your head, not on your face, no glasses, a friendly smile, etc. Good actors have an advantage.
Actually, if you look for the research of Wolford, you'll find that his theory is that underclocking the body's metabolism by limiting caloric intake is critically important to increasing life span.
He's done experiments with mice and he's living his own theory, too.
Personally, I find his lifestyle too difficult - I'm addicted to food.
Greater weight is given to voters in sparse rural states. If you want the greatest say in a presidential election, then become a resident of Wyoming.
Even greater influence than that, of course, can be had for a price.
the whole debate reminds me of the scene in Risky Business where Tom Cruise the neophyte pimp is warned by the established pimp "not to mess with another man's livelihood":)
Gangsta's all around, no honor among thieves, etc.
I hope they figure out some experiment for determining a little bit more about the dark matter and the dark energy (which I hadn't heard about before).
According to the article, they can place more accurate estimates on the proportions of dark matter and dark energy relative to what we can see, but it still begs the question of exactly what this stuff is.
[About 90+ per cent of testimonials...]
"Yes, I switched to MS.
"I was a happy Apple user until corporate IT said that we had to standardize on a single platform, and since PCs were in the majority, that's what we standardized on.
"I'm not sure how much our IT costs have come down, but certainly now, after the transition, I'm resigned, I'm unhappy and, with medication, I can tolerate the crap that MS puts on my monitor at least 40% of the time."
Ethernet is cheap and fast (especially gigabit)
Well, cheap compared to fiber channel, I guess. But the 1000bsx ethernet at my workplace wasn't too cheap to put, as I recall. I'm sure it will get cheaper faster than FC, though, just do to the economies of scale of Ethernet deployment.
Despite the fantastic potential bandwidth of gigabit ethernet (assuming big frames), I still wonder if latency issues won't become more important in a NAS environment full of iSCSI devices.
From what very little I understand, gcc has years of infrastructure focused on multiple machine instruction sets.
I'm pleasantly surprised gcc can do as well as it does considering that it can be built and run on some very unusual and dated pieces of hardware (although, from the recent release notes, it looks like some of the most obscure ones are slipping into oblivion.)
That if the United States had an effective judiciary and the means for correcting monopolistic behavior, then perhaps the EU action would have never bubbled up. The EU action is effectively saying "the U.S. has not effectively dealt with the behavior of this multinational corporation.", despite years of court proceedings, consent decrees, etc.
Still, even if the U.S. had dealt rationally with the anti-trust issue for Microsoft, the privacy implications of technology would still be a source of contention, as Europeans seem to be taking this much more seriously than the Americans.
Well, OK, not exactly. Americans are taking privacy issues seriously - they're ignoring the benefits of their constitutional rights to unreasonable search and seizure and passing gems of legislations like the Patriot Act, soon to be followed by the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. These pretty much belong in the same category as the Alien and Sedition Act and will be just as admired centuries from now by historians.
I've thought the only way for a new entity to establish a trust relationship is to tie into some existing entity with a surety bond.
If rw2 CAnonical Enterprises, Inc. could convince me that some chunk of money backed up any and all claims of their identity, then I'd be willing to transact business using them.
But I don't see how to do this unless the existing entity is a bank. From what I understand, becoming a bank is no trivial task.
what things safely can be put into the black box, and when.
Later, a project might come along where something in the black box should be taken out, exposed and given attention.
It behooves you to learn about everything on your project as much as time permits so you can help define your own black boxes, because the people around you and in charge of you have only an inkling of what is assumable and what is not.
I've used the web to do geneological research and really was in favor of the free "rootsweb" concept when it came out.
Last I heard, though, they were struggling financially and I think they got bought up by ancestry.com, which tends to charge for access to their database if you want everything you can get. Some limited access is free.
When my relatives thought of putting up our family tree on the web, my first thought was "No way do I want anyone in the world to be able to know this much about me and my family."
When I mentioned this to my father and cousin, they agreed. Since they didn't have the know-how to setup a special SSL site, we more or less don't have an official web site and use an obscure URL.
But it's really a shame that I cannot find some way to share my geneological research with other responsible researchers that could benefit from my work to expand their own family trees - and vice versa.
This is really a good example of where you need metrics for the web of trust and a mechanism for systematically excluding more information the less you can trust someone.
However, I suspect the problem can be reduced to the same problem that applies to the distribution of copyrighted material - they wan't some control over the distribution of the information.
It would be enough for me if anyone with access posted a surety bond at PayPal - but if they re-released the information over the net, there'd be no certain way to know which of the people disclosed the information (assuming they were smart enough to munge any digital watermarks).
I am sure what will come of this is every copy of software will have licensing that will print out and the user must sign it and give it to the cashier before they are alowed to take it home.
I bet you're right. Sign this credit card receipt here and sign this long contract here.
Reminds me of the last time I bought a DirecTV receiver (my old one got fried by lightning).
I had to sign a piece of paper stating that I would absolutely sign up and use DirecTV service for a minimum of 6 months or a year. I had my old access card and I was planning on continuing the service anyway, so it was no skin off my nose to sign the contract.
But it goes to show you. I can only guess they must have been having problems with people buying the receivers and then inserting counterfeit access cards.
Smaller numbers to the left of larger numbers are subtracted instead of summed.
Good thing tax returns are in Arabic. The Romans would not have tolerated these kinds of arithmetic mistakes,
give us Linux benchmarks that reflect real life computer code!
You have a good point, although it could be argued that all benchmarks are artificial, never to be seen outside the controlled laboratory environment. That being the case, you'll need to develop the same sense of skepticism and comparison between
- the hardware you're running now, with Linux
- the benchmarks for "similar" software on Windows on the same dated hardware
in order to get an estimate of how well the new hardware will perform on your mix of Linux applications.But your point is a good one in one sense.
Linux is comparitively dirt cheap relative to buying all those Windows licenses, so that the proportion of your overall IT costs going to hardware is greater. That being the case, Linux users really want to get the best price/performance hardware they can.
OTOH, you could just as well argue that the Windows IT shops are so strapped for case having to shell out for Software Assurance whatnot, that they are particularly starved of funds and really have to find the best deal on hardware they can get.
I'd be curious if there's any correlation between what OS is running on what brand/age of hardware in the big co-lo shops.
Anyone?
Well, even though "XML" doesn't obey proper grammatical rules, this Roman figures it to add up to one thousand forty.
Plus, most people know that 1040 is associated with April 15 (at least in the USA)..
The link is wrong BTW.
Huh? He must have thought the goat was not work related.
[Sorry I burned my Moderator Points earlier today.]
You are exactly right on.
The reason for the bandwidth is not to better enable current applications, though that can be a side-effect, but rather to make possible applications that were inconceivable without that kind of connectivity.
Much of the naysaying reminds me of what people might have said about the early IBM PC not needing any more processing power or memory because Lotus 1-2-3 updates fast enough for 99% of the cases.
Once the corporate market starts to utilize candy apple live video applications that home users want to have, then you'll start to see more serious pressure put on the local carriers to move off their rears. I still shake my head at the whole fiasco that could have been ISDN, but which was no more than a slo-mo train wreck.
If the land line providers don't move on this, then be assured that cellular wireless connectivity will overtake them and eat their lunch.
I can just see the latest edition of "Soldier of Fortune" with advertisements in the back for "733t h4Xor5" to DDOS the 8 servers that comprise the Iraqi Ministry of Disinformation.
They'll probably have a lurid cover photo showing "actual damage done" to such a server.
"Eeewww - look at the smoking wires just hanging out of the CD drive bay!"
Credit ratings are in fact accurate. If you have bad credit it is because you are not creditworthy or trustworthy in financial matters.
Credit reports are not perfectly accurate; stories abound of how bad credit reports cause people no end of hassles.
Credit reports should be treated as "a data point" on the road to assessing credit worthiness. They should be taken as only a very rough guide to indicating who will make a good employee. [I have a relative that is a phenomenally great wafer processor, but his personal finances are always about 0.13 microns away from the abyss. Poor finances; excellent employee - go figure.]
Indeed, the most creditworthy people, such as you yourself are well on your way to becoming, and such as very wealthy people without the need to avail themselves of credit frequently - have short, sketchy or nonexistent credit ratings!
You could become a victim of your own admirable fiscal responsibility in the future as your credit report shrinks to almost nothing. That could be a disaster should you ever need to borrow; but your nest egg should take care of 99% of the emergencies.
Be warned, though, that if you ever do have a change of heart about risk-pool averaging say, due to the onset of sudden kidney or liver disease requiring a $250K operation, that you won't find much sympathy among those who have heard your above-mentioned philosophy. They'll comfort you by just repeating your arguments back to your face:)
I'm willing to believe that clumsiness and poor web page maintenance had a lot to do with this problem more than some conspiracy to "get Opera", which has probably two orders of magnitude fewer users compared to IE. MS doesn't feel genuinely threatened, but like all web site developers, they'll make sure they look right on 90% of the client browsers, then on the 99% of the client browsers the week after, if they have spare time, then on 99.9% of the client browsers, if they have spare time two weeks later, after the content gets refreshed, etc.
The most alarming problem, though, is that MS controls both a large web site that server content on the one hand, and controls a large population of browsers that are clients on the other hand.
That being the case, it would be quite possible for them to leave the W3C in the dust and create completely proprietary protocols between their MSN services and IE clients.
MS could trot out its old chestnuts about "innovation" and "improving the user experience" and no one would stop them.