What's the point of this? To show that NT takes a long time to boot up? To make NT look bad?
It doesn't do either. The organisers come across as being incredibly immature, and the existence of such a lame contest is hardly a credit to the Linux community.
In most areas, raising the price by too much when it's hotter wouldn't work. Why? Because all someone would have to do would be walk a couple more feet and find another vending machine that doesn't do that. (I prefer those $.25 sodas they sell outside of grocery stores)
Unfortunately, price discrimination does work, even in the presence of competition. It makes perfect sense if you look at the economics: if consumers are willing to pay more, the demand curve goes up, and the new equilibrium price is a higher price.
Some examples: Plane tickets are more expensive during peak holiday seasons. The prices of all goods are more expensive in wealthier areas (just check out the price gouging that goes on in Palo Alto...ugh). Even the prices of drinks from vending machines differ from area to area. etc. etc.
How can we keep data secure in the long term? It seems that even the strongest crypto isn't viable for keeping data secure in the long term (say 50 to 100 years), because computers get faster (exponentially if one believe's Moore's law), advances in computation break existing crypto schemes, flaws in the algorithms are found, etc.
Tony Shepps understood the spirit of Roblimo's article perfectly. You haven't done anything other than repeat what he said.
> The ideal woman is one who selflessly meets your every needs.
Being in love with someone is being *willing* to selflessly meet your partners needs. This comes from within and isn't the terrible thing you seem to think it is.
That would be right, except that Roblimo advises one not to look for a geek girl because she'll be too busy hacking on computers to service your needs. Rather, find a girl willing to service your needs while you hack on your computers.
> Be nice to geeky looking girls, just in case they grow up and look good.
The moral of that story is "Be nice to everyone, 'cause that ugly duckling may just be the lovely swan
Don't you get it? This is precisely what he takes offense against: being nice to someone just in case they turn out to be good looking.
and don't do to others what you don't like them doing to you."
Yes, but this sentiment wasn't present in Roblimo's aritcle.
Yes, it seems that as we get older, we lose our sense of play and curiosity. While I think simple aging does play a very important role, I think a large part of this due is societal pressure: as we become adults, we're more and more made to conform, to act 'responsibly', to behave in a certain manner. Adults are not supposed stop and pick up a strange looking object on the street just because it looks fascinating. There's a label for people who continue to do so: geek or nerd... Totally 'uncool'. Hormones kick in: finding and impressing a mate is more important than learning something new. Learning takes the back seat to the pressures of everyday life.
The article mentions some people who have "lost the ability to tell right from wrong" through neurological damange. As right and wrong are subjective classifications, I wonder what exactly they mean by that
Perhaps a more objective way of stating this would be that these people are unable to grasp societal norms, or even if they did, do not see the need to comply with them.
Given that people thought for a long time that the adult brain was pretty much unmalleable, going from there and saying that people now aren't so sure seems to be pretty informative and interesting.
Many times, bad management has contributed to the downfall of a good prodcut, but very rarely is the opposite true.
Many ideas can be turned into products, but it often seems that the difference between success and failure depends on the personal clout (money, connections, reputation,etc.) of the people involved.
There seem to be 3 kinds of products: bad products, truly innovative products, and products just waiting to be made but which require large amounts of capital and organisational abilities to pull off -- this is where the personal clout of those involved become important... and the 3rd category is often where the big money is.
Reading about Jim Clark's latest venture in the New York Times, I was really struck by the fact that despite the basic concept being incredibly simple (basically, reduce paperwork in the health industry) and unoriginal (I'm sure similar ideas have occured to anyone who has ever been tied up by paperwork), it really takes someone with Jim Clark's reputation to pull off: I imagine it'll be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for someone without a similar reputation to attract the capital or the people required. And this is where people like Marc Andreesen come in. And like Jim Clark, his first step required great innovation (development of the graphical browser), but he can subsequently leverage his reputation towards the 3rd category of products.
Ok,here's my theory: A lot of people describe MS as evil or satan on their web pages, so it isn't that surprising that MS would show up, since this would make google think that MS is an authority on evil or satan. However, a search for just "evil satan" doesn't work. "evil more satan" works though. This is probably because the word "more" appears frequently on MS's home page, and these 3 terms together are enough to bring MS to the top of the list.
"He did -not- write The Sheep Look Up aka Blade Runner, that was John Brunner. Sheep is good, but not much related to the movie. Stand on Zanzibar is better, IMHO. "
I think you've got things mixed up. Blade Runner was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick. It's another damn fine book by Philip K. Dick, much better than the movie. I highly recommend it.
Just when I thought RAM prices were able to return to reality." There's also the people who work in those factories, who are having a rough time of it right now. I wonder if there's a Taiwan Electronics Industry Workers' Relief Fund or something like that. I'd kick in a few bucks
I can't believe this. There's more to Taiwan than RAM and the electronics industry or even just people in the electronics industry. Like... people in general, you know what I mean?
If an earthquake hit Silicon Valley (and I'd hate to see that, since I'm living around there now), I can't imagine/. posting an article saying 'Oh, there goes our software and other cool gadgets.'
Let everyone see every submitted patent that has been past the first "does it fit the required format, and did they pay up" pass.
That won't work, because pending patent applications should be, and are kept secret by the PTO (unless the applicant chooses to reveal his invention to the public of course). There's a good reason for this, because even if the patent application fails, the applicant now has the option of keeping the product a trade secret i.e. it's a secret as long as you can keep it secret.
Do it over the Web, and allow a Slashdot-like feedback. Only patents that don't get a bozo-alert from the masses get sent on to the next stage (internal USPTO technical review).
I wouldn't trust the/. crowd to review patents. They're far too hostile towards patents to give applications a fair review, and less technologically knowledgeable than they would like to believe. But that's just my opinion.
"Indeed some companies focus on making patents on products they will never make, just to get IP-revenue. "
The validity or morality of software patents aside, I don't see what's wrong with patenting inventions that you'll never make. In fact, for independent inventors or even small companies, the sensible way to go about making money off your invention would be to license the patent to a larger company with the manufacturing capabilities -- it's called specialization or making the most of your comparative advantage. Furthermore, I don't see why a large company willing to devote the time and resources to research, but chooses not to manufacture the product itself shouldn't be able to license out its patents -- unless you're against the whole idea of patents.
Hacking itself is boring to watch, but I think a movie about the hacker culture can be very interesting -- and I mean real hackers, not the kids you see on MTV's (whatsitcalled) hacker show.
Hackers are odd people (and I mean that in a good way) and people find oddity absolutely fascinating. The novelty of the hacker lifestyle itself is interesting enough without the need for dramatisation through technical inaccuracy. Everything you need for a good movie is there: the ego conflicts, the ideological wars, the long hairedness, and the dramatic exploits (I'm thinking RMS smashing down a professor's door to get at a computer...)
I'd personally love to see a movie or some sort of biography of Richard Stallman. RMS has great star potential: my girlfriend, an absolutely nontechnical person, finds him fascinating. If the frigid duo (Steve jobs and Bill Gates) can have popular show made about them, then RMS definitely has the potential to be the star of tommorow.
". This event sets a rather unfortunate precident for the future, meaning that I wouldnt want to get into the online casino business any time soon. " This is sort of like the idea since online gambling is illegal.
Ok, all these computers run to predict the weather, generating lots of heat and fossil fuel burning from cpu consumption, thereby creating the global warming that they're trying to predict.
There was an interesting short story by Robert Henlein with a similar theme. (I can't remember the name of the story now, but I believe it was the first story he ever published).
The premise was that we are 4 dimensional creatures, extruded into a worm-like shape along the time dimension, with the beginning of the worm marking our time of birth and the end of the worm marking our time of death. A guy in the story figures out how to measure the length of this worm using a method analogous to echo sounding, letting him predict the time of people's death. Very interesting reading, and there may be some truth in it.
From what I recall from chemistry, Mg is a highly reactive metal. From Encyclopædia Britannica:
"At one time, magnesium was used predominantly for photographic flash ribbon and powder, incendiary bombs, and pyrotechnic devices, because in finely divided form it burns in air with an intense white light....It is a very strong reducing agent, reacting with most acids or with boiling water to liberate hydrogen"
er..Don't pour any boiling water on your 'super tough' laptop I guess.
". Because of its low density (only two-thirds that of aluminum) it has found extensive use in the aerospace industry. A part that would weigh 70 pounds (31.8 kilograms) when made of steel weighs only 15 pounds when made from magnesium. Because the pure metal has low structural strength, alloys have been developed--principally with aluminum, zinc, and manganese--to improve its hardness, tensile strength, and ability to be cast, welded, and machined. "
Perhaps an alloy is more heat resistant and less reactive. But they claim to be using a 'full' magnesium case. I guess it means that the case won't be very strong either.
The story I heard was that Nobel's wife was involved in an affair with a young mathematician who would have stood a good chance of winning the prize for mathematics, had there been one...
Anyway mathematics and computer science have their own well established prizes, so there isn't really a need for Nobels in those areas. Although of course, no other prizes come close to the Nobels in terms of public prestige -- the Nobels are probably the only acamdemic prizes that most of the public can even name you.
"It's long been a practiced for lesser developed nations to try to bootstrap themselves into the modern world by acquiring technology hook or crook from more developed nations. "
It's also long been practiced by the modern world to try to make themselves even richer by exploiting lesser developed nations, by paying sweatshop workers less than human wages to churn out luxury products for the pleasure of the modern world (not to mention outright enslavement and other forms of bullying). Fair return I think.
"Yes, I agree that the impossibility of disproving creationism is a strong argument against it. That's why the assumptions behind the theory are usually not explicitly stated."
This isn't really what I mean. I'm thinking more along the lines of, that even if you produce very strong evidence or an argument that would convince a rational person that creationism was false, a creationist still wouldn't believe it -- it's a matter of faith rather than rationality. Which is why creationism doesn't fall under the realm of scientific theory.
"I just hear too much talk about truth and provability in this debate, and I think it's missing the correct issue. "
I think scientists seek falsifiability rather than provability. Scientists don't try to prove that their theory is correct: they publish their results, and invite other scientists to try to falsify their theory. A good scientific theory is one with which there are many means of falsifying it, but nonetheless stands up to the test.
"Creationism can predict current observation perfectly by assuming that God did whatever is necessary to bring about what we observe, but that is powerless to predict future evolution. "
Ah, but creationism doesn't rule out future evolution. By assuming an omnipotent being, everything is possible.
Look for a good state school in your region, and which are strong in CS. e.g. UC Berkeley, Univ. Texas at Austin, SUNY Stony brook, Virginia Tech, etc. Take a look at the USNEWS report on the best public schools.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of this? To show that NT takes a long time to boot up? To make NT look bad?
It doesn't do either. The organisers come across as being incredibly immature, and the existence of such a lame contest is hardly a credit to the Linux community.
In most areas, raising the price by too much when it's hotter wouldn't work. Why? Because all someone would have to do would be walk a couple more feet and find another vending machine that doesn't do that. (I prefer those $.25 sodas they sell outside of grocery stores)
Unfortunately, price discrimination does work, even in the presence of competition. It makes perfect sense if you look at the economics: if consumers are willing to pay more, the demand curve goes up, and the new equilibrium price is a higher price.
Some examples: Plane tickets are more expensive during peak holiday seasons. The prices of all goods are more expensive in wealthier areas (just check out the price gouging that goes on in Palo Alto...ugh). Even the prices of drinks from vending machines differ from area to area. etc. etc.
A potatoe a day improves your spelling.
How can we keep data secure in the long term? It seems that even the strongest crypto isn't viable for keeping data secure in the long term (say 50 to 100 years), because computers get faster (exponentially if one believe's Moore's law), advances in computation break existing crypto schemes, flaws in the algorithms are found, etc.
Tony Shepps understood the spirit of Roblimo's article perfectly. You haven't done anything other than repeat what he said.
> The ideal woman is one who selflessly meets your every needs.
Being in love with someone is being *willing* to selflessly meet your partners needs. This comes from within and isn't the terrible thing you seem to think it is.
That would be right, except that Roblimo advises one not to look for a geek girl because she'll be too busy hacking on computers to service your needs. Rather, find a girl willing to service your needs while you hack on your computers.
> Be nice to geeky looking girls, just in case they grow up and look good.
The moral of that story is "Be nice to everyone, 'cause that ugly duckling may just be the lovely swan
Don't you get it? This is precisely what he takes offense against: being nice to someone just in case they turn out to be good looking.
and don't do to others what you don't like them doing to you."
Yes, but this sentiment wasn't present in Roblimo's aritcle.
NYT recently had an extensive article on the film. I watched the subtitled version -- do watch it, and other Miyazaki films, they're great.
Yes, it seems that as we get older, we lose our sense of play and curiosity. While I think simple aging does play a very important role, I think a large part of this due is societal pressure: as we become adults, we're more and more made to conform, to act 'responsibly', to behave in a certain manner. Adults are not supposed stop and pick up a strange looking object on the street just because it looks fascinating. There's a label for people who continue to do so: geek or nerd ... Totally 'uncool'. Hormones kick in: finding and impressing a mate is more important than learning something new. Learning takes the back seat to the pressures of everyday life.
The article mentions some people who have
"lost the ability to tell right from wrong"
through neurological damange. As right and
wrong are subjective classifications, I wonder
what exactly they mean by that
Perhaps a more objective way of stating this would be that these people are unable to grasp societal norms, or even if they did, do not see the need to comply with them.
Given that people thought for a long time that the adult brain was pretty much unmalleable, going from there and saying that people now aren't so sure seems to be pretty informative and interesting.
Many times, bad management has contributed to the downfall of a good prodcut, but very rarely is the opposite true.
... and the 3rd category is often where the big money is.
Many ideas can be turned into products, but it often seems that the difference between success and failure depends on the personal clout (money, connections, reputation,etc.) of the people involved.
There seem to be 3 kinds of products: bad products, truly innovative products, and products just waiting to be made but which require large amounts of capital and organisational abilities to pull off -- this is where the personal clout of those involved become important
Reading about Jim Clark's latest venture in the New York Times, I was really struck by the fact that despite the basic concept being incredibly simple (basically, reduce paperwork in the health industry) and unoriginal (I'm sure similar ideas have occured to anyone who has ever been tied up by paperwork), it really takes someone with Jim Clark's reputation to pull off: I imagine it'll be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for someone without a similar reputation to attract the capital or the people required. And this is where people like Marc Andreesen come in. And like Jim Clark, his first step required great innovation (development of the graphical browser), but he can subsequently leverage his reputation towards the 3rd category of products.
Try: more evil than satan
or: evil more satan
Disney comes up 3rd and 2nd on those searches respectively... perhaps the web knows something everyone else doesn't....
Ok,here's my theory:
A lot of people describe MS as evil or satan on their web pages, so it isn't that surprising that MS would show up, since this would make google think that MS is an authority on evil or satan.
However, a search for just "evil satan" doesn't work.
"evil more satan" works though. This is probably because the word "more" appears frequently on MS's home page, and these 3 terms together are enough to bring MS to the top of the list.
"He did -not- write The Sheep Look Up aka Blade Runner, that was John Brunner. Sheep is good, but not much related to the movie. Stand on Zanzibar is better, IMHO. "
I think you've got things mixed up. Blade Runner was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick. It's another damn fine book by Philip K. Dick, much better than the movie. I highly recommend it.
Just when I thought RAM prices were able to return to reality." There's also the people who work in those factories, who are having a rough time of it right now. I wonder if there's a Taiwan Electronics Industry Workers' Relief Fund or something like that. I'd kick in a few bucks
... people in general, you know what I mean?
/. posting an article saying 'Oh, there goes our software and other cool gadgets.'
I can't believe this. There's more to Taiwan than RAM and the electronics industry or even just people in the electronics industry. Like
If an earthquake hit Silicon Valley (and I'd hate to see that, since I'm living around there now), I can't imagine
Show some sensitivity. Please.
Let everyone see every
/. crowd to review patents. They're far too hostile towards patents to give applications a fair review, and less technologically knowledgeable than they would like to believe. But that's just my opinion.
submitted patent that has been past the first "does it fit the
required format, and did they pay up" pass.
That won't work, because pending patent applications should be, and are kept secret by the PTO (unless the applicant chooses to reveal his invention to the public of course). There's a good reason for this, because even if the patent application fails, the applicant now has the option of keeping the product a trade secret i.e. it's a secret as long as you can keep it secret.
Do it over the Web, and
allow a Slashdot-like feedback. Only patents that don't get a bozo-alert
from the masses get sent on to the next stage (internal USPTO technical
review).
I wouldn't trust the
"Indeed some companies focus on making patents on products they will never make, just to get IP-revenue. "
The validity or morality of software patents aside, I don't see what's wrong with patenting inventions that you'll never make. In fact, for independent inventors or even small companies, the sensible way to go about making money off your invention would be to license the patent to a larger company with the manufacturing capabilities -- it's called specialization or making the most of your comparative advantage. Furthermore, I don't see why a large company willing to devote the time and resources to research, but chooses not to manufacture the product itself shouldn't be able to license out its patents -- unless you're against the whole idea of patents.
Hacking itself is boring to watch, but I think a movie about the hacker culture can be very interesting -- and I mean real hackers, not the kids you see on MTV's (whatsitcalled) hacker show.
Hackers are odd people (and I mean that in a good way) and people find oddity absolutely fascinating. The novelty of the hacker lifestyle itself is interesting enough without the need for dramatisation through technical inaccuracy. Everything you need for a good movie is there: the ego conflicts, the ideological wars, the long hairedness, and the dramatic exploits (I'm thinking RMS smashing down a professor's door to get at a computer...)
I'd personally love to see a movie or some sort of biography of Richard Stallman. RMS has great star potential: my girlfriend, an absolutely nontechnical person, finds him fascinating. If the frigid duo (Steve jobs and Bill Gates) can have popular show made about them, then RMS definitely has the potential to be the star of tommorow.
". This event sets a rather unfortunate precident for the future, meaning that I wouldnt want to get into the online casino business any time soon. " This is sort of like the idea since online gambling is illegal.
Ok, all these computers run to predict the weather, generating lots of heat and fossil fuel burning from cpu consumption, thereby creating the global warming that they're trying to predict.
There was an interesting short story by Robert Henlein with a similar theme. (I can't remember the name of the story now, but I believe it was the first story he ever published).
The premise was that we are 4 dimensional creatures, extruded into a worm-like shape along the time dimension, with the beginning of the worm marking our time of birth and the end of the worm marking our time of death. A guy in the story figures out how to measure the length of this worm using a method analogous to echo sounding, letting him predict the time of people's death. Very interesting reading, and there may be some truth in it.
From what I recall from chemistry, Mg is a highly reactive metal. From Encyclopædia Britannica:
"At one time, magnesium was used predominantly for photographic flash ribbon and powder, incendiary bombs, and pyrotechnic devices, because in finely divided form it burns in air with an intense white light....It is a very strong reducing agent, reacting with most acids or with boiling water to liberate hydrogen"
er..Don't pour any boiling water on your 'super tough' laptop I guess.
". Because of its low density (only two-thirds that of aluminum) it has found extensive use in the aerospace industry. A part that would weigh 70 pounds (31.8 kilograms) when made of steel weighs only 15 pounds when made from magnesium. Because the pure metal has low structural strength, alloys have been developed--principally with aluminum, zinc, and manganese--to improve its hardness, tensile strength, and ability to be cast, welded, and machined. "
Perhaps an alloy is more heat resistant and less reactive. But they claim to be using a 'full' magnesium case. I guess it means that the case won't be very strong either.
The story I heard was that Nobel's wife was involved in an affair with a young mathematician who would have stood a good chance of winning the prize for mathematics, had there been one...
Anyway mathematics and computer science have their own well established prizes, so there isn't really a need for Nobels in those areas. Although of course, no other prizes come close to the Nobels in terms of public prestige -- the Nobels are probably the only acamdemic prizes that most of the public can even name you.
"It's long been a practiced for lesser developed nations to try to bootstrap themselves into the modern world by acquiring technology hook or crook from more developed nations. "
It's also long been practiced by the modern world to try to make themselves even richer by exploiting lesser developed nations, by paying sweatshop workers less than human wages to churn out luxury products for the pleasure of the modern world (not to mention outright enslavement and other forms of bullying).
Fair return I think.
"Yes, I agree that the impossibility of disproving creationism is a strong argument against it. That's why the assumptions behind the theory are usually not explicitly stated."
This isn't really what I mean. I'm thinking more along the lines of, that even if you produce very strong evidence or an argument that would convince a rational person that creationism was false, a creationist still wouldn't believe it -- it's a matter of faith rather than rationality. Which is why creationism doesn't fall under the realm of scientific theory.
"I just hear too much talk about truth and provability in this debate, and I think it's missing the correct issue. "
I think scientists seek falsifiability rather than provability. Scientists don't try to prove that their theory is correct: they publish their results, and invite other scientists to try to falsify their theory. A good scientific theory is one with which there are many means of falsifying it, but nonetheless stands up to the test.
"Creationism can predict current observation perfectly by assuming that God did whatever is necessary to bring about what we observe, but that is powerless to predict future evolution. "
Ah, but creationism doesn't rule out future evolution. By assuming an omnipotent being, everything is possible.
Look for a good state school in your region, and which are strong in CS. e.g. UC Berkeley, Univ. Texas at Austin, SUNY Stony brook, Virginia Tech, etc.
Take a look at the USNEWS report on the best public schools.