The price differential is being blamed on raw materials costs and currency fluctuation.
Oh, give me a break. What utter trash.
I do realize that the original price was never intended to be $100, as referenced by the parent and noted in this article: "We have a target of $100 by 2008, but probably it will be $135, maybe $140." Currency "fluctuation", a.k.a. inflation, may raise this by $5 tops. Currency is not to blame for the constant increase of the price... and let's not kid ourselves, they've been raising the price since the start of the project.
It's really hard to walk this fine line of balance. More functionality for fewer schools, or less functionality for more schools? I personally would have preferred the latter, and I would have been okay with the former if they had stuck to it, but driving up hype and then making conscious decisions to fail to live up to the hype is going to cause them to blow the whole thing. You're dropping the ball, guys. Shape up.
That's textbook FUD for ya. Make a claim, let the news sink in, then follow up later with easily debunked reasoning far after everyone's stopped paying attention.
I've been interested in the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project for awhile now, and they have quite a few papers on voting issues, including discrepancies, statistics, technologies, reliability. One paper in particular (PDF warning) speaks of a study done on different methods of verifying user voting. For the mock election, they randomly inserted incorrect vote records, and thus tested different methods of auditing, to see how often voters noticed the discrepancy. With the paper trail, only 8% acknowledged any problem (i.e., realized that the machine voted wrong). For an auditing system, that's not at all counterproductive as the topical article would have you believe, but it's still pathetically ineffective.
A different kind of auditing system is advocated in the paper: one using audio via headphones to play back the recorded votes to the voter. 77% of voters caught the errors. Of course with every added system, there is inherent risk -- listening devices, accessibility, etc. -- and, of course, audio auditing is relatively untested, but this seems promising. This, however, assumes that the problem is with voters or the machines making an honest mistake and not with the machines maliciously changing votes. Thus, the best course of action would be to have both paper and audio: one to help the voter, the other to verify recounts and prove unreliability.
Of course, no auditing system, no matter the sophistication or rate of helpfulness, will matter if the machines themselves are designed to be corrupted and the vote counts manipulated. Ultimately, it will be far more beneficial to the American people if, rather than trying to force accountability and regulations on corrupted producing companies bought and paid for by corrupt political crooks, the machines are written and produced, or at least heavily tested, by independent committees.... May I suggest academic committees, such as this Caltech/MIT VTP, or similar groups? Their ultimate goal is to certify reliability, and since academics is far less motivated by money, they're far less likely to be corrupted. Or so goes my theory, anyway.
So you're saying that politicians aren't mature, thoughtful diplomats? They have pissing contests like little children? And they're always trying to one-up each other to show whose country has the biggest penis^Warsenal?
CakePHP vs PHP5? Do they think that PHP5 is a framework?
No. We're not comparing frameworks, we're comparing tools to create websites. You might use a scripting language, or you might use a framework, or you might even use a framework written with said scripting language. One might have preferences according to complexity, prior experience of developers, size of dev community, flexibility, and other factors.
I personally prefer PHP5 to Rails (I have no experience with CakePHP). The latter is great for complex data models and for lots of back-end computation and interaction, at least in the sense that I wouldn't have to code very much. Ultimately, However, I feel more in control with a scripting language than with dynamically created code. This probably has much to do with the fact that I have far more experience with PHP than with Rails, but then again, I'm a purist; I always prefer writing my own code to using someone else's.
How can you have PHP vs. "thing written in PHP"?
Have you ever compared programming in C to programming in Python? That's how.
The only thing this survey shows is that of blog readers who fill out surveys, females tend to blog more than males.
This is further skewed by the fairly well known fact that females, especially underage girls, have a higher rate of filling out surveys and taking quizzes and posting the pretty graphic of the results on their blogs. Females are far more talkative in real life, so it's small wonder why they act and interact on the Internet more, whether the medium is IMing, blogging, posting in forums, or whatever.
Relatedly, since this was an online survey, if there really is an imbalance in the blogosphere, it would be magnified due to the nature of blog interaction: friends with blogs frequently exchange links to surveys and other interactive websites, so those who do have blogs would be in a better position to learn about the survey and take it.
Personally, I think any overall gender imbalance is irrelevant. Blogs within categories of subject content are far more polarized by gender, with men going for tech, sports, and science, and women for entertainment, fashion/shopping, and health -- and besides, having a blog is useless if no one reads it. I'd be more interested in the different gender imbalances of figures considered powerful or influential in the blogosphere versus reality. Are women in positions of influence in higher proportions on the Internet than in real life? That would be eye-opening, I think.
The music industry's business model is busted. Traditional news media's business model is busted. Hell, you could argue that Microsoft's is busted. Having a busted business model doesn't mean that a company is small or easy to beat.
Apple is further hampered by their policy of selling their own OS on their own hardware, while Gateway piggybacked on the success of Windows. Apple still beat them out. So, yes, I'd say that's an achievement -- if only an achievement until Gateway is bought by Acer, but an achievement nonetheless.
free college tuition for US math, science, and engineering majors conditional upon working or teaching in the field for at least four years.
Mandatory four-year teaching might cause some problems (flooding the teaching profession with irreverent or apathetic just-want-to-graduate students), but this is a great start to a great idea. As a current student struggling with something akin to $50k yearly tuition, I'd take this deal in a heartbeat. I think four years of teaching is a small price to pay for my own four years of education -- and I'd be giving back what the academic community had given me.
The interesting thing is that, with EA's rep as prolific-and-therefore-low-quality game dev/pub/distrib, I'm hearing a lot of Windows fan(boy)s trashing this move. These games suck, no serious gamer would ever want these games, Carbon is the worst NFS ever, etc., etc. But that's not the point. The point is that EA is hopping on the and-the-Mac-too bandwagon. World of Warcraft is on the Mac. Civ is on the Mac. Most of the big-name games are on the Mac, too, because despite its small marketshare, those within it tend to wield greater spending power -- not to mention that said marketshare has been growing lately. Macs might represent a meager 5% of the computer market, if that, but they represent a significantly larger portion of the available spending money.
As of today, Mac-only games are still a tiny, nearly irrelevant market. That's okay. We Mac users don't mind. We just want the same games on our (superior) OS, too. And this is happening: as one big name releases for the Mac, that makes it more likely that more big names will, and then relatively smaller ones, and then smaller ones.
Also, enough with the bootcamp drivel. I don't want to reboot to play games. If a given game is not offered for Macs (or Linux), I'll deal without it. I have a Wii for that. If you want my money, make it available for Mac. I paid for Coda, I paid for Parallels, and yes, I paid for Civ4. I'll pay for a Mac game I want, but want or not, I'm not paying for a game for which I have to reboot my computer in order to play.
Additionally, they could have calculated the type of virus (by entry method, severity (as you mentioned), spread method, mode of attack, age, etc.) and weighed their percentages in the wild. It's also possible that the programs perhaps prevented some of the damage of some of the virusus, thus meriting partial credit.
It's also possible I'm wrong, but either way, the article is omitting some information we're supposed to know.
No, the summary said a "Swiss company is competing... to be the first to commercially develop a geothermal power plant," which is nearly word-for-word what the actual article said. The article reveals almost nothing, unfortunately. The Wikipedia article to which you linked isn't clear, but the few geothermal plans mentioned in it seem to be spotty efforts, not a large-scale one. The corporation that owns most of the existing plants isn't doing too well in terms of stock price, so I'm assuming that's what "commercial" is referring to, that there's been a breakthrough in profit-making in the area of geothermal power generation.
Capitalism in action. Fuck the environment unless it makes you money. At least it might work out in the environment's favor this time.
1. "not" should be capitalized; 2. "nazi", as a proper noun, should be capitalized; 3. "words" should be singular, as you are referring to one single word, "check"; 4. "im" should be capitalized and spelled with an apostrophe; 5. there should be a period after "mistake"; and 6. "cheque" is, if not only the British spelling, interchangeable with "check" -- in an international forum such as the Internet, both are acceptable.
Please surrender your club card at the next meeting. Have a nice day.
I don't need to ask for references, because I already know that half of this stuff is just false.
Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them) I don't. I much, much prefer black hair. The author tries to make it seem like preference for blond hair is universal -- then argues that blond hair developed in northern Europe. Supposedly, blond hair evolved in that cold climate as an alternate means to advertise youth, but how would the men from the rest of the world know that?
Most suicide bombers are Muslim This means in no way that Muslims have any sort of monopoly on violence -- they're just willing to take their own lives.
What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals This is just fear-mongering. How is it politically incorrect to state that the young are crazier than the mature? My car insurance company has no qualms making this distinction...
Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist This is inapplicable because there is no way for men in all-men workplaces to hit on others in a blatant and disrespectful way. Enter women, and abuse alley opens up. This speaks more of the insensitivity of men than of anything else.
The midlife crisis is a myth--sort of Personally, this is the only one I found interesting, and it has a meager paragraph on it. Disappointing.
I'd rather have a third party implement the ODF support for office. I don't trust MS to go against their embrace and extend instinct, and I'd rather have Office support ODF, rather than ODF plus some closed extensions and minus some slightly esoteric, but standard, features.
I wouldn't worry about closed extensions, but overall I agree. If Microsoft had been forced to implement ODF, they would have made it half-assed, incomplete, and unreliable to give the impression of inferiority. They've done this before.
Repeat every 6 years until... people realise that... their first responsibility should be to the human race.
What? This won't happen until the "human race" has a common enemy. We are tribal in nature, so humans will always fight at the highest level of categorization, and those categories will only unite when they have a common thing to fight against. It's possible that natural disaster could become a common enemy, but it's more likely that we will remain infighting until we find a sentient alien race (or said alien race finds us).
So, expect to see this fight over an ice cap go on for awhile. It won't matter in the long run, once we have to start worrying about other planets.
Does anyone else find the Internet a rather unlikely medium for spreading incest? Incest happens within the family, one which probably doesn't think much of the Internet. And if you're convinced to commit incest because of what strangers on the interwebs say, your family's got bigger issues.
They're the same people who think REAL ID is a good thing, the people who think that the trade of some rights to privacy for a little convenience is a good one.
Slashdot Mirror
I do realize that the original price was never intended to be $100, as referenced by the parent and noted in this article: "We have a target of $100 by 2008, but probably it will be $135, maybe $140." Currency "fluctuation", a.k.a. inflation, may raise this by $5 tops. Currency is not to blame for the constant increase of the price
It's really hard to walk this fine line of balance. More functionality for fewer schools, or less functionality for more schools? I personally would have preferred the latter, and I would have been okay with the former if they had stuck to it, but driving up hype and then making conscious decisions to fail to live up to the hype is going to cause them to blow the whole thing. You're dropping the ball, guys. Shape up.
I've been interested in the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project for awhile now, and they have quite a few papers on voting issues, including discrepancies, statistics, technologies, reliability. One paper in particular (PDF warning) speaks of a study done on different methods of verifying user voting. For the mock election, they randomly inserted incorrect vote records, and thus tested different methods of auditing, to see how often voters noticed the discrepancy. With the paper trail, only 8% acknowledged any problem (i.e., realized that the machine voted wrong). For an auditing system, that's not at all counterproductive as the topical article would have you believe, but it's still pathetically ineffective.
A different kind of auditing system is advocated in the paper: one using audio via headphones to play back the recorded votes to the voter. 77% of voters caught the errors. Of course with every added system, there is inherent risk -- listening devices, accessibility, etc. -- and, of course, audio auditing is relatively untested, but this seems promising. This, however, assumes that the problem is with voters or the machines making an honest mistake and not with the machines maliciously changing votes. Thus, the best course of action would be to have both paper and audio: one to help the voter, the other to verify recounts and prove unreliability.
Of course, no auditing system, no matter the sophistication or rate of helpfulness, will matter if the machines themselves are designed to be corrupted and the vote counts manipulated. Ultimately, it will be far more beneficial to the American people if, rather than trying to force accountability and regulations on corrupted producing companies bought and paid for by corrupt political crooks, the machines are written and produced, or at least heavily tested, by independent committees.... May I suggest academic committees, such as this Caltech/MIT VTP, or similar groups? Their ultimate goal is to certify reliability, and since academics is far less motivated by money, they're far less likely to be corrupted. Or so goes my theory, anyway.
So you're saying that politicians aren't mature, thoughtful diplomats? They have pissing contests like little children? And they're always trying to one-up each other to show whose country has the biggest penis^Warsenal?
SAY IT ISN'T SO!
I personally prefer PHP5 to Rails (I have no experience with CakePHP). The latter is great for complex data models and for lots of back-end computation and interaction, at least in the sense that I wouldn't have to code very much. Ultimately, However, I feel more in control with a scripting language than with dynamically created code. This probably has much to do with the fact that I have far more experience with PHP than with Rails, but then again, I'm a purist; I always prefer writing my own code to using someone else's. Have you ever compared programming in C to programming in Python? That's how.
Relatedly, since this was an online survey, if there really is an imbalance in the blogosphere, it would be magnified due to the nature of blog interaction: friends with blogs frequently exchange links to surveys and other interactive websites, so those who do have blogs would be in a better position to learn about the survey and take it.
Personally, I think any overall gender imbalance is irrelevant. Blogs within categories of subject content are far more polarized by gender, with men going for tech, sports, and science, and women for entertainment, fashion/shopping, and health -- and besides, having a blog is useless if no one reads it. I'd be more interested in the different gender imbalances of figures considered powerful or influential in the blogosphere versus reality. Are women in positions of influence in higher proportions on the Internet than in real life? That would be eye-opening, I think.
The music industry's business model is busted. Traditional news media's business model is busted. Hell, you could argue that Microsoft's is busted. Having a busted business model doesn't mean that a company is small or easy to beat.
Apple is further hampered by their policy of selling their own OS on their own hardware, while Gateway piggybacked on the success of Windows. Apple still beat them out. So, yes, I'd say that's an achievement -- if only an achievement until Gateway is bought by Acer, but an achievement nonetheless.
The interesting thing is that, with EA's rep as prolific-and-therefore-low-quality game dev/pub/distrib, I'm hearing a lot of Windows fan(boy)s trashing this move. These games suck, no serious gamer would ever want these games, Carbon is the worst NFS ever, etc., etc. But that's not the point. The point is that EA is hopping on the and-the-Mac-too bandwagon. World of Warcraft is on the Mac. Civ is on the Mac. Most of the big-name games are on the Mac, too, because despite its small marketshare, those within it tend to wield greater spending power -- not to mention that said marketshare has been growing lately. Macs might represent a meager 5% of the computer market, if that, but they represent a significantly larger portion of the available spending money.
As of today, Mac-only games are still a tiny, nearly irrelevant market. That's okay. We Mac users don't mind. We just want the same games on our (superior) OS, too. And this is happening: as one big name releases for the Mac, that makes it more likely that more big names will, and then relatively smaller ones, and then smaller ones.
Also, enough with the bootcamp drivel. I don't want to reboot to play games. If a given game is not offered for Macs (or Linux), I'll deal without it. I have a Wii for that. If you want my money, make it available for Mac. I paid for Coda, I paid for Parallels, and yes, I paid for Civ4. I'll pay for a Mac game I want, but want or not, I'm not paying for a game for which I have to reboot my computer in order to play.
It's really that simple.
Yeah, me neither.
Additionally, they could have calculated the type of virus (by entry method, severity (as you mentioned), spread method, mode of attack, age, etc.) and weighed their percentages in the wild. It's also possible that the programs perhaps prevented some of the damage of some of the virusus, thus meriting partial credit.
It's also possible I'm wrong, but either way, the article is omitting some information we're supposed to know.
No, the summary said a "Swiss company is competing ... to be the first to commercially develop a geothermal power plant," which is nearly word-for-word what the actual article said. The article reveals almost nothing, unfortunately. The Wikipedia article to which you linked isn't clear, but the few geothermal plans mentioned in it seem to be spotty efforts, not a large-scale one. The corporation that owns most of the existing plants isn't doing too well in terms of stock price, so I'm assuming that's what "commercial" is referring to, that there's been a breakthrough in profit-making in the area of geothermal power generation.
Capitalism in action. Fuck the environment unless it makes you money. At least it might work out in the environment's favor this time.
Not to be a grammar Nazi, but
1. "not" should be capitalized;
2. "nazi", as a proper noun, should be capitalized;
3. "words" should be singular, as you are referring to one single word, "check";
4. "im" should be capitalized and spelled with an apostrophe;
5. there should be a period after "mistake"; and
6. "cheque" is, if not only the British spelling, interchangeable with "check" -- in an international forum such as the Internet, both are acceptable.
Please surrender your club card at the next meeting. Have a nice day.
I don't need to ask for references, because I already know that half of this stuff is just false.
Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
I don't. I much, much prefer black hair. The author tries to make it seem like preference for blond hair is universal -- then argues that blond hair developed in northern Europe. Supposedly, blond hair evolved in that cold climate as an alternate means to advertise youth, but how would the men from the rest of the world know that?
Most suicide bombers are Muslim
This means in no way that Muslims have any sort of monopoly on violence -- they're just willing to take their own lives.
What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
This is just fear-mongering. How is it politically incorrect to state that the young are crazier than the mature? My car insurance company has no qualms making this distinction...
Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
This is inapplicable because there is no way for men in all-men workplaces to hit on others in a blatant and disrespectful way. Enter women, and abuse alley opens up. This speaks more of the insensitivity of men than of anything else.
The midlife crisis is a myth--sort of
Personally, this is the only one I found interesting, and it has a meager paragraph on it. Disappointing.
What? This won't happen until the "human race" has a common enemy. We are tribal in nature, so humans will always fight at the highest level of categorization, and those categories will only unite when they have a common thing to fight against. It's possible that natural disaster could become a common enemy, but it's more likely that we will remain infighting until we find a sentient alien race (or said alien race finds us).
So, expect to see this fight over an ice cap go on for awhile. It won't matter in the long run, once we have to start worrying about other planets.
...or if Slashdot has support for them.
Does anyone else find the Internet a rather unlikely medium for spreading incest? Incest happens within the family, one which probably doesn't think much of the Internet. And if you're convinced to commit incest because of what strangers on the interwebs say, your family's got bigger issues.
Think of the children! To hell with the rest.
Absolutely no second chances? So, I suppose you're not buying Nintendo, either? Shame, that.
Nitpick, and you shall be nitpicked yourself:
God is a smiter.
God is about to smite Bob.
God is smiting Bob.
God smote Bob.
God has smitten Bob.
Bob has been smitten.
The adjective is always the past participle.
They're the same people who think REAL ID is a good thing, the people who think that the trade of some rights to privacy for a little convenience is a good one.
These people exist, just not on Slashdot.