What other conferences are worth seeing? I would submit that the motivation behind attending a conference is to 'discover' something, or to forward your exposure on some field that you (personally) feel that you don't understand as much as you should. This is probably the result of media buzz, FUD, rumor, or a combination of all three.
Some (negative) examples toward my thesis: 1. no one goes to a conference about vacuum cleaners or washing machines, because we all understand them.
2. No one goes to MacWorld outside the religeous MacHeads, because that 'need to know' isn't there (other than the pure followers).
3. People go to boat fairs, car shows, and consumer electronics to oogle at the latest and greatest. Business people are no better, but this is the one they can justify the cost of going (because they feel that 'gap' in their understanding, or their PHB feels the gap).
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad more and more people are coming to these things, but I think there are other factors/inferences to be pulled from such a dramatic shift.
As a boy scout, I suggest you check your footing-- your 'firm grounding' ain't so firm.
ISP do not have high fixed costs, they have high variable costs. The only fixed costs for an ISP is the hardware for the servers, the server room facilities, and sysadmin overhead.
ISP variable costs include bandwidth (expensive), marketing costs (expensive with severe diminishing returns), and tech support (overhead, unless you want to go through Mumbai).
As such, this ISP seems to be pushing the bulk of it's variable costs off on it's partner/reseller/localgeeks. They will acheive great penetration, minimize (if not eliminate) tech support, and streamline their bandwidth requirements (because of the WiFi).
Smart. If I were in the US, I would sign up today.
While I am an avid free-trade advocate, I must back the US position on this one. Hynix has been bailed out a number of times by Seoul, and they've recieved enormous tax breaks.
The 44% tarriff is excessive, but that's the whole point: it's a slap in the face to wake the Koreans up. Eventually, this will get watered down in the WTO, but not until the same WTO pushes Seoul to tone down it's own corporate capitalism efforts.
I see all the standard anti-US rhetoric is in full swing already, so I won't broach that one....
It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet. Granted he's never been a man who's to court publicity, but he will go down in history as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Hrmmm... his invention certainly is influential, but not him. Influence is a showing of the pervasity, and profound changes from something. If that something is a single event, then it must be fundamentaly different, and destroy the prior 'world': Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Marx' theory of class struggle (good and bad).
TBL's "hypertext", while certainly a fantastic insight and construct, built upon endless hours of conceptualisation by the Arpanet team concerning distributed data. Also, hypertext didn't "destroy" anything, it merely added another medium.
Just as Philo T. Farnsworth "invented" television, would you have remembered his name? Is he up there with Einstein, Woodrow Wilson? Kennedy?
The gravitational force exerted on the traveler would be proportional to his distance from the center of the earth: it's at a maximum at the surface and zero at the center.
Not quite. Gravitational force is relative to the distance between the two bodies, but it gets STRONGER as those bodies get closer. Hence Ecuadorian mountain people "weigh" less than people in Death Valley.
In the theoretical tube through the Earth, there would be a sort of reverse LaGrange point somwehere in the tube, where the proxmity to the center maximizes gravitational force, and the gravitational pull from the dirt above you (back toward the surface) is minimized. This would be the meximum gravity point. From there to the center, gravitational acceleration would drop off, become xero, then maximize at the other anti-LaGrange point on the other side, then tail off to 1 G at the surface again.
Modern philosophy seeks to answer more than simple and ultimately irrelevant metaphysical questions. That is for the buddhists and new age folks.
I see. So the Nietzsche clown is a genius and the 2500-year old religion is nothing more than granola-types answering dumb questions? How can you put so much effort into one philosopher (and one book) yet not get the overriding thesis of that same philosopher/book?
Did you ever stop to think that the Nietzchean post-marxist concepts to which you so dearly hold close to your heart are just as much a shackle on your mind?
Remember when the Oracle told Neo that he'd stay up late wondering about what would happen if she hadn't warned him about dropping the plate?
I do know how cookies work. my point is that they deny access to the website unless i turn on cookies. i realize 'they' are not harvesting anything from that-- but the existence of cookies on my computer shows up as a security risk when (god forbid) a virus comes through and sucks up all those cookies. I realize I can go back and delete the cookies-- my point is that this site denies access unless i have the cookie (whereas I would just rather turn them off and browse anonymously to start with.
I'm sick of people like you jumping down my throat.
bah... i hate sites that require a cookie. it's odd that so many people freak over their 'right to privacy' being violated by the gov't, when everyday companies are doing it right there in front of our noses.
Well, if you think that M$ is rich because of their stock price, you're grasp of economics is slim.
M$ got it's riches from lucrative licesnsing deals and then a monopolistic position in the marketplace. Their stock price is actually a security liability to them, and much of their 'wealth' is virtual (in options unable to be excersized): witness Gates' loss of billions in equity when their stock took a fall a couple of years back. One could argue that he would have just as much 'actual' wealth if they never took the company public...
The employees were lured with huge options-- which does help get good talent when the price is going up. However, that was before the bubble popped-- there is no such illusion now, therefore there is no cache in the options.
Q:What does the richest private company in the world do? A: Anything it wants.
When a company seeks a wide consumer base, especially from the financial sector itself, it makes sense to go public. However, when a company is heavy on R&D, needs to be nimble, and supplies directly to other corporations, there is no _need_ to go public.
Adobe wants to embrace commodity (PC) hardware-- think about it-- which makes more sense? a user base of 500 mac users or 5000 PC users?
Letting customers spend less money on hardware means there is more money leftover for buying pricey Adobe software. Moreover, Adobe may soon abandon one of its development team to shave costs-- guess which one won't survive: the one not making that much money.
Re:are you making this up?
on
Robots!
·
· Score: 1
I don't claim to be japanese expert, but I am not completely uninformed.
Gomen-- I didn't mean to be so accusatory and desultory in my comment. I would agree with BJH that we should look to translate phrases, not so much individual words--
Re:are you making this up?
on
Robots!
·
· Score: 2, Informative
until you want to express "the faster the better"
hayai kagiri yoi.
"I bumped my head while entering the bath" (as far as i know there is no expressing for "while entering,"
hairu tochuu-- bath ni hairu tochuu atama wo butsukemashita. however, that's poor grammar. bath ni hairu tokoro atama butsukemashita.
As far as you know-- which doesn't seem to be very far.:-)
Al Gore, as a standing liberal, has quite a bit of pull with the teachers unions and others who are buying computers for schools. This alone makes it worth Apple's money to try and shore up their stronghold-- although that educational market is quickly being eroded with Linux on commodity white boxen.
Al Gore also carries weight with the pot-smoking hippie baby-boomers. Stinky hippies.
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
What are you doing with 8.x on your servers? Red Hat 8.0 is meant for personal use-- there is very little bare-bones support for it. If you want a supportable enviornment for your server, then you need Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (a.k.a. Advanced Server).
If, theoretically, the USG saw all the source code, couldn't citizens then solicit that same information (the source code) under the Freedom of Information Act?
I mean-- it comes down to the core issue of privacy-- the gov't would have to prove that it has no unfair advantage that could impede my 4th Amendment rights vis a vis the M$ software.
Or-- it could prove to be collusion between a private entity and the state, also illegal in the US, and I would think most of Europe...
I am astounded at the sheer number of developers involved-- well, let me clarify that-- the number that are being paid, overseen, and managed by a single entity for this code. Clearly we know where all the money from those licenses is going, but it's structurally flawed: as software evolves, it will take an increasing number (linear? geometric? exponential?) of developers to build and maintain that OS. However, by trying to maintain them all under one roof, with one management structure, one 'political system' if you will, will always either make the process needlessly inefficient or horribly expensive.
I am reminded of the massive engineering projects the Soviets used to do just because they could-- it wouldn't make sense in terms of feeding their people or making their lives any more secure, but they did it because the central planners knew they could plan it.
This seems similar-- NT will become such an incredible beast that the bureaucracy to maintain it will suffocate it, or they'll start taking shortcuts.
There was an excellent documentary on the BBC last summer that showed the elaborate lengths to which the Chinese fraud industry will go to fake a winged fossil.
The fraud detailed in the show fooled even National Geographic, which had spent thousands on research, documentation, and 'verification' by palaentologists.
Disinformation, the act of spreading rumors, false orders, and couterfeit money is as old as warfare itself. Usually, the production cost' of disinformation is much less than the 'production cost' of truth. It's easy to spread a rumor about ambushed soldiers, whereas actually ambushing someone is pricey. Fake Confederate dollars were much easier to print than real ones, etc. Al Qaeda knows this, and it's rumor mill is going full steam.
Now to the immediate fight: the RIAA and record labels have decided to invest time and money into producing counterfeits and disinformation. The problem is that the very structure of P2P networks makes this overtly pricey: 1. The RIAA must proactively produce 'bad' Britney Spears 2. Some dope must download this 'bad' track-- but once they find it's bad, they delete it. The track never gets past that first copy.
Whereas 'legitimate' tracks get copied and passed around by everyone, because the legitimate tracks are keepers, and they expand virally.
Eventually, the RIAA will come under such heavy costs to maintain their disinformation campaign, that it would be cheaper to start using the P2P system to their advantage (theoretically)
Slashdot Mirror
What other conferences are worth seeing? I would submit that the motivation behind attending a conference is to 'discover' something, or to forward your exposure on some field that you (personally) feel that you don't understand as much as you should. This is probably the result of media buzz, FUD, rumor, or a combination of all three.
Some (negative) examples toward my thesis:
1. no one goes to a conference about vacuum cleaners or washing machines, because we all understand them.
2. No one goes to MacWorld outside the religeous MacHeads, because that 'need to know' isn't there (other than the pure followers).
3. People go to boat fairs, car shows, and consumer electronics to oogle at the latest and greatest. Business people are no better, but this is the one they can justify the cost of going (because they feel that 'gap' in their understanding, or their PHB feels the gap).
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad more and more people are coming to these things, but I think there are other factors/inferences to be pulled from such a dramatic shift.
BURNINATION to anyone who questions the need for homestar runner!!!!!!
BURNINATION to Marc!!!
As a boy scout, I suggest you check your footing-- your 'firm grounding' ain't so firm.
ISP do not have high fixed costs, they have high variable costs. The only fixed costs for an ISP is the hardware for the servers, the server room facilities, and sysadmin overhead.
ISP variable costs include bandwidth (expensive), marketing costs (expensive with severe diminishing returns), and tech support (overhead, unless you want to go through Mumbai).
As such, this ISP seems to be pushing the bulk of it's variable costs off on it's partner/reseller/localgeeks. They will acheive great penetration, minimize (if not eliminate) tech support, and streamline their bandwidth requirements (because of the WiFi).
Smart. If I were in the US, I would sign up today.
While I am an avid free-trade advocate, I must back the US position on this one. Hynix has been bailed out a number of times by Seoul, and they've recieved enormous tax breaks.
The 44% tarriff is excessive, but that's the whole point: it's a slap in the face to wake the Koreans up. Eventually, this will get watered down in the WTO, but not until the same WTO pushes Seoul to tone down it's own corporate capitalism efforts.
I see all the standard anti-US rhetoric is in full swing already, so I won't broach that one....
I'm happy to hear specific and credible evidence to the contrary. (seriously)
Okay: time for the shameless plug: If you're looking for a slashdot-type forum to debate this stuff, come over to Thought -Control
It's still small, and the signal-to-noise ratio is therefore good.
Do you understand the usage of quotation marks in sentences to denote irony?
Duh.
It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet. Granted he's never been a man who's to court publicity, but he will go down in history as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Hrmmm... his invention certainly is influential, but not him. Influence is a showing of the pervasity, and profound changes from something. If that something is a single event, then it must be fundamentaly different, and destroy the prior 'world': Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Marx' theory of class struggle (good and bad).
TBL's "hypertext", while certainly a fantastic insight and construct, built upon endless hours of conceptualisation by the Arpanet team concerning distributed data. Also, hypertext didn't "destroy" anything, it merely added another medium.
Just as Philo T. Farnsworth "invented" television, would you have remembered his name? Is he up there with Einstein, Woodrow Wilson? Kennedy?
The gravitational force exerted on the traveler would be proportional to his distance from the center of the earth: it's at a maximum at the surface and zero at the center.
Not quite. Gravitational force is relative to the distance between the two bodies, but it gets STRONGER as those bodies get closer. Hence Ecuadorian mountain people "weigh" less than people in Death Valley.
In the theoretical tube through the Earth, there would be a sort of reverse LaGrange point somwehere in the tube, where the proxmity to the center maximizes gravitational force, and the gravitational pull from the dirt above you (back toward the surface) is minimized. This would be the meximum gravity point. From there to the center, gravitational acceleration would drop off, become xero, then maximize at the other anti-LaGrange point on the other side, then tail off to 1 G at the surface again.
Modern philosophy seeks to answer more than simple and ultimately irrelevant metaphysical questions. That is for the buddhists and new age folks.
I see. So the Nietzsche clown is a genius and the 2500-year old religion is nothing more than granola-types answering dumb questions? How can you put so much effort into one philosopher (and one book) yet not get the overriding thesis of that same philosopher/book?
Did you ever stop to think that the Nietzchean post-marxist concepts to which you so dearly hold close to your heart are just as much a shackle on your mind?
Remember when the Oracle told Neo that he'd stay up late wondering about what would happen if she hadn't warned him about dropping the plate?
Happy sleeping...
Cris
I do know how cookies work. my point is that they deny access to the website unless i turn on cookies. i realize 'they' are not harvesting anything from that-- but the existence of cookies on my computer shows up as a security risk when (god forbid) a virus comes through and sucks up all those cookies. I realize I can go back and delete the cookies-- my point is that this site denies access unless i have the cookie (whereas I would just rather turn them off and browse anonymously to start with.
I'm sick of people like you jumping down my throat.
bah... i hate sites that require a cookie. it's odd that so many people freak over their 'right to privacy' being violated by the gov't, when everyday companies are doing it right there in front of our noses.
ha ha ha ha ha ha
what more can be said?
Tell that to Bill Gates and Company.
Well, if you think that M$ is rich because of their stock price, you're grasp of economics is slim.
M$ got it's riches from lucrative licesnsing deals and then a monopolistic position in the marketplace. Their stock price is actually a security liability to them, and much of their 'wealth' is virtual (in options unable to be excersized): witness Gates' loss of billions in equity when their stock took a fall a couple of years back. One could argue that he would have just as much 'actual' wealth if they never took the company public...
The employees were lured with huge options-- which does help get good talent when the price is going up. However, that was before the bubble popped-- there is no such illusion now, therefore there is no cache in the options.
Q:What does the richest private company in the world do?
A: Anything it wants.
When a company seeks a wide consumer base, especially from the financial sector itself, it makes sense to go public. However, when a company is heavy on R&D, needs to be nimble, and supplies directly to other corporations, there is no _need_ to go public.
Adobe wants to embrace commodity (PC) hardware-- think about it-- which makes more sense? a user base of 500 mac users or 5000 PC users?
Letting customers spend less money on hardware means there is more money leftover for buying pricey Adobe software. Moreover, Adobe may soon abandon one of its development team to shave costs-- guess which one won't survive: the one not making that much money.
I don't claim to be japanese expert, but I am not completely uninformed.
Gomen-- I didn't mean to be so accusatory and desultory in my comment. I would agree with BJH that we should look to translate phrases, not so much individual words--
until you want to express "the faster the better"
:-)
hayai kagiri yoi.
"I bumped my head while entering the bath" (as far as i know there is no expressing for "while entering,"
hairu tochuu-- bath ni hairu tochuu atama wo butsukemashita. however, that's poor grammar. bath ni hairu tokoro atama butsukemashita.
As far as you know-- which doesn't seem to be very far.
Al Gore, as a standing liberal, has quite a bit of pull with the teachers unions and others who are buying computers for schools. This alone makes it worth Apple's money to try and shore up their stronghold-- although that educational market is quickly being eroded with Linux on commodity white boxen.
Al Gore also carries weight with the pot-smoking hippie baby-boomers. Stinky hippies.
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
What are you doing with 8.x on your servers? Red Hat 8.0 is meant for personal use-- there is very little bare-bones support for it. If you want a supportable enviornment for your server, then you need Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (a.k.a. Advanced Server).
If, theoretically, the USG saw all the source code, couldn't citizens then solicit that same information (the source code) under the Freedom of Information Act?
I mean-- it comes down to the core issue of privacy-- the gov't would have to prove that it has no unfair advantage that could impede my 4th Amendment rights vis a vis the M$ software.
Or-- it could prove to be collusion between a private entity and the state, also illegal in the US, and I would think most of Europe...
I am astounded at the sheer number of developers involved-- well, let me clarify that-- the number that are being paid, overseen, and managed by a single entity for this code. Clearly we know where all the money from those licenses is going, but it's structurally flawed: as software evolves, it will take an increasing number (linear? geometric? exponential?) of developers to build and maintain that OS. However, by trying to maintain them all under one roof, with one management structure, one 'political system' if you will, will always either make the process needlessly inefficient or horribly expensive.
I am reminded of the massive engineering projects the Soviets used to do just because they could-- it wouldn't make sense in terms of feeding their people or making their lives any more secure, but they did it because the central planners knew they could plan it.
This seems similar-- NT will become such an incredible beast that the bureaucracy to maintain it will suffocate it, or they'll start taking shortcuts.
You have no business here!
This is a LOCAL shop, for LOCAL fol---
oh, wait...
and i call troll on you. what was so inflamatory/offpost/thumbing-nose-at-Linus about my post?
There was an excellent documentary on the BBC last summer that showed the elaborate lengths to which the Chinese fraud industry will go to fake a winged fossil.
The fraud detailed in the show fooled even National Geographic, which had spent thousands on research, documentation, and 'verification' by palaentologists.
I bet $20 this one turns out to be a fake.
Disinformation, the act of spreading rumors, false orders, and couterfeit money is as old as warfare itself. Usually, the production cost' of disinformation is much less than the 'production cost' of truth. It's easy to spread a rumor about ambushed soldiers, whereas actually ambushing someone is pricey. Fake Confederate dollars were much easier to print than real ones, etc. Al Qaeda knows this, and it's rumor mill is going full steam.
Now to the immediate fight: the RIAA and record labels have decided to invest time and money into producing counterfeits and disinformation. The problem is that the very structure of P2P networks makes this overtly pricey:
1. The RIAA must proactively produce 'bad' Britney Spears
2. Some dope must download this 'bad' track-- but once they find it's bad, they delete it. The track never gets past that first copy.
Whereas 'legitimate' tracks get copied and passed around by everyone, because the legitimate tracks are keepers, and they expand virally.
Eventually, the RIAA will come under such heavy costs to maintain their disinformation campaign, that it would be cheaper to start using the P2P system to their advantage (theoretically)