The big thing about the metric system is that you have only one unit to measure a property in. Length goes in meters. From Petameters to picometers. And it's naturally in sync with the decimal notation, 0.2 will always mean 2 decisomethings. 3000 will mean 3 kilosomething. Then the US/imperial/CSG systems use a lot of units to measure one property, just look at lenght. You have to know how much inch go in a feet, how much feet in a yard, how much yards on a rod, how much rods in a mile. And then there are things like furlong, hand, fathom, league. And when taking the same properties in 2 or 3 dimensions, it goes into only to square foot/inch/mile/yard and cubic foor/inch/mile/yard, but also acres, US and imperial gallons, cords, pints, bushels, quarts, pecks and barrels. From my point of view I prefer 1 unit to the 18+ I have to remember in the US/imperial/CSG system.
Because of using a decimal number system all this is very prone to getting long fractional decimal numbers and rounding errors. I know there are some non-decimal notations, like 3'7", to get around this in some cases.
As for temperature, I do not have a problem with Fahrenheit over Celsius or Kelvin, because there is only one unit, and it's notation is decimal. Or there should be some odd unit for 1/540 or 93 Fahrenheit that I am not aware of. In some areas the SI notation would come in handy, like for example astronomical temperatures, or super-conductivity physics, but for everyday use I have no real preference. All you have to remember is that 32 Fahrenheit = 0 Celsius and 9 fahrenheit in 5 celsius. It's almost 1 Fahrenheit = 0.5 Celsius, maybe that's why my central heating system works in steps of 0.5 celsius, hmmmm....
The odd one out is indeed time, maybe it survives to this day because there is a widely accepted non-decimal notation, like 4-12-2003 19:03:12, and day/month/year do not have a decimal, but fixed relationship anyway. Units like lenght, time and weight are much more arbitrairy.
I agree with you on almost all points you present, I only have a different memory on 1991 prices, but maybe it was area dependant. I'm still not sure if you get what I meant, but let's end it here.
> I don't know if you have time to read it... I did, maybe you'll read my response. I realy like our discussion as it also helps me define my own opinion.
>(Netherlands...BTW, what's the difference between Netherlands and > Holland? Same thing?) Holland is the largest of the original 7 provinces that constituted the Republic of the Netherlands when it was formed in 1579. Three of the four most important cities are located there as is about 25% of the population. Finally it has the longest maritime history together with Zeeland, making it almost synonymous in the rest of the world. It's like England and Great Brittain.
>>About capitalism: I think the average citizen can only be >>sufficently protected in a properly functioning democracy.
> In particular, majorities can oppress minorities under a democracy. I agree with you on this one, best demonstrated in Germany in 1933. But in surpressing minorities overall democracy does not have a very bad track-record, compared to the other systems.
>When you are living in a small country, with possibly few ethnic >groups, the problems aren't that serious. But it is problematic for >large countries with tens of millions lined up on opposite sides. An ethnic conflict can be volatile on any scale, see the basques in Spain. Still I think that in a true democracy political divisions would not be along ethnical/cultural lines. I see political parties as groups of people who have similar ideas on ways to rule a country. This should lead to a spectrum of parties from left-wing socialism, to ultra-convervative.
>It is my opinion that that democracy is the cause of many civil wars. I do not agree with you here. >A lot of the civil wars start when some minority group is oppressed >and has no other choice since the political system does not cater to >their views. I do agree with you here, but fail to see the link with democracy. I a system divided along socialist-convervative lines, for the conservatives to gain a mayority, they will need the support of the conservatives of all significant ethnic groups, giving the smaller groups a very important role as they are necesary for mayority rule. A system divided along ethnical lines will not work in the long term, as there is no agreement within the ethnical groups on policies to run a country.
>I think the far-future solution is anarchism. I'm not going to go >into that since it is not relevant now. A lot of people situate anarchism at the leftish point of the political spectrum, but I think it would actually be more like ultra-capitalism, and therefore more a rightish thing. Communism-socialism-conservatism-liberalis m-capita lism-anarchism Is what my spectrum looks like, but maybe it wraps around at the ends? I think the true value of democracy is that you get a little of all the above, depending on what coalitions are formed between elections to create a mayority.
>The problem is that people (at least most of them) can be >manipulated. What needs to happen is for people to be more aware. I agree. I think it's one of the great challenges of democracy.
>I don't think this is as big of a problem as it seems. All you need >to do is to ban donations and put limits on "personal gifts". And you >make everything transparent (eg. anyone who runs for office needs to >disclose their receipts, expenses, etc). That is how it works around here.
>If all you could do with money is to buy stuff, it's value will >plummet. That's exactly how I want it to be. In a democracy power = votes. Given a system where voting is anonymous, and therefore votes can not be bought, the rich will not be the rulers. The only power a company has is though it's employees, as they are voters, and they have a stake in the company surviving.
>I don't really know how feasible this is in large countries. >The reason people ha
You would have prefered that they did not make the movies? I like that they took the risk, a now we have 3 very nice films. And when someone makes a lot of money from it, I hope Peter Jackson is one of them. The EE versions were one of the few DVD's I thought were not overpriced for what they offered. Apperently a lot of people tought the same and bought them also, making PJ and New Line and some other people a lot of money. Talk to me about the spiderman DVD, with almost no added value compared to the VHS, I think that was overpriced, even though the movie was o.k.
I see a justice system as serving several functions: 1) As a deterant. When there is a penalty hopefully a lot of people will not commit the crime. 2) As punishment. This is meant to be severe enough that we prevent people from repeating. 3) Revenge. People want to have something nasty done to people who wronged them. 4) To prevent an offender from repeating. If somebody is locked up, then they can not commit many crimes.
I think only 3 and 4 give reason to put someone away for life. For 1 and 2 there is a certain cost/benefit point where having more severe penalties has almost no effect. I am not willing to consider 3 as a sole reason to put someone away for life. I think people deserve a second chance, maybe after 20 years, but people can change. If you take into account reason 4 then there are cases where you need to keep somebody locked up for life, because he/she is a danger.
If you think reason 3 alone should be enough to put someone away for life, we disagree and I understand your point of view, only I do not share it. If you have another reason, please make it clear to me.
As someone who has spent a lot of time the last three years (as a job) listening to this stuff - amazing what you can learn just by listening - I believe the bong bing bong is specificly V.92.
I am not from the USA, and to me your opinion seems very odd, therefore I want to ask you four questions:
1) If you do not want to let him get out, what do you want, a life in prison or a death penalty?
2) If you mean a life in prison, are you willing to consider the financial and social consequences, as at this moment your country already has the highest number of people in jail and the most severe penalties of any western nation. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1494726.stm Prison populations (per 100,000) EU average is 88 England and Wales top with 128 Finland is lowest at 52 USA has world high of 702 You might end up putting a very significant portion of your population in jail.
3) If you mean the death penalty, what number of errors and innocently convicted are you willing to accept?
4) What result do you want to achieve with your justice system? What do you call justice? I could have murderer someone after my car was stolen, do you think putting the death penalty, or life on every crime would help? Burglary, speeding? It does not prove anything, but the USA has the highest number of convicts, the severest penalties (only one with death penalty) and the highest crime rates in the western world. (for example murder rates: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_mur_cap)
Hey, they took a BIG risk having some rather unknown NZ people make a LOTR movie voor A LOT of money. This gamble just payed off. Remember the Peter Jackson first had a contract with some other studio (can't remember) but they wanted to do the film in 2 episodes, and did not want to go though with it alter, so PJ ended up with New Line, and they took the gamble. Having this gamble pay off big time, might have opened options for other projects, that previously would not have been considered.
The real heavy duty solutions are all 64 bit, Opteron, Athlon 64FX and Itanium. These I compare to the 386. The Athlon64 will not give you real heavy duty performance, but will allow you to run the same apps as the real heavy duty systems. Just like the 386SX. By having a cheaper motherboard it can be sold to those who do not need the true heavy duty power. For existing apps it does not offer a big performance increase compared to existing systems, be it Athlon XP/Pentium for the Athlon64, or 286 for the 386SX. Both the Athlon64 and the 386SX are not targetted at the heavy duty market. They were meant as the cheapest possible upgrade path to the new technology, with performance and price to match the previous generation. In 1991 my dad bought an 286-20Mhz with 2Mb RAM as it did outperform the equally expensive 386SX-16Mhz with 1 Mb. But in 1-2 years he regretted the choice as the 386SX could have been upgraded to run Win3.11, Word6, use UMB, etc. while the 286 was already at the end of its options when bought, no matter that he could have plugged in up to 16 Mb. (memory prices had come down) That's the analogy I'm trying to make, even though I have no idea if the Athlon 64 will find the same market nice as the 386SX.
The OS does not need to be updated very often, only the data, so you need to keep that in RAM. This has some drawbacks in case of a power outage, but with current tech I think it's not a big problem, if you need a good connection to some central system anyway, for ads, streamin g video, and whatever else.
I am by no means an expert in your field, so this might sound stupid, but if you need to store and change it frequently you could do this in RAM maybe. Memory cheap enough for it to be able to store a 2 hr divx in a 1Gb ram or something like that. If you need to update it frequently I suppose you have some kind of connection where you could download from in case of a power outage. You might need something smart like being able to broadcast the content to all systems simultaniously after a power outage.
I'm just trying to come up with a solid state solution to your problem.
Then you did not understand my analogy, I was talking about being able to buy something now that will be able to run 64 bit software (win xp-64, suse linux 64) just like an 386SX could run 386 code, but a 386SX system was much cheaper to produce was therefore able to compete directly with the 286 on price. The SX was the end of the 286 as the Athlon 64 will be the end of the Athlon XP, and maybe the Pentium too. Athlon XP - 286 Athlon 64 - 386SX Athlon 64 FX - 386
I realy liked the way Borland were going with C++Builder, Delphi and Kylix, until Windows XP and.Net and VS.Net came along. It has taken Borland 2 years to produce C#Builder.Net and other.Net stuff, essentially to catch up.
About WordPerfect: I don't know what exacly happened, but I do know that NOT having a Windows 3 version killed it. Technically it's a real solid product. They did a mayor overhaul from 5.1 to 6.0 and haven't changed it much since. I can open a WP 10 file in WP6 for DOS. They only have been tweaking the interface and been delivering it for new versions of windows. They didn't need to add any essential features as it can do everything. Like when multipage printing and folding schematics were all the rage in the new Word XP, WP 6 for DOS already had those in 1993. Better stop here, or this will become a very long and boring post.
OFF-TOPIC:
About capitalism: I think the average citizen can only be sufficently protected in a properly functioning democracy. Here the legislative force only has to answer to the representation of the people, and those in turn to the people themselves. I think goverment should have absolutely NO TIES to anything but the voters. No campain sponsoring, no investment in/owner of any business, not a shareholder. I know there is this gray area where a private person with an agenda and a lot of money can do a "personal gift" to a politician, that would still further that personal agenda. I haven't thought that thru yet. There will always be richer and poorer people, but the rules of the democracy should be constructed in such a way as to make it as hard as possible for a rich person to buy influence. democracy can be done in a lot of different ways, I realy like the political system in my country, The Netherlands, but I fear the talking of changing it, "to have the politics closer to the people". I like nation wide tallying of votes, not on a per state basis. I like the fact that politicians can not have an active stake in a company, even though there are some loopholes, they sometimes result in a national scandal if discovered. I like the equal representation, not the 'winner takes all' aproach. I like election campains being sponsored largely by government/tax payers money. Every party, independant of it's financial situation, get's money, if it can find enough voters who will become members.
Nobody is perfect, and I can also find a lot of improvement in our current system, both the dutch democratic system and capitalism. I think capitalism can only work between countries with sufficiently matching legal and gouvernemental systems. capitalism *assumes* a level playing field. If that is absent it will first need to be created with regulation. Only within those bounderies can capitalism function.
If your theory is correct that democracy and capitalism do not go toghether and capitalism will destroy the democracy, then after it has degraded into another political system there will be eventualy a revolt of some sort. Maybe we'll find some better system in the future, but until now it's the best we've come up with, or do you suggest an alternative?
Hmmmm, it has become a very long and boring post afterall, Sorry, I seem to be good at that.
The book was written before the war (WW II) and only published in parts after the war when The Hobbit became a succes. Until then it was deemed to expensive to publish because of thew post war paper shortage. The Hobbit was written after Lord Of The Rings and a lot of other stuff to introduce Tolkiens children to the greater epic, but was published first as it was small enough and a good story on it's own.
The Athlon 64 FX - Athlon 64 XXXX+ relation is just like the 386DX - 386SX relation, it alows for a cheaper motherboard/memory design, while still being able to run all the AMD64 code, altough a little slower. It's essentially a normal Pentium/Athlon XP but able to run AMD 64 if you need to, just like the 386 SX was a 286 able to run 386 code. Plesae note I'm talking supposed function here, not internal design.
> Diskless would be nice, of course, but can you imagine the catastrophe > if your NFS/BOOTP/whatever server went down?
Just use some CompactFlash as disk, 32 Mb or larger will do fine for an embedded linux system (SDL graphics, tinyhttp server if need be). I have used the SSV systems for this kind of thing. http://www.ssv-embedded.de/
My point is that everytime MS brings out a new OS, it put's out new versions of their other applications using the new features of the OS.
Meanwhile their competitors need to scramble to start making a new version supporting the new OS, probably being kept in the dark as long as possible about the new features. When the cometition release a new version after 1-2 years people only buy it if it's not equal but MUCH better as MS competing offering. This means getting whiped out if you do not offer anything superior, beging equal will not be good enough, so the market place is tilted in MS favour because of their OS monopoly. Maybe some execs also made bad decision, but it think ALL exec's (and other humans) do that from time to time. MS just has the money and the OS monopoly to try again and they every now and then they hit the jackpot.
The pattern as I see it: MS-DOS 6-doublespace -> Stacker killed, 386Max killed Windows 3-Word6,Excel6 -> Wordperfect killed, Lotus 123 killed Windows 95-IE -> Netscape killed, almost killed Norton Windows XP-VS.Net -> Borland, Nero, Symantec, RealNetworks maybe killed Several versions do not qualify (98, ME) as they did not have enough new features that people upgraded. I'm not sure if DOS3, 4, NT3, 3.5, 4, or 2000 killed anything significant.
Which versions: WordPerfect 9 and C++Builder 5 FYI While not the most recent versions 10 and 6 offer not much improvement. C#Builder and CBuilderX are only just out, I'm still thinking about buying.
OFF TOPIC I
I do noet agree with your anti capitalism stance. It's a flawed system, but we have not come up with anything better yet and a lot of saveguards ar in place to protect us from it's excesses. It has currently at least 3 problems: 1) The speed of software/hardware is to high compared to the legislative system. 2) In the USA and some other places the saveguards are not working properly because of faltering democratic principles, giving rise to mingling of interests between politics, legislative arm, executive arm, business and people. 3) Internationalisation, while also having some benefist (if you don't like te DMCA, host somewhere else) it has the drawback of allowing businesses with bad habits to gravitate towards legislative systems that have no/less saveguards.
OFF-TOPIC II
--obviously you survived AGAIN -- That's why I use the name;-) You at least get the reference, most people today seemt to think it's some only team communication tool or something. SQ0 is nice btw. - http://www.wiw.org/%7Ejess/roger.html
Off-TOPIC III I do have a dual boot system, but find myself a lot on windows as my employer is shop mainly targetting ms-windows. Did some small linux projects, but those were embedded systems, so C++Kylix was not usefull (and maybe to immature?)
A good UI should have the wizard ANd the 80 clickable options under the 'Advanced' button. Or something like that. But UI is much more as only the number of user inputs per window as another poster points out (internationalisation for example)
It was in Kalkar, and it was a "conventional" uranium to plutonium conversion reactor (for nuclear weapon production I think). It's now an amusement park: http://www.kernwasserwunderland.de/ It has nothing to do with the technology discussed here.
I believe North America has a few more as 3 countries on it.
Maybe not the best source, but
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/na.htm
North America, the 3rd largest continent, includes Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the United States, all the countries of Central America and the island countries and dependencies of the Caribbean.
This hasn't been a problem with Notepad for a long time, but until XP the 32k/64k limit used to be. I mean with previous versions of notepad you can not open files larger as 64kb, and only edit files smaller as 32 kb. When trying to edit files between 32 and 64 kb it will complain that it does not have enough memory and advise you to close the other programs you have running.
As shown in a lot of developing countries. Capitalism and the free market only work in a system woth strong institutions and functioning laws. It's why the IMF's policies have failed a lot in the past. You need things like a SEC, FCC, FTC, National reserve, working anti-corruption measures, etc. before you can have a valid operating free market. Things don't work in an anarchistic free-for-all. You need regulations to level the playing field.
I'll bite. The key to Microsoft's succes has been in my view their leveraging of their OS monopoly, and their unfair business practices. I'll give you a few examples.
Stacker: MS worked with them for a while to include the tech into DOS. Then this cooperation stopped and DOS was equipped with doublespace. Eventually Stacker won this case and was awarded 165 Million IIRC.
Wordperfect: Microsoft used the introduction of Windows 3 to push Word. When Windows 3 came out WP had no version for it. I don't know if this was part WP's own stupidity or they were kept in the dark by MS.
Netscape: Bundling the browser with the Os, just because it's unseparately. I beleive they have been found guilty on misusing their monopoly in this case.
Borland C++ Builder/Delphi. Visual Studio.Net looks more like these products as it looks like VS 6. The only problem Borland always had is that is was lagging behind, because it could never have a new version out together with the introduction of a new Windows version. Again just like WP probably kept in the dark for as long as possible giving the competing MS product a head start of about a year.
Playstation/GameCube MS is now at a point where they can just keep throwing money at until the opposition goes broke. They could give Xbox away for free, they just don't do that because then a lot of buyers would be outside the intended audience.
These are just a few I get excited about, mainly because I still think WordPerfect and Borland C++Builder superior producs, I have legal copies of those. For developing VS.Net 2003 is finally gettting interesting too. Of OO I only use Calc because Quatro Pro is worse, but because it's an MS-Office clone it's to clumsy and simple for my wordprocessing taste. I might some day buy MS-Office for Excel. Oh and I'm typing this in Firebird.
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The big thing about the metric system is that you have only one unit to measure a property in.
Length goes in meters. From Petameters to picometers. And it's naturally in sync with the decimal notation, 0.2 will always mean 2 decisomethings. 3000 will mean 3 kilosomething.
Then the US/imperial/CSG systems use a lot of units to measure one property, just look at lenght. You have to know how much inch go in a feet, how much feet in a yard, how much yards on a rod, how much rods in a mile. And then there are things like furlong, hand, fathom, league.
And when taking the same properties in 2 or 3 dimensions, it goes into only to square foot/inch/mile/yard and cubic foor/inch/mile/yard, but also acres, US and imperial gallons, cords, pints, bushels, quarts, pecks and barrels.
From my point of view I prefer 1 unit to the 18+ I have to remember in the US/imperial/CSG system.
Because of using a decimal number system all this is very prone to getting long fractional decimal numbers and rounding errors. I know there are some non-decimal notations, like 3'7", to get around this in some cases.
As for temperature, I do not have a problem with Fahrenheit over Celsius or Kelvin, because there is only one unit, and it's notation is decimal. Or there should be some odd unit for 1/540 or 93 Fahrenheit that I am not aware of. In some areas the SI notation would come in handy, like for example astronomical temperatures, or super-conductivity physics, but for everyday use I have no real preference. All you have to remember is that 32 Fahrenheit = 0 Celsius and 9 fahrenheit in 5 celsius. It's almost 1 Fahrenheit = 0.5 Celsius, maybe that's why my central heating system works in steps of 0.5 celsius, hmmmm....
The odd one out is indeed time, maybe it survives to this day because there is a widely accepted non-decimal notation, like 4-12-2003 19:03:12, and day/month/year do not have a decimal, but fixed relationship anyway. Units like lenght, time and weight are much more arbitrairy.
I agree with you on almost all points you present, I only have a different memory on 1991 prices, but maybe it was area dependant.
I'm still not sure if you get what I meant, but let's end it here.
> I don't know if you have time to read it...
I did, maybe you'll read my response.
I realy like our discussion as it also helps me define my own opinion.
>(Netherlands...BTW, what's the difference between Netherlands and
> Holland? Same thing?) Holland is the largest of the original 7 provinces that constituted the Republic of the Netherlands when it was formed in 1579. Three of the four most important cities are located there as is about 25% of the population. Finally it has the longest maritime history together with Zeeland, making it almost synonymous in the rest of the world. It's like England and Great Brittain.
>>About capitalism: I think the average citizen can only be
>>sufficently protected in a properly functioning democracy.
> In particular, majorities can oppress minorities under a democracy.
I agree with you on this one, best demonstrated in Germany in 1933.
But in surpressing minorities overall democracy does not have a very bad track-record, compared to the other systems.
>When you are living in a small country, with possibly few ethnic
>groups, the problems aren't that serious. But it is problematic for
>large countries with tens of millions lined up on opposite sides.
An ethnic conflict can be volatile on any scale, see the basques in Spain. Still I think that in a true democracy political divisions would not be along ethnical/cultural lines. I see political parties as groups of people who have similar ideas on ways to rule a country. This should lead to a spectrum of parties from left-wing socialism, to ultra-convervative.
>It is my opinion that that democracy is the cause of many civil wars.
I do not agree with you here.
>A lot of the civil wars start when some minority group is oppressed >and has no other choice since the political system does not cater to
>their views.
I do agree with you here, but fail to see the link with democracy.
I a system divided along socialist-convervative lines, for the conservatives to gain a mayority, they will need the support of the conservatives of all significant ethnic groups, giving the smaller groups a very important role as they are necesary for mayority rule.
A system divided along ethnical lines will not work in the long term, as there is no agreement within the ethnical groups on policies to run a country.
>I think the far-future solution is anarchism. I'm not going to go
>into that since it is not relevant now.
A lot of people situate anarchism at the leftish point of the political spectrum, but I think it would actually be more like ultra-capitalism, and therefore more a rightish thing.
Communism-socialism-conservatism-liberalis m-capita lism-anarchism
Is what my spectrum looks like, but maybe it wraps around at the ends?
I think the true value of democracy is that you get a little of all the above, depending on what coalitions are formed between elections to create a mayority.
>The problem is that people (at least most of them) can be
>manipulated. What needs to happen is for people to be more aware.
I agree. I think it's one of the great challenges of democracy.
>I don't think this is as big of a problem as it seems. All you need
>to do is to ban donations and put limits on "personal gifts". And you
>make everything transparent (eg. anyone who runs for office needs to >disclose their receipts, expenses, etc).
That is how it works around here.
>If all you could do with money is to buy stuff, it's value will
>plummet.
That's exactly how I want it to be. In a democracy power = votes. Given a system where voting is anonymous, and therefore votes can not be bought, the rich will not be the rulers.
The only power a company has is though it's employees, as they are voters, and they have a stake in the company surviving.
>I don't really know how feasible this is in large countries.
>The reason people ha
You would have prefered that they did not make the movies?
I like that they took the risk, a now we have 3 very nice films.
And when someone makes a lot of money from it, I hope Peter Jackson is one of them.
The EE versions were one of the few DVD's I thought were not overpriced for what they offered. Apperently a lot of people tought the same and bought them also, making PJ and New Line and some other people a lot of money.
Talk to me about the spiderman DVD, with almost no added value compared to the VHS, I think that was overpriced, even though the movie was o.k.
I see a justice system as serving several functions:
1) As a deterant. When there is a penalty hopefully a lot of people will not commit the crime.
2) As punishment. This is meant to be severe enough that we prevent people from repeating.
3) Revenge. People want to have something nasty done to people who wronged them.
4) To prevent an offender from repeating. If somebody is locked up, then they can not commit many crimes.
I think only 3 and 4 give reason to put someone away for life. For 1 and 2 there is a certain cost/benefit point where having more severe penalties has almost no effect.
I am not willing to consider 3 as a sole reason to put someone away for life. I think people deserve a second chance, maybe after 20 years, but people can change.
If you take into account reason 4 then there are cases where you need to keep somebody locked up for life, because he/she is a danger.
If you think reason 3 alone should be enough to put someone away for life, we disagree and I understand your point of view, only I do not share it. If you have another reason, please make it clear to me.
As someone who has spent a lot of time the last three years (as a job) listening to this stuff - amazing what you can learn just by listening - I believe the bong bing bong is specificly V.92.
I am not from the USA, and to me your opinion seems very odd, therefore I want to ask you four questions:
m
1) If you do not want to let him get out, what do you want, a life in prison or a death penalty?
2) If you mean a life in prison, are you willing to consider the financial and social consequences, as at this moment your country already has the highest number of people in jail and the most severe penalties of any western nation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1494726.st
Prison populations (per 100,000)
EU average is 88
England and Wales top with 128
Finland is lowest at 52
USA has world high of 702
You might end up putting a very significant portion of your population in jail.
3) If you mean the death penalty, what number of errors and innocently convicted are you willing to accept?
4) What result do you want to achieve with your justice system? What do you call justice? I could have murderer someone after my car was stolen, do you think putting the death penalty, or life on every crime would help? Burglary, speeding? It does not prove anything, but the USA has the highest number of convicts, the severest penalties (only one with death penalty) and the highest crime rates in the western world.
(for example murder rates: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_mur_cap)
Hey, they took a BIG risk having some rather unknown NZ people make a LOTR movie voor A LOT of money. This gamble just payed off.
Remember the Peter Jackson first had a contract with some other studio (can't remember) but they wanted to do the film in 2 episodes, and did not want to go though with it alter, so PJ ended up with New Line, and they took the gamble.
Having this gamble pay off big time, might have opened options for other projects, that previously would not have been considered.
The real heavy duty solutions are all 64 bit, Opteron, Athlon 64FX and Itanium. These I compare to the 386.
The Athlon64 will not give you real heavy duty performance, but will allow you to run the same apps as the real heavy duty systems. Just like the 386SX. By having a cheaper motherboard it can be sold to those who do not need the true heavy duty power. For existing apps it does not offer a big performance increase compared to existing systems, be it Athlon XP/Pentium for the Athlon64, or 286 for the 386SX.
Both the Athlon64 and the 386SX are not targetted at the heavy duty market. They were meant as the cheapest possible upgrade path to the new technology, with performance and price to match the previous generation.
In 1991 my dad bought an 286-20Mhz with 2Mb RAM as it did outperform the equally expensive 386SX-16Mhz with 1 Mb. But in 1-2 years he regretted the choice as the 386SX could have been upgraded to run Win3.11, Word6, use UMB, etc. while the 286 was already at the end of its options when bought, no matter that he could have plugged in up to 16 Mb. (memory prices had come down)
That's the analogy I'm trying to make, even though I have no idea if the Athlon 64 will find the same market nice as the 386SX.
The OS does not need to be updated very often, only the data, so you need to keep that in RAM. This has some drawbacks in case of a power outage, but with current tech I think it's not a big problem, if you need a good connection to some central system anyway, for ads, streamin g video, and whatever else.
I am by no means an expert in your field, so this might sound stupid, but if you need to store and change it frequently you could do this in RAM maybe. Memory cheap enough for it to be able to store a 2 hr divx in a 1Gb ram or something like that. If you need to update it frequently I suppose you have some kind of connection where you could download from in case of a power outage. You might need something smart like being able to broadcast the content to all systems simultaniously after a power outage.
I'm just trying to come up with a solid state solution to your problem.
Then you did not understand my analogy, I was talking about being able to buy something now that will be able to run 64 bit software (win xp-64, suse linux 64) just like an 386SX could run 386 code, but a 386SX system was much cheaper to produce was therefore able to compete directly with the 286 on price. The SX was the end of the 286 as the Athlon 64 will be the end of the Athlon XP, and maybe the Pentium too.
Athlon XP - 286
Athlon 64 - 386SX
Athlon 64 FX - 386
I realy liked the way Borland were going with C++Builder, Delphi and Kylix, until Windows XP and .Net and VS.Net came along. It has taken Borland 2 years to produce C#Builder.Net and other .Net stuff, essentially to catch up.
About WordPerfect: I don't know what exacly happened, but I do know that NOT having a Windows 3 version killed it.
Technically it's a real solid product. They did a mayor overhaul from 5.1 to 6.0 and haven't changed it much since. I can open a WP 10 file in WP6 for DOS. They only have been tweaking the interface and been delivering it for new versions of windows. They didn't need to add any essential features as it can do everything. Like when multipage printing and folding schematics were all the rage in the new Word XP, WP 6 for DOS already had those in 1993. Better stop here, or this will become a very long and boring post.
OFF-TOPIC:
About capitalism: I think the average citizen can only be sufficently protected in a properly functioning democracy. Here the legislative force only has to answer to the representation of the people, and those in turn to the people themselves. I think goverment should have absolutely NO TIES to anything but the voters. No campain sponsoring, no investment in/owner of any business, not a shareholder.
I know there is this gray area where a private person with an agenda and a lot of money can do a "personal gift" to a politician, that would still further that personal agenda. I haven't thought that thru yet.
There will always be richer and poorer people, but the rules of the democracy should be constructed in such a way as to make it as hard as possible for a rich person to buy influence.
democracy can be done in a lot of different ways,
I realy like the political system in my country, The Netherlands, but I fear the talking of changing it, "to have the politics closer to the people".
I like nation wide tallying of votes, not on a per state basis.
I like the fact that politicians can not have an active stake in a company, even though there are some loopholes, they sometimes result in a national scandal if discovered.
I like the equal representation, not the 'winner takes all' aproach.
I like election campains being sponsored largely by government/tax payers money. Every party, independant of it's financial situation, get's money, if it can find enough voters who will become members.
Nobody is perfect, and I can also find a lot of improvement in our current system, both the dutch democratic system and capitalism. I think capitalism can only work between countries with sufficiently matching legal and gouvernemental systems. capitalism *assumes* a level playing field. If that is absent it will first need to be created with regulation. Only within those bounderies can capitalism function.
If your theory is correct that democracy and capitalism do not go toghether and capitalism will destroy the democracy, then after it has degraded into another political system there will be eventualy a revolt of some sort. Maybe we'll find some better system in the future, but until now it's the best we've come up with, or do you suggest an alternative?
Hmmmm, it has become a very long and boring post afterall, Sorry, I seem to be good at that.
Adriaan.
The book was written before the war (WW II) and only published in parts after the war when The Hobbit became a succes. Until then it was deemed to expensive to publish because of thew post war paper shortage.
The Hobbit was written after Lord Of The Rings and a lot of other stuff to introduce Tolkiens children to the greater epic, but was published first as it was small enough and a good story on it's own.
Adriaan.
The Athlon 64 FX - Athlon 64 XXXX+ relation is just like the
386DX - 386SX relation, it alows for a cheaper motherboard/memory design, while still being able to run all the AMD64 code, altough a little slower. It's essentially a normal Pentium/Athlon XP but able to run AMD 64 if you need to, just like the 386 SX was a 286 able to run 386 code.
Plesae note I'm talking supposed function here, not internal design.
> Diskless would be nice, of course, but can you imagine the catastrophe > if your NFS/BOOTP/whatever server went down?
Just use some CompactFlash as disk, 32 Mb or larger will do fine for an embedded linux system (SDL graphics, tinyhttp server if need be).
I have used the SSV systems for this kind of thing.
http://www.ssv-embedded.de/
My point is that everytime MS brings out a new OS, it put's out new versions of their other applications using the new features of the OS.
;-)
Meanwhile their competitors need to scramble to start making a new version supporting the new OS, probably being kept in the dark as long as possible about the new features.
When the cometition release a new version after 1-2 years people only buy it if it's not equal but MUCH better as MS competing offering. This means getting whiped out if you do not offer anything superior, beging equal will not be good enough, so the market place is tilted in MS favour because of their OS monopoly.
Maybe some execs also made bad decision, but it think ALL exec's (and other humans) do that from time to time. MS just has the money and the OS monopoly to try again and they every now and then they hit the jackpot.
The pattern as I see it:
MS-DOS 6-doublespace -> Stacker killed, 386Max killed
Windows 3-Word6,Excel6 -> Wordperfect killed, Lotus 123 killed
Windows 95-IE -> Netscape killed, almost killed Norton
Windows XP-VS.Net -> Borland, Nero, Symantec, RealNetworks maybe killed
Several versions do not qualify (98, ME) as they did not have enough new features that people upgraded. I'm not sure if DOS3, 4, NT3, 3.5, 4, or 2000 killed anything significant.
Which versions: WordPerfect 9 and C++Builder 5 FYI
While not the most recent versions 10 and 6 offer not much improvement. C#Builder and CBuilderX are only just out, I'm still thinking about buying.
OFF TOPIC I
I do noet agree with your anti capitalism stance. It's a flawed system, but we have not come up with anything better yet and a lot of saveguards ar in place to protect us from it's excesses.
It has currently at least 3 problems:
1) The speed of software/hardware is to high compared to the legislative system.
2) In the USA and some other places the saveguards are not working properly because of faltering democratic principles, giving rise to mingling of interests between politics, legislative arm, executive arm, business and people.
3) Internationalisation, while also having some benefist (if you don't like te DMCA, host somewhere else) it has the drawback of allowing businesses with bad habits to gravitate towards legislative systems that have no/less saveguards.
OFF-TOPIC II
--obviously you survived AGAIN -- That's why I use the name
You at least get the reference, most people today seemt to think it's some only team communication tool or something.
SQ0 is nice btw. - http://www.wiw.org/%7Ejess/roger.html
Off-TOPIC III
I do have a dual boot system, but find myself a lot on windows as my employer is shop mainly targetting ms-windows. Did some small linux projects, but those were embedded systems, so C++Kylix was not usefull (and maybe to immature?)
A good UI should have the wizard ANd the 80 clickable options under the 'Advanced' button. Or something like that.
But UI is much more as only the number of user inputs per window as another poster points out (internationalisation for example)
Adriaan
At least this will give the shopping mall music/ 'muzak' new options
thank you I always wondered what the difference was.
It was in Kalkar, and it was a "conventional" uranium to plutonium conversion reactor (for nuclear weapon production I think). It's now an amusement park:
http://www.kernwasserwunderland.de/
It has nothing to do with the technology discussed here.
I believe North America has a few more as 3 countries on it.
m
Maybe not the best source, but
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/na.ht
North America, the 3rd largest continent, includes Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the United States, all the countries of Central America and the island countries and dependencies of the Caribbean.
This hasn't been a problem with Notepad for a long time, but until XP the 32k/64k limit used to be.
I mean with previous versions of notepad you can not open files larger as 64kb, and only edit files smaller as 32 kb. When trying to edit files between 32 and 64 kb it will complain that it does not have enough memory and advise you to close the other programs you have running.
As shown in a lot of developing countries. Capitalism and the free market only work in a system woth strong institutions and functioning laws.
It's why the IMF's policies have failed a lot in the past. You need things like a SEC, FCC, FTC, National reserve, working anti-corruption measures, etc. before you can have a valid operating free market. Things don't work in an anarchistic free-for-all.
You need regulations to level the playing field.
I'll bite.
The key to Microsoft's succes has been in my view their leveraging of their OS monopoly, and their unfair business practices.
I'll give you a few examples.
Stacker:
MS worked with them for a while to include the tech into DOS.
Then this cooperation stopped and DOS was equipped with doublespace.
Eventually Stacker won this case and was awarded 165 Million IIRC.
Wordperfect:
Microsoft used the introduction of Windows 3 to push Word. When Windows 3 came out WP had no version for it. I don't know if this was part WP's own stupidity or they were kept in the dark by MS.
Netscape:
Bundling the browser with the Os, just because it's unseparately. I beleive they have been found guilty on misusing their monopoly in this case.
Borland C++ Builder/Delphi.
Visual Studio.Net looks more like these products as it looks like VS 6. The only problem Borland always had is that is was lagging behind, because it could never have a new version out together with the introduction of a new Windows version. Again just like WP probably kept in the dark for as long as possible giving the competing MS product a head start of about a year.
Playstation/GameCube
MS is now at a point where they can just keep throwing money at until the opposition goes broke. They could give Xbox away for free, they just don't do that because then a lot of buyers would be outside the intended audience.
These are just a few I get excited about, mainly because I still think WordPerfect and Borland C++Builder superior producs, I have legal copies of those. For developing VS.Net 2003 is finally gettting interesting too. Of OO I only use Calc because Quatro Pro is worse, but because it's an MS-Office clone it's to clumsy and simple for my wordprocessing taste. I might some day buy MS-Office for Excel.
Oh and I'm typing this in Firebird.
Just my 2 euro-cents,
Adriaan