respondents gave Microsoft very high marks for leadership and financial results. But Mr. Gates's personal philanthropy also boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft.
So do the mafia and the Cali drug cartel. The reputation of a company shouldn't be measured by how ruthless or financially successful it is, or how much money their founders give away, it should be measured by whether they comply with the law, innovate, are socially responsible in their business activities, and produce high-quality products.
To satisfy the average per person water usage, you need about 0.3 m^3 / sec flow at 100% extraction efficiency and 100% humidity at room temperature--scale up for less efficiency and humidity. That's in the ballpark.
However, I don't see how you can maintain those flow rates anywhere other than in the countryside.
Based on the size of the Chixculub (sp?) impact crater, they concluded that the heat of re-entering rock on ballistic trajectories would have heated almost the entire atmosphere to incandescence. This is global warming of a sort, I suppose.
You're not reading it correctly. They are talking about widespread wildfires, not "heating the entire atmosphere to incandescence".
anything small enough to hide in a burrow, or agile enough to swim deep underwater for a few days survived (at least in numbers large enough to propagate); everything else was cooked.
Again, that makes no sense, given the pattern of species that actually survived.
Most of us come from the exact-reasoning world -- but most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers.'
Indeed. But the technology to answer those questions has been around for decades, it's just that the database vendors (and academics) were on such a gravy train with relational databases that they simply didn't let anything else in. Gray's own efforts to move in new directions have been far behind the state of the art, but because of his name recognition, he's been getting a lot of press coverage.
Maybe it's true that paradigms only change when their old, powerful proponents retire (or, sadly, get lost with their sailboats).
How much praise was adorned on Linux when it got an O(1) scheduler? NT has had it for over a decade.
Whether the scheduler is O(1) or O(N) or O(N^2) doesn't matter. What matters is that it schedules processes well and does so fast enough. The Linux scheduler has done that for years, while the NT scheduler has always sucked. It looks like they have been incorporating some of the traditional UNIX scheduling heuristics. Whether it works in practice remains to be seen.
Not even a kill -9 would get rid of the wedged process. Why is there even such a thing as "non-interruptible sleep"?
It's there to annoy the users, of course!
Seriously, some of these things are simply not worth doing any better because they are so rare for most users and a lot of work to do differently. And those choices are not made by accident, they are made by prioritizing bug reports and time estimates.
I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with personal computers, today, people aren't laughing at Microsoft products. Yet they don't, and Bill Gates has profited handsomely from this kind of stupidity.
That this is no longer a world of great men, but a world of committees.
Actually, when companies get away with this on a big scale, they get to write history. So, you can look forward to people believing 100 years from now that Bill Gates invented the Internet, object-oriented development, personal computing, graphical user interfaces, and visual development environments. Well, maybe Microsoft will share some of the credit with Steve Jobs, which is just as erroneous.
Yes, this is evil. But you're underestimating the problem if you think it's just Microsoft or that we can stop it by reigning in a single company. Apple does the same thing, for example, as do many other companies.
The only solution is a total overhaul of the patent system.
(As for the BlueJ feature itself, I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be new about it anyway. People have been doing that kind of testing since the days of Smalltalk.)
No, the problem is that incompetently created websites use delicate nonportable nonstandard proprietary software that is only interoperative with one single obsolete platform.
It's only "obsolete" because it was poorly designed in the first place and the vendor had to drop support for it in Vista. Although you can blame the web sites for being stupid and not anticipating that they were going to get screwed by Microsoft, Microsoft is still the primary party at fault here.
And if you think Vista's "advanced technologies" are going to look any better a few years down the road, well, you deserve what you get.
You can't "prove" string theory through an experiment. Even if the experiment works exactly as string theory predicts, it doesn't "prove" anything, it merely fails to disprove string theory.
The best outcome would be if the experiment clearly doesn't work like string theory predicts, because in that case, we'd learn the most from it.
Rubbish. If they haven't been sterilized yogurt and cheese are full of bacteria. They are bacterial cultures for chrissakes. If it wasn't for the bacteria, there wouldn't be any cheese or yogurt!
Of course, cheeses and yogurts are "full of bacteria" when they are being made. However, depending on how they are processed and stored, the product that reaches you may even be completely sterile, or it may contain only a low count of viable bacteria.
How is this different from real life? Computers, stock options, stocks, homes, cars, home appliances, etc. are all sold with the promise that they save/make people lots of money, and they rarely deliver. Lots of people in real life have dreams of being their own boss and becoming independent, and they keep buying stuff supposedly allowing them to do it, but few ever make it. Financially prudent living involves purchasing very little, in real life or Second Life.
Proper pyramid schemes also require more than broken promises of financial wealth, they require a very specific pattern of payment and recruitment, something that doesn't apply to Second Life's business model. Second Life may be a waste of money and it may make false promises of financial riches, but it's not a pyramid scheme.
FWIW, Second Life does have pyramid schemes. They are actually--get this--pyramids that take your money and redistribute it.
Yes, they are common bacteria, known to be not harmful. Also, you eat lots of bacteria in many other foods anyway.
Keep in mind that there are a huge number of bacteria living in you and on you, most of them completely uncharacterized, and many of them probably essential for your health and well being.
A "perfect vacuum" isn't empty; it contains virtual particles, and they slow down light a little. It's possible to reduce the occurrence of virtual particles and light then travels a little faster (at least theoretically). It's not useful, but its just one of many illustrations that there is no such thing as a "perfect vacuum".
It's been done already. Light slows down whenever it passes through anything. It only manages to get up to 299 792 458 ms-1 in a perfect vacuum. Even air slows it a little bit.
Well, actually, even a perfect vacuum slows light down a little.
The speed of light in a vacuum is c or 299,792,458 m/s. This obviously cannot change. [...] How the slowing of light does occur is not by slowing the photon, but by the electrons interfering with the electromagnetic radiation that is light. This gives the illusion of "slower" light.
The view that the speed of light in vacuum is any more fundamental than the speed of light in materials is pretty simplistic. After all, we already know that the speed of light in vacuum is not exactly constant.
Now we have an explanation for all the Sci-Fi movies where the beam from some "ray gun" is visible (let alone moving at a perceptible speed)!
Actually, seeing the beam of a "ray gun" is actually fairly plausible: interactions of whatever is being beamed with air. It's quite reasonable for those to be visible and propagate quite slowly.
Now, I can't help you with space battles.
Re:Because you'll end up at Lisp.
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Combine this with CLOS and generic and functional programming techniques, and you have one of the best languages around for dealing with concepts at a very high level.
Yes, and the ability to create entirely novel sublanguages on a whim is a big problem because people reading your code won't have a clue what it does.
Lisp has its weaknesses, but expressiveness and abstraction are not among them.
No, excessive expressiveness and abstraction are Lisp's weaknesses.
The GPL is the document that grants the right to have your own personal copy of the code, but it's unconditional; you don't have to accept the GPL, or do anything else that would constitute 'agreeing' to it. Everyone has the right to have GPLed software on their machines, granted by the GPL, whether they accept the GPL or not.
Legally, if you copy the software onto your machine, you have "accepted the GPL" in its entirety. It's just that almost all of the terms of the GPL pertain to distribution, so when the GPL says that "you don't need to accept the GPL", that really is just a shorthand for saying "if you don't distribute the software, you don't have to read on". But, still, you have accepted the GPL in its entirety, it's just that most of the terms don't apply to you.
Oh, and for the record, if you, say, have a copy of the code on a CD-ROM, then it's not just the GPL that necessarily gives you the right to have 'a copy of the code on your machine';
No, but the CD copy was made under the GPL, and when the ownership is transferred to you, you assume all obligations under that license.
Business and innovation are getting completely strangled by all this IP rights cr^H^H stuff.
Patents are a minefield, copyrights aren't. Code under the GPL is crystal clear about what you may and may not do with it. If Cisco doesn't comply with the GPL, it's a deliberate, premeditated rip-off of open source developers.
Cisco doesn't even have any moral high ground to stand on, given how possessive they are of their own copyrights, how little they have contributed to the community, and the rate at which they patent and threaten open source through their patents.
So, don't whine to us about how Cisco is "being strangled"--they are the problem, and the fact that they can't even comply with a simple, straightforward, and perfectly clear software license shows that, while they can get vicious about defending their own IP, they don't respect other people's.
It's gotten to the point where any business needs a lawyer first, and accountant second and a functional business model an optional third.
What rock have you been living under? Businesses have always operated that way. Almost any big, successful company has started off by taking someone else's invention or business model (stealing, copying, acquiring, licensing,...) and running with it.
Slashdot Mirror
respondents gave Microsoft very high marks for leadership and financial results. But Mr. Gates's personal philanthropy also boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft.
So do the mafia and the Cali drug cartel. The reputation of a company shouldn't be measured by how ruthless or financially successful it is, or how much money their founders give away, it should be measured by whether they comply with the law, innovate, are socially responsible in their business activities, and produce high-quality products.
To satisfy the average per person water usage, you need about 0.3 m^3 / sec flow at 100% extraction efficiency and 100% humidity at room temperature--scale up for less efficiency and humidity. That's in the ballpark.
However, I don't see how you can maintain those flow rates anywhere other than in the countryside.
Whenever you see anyone filling in an area of uncertainty with a trendy, crisis-du-jour explanation, you should be very sceptical.
There is nothing "trendy" about their hypothesis: global climate change has occurred many times and it's a perfectly reasonable explanation.
The odds that a major socio-economic/political concern today just happens to be related to a mass extinction in the distant past are extremely low
You're being unreasonable and irrational.
Based on the size of the Chixculub (sp?) impact crater, they concluded that the heat of re-entering rock on ballistic trajectories would have heated almost the entire atmosphere to incandescence. This is global warming of a sort, I suppose.
You're not reading it correctly. They are talking about widespread wildfires, not "heating the entire atmosphere to incandescence".
anything small enough to hide in a burrow, or agile enough to swim deep underwater for a few days survived (at least in numbers large enough to propagate); everything else was cooked.
Again, that makes no sense, given the pattern of species that actually survived.
Most of us come from the exact-reasoning world -- but most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers.'
Indeed. But the technology to answer those questions has been around for decades, it's just that the database vendors (and academics) were on such a gravy train with relational databases that they simply didn't let anything else in. Gray's own efforts to move in new directions have been far behind the state of the art, but because of his name recognition, he's been getting a lot of press coverage.
Maybe it's true that paradigms only change when their old, powerful proponents retire (or, sadly, get lost with their sailboats).
why?
How much praise was adorned on Linux when it got an O(1) scheduler? NT has had it for over a decade.
Whether the scheduler is O(1) or O(N) or O(N^2) doesn't matter. What matters is that it schedules processes well and does so fast enough. The Linux scheduler has done that for years, while the NT scheduler has always sucked. It looks like they have been incorporating some of the traditional UNIX scheduling heuristics. Whether it works in practice remains to be seen.
Not even a kill -9 would get rid of the wedged process. Why is there even such a thing as "non-interruptible sleep"?
It's there to annoy the users, of course!
Seriously, some of these things are simply not worth doing any better because they are so rare for most users and a lot of work to do differently. And those choices are not made by accident, they are made by prioritizing bug reports and time estimates.
I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with personal computers, today, people aren't laughing at Microsoft products. Yet they don't, and Bill Gates has profited handsomely from this kind of stupidity.
That this is no longer a world of great men, but a world of committees.
Actually, when companies get away with this on a big scale, they get to write history. So, you can look forward to people believing 100 years from now that Bill Gates invented the Internet, object-oriented development, personal computing, graphical user interfaces, and visual development environments. Well, maybe Microsoft will share some of the credit with Steve Jobs, which is just as erroneous.
Yes, this is evil. But you're underestimating the problem if you think it's just Microsoft or that we can stop it by reigning in a single company. Apple does the same thing, for example, as do many other companies.
The only solution is a total overhaul of the patent system.
(As for the BlueJ feature itself, I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be new about it anyway. People have been doing that kind of testing since the days of Smalltalk.)
No, the problem is that incompetently created websites use delicate nonportable nonstandard proprietary software that is only interoperative with one single obsolete platform.
It's only "obsolete" because it was poorly designed in the first place and the vendor had to drop support for it in Vista. Although you can blame the web sites for being stupid and not anticipating that they were going to get screwed by Microsoft, Microsoft is still the primary party at fault here.
And if you think Vista's "advanced technologies" are going to look any better a few years down the road, well, you deserve what you get.
They haven't even been able to get out Nano ITX in quantity in several years. To me, this looks like it's gonna stay vaporware as well.
You can't "prove" string theory through an experiment. Even if the experiment works exactly as string theory predicts, it doesn't "prove" anything, it merely fails to disprove string theory.
The best outcome would be if the experiment clearly doesn't work like string theory predicts, because in that case, we'd learn the most from it.
Rubbish. If they haven't been sterilized yogurt and cheese are full of bacteria. They are bacterial cultures for chrissakes. If it wasn't for the bacteria, there wouldn't be any cheese or yogurt!
Of course, cheeses and yogurts are "full of bacteria" when they are being made. However, depending on how they are processed and stored, the product that reaches you may even be completely sterile, or it may contain only a low count of viable bacteria.
How is this different from real life? Computers, stock options, stocks, homes, cars, home appliances, etc. are all sold with the promise that they save/make people lots of money, and they rarely deliver. Lots of people in real life have dreams of being their own boss and becoming independent, and they keep buying stuff supposedly allowing them to do it, but few ever make it. Financially prudent living involves purchasing very little, in real life or Second Life.
Proper pyramid schemes also require more than broken promises of financial wealth, they require a very specific pattern of payment and recruitment, something that doesn't apply to Second Life's business model. Second Life may be a waste of money and it may make false promises of financial riches, but it's not a pyramid scheme.
FWIW, Second Life does have pyramid schemes. They are actually--get this--pyramids that take your money and redistribute it.
What, like normal yogurt and cheese?
Yogurt and cheese that aren't specifically meant for that purpose do not consistently contain large numbers of live bacteria; these drinks should.
Yes, they are common bacteria, known to be not harmful. Also, you eat lots of bacteria in many other foods anyway.
Keep in mind that there are a huge number of bacteria living in you and on you, most of them completely uncharacterized, and many of them probably essential for your health and well being.
A "perfect vacuum" isn't empty; it contains virtual particles, and they slow down light a little. It's possible to reduce the occurrence of virtual particles and light then travels a little faster (at least theoretically). It's not useful, but its just one of many illustrations that there is no such thing as a "perfect vacuum".
It's been done already. Light slows down whenever it passes through anything. It only manages to get up to 299 792 458 ms-1 in a perfect vacuum. Even air slows it a little bit.
Well, actually, even a perfect vacuum slows light down a little.
The speed of light in a vacuum is c or 299,792,458 m/s. This obviously cannot change. [...] How the slowing of light does occur is not by slowing the photon, but by the electrons interfering with the electromagnetic radiation that is light. This gives the illusion of "slower" light.
The view that the speed of light in vacuum is any more fundamental than the speed of light in materials is pretty simplistic. After all, we already know that the speed of light in vacuum is not exactly constant.
Now we have an explanation for all the Sci-Fi movies where the beam from some "ray gun" is visible (let alone moving at a perceptible speed)!
Actually, seeing the beam of a "ray gun" is actually fairly plausible: interactions of whatever is being beamed with air. It's quite reasonable for those to be visible and propagate quite slowly.
Now, I can't help you with space battles.
Combine this with CLOS and generic and functional programming techniques, and you have one of the best languages around for dealing with concepts at a very high level.
Yes, and the ability to create entirely novel sublanguages on a whim is a big problem because people reading your code won't have a clue what it does.
Lisp has its weaknesses, but expressiveness and abstraction are not among them.
No, excessive expressiveness and abstraction are Lisp's weaknesses.
The GPL is the document that grants the right to have your own personal copy of the code, but it's unconditional; you don't have to accept the GPL, or do anything else that would constitute 'agreeing' to it. Everyone has the right to have GPLed software on their machines, granted by the GPL, whether they accept the GPL or not.
Legally, if you copy the software onto your machine, you have "accepted the GPL" in its entirety. It's just that almost all of the terms of the GPL pertain to distribution, so when the GPL says that "you don't need to accept the GPL", that really is just a shorthand for saying "if you don't distribute the software, you don't have to read on". But, still, you have accepted the GPL in its entirety, it's just that most of the terms don't apply to you.
Oh, and for the record, if you, say, have a copy of the code on a CD-ROM, then it's not just the GPL that necessarily gives you the right to have 'a copy of the code on your machine';
No, but the CD copy was made under the GPL, and when the ownership is transferred to you, you assume all obligations under that license.
Business and innovation are getting completely strangled by all this IP rights cr^H^H stuff.
...) and running with it.
Patents are a minefield, copyrights aren't. Code under the GPL is crystal clear about what you may and may not do with it. If Cisco doesn't comply with the GPL, it's a deliberate, premeditated rip-off of open source developers.
Cisco doesn't even have any moral high ground to stand on, given how possessive they are of their own copyrights, how little they have contributed to the community, and the rate at which they patent and threaten open source through their patents.
So, don't whine to us about how Cisco is "being strangled"--they are the problem, and the fact that they can't even comply with a simple, straightforward, and perfectly clear software license shows that, while they can get vicious about defending their own IP, they don't respect other people's.
It's gotten to the point where any business needs a lawyer first, and accountant second and a functional business model an optional third.
What rock have you been living under? Businesses have always operated that way. Almost any big, successful company has started off by taking someone else's invention or business model (stealing, copying, acquiring, licensing,