My impression was that in the UK you have to do an MSc/MPhil/etc. first regardless and that requires some coursework.
At Oxford, students wanting to do a DPhil enter as "Probationary Research Students". If they've already done a MSc, they can transfer to DPhil status during their first term; otherwise, they spend a year taking courses, writing a "qualifying dissertation", and transfer to DPhil status at the end of their first year. In practice, many students holding Masters degrees decide to spend their first year taking courses anyway.
The idea behind this process is that being granted the status of DPhil student means that you have demonstrated an ability to do research, and it's hard to judge that based on an undergraduate degree.
In theory, someone could enter Oxford University as an undergraduate student, get their BA three years later, get accepted as a PRS, transfer to DPhil status, and finish their DPhil after a total of five years. In practice, most people who want to do research opt for a 4 year undergraduate MSc program and spend 4 years on their DPhil.
As a show of gratitude companies led by Novell helped sue to stop the free distribution of the BSD operating system
No. Novell acquired the AT&T IP after the lawsuite was already in progress.
It finally made it so that BSD had to remove every bit of code that was related to Unix. This turned into a near fatal blow to BSD
Hardly. Most files from AT&T UNIX were licensed under the terms of the BSD license; only a very few files had to be removed, and they were very easily replaced.
That doesn't apply in this case. The people who have to pay the lawyer's fees (Microsoft) weren't given the option of saying "your fees are crazy, we don't want to hire you".
RTFA people. Microsoft isn't complaining about the fines (or settlements) here. They're complaining about the plaintiff's legal fees (which they're being required to pay).
And, quite frankly, I think they have a point. The lawyer who lead the class action lawsuit may be a really good lawyer, but I don't think his time is worth over $3000 per hour.
Refrigeration - I don't know (benefit of doubt to America then). Automobiles - Germany. Television - Britain. Computers - Britain. Space travel - Russia (or more accurately, competeting sets of Germans working in Russia and America after WWII). The Internet - America.
I never looked at Quebec as having that distinct of a culture unless you include redubbing most American shows into French as being a culture.
Last time I checked the statistics, 20 out of the 25 most watched TV shows in Quebec were produced in Quebec. They have a far more thriving culture than the rest of Canada.
The University of Cambridge. After you get a BA you wait a few years (that's the 'life experience' bit) and you can then buy an MA.
While you're right that they hand out bogus degrees, the MA isn't the bogus one. The BA is bogus.
When you enter Oxford or Cambridge as an undergraduate, you're studying for the degree of MA. The MA is a seven-year course, just as it has been for the past eight hundred years.
After three years, you've finished your lectures, and you get a certificate saying that. This certificate is called a BA. It's not a degree, and it doesn't give you any of the privileges of having a degree (eg, being allowed to mark exams); it's just an affirmation that you've studied for three years and passed some exams.
Yay! Just what the world needs, more archane, archaic taxation systems...
I think you're missing the point. This change simplifies the tax system: Instead of having a special tax exemption for "custom software", there is one sales tax which applies to all software.
This isn't adding a special tax; this is removing a special tax exemption.
Students have zero influence over textbook selection. Teachers pick textbooks based on their own criteria.
How I wish that you were correct. Unfortunately, many institutions are plagued by powerful (and short-sighted) students' unions.
Translation:
on
GPS for GBA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Grey Ninja writes "
I just came across a preview for a new gadget that's going to be demoed at E3, which is a GPS and map attachment for your GBA.
Grey Ninja writes "I work for a company which is trying to find suckers willing to buy our latest toy.
It should be mentioned that you can pre-order now and get $50 off."
If you pre-order now, you'll get $50 off. If you wait until after the release, the price will drop by $100 when we realize that this is useless junk which nobody wants to buy."
I can't imagine very many useful applications for this, but it sure is nifty.
Sounds like junk to me, but they paid for the advertising spot.
Actually, in the textbook field, they can afford to give their work away because they're paid by a university.
It's not that simple. Time spent writing textbooks is time not spent doing teaching or research. Less teaching means that the university needs to hire someone else; less research means less research grants, which will cause problems at institutions which get a large fraction of their income by deducting "overhead costs" from their professors' research grants.
Free textbooks sounds like a nice idea, but I have to wonder if quality will suffer as a result. There is going to be great pressure from student groups to use free textbooks, even if there are better textbooks available. Since the vast majority of authors can't afford to give away their work for free, this will inevitably reduce the competition between textbooks.
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
These already exist. They're called publications. Once you've published something, nobody else can patent it (and you can't either, once a one-year time limit expires).
The only case where someone else could patent a method which you are already using is if you've kept the method a secret -- which is exactly what the patent system is designed to stop.
While there can be no doubt that the actual implementation of the patent system is severely flawed, the overall purpose and approach -- using the granting of monopolies to encourage people to publish their research instead of keeping it as "trade secrets" -- is certainly reasonable.
Anyone see a downside to this besides the annoying move to such a system?
Yes. It wouldn't work.
I send mail from several different places, with several different return addresses. The mail server for foo.com doesn't know anything about most of the email which I (legitimately) send with my @foo.com return address.
Also, there's a huge amount of mangling which happens to email messages. Headers are added, removed, or modified; line breaks are changed; some characters or strings are escaped... you'll have trouble finding something you can rely upon for your hashing.
Re:Horray: First non-linux story in 6 hours
on
For Sale: Lycos.com
·
· Score: 3, Funny
But thank god, slashdot has returned to normal. A sexy search engine story to wet my apatite.
If cvsup && buildworld && installworld is the easy solution, I wonder what he considers this to be: freebsd-update fetch freebsd-update install
Yeah, ok, FreeBSD Update is only about tracking the release branch. But really, this story just covers the standard technique which people have been using for... well, longer than I've been using FreeBSD.
Looking at that resume, I see a mediocre degree (BS) from a mediocre school (UConn) with a mediocre GPA (3.297 -- and why all the digits?). Most people aren't going to look any further.
On the plus side, you've managed to avoid the usual problems (spelling errors, incorrect grammar, poor format), and you do have some reasonable experience (although I personally hate the bulleted lists of passive verbs). But you've obviously got more experience than you list here -- where does your knowledge of SPARC, PPC, and MIPS assembly code come from? (Ok, MIPS assembly is often used as a teaching tool; but I can't imagine anyone teaching using SPARC assembly.)
Unless your education is really stellar, it's just going to be another check box for someone in HR to fill in; put your experience first, and include more details, while saving space in the education section.
Slashdot Mirror
My impression was that in the UK you have to do an MSc/MPhil/etc. first regardless and that requires some coursework.
At Oxford, students wanting to do a DPhil enter as "Probationary Research Students". If they've already done a MSc, they can transfer to DPhil status during their first term; otherwise, they spend a year taking courses, writing a "qualifying dissertation", and transfer to DPhil status at the end of their first year. In practice, many students holding Masters degrees decide to spend their first year taking courses anyway.
The idea behind this process is that being granted the status of DPhil student means that you have demonstrated an ability to do research, and it's hard to judge that based on an undergraduate degree.
In theory, someone could enter Oxford University as an undergraduate student, get their BA three years later, get accepted as a PRS, transfer to DPhil status, and finish their DPhil after a total of five years. In practice, most people who want to do research opt for a 4 year undergraduate MSc program and spend 4 years on their DPhil.
As a show of gratitude companies led by Novell helped sue to stop the free distribution of the BSD operating system
No. Novell acquired the AT&T IP after the lawsuite was already in progress.
It finally made it so that BSD had to remove every bit of code that was related to Unix. This turned into a near fatal blow to BSD
Hardly. Most files from AT&T UNIX were licensed under the terms of the BSD license; only a very few files had to be removed, and they were very easily replaced.
Time dependent translucency?? ... If I control it by the phase of the Moon, can I patent that?
Yes, provided that you can:
1. Explain how this can be implemented (mostly trivial), and
2. Explain why this is useful (rather harder).
we let people earn whatever the market will bear
That doesn't apply in this case. The people who have to pay the lawyer's fees (Microsoft) weren't given the option of saying "your fees are crazy, we don't want to hire you".
RTFA people. Microsoft isn't complaining about the fines (or settlements) here. They're complaining about the plaintiff's legal fees (which they're being required to pay).
And, quite frankly, I think they have a point. The lawyer who lead the class action lawsuit may be a really good lawyer, but I don't think his time is worth over $3000 per hour.
Refrigeration - I don't know (benefit of doubt to America then). Automobiles - Germany. Television - Britain. Computers - Britain. Space travel - Russia (or more accurately, competeting sets of Germans working in Russia and America after WWII). The Internet - America.
Don't forget the Telephone - Canada.
I never looked at Quebec as having that distinct of a culture unless you include redubbing most American shows into French as being a culture.
Last time I checked the statistics, 20 out of the 25 most watched TV shows in Quebec were produced in Quebec. They have a far more thriving culture than the rest of Canada.
The University of Cambridge. After you get a BA you wait a few years (that's the 'life experience' bit) and you can then buy an MA.
While you're right that they hand out bogus degrees, the MA isn't the bogus one. The BA is bogus.
When you enter Oxford or Cambridge as an undergraduate, you're studying for the degree of MA. The MA is a seven-year course, just as it has been for the past eight hundred years.
After three years, you've finished your lectures, and you get a certificate saying that. This certificate is called a BA. It's not a degree, and it doesn't give you any of the privileges of having a degree (eg, being allowed to mark exams); it's just an affirmation that you've studied for three years and passed some exams.
Yay! Just what the world needs, more archane, archaic taxation systems...
I think you're missing the point. This change simplifies the tax system: Instead of having a special tax exemption for "custom software", there is one sales tax which applies to all software.
This isn't adding a special tax; this is removing a special tax exemption.
Students have zero influence over textbook selection. Teachers pick textbooks based on their own criteria.
How I wish that you were correct. Unfortunately, many institutions are plagued by powerful (and short-sighted) students' unions.
Actually, in the textbook field, they can afford to give their work away because they're paid by a university.
It's not that simple. Time spent writing textbooks is time not spent doing teaching or research. Less teaching means that the university needs to hire someone else; less research means less research grants, which will cause problems at institutions which get a large fraction of their income by deducting "overhead costs" from their professors' research grants.
Free textbooks sounds like a nice idea, but I have to wonder if quality will suffer as a result. There is going to be great pressure from student groups to use free textbooks, even if there are better textbooks available. Since the vast majority of authors can't afford to give away their work for free, this will inevitably reduce the competition between textbooks.
Luke Mewburn wrote the new rc.d system for NetBSD.
Give credit to whom it is due: FreeBSD just borrowed the rcorder system from NetBSD.
The perl programs are easier to maintain and modify.
I almost believed you until I reached this point.
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
These already exist. They're called publications. Once you've published something, nobody else can patent it (and you can't either, once a one-year time limit expires).
The only case where someone else could patent a method which you are already using is if you've kept the method a secret -- which is exactly what the patent system is designed to stop.
While there can be no doubt that the actual implementation of the patent system is severely flawed, the overall purpose and approach -- using the granting of monopolies to encourage people to publish their research instead of keeping it as "trade secrets" -- is certainly reasonable.
Why spend all this time travelling across the surface of Mars to get to a crater?
Is there any reason why NASA couldn't have given each rover a few bombs which could be deposited and detonated from a distance?
What was it?
OpenSSH.
Anyone see a downside to this besides the annoying move to such a system?
Yes. It wouldn't work.
I send mail from several different places, with several different return addresses. The mail server for foo.com doesn't know anything about most of the email which I (legitimately) send with my @foo.com return address.
Also, there's a huge amount of mangling which happens to email messages. Headers are added, removed, or modified; line breaks are changed; some characters or strings are escaped... you'll have trouble finding something you can rely upon for your hashing.
But thank god, slashdot has returned to normal. A sexy search engine story to wet my apatite.
Just what you need... some wet calcium fluoride phosphate.
Just the thing to whet one's appetite.
Anybody know if cvsup will ever be rewritten in C instead of Modula-2 or whatever the heck that is?
Yes. It is being done, and there is (mostly) working code.
If cvsup && buildworld && installworld is the easy solution, I wonder what he considers this to be:
freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
Yeah, ok, FreeBSD Update is only about tracking the release branch. But really, this story just covers the standard technique which people have been using for... well, longer than I've been using FreeBSD.
I ie o eae a e ooa ou o o. I ae o o ie o ie u i a ai i e a o ea a ae e oo ie a oee ii.
Would you hire me?
Based on that resume? No.
Looking at that resume, I see a mediocre degree (BS) from a mediocre school (UConn) with a mediocre GPA (3.297 -- and why all the digits?). Most people aren't going to look any further.
On the plus side, you've managed to avoid the usual problems (spelling errors, incorrect grammar, poor format), and you do have some reasonable experience (although I personally hate the bulleted lists of passive verbs). But you've obviously got more experience than you list here -- where does your knowledge of SPARC, PPC, and MIPS assembly code come from? (Ok, MIPS assembly is often used as a teaching tool; but I can't imagine anyone teaching using SPARC assembly.)
Unless your education is really stellar, it's just going to be another check box for someone in HR to fill in; put your experience first, and include more details, while saving space in the education section.