While it is not right for a university to teach only one language, I see a lot of mixing up in the discussion.
There are two big domain areas for people who program computers (call them CompSci, Engineers, or whatever, the terminology is irrelevant).
a) Systems Programming
These are people who write stuff that is gluish in nature, be it kernel algorithms, device drivers or similar things. Even things like Web browsers, text editors, word processors, compilers,...etc. fall in that category. Java is not the right tool for this, but something closer to the operating system and/or the hardware (e.g. C, and even C++). People working on these type of problems require the features and capabilities of these languages.
b) Business Application Programming
These are the people who build higher level applications for end users. These are things such as an accounting application, air line reservation systems, banking systems,...etc. In this case, lower level languages are not the right tool. Having pointers and having to deal with memory leaks stands in the way of delivering business logic. COBOL used to be the language for this, and now Java fills that niche. The businesses hiring these people do not pay them to invent a new process scheduling algorithm, nor make sound come out of a new sound chipset.
If one tries to use a language that is more suited to (a) for (b), or vice versa, then it is the wrong tool for the job, and will stand in the way.
A university graduate of engineering or computer science should be exposed to both types of languages and both types of problems, not just one. When the graduate they can make the decision which one to pursue as a career.
The saleswoman is based in Peru, and a member of the worldwide sales organization. The OLPC partnership is at a corporate level with some marketing or community entity within Intel.
Within Intel, one part (the OLPC liaison) is pro OLPC, seeing it as a growth opportunity, while another (the field sales organization) is anti OLPC because it eats up into their potential sales. I am sure they never talked to each other. Even if they did, corporate politics and turf wars may have ensued, with sales winning this round.
These two things are very common in large corporations (left hand does not know what the right hand does, and turf wars and power struggles between different organizations).
When Negroponte made this public, it was embarrassing to Intel, and eventually the money balance tipped the scale and they withdrew from the OLPC.
I agree with you that greed and desperation are motivations for scams, internet or otherwise. Add to that ignorance and naiveté as well.
On my site, I published some internet scams and fraud that appear in my inbox. The response is overwhelming. People are actually falling for them. Many are from third world countries and poor. Some are from Western countries and greedy. Some were laid off by their employers and desperate.
Many people mistake my site for the fake lottery and ask if their ticket number is genuine. Some post phone numbers and email addresses.
The same is true in other cultures too, such as some rural areas in the Middle East, observant religious people, desert dwellers,...etc. In such a culture, being "nice" to a female in the Western sense, is taken as being lusty or making a pass, and hence the indifference. The same goes for looking a woman in the face.
Imagine the airport profiler is a female, and the person avoiding eye contact and being aloof/indifferent...
There is also the incident where traveling Imams (Muslim clerics) were praying in an airport, only for them to be arrested by those who thought they are staging a terror attack or something. One guy is even blind. There was a case of an Orthodox Hasidic Jew who was evicted from a plane in Canada because he was praying too, and did not know English to explain himself.
Things that are expected to be "nice" in US culture is rude in others. Examples are looking someone in the eye. In the US, it is expected, while it is insolent in many other cultures. Not looking someone in the eye can mean disrespect, evasion, sneakiness,...etc.
This is going to be fun to watch, unless you are the suspect that is...
TV is the modern version of Panem et circenses, specifically Circus games (as in Gladiators) replaced by American Idol, Top model and pseudo news about Paris and Britney.
I have been using Kubuntu for a couple of years too.
The problems I had were on the upgrade to Feisty.
An Intersil WiFi card that worked fine on Edgy stopped working on Feisty.
The slmodem driver for the HDA sound card which worked fine on Edgy stopped working on Feisty.
Apart from that, on Gutsy with a new laptop (Toshiba A200-TR6), sound is a bit flaky (plugging in a headphone, sound still comes out from the laptop built-in speaker in addition to the head phone).
Also on Gutsy, inserting an SD card works most of the time, but has to be taken out and inserted for it to work on other occasions.
Elsewhere in this thread, you will find a comment by jg (Jim Gettys). It has many things that at first I believed to be exaggerations, or just a glowing review from an OLPC staffer.
But, I found that all of what he said is present in detail, and pictures, on Carla Gomez's OLPC in Arahuay.
My first paid job in computing was on mainframes. This was mid 1980s.
In those days, mainframe disks were removable with 3 platters and a whopping 200 MB. I remember seeing an engineer with his foot in a cast because the disc pack fell on it.
The mainframe I worked on had fixed disks that came in pairs, each with 500MB (half a Gigabyte). The site had 3GB total (6 disks, each the size of a big washing machine).
Last week I was amazed when I bought a 2GB microSD card for my phone that cost some 30$ and was smaller than my thumbnail.
Well this feeling sucks: the fact that you loved computing, then it turned into a job and now you hate it.
But it does not have to be so. As someone who started with computers as a hobby, then made a career out of it, I can tell you that the flame never dies.
Workplaces are the problem, be it corporations and/or managers, not computers themselves.
Find an open source project or something to rekindle that flame. Or find a job where you get to do what you love with computers.
Back in Egypt in the early 1980s, the Commodore 64 never caught on in homes. I have seen it in offices though, along with the TRS-80, Apples,...etc., but not in homes. Perhaps the price was a factor, perhaps other choices were, don't know, but it did not catch on.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum on the other hand did catch on. It was my first computer. It was reasonably priced, and capable. I still remember it fondly. My brother and I used to buy computer magazines and type in listing character by character. We had two games for it, Jumping Jack and Blue Thunder (I think).
I later loaned it to a friend after I got a PC compatible. That friend (jokingly) had a proper name for it (Mes3ed!) The power supply or something else died.
I moved on from Sinclair to Mainframes, PCs, and minis with UNIX, then later Linux.
Glad to see the USA is finally catching up to the third world.
Egypt and other countries have done that for a long time. It is mainly due to higher ups in power being in collusion with those who hold the distribution license for the country, and hence kickbacks by the business men motivates those in power to enforce these things.
This is similar in a way to Google getting hold of all Usenet archives since early 90s, and then putting it publicly online for everyone to see and search.
I recall that there were archives of Usenet, but not as readily accessible as via a web search.
I think IRC is different since it is transient in nature from the beginning. Yes, people can log channels, but they are few and they don't make it publicly accessible. It also causes an outcry if it happens in some channels.
Here in Canada, Apple has not released the iPhone yet. Rumors last month said that Rogers will announce it before Christmas.
However, you see some people here who use iPhone.
Even in places as far away as Qatar, the iPhone is widely used there.
Since all the sets had to come from USA (or recently from Germany and UK), they have to be unlocked in order to work with the "normal" GSM carriers. Which means it is a widely used practice.
Perhaps Apple's dev team are just bowing to the inevitable. But how does that fare with AT&T and the exclusive contract.
Some of the posters see conspiracies every where (marketing strategy,...etc.).
A simpler explanation is that in a large corporation, you have communication "issues" causing delays and lags. The technical folk may have finished their part of the project, but the web presence or product management folk has not gotten to publishing the source yet.
This is the classic left hand does know what the right hand does...
Let us not assume bad intentions where no hard evidence exists.
This happens all the time. One side will see the person/group as traitors, spies, terrorists,...etc. The other side will see you as a hero, role model,...etc.
The same happened in the Lavon Affair, where bombings were conducted in Cairo by Egyptian Jews at the instigation of the government of Israel to destabilize Nasser's hard line regime. One surgeon, Moshe Marzouk was found to be a spy and a terrorist, and was executed by hanging. After half a century of denial, Israel honored the perpetrators as heroes.
The affair left a lasting legacy of conspiracy theories as a precedent...
Compare and contrast with other cases in other places, and more recent times.
This is a common phenomenon: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Another example is Egyptians in WW2 favored Germany and Italy, not out of agreement with ideology, but rather out of hatred of Britian, who occupied Egypt since 1882. A few people named their newborn boys "Hitler" and "Mussolini" as first names even. Only a minority of Egyptian intellectuals sided with the British, such as Abbas Mahmoud El Akkad, who wrote against Hitler and Nazism, contrary to the general sentiment of the public (and the intellectuals) who wanted the British to lose so Egypt can be freed from them.
Another example was Hungary siding with the wrong side and ending up losing a lot of territory to neighboring countries.
Well, the summary says primates have the notion of numbers.
Decades ago I read a book in Russia about animal behavior and such.
In it, there was an interesting case of how crows are smart,...etc. The experiment was that they stayed away from gun range. Even when the farmer/experimenter went into building and shot them from the window, they figured it out. The crows would not venture near the building if they saw someone go in. The farmer/experimenter then tried to outsmart them and got another person to go with him to the building, and then leave. In other words they could count one and two.
I think this went on until a certain number was reached (can't remember exactly which is it, but it is a single digit), then it did not work anymore.
It says that it prevents the nerve from firing for weeks.
Wouldn't this cause atrophy for said nerves?
I know that in many cases where nerve conductivity is hampered, one ends up with less sensation and mobility in muscles/skin that is served by that nerve. For example, in Bell's facial palsy, the face never recovers to its original if the nerve pinching that happens (due to inflammation, virus or whatever unknown reason so far) causes conductivity to the muscles of the affected side to vanish or diminish.
Would weeks of non-conductivity do the same thing?
Slashdot Mirror
While it is not right for a university to teach only one language, I see a lot of mixing up in the discussion.
...etc. fall in that category. Java is not the right tool for this, but something closer to the operating system and/or the hardware (e.g. C, and even C++). People working on these type of problems require the features and capabilities of these languages.
...etc. In this case, lower level languages are not the right tool. Having pointers and having to deal with memory leaks stands in the way of delivering business logic. COBOL used to be the language for this, and now Java fills that niche. The businesses hiring these people do not pay them to invent a new process scheduling algorithm, nor make sound come out of a new sound chipset.
There are two big domain areas for people who program computers (call them CompSci, Engineers, or whatever, the terminology is irrelevant).
a) Systems Programming
These are people who write stuff that is gluish in nature, be it kernel algorithms, device drivers or similar things. Even things like Web browsers, text editors, word processors, compilers,
b) Business Application Programming
These are the people who build higher level applications for end users. These are things such as an accounting application, air line reservation systems, banking systems,
If one tries to use a language that is more suited to (a) for (b), or vice versa, then it is the wrong tool for the job, and will stand in the way.
A university graduate of engineering or computer science should be exposed to both types of languages and both types of problems, not just one. When the graduate they can make the decision which one to pursue as a career.
A simpler possible explanation exists ...
The saleswoman is based in Peru, and a member of the worldwide sales organization. The OLPC partnership is at a corporate level with some marketing or community entity within Intel.
Within Intel, one part (the OLPC liaison) is pro OLPC, seeing it as a growth opportunity, while another (the field sales organization) is anti OLPC because it eats up into their potential sales. I am sure they never talked to each other. Even if they did, corporate politics and turf wars may have ensued, with sales winning this round.
These two things are very common in large corporations (left hand does not know what the right hand does, and turf wars and power struggles between different organizations).
When Negroponte made this public, it was embarrassing to Intel, and eventually the money balance tipped the scale and they withdrew from the OLPC.
Actually devices that you can put the alternative Rockbox firmware on them do support OGG. This includes Sansa, Archos, iRiver, Cowon and others.
I agree with you that greed and desperation are motivations for scams, internet or otherwise. Add to that ignorance and naiveté as well.
...
On my site, I published some internet scams and fraud that appear in my inbox. The response is overwhelming. People are actually falling for them. Many are from third world countries and poor. Some are from Western countries and greedy. Some were laid off by their employers and desperate.
Many people mistake my site for the fake lottery and ask if their ticket number is genuine. Some post phone numbers and email addresses.
Really depressing
The same is true in other cultures too, such as some rural areas in the Middle East, observant religious people, desert dwellers, ...etc. In such a culture, being "nice" to a female in the Western sense, is taken as being lusty or making a pass, and hence the indifference. The same goes for looking a woman in the face.
...
Imagine the airport profiler is a female, and the person avoiding eye contact and being aloof/indifferent
There is also the incident where traveling Imams (Muslim clerics) were praying in an airport, only for them to be arrested by those who thought they are staging a terror attack or something. One guy is even blind. There was a case of an Orthodox Hasidic Jew who was evicted from a plane in Canada because he was praying too, and did not know English to explain himself.
This is amazing.
...etc.
...
Does anyone know how culture factors in here?
Things that are expected to be "nice" in US culture is rude in others. Examples are looking someone in the eye. In the US, it is expected, while it is insolent in many other cultures. Not looking someone in the eye can mean disrespect, evasion, sneakiness,
This is going to be fun to watch, unless you are the suspect that is
TV is the modern version of Panem et circenses, specifically Circus games (as in Gladiators) replaced by American Idol, Top model and pseudo news about Paris and Britney.
Two sites that are fine examples of collaborative creation of maps and adding info to maps are:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
A from scratch volunteer effort to map the world using GPS, as people visit places.
http://wikimapia.org/
An overlay on Google Maps where people can mark their landmarks and comment on others.
Really really nice efforts.
I have been using Kubuntu for a couple of years too.
The problems I had were on the upgrade to Feisty.
An Intersil WiFi card that worked fine on Edgy stopped working on Feisty.
The slmodem driver for the HDA sound card which worked fine on Edgy stopped working on Feisty.
Apart from that, on Gutsy with a new laptop (Toshiba A200-TR6), sound is a bit flaky (plugging in a headphone, sound still comes out from the laptop built-in speaker in addition to the head phone).
Also on Gutsy, inserting an SD card works most of the time, but has to be taken out and inserted for it to work on other occasions.
Elsewhere in this thread, you will find a comment by jg (Jim Gettys). It has many things that at first I believed to be exaggerations, or just a glowing review from an OLPC staffer.
But, I found that all of what he said is present in detail, and pictures, on Carla Gomez's OLPC in Arahuay.
Really eye opening. Keep up the good work all.
The list of affected services is on a registration required site.
Here is a link from Associated Press that does not need registration.
My first paid job in computing was on mainframes. This was mid 1980s.
In those days, mainframe disks were removable with 3 platters and a whopping 200 MB. I remember seeing an engineer with his foot in a cast because the disc pack fell on it.
The mainframe I worked on had fixed disks that came in pairs, each with 500MB (half a Gigabyte). The site had 3GB total (6 disks, each the size of a big washing machine).
Last week I was amazed when I bought a 2GB microSD card for my phone that cost some 30$ and was smaller than my thumbnail.
Well this feeling sucks: the fact that you loved computing, then it turned into a job and now you hate it.
But it does not have to be so. As someone who started with computers as a hobby, then made a career out of it, I can tell you that the flame never dies.
Workplaces are the problem, be it corporations and/or managers, not computers themselves.
Find an open source project or something to rekindle that flame. Or find a job where you get to do what you love with computers.
Back in Egypt in the early 1980s, the Commodore 64 never caught on in homes. I have seen it in offices though, along with the TRS-80, Apples, ...etc., but not in homes. Perhaps the price was a factor, perhaps other choices were, don't know, but it did not catch on.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum on the other hand did catch on. It was my first computer. It was reasonably priced, and capable. I still remember it fondly. My brother and I used to buy computer magazines and type in listing character by character. We had two games for it, Jumping Jack and Blue Thunder (I think).
I later loaned it to a friend after I got a PC compatible. That friend (jokingly) had a proper name for it (Mes3ed!) The power supply or something else died.
I moved on from Sinclair to Mainframes, PCs, and minis with UNIX, then later Linux.
That Sinclair changed the course of my life.
Glad to see the USA is finally catching up to the third world.
Egypt and other countries have done that for a long time. It is mainly due to higher ups in power being in collusion with those who hold the distribution license for the country, and hence kickbacks by the business men motivates those in power to enforce these things.
I described that in this article and this comment.
Such practices have caused some businesses to consider alternatives, such as Linux.
This is similar in a way to Google getting hold of all Usenet archives since early 90s, and then putting it publicly online for everyone to see and search.
I recall that there were archives of Usenet, but not as readily accessible as via a web search.
I think IRC is different since it is transient in nature from the beginning. Yes, people can log channels, but they are few and they don't make it publicly accessible. It also causes an outcry if it happens in some channels.
Here in Canada, Apple has not released the iPhone yet. Rumors last month said that Rogers will announce it before Christmas.
However, you see some people here who use iPhone.
Even in places as far away as Qatar, the iPhone is widely used there.
Since all the sets had to come from USA (or recently from Germany and UK), they have to be unlocked in order to work with the "normal" GSM carriers. Which means it is a widely used practice.
Perhaps Apple's dev team are just bowing to the inevitable. But how does that fare with AT&T and the exclusive contract.
Some of the posters see conspiracies every where (marketing strategy, ...etc.).
...
A simpler explanation is that in a large corporation, you have communication "issues" causing delays and lags. The technical folk may have finished their part of the project, but the web presence or product management folk has not gotten to publishing the source yet.
This is the classic left hand does know what the right hand does
Let us not assume bad intentions where no hard evidence exists.
How about connecting the drive, NOT mounting it, and using dd if=/dev/DEVICE of=somefile to make a verbatim copy, then mount that copy as a loopback?
May not be admissible in court, but for sure does not taint the drive in anyway.
Sandvine is a local company here in Waterloo, Ontario. It has been a high flyer and a media/investor darling of late.
The local newspaper had an article , which I blogged about a few days ago, on Sandvine's technology and how it is involved in the Comcast debacle.
This happens all the time. One side will see the person/group as traitors, spies, terrorists, ...etc. The other side will see you as a hero, role model, ...etc.
...
The same happened in the Lavon Affair, where bombings were conducted in Cairo by Egyptian Jews at the instigation of the government of Israel to destabilize Nasser's hard line regime. One surgeon, Moshe Marzouk was found to be a spy and a terrorist, and was executed by hanging. After half a century of denial, Israel honored the perpetrators as heroes.
The affair left a lasting legacy of conspiracy theories as a precedent
Compare and contrast with other cases in other places, and more recent times.
Well, there were products on the market in the 1980s that did break down the queries to several CPUs.
...
One such example is Teradata, which had the database tables partitioned among many CPUs (done automatically on insert), each with its storage.
A query would be split automatically to all the CPUs, and each would fetch and return the rows matching the criteria in its part of the table.
The results are then combined from all CPUs and returned back to the application.
Later the CPUs were just emulated in software, as hardware became more powerful.
Prior art then
This is a common phenomenon: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Another example is Egyptians in WW2 favored Germany and Italy, not out of agreement with ideology, but rather out of hatred of Britian, who occupied Egypt since 1882. A few people named their newborn boys "Hitler" and "Mussolini" as first names even. Only a minority of Egyptian intellectuals sided with the British, such as Abbas Mahmoud El Akkad, who wrote against Hitler and Nazism, contrary to the general sentiment of the public (and the intellectuals) who wanted the British to lose so Egypt can be freed from them.
Another example was Hungary siding with the wrong side and ending up losing a lot of territory to neighboring countries.
Well, the summary says primates have the notion of numbers.
...etc. The experiment was that they stayed away from gun range. Even when the farmer/experimenter went into building and shot them from the window, they figured it out. The crows would not venture near the building if they saw someone go in. The farmer/experimenter then tried to outsmart them and got another person to go with him to the building, and then leave. In other words they could count one and two.
Decades ago I read a book in Russia about animal behavior and such.
In it, there was an interesting case of how crows are smart,
I think this went on until a certain number was reached (can't remember exactly which is it, but it is a single digit), then it did not work anymore.
It says that it prevents the nerve from firing for weeks.
Wouldn't this cause atrophy for said nerves?
I know that in many cases where nerve conductivity is hampered, one ends up with less sensation and mobility in muscles/skin that is served by that nerve. For example, in Bell's facial palsy, the face never recovers to its original if the nerve pinching that happens (due to inflammation, virus or whatever unknown reason so far) causes conductivity to the muscles of the affected side to vanish or diminish.
Would weeks of non-conductivity do the same thing?
Any doctors in the house?