If those with genuine uses for the technology don't like seeing it restricted, they should take it up with those who are abusing it and motivating that restriction, not the parties who are just defending their rights under the law.
Likewise, suppose a right-wing extremist Christian group wants to burn down the local library due to the rampant Satanism found in its books. Then I, as a reader with a genuine use for the technology, should take it up with the authors of the offending works?
In my experience of language classes, it's not. Do only what's mandated in class, and you might pass; you have to be into the literature & speaking the language in your spare time to do well.
Good point. I completely agree. The "language lab" approach I experienced both in high school and in college appears to be an attempt to force everyone to spend as much time and effort listening and talking as those people who are really interested and practice on their own. Of course, you can't create enthusiasm where none exists.
It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, GNOME, written in C. I found this posted in response to an article on C Monks asking if C was obsessed with device drivers? Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting. I wonder how fast it runs?
so yeah, I'm disenfranchised with the the entire college situation.
This actually means that you have lost your right to vote "with the entire colleg situation."
I'd say that I seriously spend about 80-90% of my time working on classwork with someone else because it just doesn't make sense
No problem, it takes all kinds, and learning styles do vary. I personally need to transcribe everything, as my long and short term memory banks are, let's say, unreliable.
(I can't comprehend accents very well)
Make foreign friends, if possible. Don't be surprised if many of the people you find worth listening to are not native English speakers. Same goes for people of any origin and language: the world's getting global-er.
or the professor just doesn't have a clue
It happens, but in these cases you should be light years ahead of the professor. If your professor's a moron and you don't even keep pace with him, well, you're in trouble.
He didn't copy code, he merely asked another student about how to do the assignment when there were no teachers or aides available.
The article was very careful not to state that he didn't copy code. In fact, with the "30 lines" figure, the author implies that some code was copied. So, to be more accurate, "he merely asked another student about how to do the assignment" and the other student showed him how he did it.
Apparently, at GT, if you can't figure it out from the book and your professor's lecture, you're shit out of luck.
Yeah, that is really bogus. If their intro CS class relies on getting "the answers" right, the students are screwed from the get-go.
Intro courses should be "here's how to invoke the compiler on the school computer systems, now here's a reference book and go write a program that does X. Feel free to work together and ask questions of the TA and myself." After an assignment or so like this, you can bring on the theory. Also, basic concepts like what RAM is and how a CPU works in the most general terms should be prerequisites.
To be honest, no university can teach computer science; anyone who will be successful in this field has to have enough interest to persue it as a hobby, if not a lifestyle, in order to succeed.
Right on. I don't understand why this kind of reasoning is acceptable in some disciplines (particularly the arts) but not in engineering in general and CS in particular.
It can be learned solo--I learned more in high school on my own than I ever did in college.
While I think it's possible to learn everything from a college CS program on one's own, I don't think it probable. When learning on one's own it is very easy to miss topics that aren't sexy or immediately useful. You may get pragmatic knowledge, but stuff like computability theory and compiler and OS design is important. Most people aren't going to hit everything in a casual self-education.
There seems to be this opinion that everyone who takes the course should pass, and this quite frankly disgusts me. Iam currently still persuing my degree and I am saddled by group projects and burdened with seniors who cannot write a compilable line of C. These are not people who should be seniors; they got where they are now by "learning" from their partners.
Haha, that's a favorite. I have no idea what these people do all day, and what is to become of them...they chose the wrong area of study.
I've found I had a lot of problems early in university doing math problems on my own. But after learning from others how they do things, I'm much better now at solving things on my own from first principles, because I developed the thought patterns needed to do that. I didn't have them when I entered university, for some reason (though I did have them in other subject areas).
You're implying a lot of neurological theory here that doesn't necessarily exist. More likely it was an issue of confidence. What I have seen more frequently than any other problem in the CS program I went through was a lack of understanding of what it means to be "programming." That is, it doesn't mean sitting there with your UML diagram in one window and your editor in another...it's 5 browser windows full of google searches, three books open on your desk (or floor) and the debugger and a shitload of printfs. It is like, when you first go fishing you are thinking about your casting technique, but when you start doing it you spend half an hour trying to rip a hook out of some half-dead fish's throat with a pair of needle-nose pliers so you can "throw it back" to die 15 feet from your boat.
Wait a second. Weren't they found to be in violation of anti-trust LAWS? Sounds illegal to me.
Yeah, yeah. Antitrust laws are dumb, though. I guess what I meant when I said "illegal or immoral" was "illegal according to reasonable (i.e., moral) laws or immoral" or just "immoral". Now my point is too bogged down in terminology to have any impact, but I guess that happens sometimes.
What I was trying to express is that, until Microsoft was put on trial, the company seems to me to have acted morally and rationally in all of its dealings. Obviously I am not more knowledgeable than anyone else on these matters, but the so-called "evidence" of wrongdoing seems to me to be business as usual in any competitive firm, and not immoral in the least. Aggressive? Sure, but what succesful company isn't?
Of course, according to antitrust laws, such reasonable and acceptable behavior is defined as illegal for some companies in some situations. It's a political weapon wielded to attack specific firms, and Microsoft found itself the target. Rather than plead guilty and give the government a bunch of free money, they chose to try to lie their way through it. Not smart, but not really that immoral, lying to avoid conviction under unjust laws.
Sorry. Implicit in my post was that antitrust laws are immoral and unnecessary. I.e., if MS were really forcing other companies to do something, by breaking down their doors and holding their families at gunpoint or whatever, then they'd be breaking other laws anyway. In reality, all they're doing is saying things like, "if you do business with any of these companies, then we will choose not to do business with you." The companies have a choice, and they choose (surprise) the thing that will make them more money. When there is a compelling reason to say "no thanks" to this kind of proposal, then companies will start turning MS down, and MS will in turn start writing up less restrictive contracts to save their business.
I understand that people see Microsoft making all this money, and they're a little envious. But, honestly, what's the problem?
I guess I don't really see the point of breaking Microsoft up, (look at what happenned to the baby bells) however I think there are some great ways to keep them from being anticompetative:
I agree that there is no point (other than making some anti-corporate types happy), but your suggestions are actually great ways of discouraging success (and hence competition) in the software industry.
1. Come on, this is not something we want government deciding about.
2. Yeah, fixed prices are great for competition! At best, fixed prices are the same as they would be in the market, so it's much easier to just let the market decide. And dictating contract terms between corporations is scary scary scary.
3. If they have blatantly lied in court, then isn't that already perjury? Perjury's perjury. As far as I can tell that's the only thing anyone at MS has actually done wrong ("wrong" here means illegal or immoral, not the usual "isn't nice to competitors" definition so popular here).
4. For heaven's sake...
I just don't think that drastic solutions are going to work here... But in a way, I almost don't CARE about microsoft's monopoly, because it's almost a given that the desktop computer will lose its prevelance once Ubiquetous Computing (ala MIT's Oxygen, etc) becomes a reality. Just so long as they don't control *THAT*, I'm happy.
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in any market (except the market for Windows given them by copyright law...but that's the same monopoly enjoyed by any copyright holder) for any reasonable definition of "monopoly." Linux is an OS, it exists. Ergo, no monopoly on x86 OS's. Yes, they have a huge share of the market. It's not their fault no one has given them a run for their money.
Ubiquitous computing...someone might dominate that. They might be MS. They might be someone else. Whoever's involved won't be any more or less good or evil than MS. They will just be trying to make a buck. Hopefully the U.S. gov't will decide to let them.
It is funny to see AMD on microsoft's side, since MS has been very pro-Intel for a long time.
How many CPUs would AMD sell without Windows? Just because some geeks think of AMD as some kind of righteous band of rebels doesn't make it so. At the end of the day they're doing the same exact thing as Microsoft, Intel, Red Hat, and every other company in the world that isn't being protected by a government-enforced monopoly (the only true kind of monopoly!). Trying to make some money.
Right, but the cost of the marketing drives down their margin at the same rate that the price increase drives it up. Otherwise, the marketers would charge more (if the margin increases) or the prices would be raised less (if it decreases). You're right, if lowering the price doesn't affect demand, the price will stay the same.
I'm trying to say that the "optimum profit point" *will be* the lowest price at which the company can survive, due to competition in the market.
I am seeing a lot of messages pointing out that Africa may perhaps not host enough content to make peering feasible for the American telcos.
While this may be, and probably is, accurate, I think we might be missing something. Is it helpful to just measure the network traffic directed to Africa, or is that comparing apples to oranges? That is, is 1 MB of African Internet content equivalent to 1 MB of American or European or Asian content?
Let's look at other types of "content". For years (centuries!) Africans were locked out of the music industry using similar reasoning. At the turn of the 20th century, the only "black" entertainers were racist white men in blackface! But as soon as they were given a chance, the Africans gave us blues, rock, jazz, rap, hip hop, R&B, funk, and the list goes on. Pretty much everything except Kraftwerk!
And I don't need to point out the advances made by Africans in other media. Anyone remember the Oscars?
In short, if Africa had been in on the dot-com boom, maybe we would have seen a much higher level of competence. Africans have demonstrated time and again that they are up to the task of competing on a level basis with the white man. Not only that, but they have shown a tendancy to go one step better. If we take a small hit now by getting rid of these outrageous charges to African ISPs, we will all benefit as the Internet receives a much-needed infusion of black blood.
Reminds me of the banking axiom: those who don't need loans get.
That's not true. Those who are likely to be able to pay back a loan get loans. If you have no income and nothing to offer as collatoral, then you don't need a loan...you need a job.
Re:Flash is Style over Substance, Usability Nightm
on
Flash and Open Source
·
· Score: 2
Flash is hell from a usability standpoint. It does away with many of the notions that the web was founded out - consistant interfaces, as well as the page-based metaphor. Flash essentially "breaks" the browser controls people have finally learned to use (the back button, URL bar, etc etc).
That seems only half-right. Things like the back, forward, and reload buttons, and the page metaphor (when not broken by forms...what's a button doing in a scrolling window?) seem to have been there from the start, but most of the consistent interfaces seem to have evolved slowly. Mostly I'm thinking about the "tab" layout, the locations of "log out" and "help," and that kind of thing. They definitely aren't part of the web's foundation, and only developed as the market's response to user confusion.
I do agree with you about Flash though. Stupid stupid.
That's a cool idea. And that's a great page! I was surprised to see that Mac users search on Google four times as much as do Linux users. I guess I have a warped perception of the number of Linux users...
Well, how do you "reboot" if some program writes over important hard disk data on current systems? The answer is, it's the job of the OS to make sure that doesn't happen (or not, as the case may be). Just because you don't need to transfer code from disk to RAM to execute it doesn't mean the address space is going to be a free-for-all. The notion of dynamic temporary storage is still useful and will be enforced at the OS level. This is what the Palm OS does, IIRC.
Because they filmed in Times Square. What if you owned a piece of property in which a movie is going to be filmed? You might want to put up some ads. Then if some film came around and changed them, you would probably be pretty ticked, along with whatever company set up the ad.
Then put it in the contract. Oh, wait, those companies didn't even have a contract with the film's producers, did they?
Also, competition doesn't necessarily force prices to the lowest that they can be. Many times companies compete using marketing and branding which allow them to operate at prices well beyond what are the bare minimum for survival. I mean, are Nike shoe really worth that much money?
Well, yes, how couldn't they be? If they weren't, Nike would be out of business!
Anyway, in this case, the prices are the lowest they can be, which is to say that the marginal cost of producing each shoe (including marketing and so forth) is not much less than the marginal gain of selling each shoe (including prices that seem crazy to a lot of us).
Think of it this way: if Nike could cut shoe prices $5 a pair across the board, without posting losses, then it would be a good move: they'd sell more shoes, increasing their market share, thus improving the likelihood of making bigger profits in the future. Therefore, they must be working with slim margins, because otherwise they would discount shoes.
There are some industries that are not sales-based, where this argument doesn't apply. For example, a painter who works on commissions. "Market share" means nothing, because she can't expand beyond her own abilities (by hiring employees). She will not cut prices as long as she has enough work, and raise them when she is overbooked.
Here in Edmonton, there is an interesting solution. Along the Whyte Avenue area where there's tons of pedestrian traffic, there are specific posting poles. They're cut down telephone poles there specificly for the purpose of posting flyers/ads. There's also the new decorative lightposts that were put up that they've asked people to not post on. Actually seems to be working fairly well..
Cutting down the telephone poles did turn out to be a little short-sighted. It turns out that Edmonton businesses had relied heavily on communication, much of which took place over phone lines either as normal voice conversations or as Internet traffic.
I would like to see simulations of the slashdot community's overall response to moderation, membership fees, advertising, etc. Also, simulations of diverse markets of computer users in selecting operating systems would be interesting. Will answer questions like "will MS rule the world?", "are all the Linux companies doomed?", "is Steve Jobs insane?", and of course, "is BSD dying?"
The findings also suggest that the world is *not* headed where your manifesto says it is. Even if there is a small elite "intelligentsia" that desires to control everything through such tools as polical correctness and global capitalism, societies appear to be complex and unpredictable enough that they won't succeed.
The author of the article suggests that this was invented by Lucas afterwards to make his flick into more than it really was. The fact that Lucas has emphasized the Campbell influence so many times supports rather than disputes this thesis.
one of the main points of the article is that mr. lucas falls into that category.
As his career, its understandable that Lucas take entertainment seriously. The real point of the article is that everyone else takes Lucas too seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Likewise, suppose a right-wing extremist Christian group wants to burn down the local library due to the rampant Satanism found in its books. Then I, as a reader with a genuine use for the technology, should take it up with the authors of the offending works?
Nice troll.
Good point. I completely agree. The "language lab" approach I experienced both in high school and in college appears to be an attempt to force everyone to spend as much time and effort listening and talking as those people who are really interested and practice on their own. Of course, you can't create enthusiasm where none exists.
It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, GNOME, written in C. I found this posted in response to an article on C Monks asking if C was obsessed with device drivers? Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting. I wonder how fast it runs?
This actually means that you have lost your right to vote "with the entire colleg situation."
I'd say that I seriously spend about 80-90% of my time working on classwork with someone else because it just doesn't make sense
No problem, it takes all kinds, and learning styles do vary. I personally need to transcribe everything, as my long and short term memory banks are, let's say, unreliable.
(I can't comprehend accents very well)
Make foreign friends, if possible. Don't be surprised if many of the people you find worth listening to are not native English speakers. Same goes for people of any origin and language: the world's getting global-er.
or the professor just doesn't have a clue
It happens, but in these cases you should be light years ahead of the professor. If your professor's a moron and you don't even keep pace with him, well, you're in trouble.
The article was very careful not to state that he didn't copy code. In fact, with the "30 lines" figure, the author implies that some code was copied. So, to be more accurate, "he merely asked another student about how to do the assignment" and the other student showed him how he did it.
Apparently, at GT, if you can't figure it out from the book and your professor's lecture, you're shit out of luck.
Yeah, that is really bogus. If their intro CS class relies on getting "the answers" right, the students are screwed from the get-go.
Intro courses should be "here's how to invoke the compiler on the school computer systems, now here's a reference book and go write a program that does X. Feel free to work together and ask questions of the TA and myself." After an assignment or so like this, you can bring on the theory. Also, basic concepts like what RAM is and how a CPU works in the most general terms should be prerequisites.
Right on. I don't understand why this kind of reasoning is acceptable in some disciplines (particularly the arts) but not in engineering in general and CS in particular.
It can be learned solo--I learned more in high school on my own than I ever did in college.
While I think it's possible to learn everything from a college CS program on one's own, I don't think it probable. When learning on one's own it is very easy to miss topics that aren't sexy or immediately useful. You may get pragmatic knowledge, but stuff like computability theory and compiler and OS design is important. Most people aren't going to hit everything in a casual self-education.
There seems to be this opinion that everyone who takes the course should pass, and this quite frankly disgusts me. Iam currently still persuing my degree and I am saddled by group projects and burdened with seniors who cannot write a compilable line of C. These are not people who should be seniors; they got where they are now by "learning" from their partners.
Haha, that's a favorite. I have no idea what these people do all day, and what is to become of them...they chose the wrong area of study.
You're implying a lot of neurological theory here that doesn't necessarily exist. More likely it was an issue of confidence. What I have seen more frequently than any other problem in the CS program I went through was a lack of understanding of what it means to be "programming." That is, it doesn't mean sitting there with your UML diagram in one window and your editor in another...it's 5 browser windows full of google searches, three books open on your desk (or floor) and the debugger and a shitload of printfs. It is like, when you first go fishing you are thinking about your casting technique, but when you start doing it you spend half an hour trying to rip a hook out of some half-dead fish's throat with a pair of needle-nose pliers so you can "throw it back" to die 15 feet from your boat.
Yeah, yeah. Antitrust laws are dumb, though. I guess what I meant when I said "illegal or immoral" was "illegal according to reasonable (i.e., moral) laws or immoral" or just "immoral". Now my point is too bogged down in terminology to have any impact, but I guess that happens sometimes.
What I was trying to express is that, until Microsoft was put on trial, the company seems to me to have acted morally and rationally in all of its dealings. Obviously I am not more knowledgeable than anyone else on these matters, but the so-called "evidence" of wrongdoing seems to me to be business as usual in any competitive firm, and not immoral in the least. Aggressive? Sure, but what succesful company isn't?
Of course, according to antitrust laws, such reasonable and acceptable behavior is defined as illegal for some companies in some situations. It's a political weapon wielded to attack specific firms, and Microsoft found itself the target. Rather than plead guilty and give the government a bunch of free money, they chose to try to lie their way through it. Not smart, but not really that immoral, lying to avoid conviction under unjust laws.
I understand that people see Microsoft making all this money, and they're a little envious. But, honestly, what's the problem?
I agree that there is no point (other than making some anti-corporate types happy), but your suggestions are actually great ways of discouraging success (and hence competition) in the software industry.
1. Come on, this is not something we want government deciding about.
2. Yeah, fixed prices are great for competition! At best, fixed prices are the same as they would be in the market, so it's much easier to just let the market decide. And dictating contract terms between corporations is scary scary scary.
3. If they have blatantly lied in court, then isn't that already perjury? Perjury's perjury. As far as I can tell that's the only thing anyone at MS has actually done wrong ("wrong" here means illegal or immoral, not the usual "isn't nice to competitors" definition so popular here).
4. For heaven's sake...
I just don't think that drastic solutions are going to work here... But in a way, I almost don't CARE about microsoft's monopoly, because it's almost a given that the desktop computer will lose its prevelance once Ubiquetous Computing (ala MIT's Oxygen, etc) becomes a reality. Just so long as they don't control *THAT*, I'm happy.
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in any market (except the market for Windows given them by copyright law...but that's the same monopoly enjoyed by any copyright holder) for any reasonable definition of "monopoly." Linux is an OS, it exists. Ergo, no monopoly on x86 OS's. Yes, they have a huge share of the market. It's not their fault no one has given them a run for their money.
Ubiquitous computing...someone might dominate that. They might be MS. They might be someone else. Whoever's involved won't be any more or less good or evil than MS. They will just be trying to make a buck. Hopefully the U.S. gov't will decide to let them.
It is funny to see AMD on microsoft's side, since MS has been very pro-Intel for a long time.
How many CPUs would AMD sell without Windows? Just because some geeks think of AMD as some kind of righteous band of rebels doesn't make it so. At the end of the day they're doing the same exact thing as Microsoft, Intel, Red Hat, and every other company in the world that isn't being protected by a government-enforced monopoly (the only true kind of monopoly!). Trying to make some money.
I'm trying to say that the "optimum profit point" *will be* the lowest price at which the company can survive, due to competition in the market.
While this may be, and probably is, accurate, I think we might be missing something. Is it helpful to just measure the network traffic directed to Africa, or is that comparing apples to oranges? That is, is 1 MB of African Internet content equivalent to 1 MB of American or European or Asian content?
Let's look at other types of "content". For years (centuries!) Africans were locked out of the music industry using similar reasoning. At the turn of the 20th century, the only "black" entertainers were racist white men in blackface! But as soon as they were given a chance, the Africans gave us blues, rock, jazz, rap, hip hop, R&B, funk, and the list goes on. Pretty much everything except Kraftwerk!
And I don't need to point out the advances made by Africans in other media. Anyone remember the Oscars?
In short, if Africa had been in on the dot-com boom, maybe we would have seen a much higher level of competence. Africans have demonstrated time and again that they are up to the task of competing on a level basis with the white man. Not only that, but they have shown a tendancy to go one step better. If we take a small hit now by getting rid of these outrageous charges to African ISPs, we will all benefit as the Internet receives a much-needed infusion of black blood.
That's not true. Those who are likely to be able to pay back a loan get loans. If you have no income and nothing to offer as collatoral, then you don't need a loan...you need a job.
That seems only half-right. Things like the back, forward, and reload buttons, and the page metaphor (when not broken by forms...what's a button doing in a scrolling window?) seem to have been there from the start, but most of the consistent interfaces seem to have evolved slowly. Mostly I'm thinking about the "tab" layout, the locations of "log out" and "help," and that kind of thing. They definitely aren't part of the web's foundation, and only developed as the market's response to user confusion.
I do agree with you about Flash though. Stupid stupid.
I onced asked a B&N employee if they had a poster of the periodic table of the elements. I was directed to the Astrology section.
That's a cool idea. And that's a great page! I was surprised to see that Mac users search on Google four times as much as do Linux users. I guess I have a warped perception of the number of Linux users...
Well, how do you "reboot" if some program writes over important hard disk data on current systems? The answer is, it's the job of the OS to make sure that doesn't happen (or not, as the case may be). Just because you don't need to transfer code from disk to RAM to execute it doesn't mean the address space is going to be a free-for-all. The notion of dynamic temporary storage is still useful and will be enforced at the OS level. This is what the Palm OS does, IIRC.
Then put it in the contract. Oh, wait, those companies didn't even have a contract with the film's producers, did they?
Seriously, though. SE/30's are sweet. Still useful after all these years, and so small.
Well, yes, how couldn't they be? If they weren't, Nike would be out of business!
Anyway, in this case, the prices are the lowest they can be, which is to say that the marginal cost of producing each shoe (including marketing and so forth) is not much less than the marginal gain of selling each shoe (including prices that seem crazy to a lot of us).
Think of it this way: if Nike could cut shoe prices $5 a pair across the board, without posting losses, then it would be a good move: they'd sell more shoes, increasing their market share, thus improving the likelihood of making bigger profits in the future. Therefore, they must be working with slim margins, because otherwise they would discount shoes.
There are some industries that are not sales-based, where this argument doesn't apply. For example, a painter who works on commissions. "Market share" means nothing, because she can't expand beyond her own abilities (by hiring employees). She will not cut prices as long as she has enough work, and raise them when she is overbooked.
Cutting down the telephone poles did turn out to be a little short-sighted. It turns out that Edmonton businesses had relied heavily on communication, much of which took place over phone lines either as normal voice conversations or as Internet traffic.
I would like to see simulations of the slashdot community's overall response to moderation, membership fees, advertising, etc. Also, simulations of diverse markets of computer users in selecting operating systems would be interesting. Will answer questions like "will MS rule the world?", "are all the Linux companies doomed?", "is Steve Jobs insane?", and of course, "is BSD dying?"
The findings also suggest that the world is *not* headed where your manifesto says it is. Even if there is a small elite "intelligentsia" that desires to control everything through such tools as polical correctness and global capitalism, societies appear to be complex and unpredictable enough that they won't succeed.
The author of the article suggests that this was invented by Lucas afterwards to make his flick into more than it really was. The fact that Lucas has emphasized the Campbell influence so many times supports rather than disputes this thesis.
one of the main points of the article is that mr. lucas falls into that category.
As his career, its understandable that Lucas take entertainment seriously. The real point of the article is that everyone else takes Lucas too seriously.