Last number I saw was that ~40% of incoming nursing students are men. Certainly in my medical career, I worked with plenty of male nurses. And go to any high-end salon -- odds are the person running it is a man. (A straight man, at that.) The prejudices are there, to be sure, but the barriers men face in getting into any "female" field are much lower than those faced by women in getting into "male" fields.
No shit. And apparently the implication is that girls can't be geeks? Ggeek-ness is something that cuts quite nicely across gender lines. If they're trying to recruit the kind of girl whose main concern is clothes and makeup and who makes head cheerleader into tech... well, that's their tough luck. Go for the smart, quiet ones in the back of the room, same as with the boys.
Do you suggest letting pimply-faced nerds run a business?
Since the nerds are the ones who make the products that actually do something, and MBA's as a group have proven themselves adept at nothing other than wasting money and running companies into the ground... um, yes, actually.
When you figure out a way to sell Hubble-scale missions to suits who generally don't think ahead farther than the next couple of quarters, let us know.
Heh. My company does just fine with techies managing other techies. (The top level are actually scientists, specifically biologists, rather than programmers; the mindsets, while not identical, are similar.) We did have one MBA in the company -- he's no longer with us...
Management is indeed a skill which has its place. It's just that business "education," in its current form, has nothing to do with skills that actually contribute anything.
Education is always good. MBA's, MCIS's, etc. are not, however, education. They're fake degrees for fake people for the sole purpose of getting fake jobs. If you want to condemn yourself to PHBness as a career... well, that's your choice. <shrug>
I'm not arguing against distance learning per se, only against the type of people who so often seem to think it's a good idea, and the type of schools that seem to cater to them.
Oh, I agree with you, which is why I'm hopeful for the success of Linux (and F/OSS generally) in the long run. I'm just saying that the "do not worry if they crush our allies, Comrades, the Revolution will continue" attitude that seems to prevail among a lot of F/OSS enthusiasts is unrealistic. Linux came to prominence in a legal, as well as technical and economic, environment that has already changed considerably -- and will no longer exist at all if Microsoft et al. have their way.
The article is followed by a bunch of ads for distance degrees, in which the University of Phoenix features prominently. Has there ever been a greater curse on the CS field than people getting degrees from places like this in the middle of the dot-com boom? The worst aspect, I think, being how many of these degrees are in "IT management" or some such garbage, thus turning out a whole bunch of apprentice PHB's who think they're qualified to tell people with real educations what to do. If the current decline in enrollment trims the fat by getting rid of those people, it won't bother me a bit.
Don't forget, though, this is part of a two-edged strategy. On the business front, they want to turn Linux back into a "hobbyist OS" that doesn't have support from any major corporate users or suppliers. On the legal front, they want to buy legislators who will then effectively outlaw F/OSS with DRM and "security" requirements... which is only possible if they've removed the corporate support.
I don't think they'll succeed, but don't be too sanguine yet.
[shrug] Different standards for ignorance; most people would recognize the origin of the name*, but wouldn't have any idea what a B. cluster is. And by/. standards, that's igorance. I'm a believer in the "one culture," myself -- if you don't recognize either, there's a serious gap in your knowledge.
*I may be giving "most people" too much credit, of course.
I honestly feel that the mere fact of the existence of intelligent life off Earth would be enough to shock a lot of the fanatics into shutting up. This may be wishful thinking on my part.;)
Are we sure that that's how these gas giants formed, though? I mean, can we get enough of an idea of their atmospheric chemistry (through spectral analysis, I would assume) to be sure that they're made up of the same sort of stuff as our own gas giants? Like I said before, I really do wonder if thinking of them as failed double stars might make more sense, in which case (I assume) the formation process would be different.
My impression is that these particular planets are so close to their stars (closer than Mercury is to the Sun!) that any moons they might have would be sterile chunks of very hot rock -- not to mention that the orbital dynamics would be a nightmare, and a moon would probably end up getting thrown into either the star or the planet pretty fast, or flung out of orbit entirely. OTOH, the idea of Earth-size moons orbiting gas giants a little further out, in the "life band," and supporting life, seems entirely reasonable.
On the other hand, I am not so sure finding another form of life outside of Earth is such a good idea. We have a hard enough time getting along with people on the other side of our own planet.
I suspect that getting alien radio signals would make our differences look rather trivial. Nothing like a common threat (and it would be seen as a threat) to make people stop fighting each other.
"... this may be a case of current technology and techniques being unable to detect planets similar to Earth..." Yeah, exactly. If the only way you have to detect planets orbiting other stars is to look for the gravitational effects of large, massive planets orbiting close their stars, then is what you're going to find.
It occurs to me that a useful way to think about these "hot Jupiters" may be as failed double stars, not planets equivalent to our own gas giants. And we already know that double stars are more common than singletons like the Sun. (Er, I think -- someone please tell me if I'm wrong.)
One thing that frustrates me about the articles I've seen on this subject is that they don't explain why formation of big, close-in gas giants precludes formation of Earth-like planets farther out. Accretion disks are really, really big; surely parts of them can clump into gas giants while others slowly form smaller, rocky planets?
This is still the United States of America, and battered as the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people may be, it still exists. Don't assume that just because the government does many things to restrict the knowledge of individuals (and the freedom to make well-informed decisions is perhaps the most basic freedom, without which all the other freedoms don't mean much) that all politicians, everywhere, all the time, want to keep everybody ignorant. Knowledge, not money or guns, is the true might of the nation.
You can almost here the oss fighters telling themeselves "finally, a big guy in the corner for the little guy fighting for the cause".
clue for the clueless, IBM is in it for IBM, if the tide ever changes and oss's destruction becomes favorable for IBM don't expect any mercy.
Um... I think most people know this already. Don't assume that everyone else is a naive little kid who needs you to explain the harsh realities of the world.
Right now, Microsoft vs. IBM is Hitler vs. Stalin: they're both evil, and in fact once upon a time they were allies, but right now, the first is a greater strategic threat and the second is marginally less evil, or at least more rational in its evil, so that's the horse to back. If things change -- and at some point, they will -- then it will be time to re-evaluate.
(Apple is England in this scenario, I think. Novell is the US, maybe? SCO, obviously, is Vichy France. Ah, hell with it, I'm running out of analogies.)
Or, to go even farther back for a political metaphor: F/OSS has no permanent allies, only permanent interests.
I didn't say anything about anyone being forced to patent anything. (Looking back through your original post, I don't see where you did either, even to dismiss the idea.) What I was objecting to was your assertion that "the ideas" are the most valuable part of software. You seem to be ignorant of the fact that anyone, anywhere, any time can come up with a great idea; writing the damn code is where the effort is.
As for the idea that patents on ideas alone are useless -- well, I agree, but obviously for very different reasons. <1/2 g> As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, corporations can and do patent ideas, without implementation, and then use those patents as weapons against the programmers who do the actual work.
I think you may have missed my point. I agree that patenting "do something cool" is stupid -- or more precisely, allowing someone to patent it is stupid; patenting it, if the patent office allows you to get away with it, is very smart. But right now, ideas like "really fast sort algorithm" are patentable, because, apparently, the patent system in the US, and soon in Europe, is run by techno-illiterates. And I suggest that this sort of silliness is where allowing software patents, at all, inevitably leads. Copyright offers adequate protection for implementation; there is no legitimate place in the whole chain of events, from idea to finished application, for patents.
I understand the goal -- calling attention to the problem, and all that -- but honestly, didn't anyone realize that the most likely result of the whole thing would be to encourage Munich and other city governments to stick with Microsoft? This seems just as Quixotic as the US Greens' die-hard support of Ralph Nader in 2000; really classic Green behavior all around.
A word to the wise: throwing monkey wrenches in the system does not work. It doesn't get you what you want. It doesn't highlight the stark injustices of the world and act as a call to arms for the oppressed. All it does is piss people off. And in the end, things go on about the same as, but a little worse than, they were before.
I think what the Greens meant to do was highlight the problems with software patents, not to stop the Linux migration. Unfortunately, in classic Green fashion, their method of doing so was to point a rather large gun directly at their foot, take careful aim, and pull the trigger.
Wow, how brave you are, telling us several times how unpopular your opinion is, and how no doubt you will be modded troll or flamebait for daring to tell The Truth(R)(TM).
Anyway... what's wrong with your post isn't that you're trolling (you're not) but the factual errors you make. To wit:
And before i get flamed, yes I know a license for code is different from a patent, but guess what, in software, the most valuable part of the software is the ideas, the algorithms. It's usually not very hard to implement the ideas(though that doesn't mean it isn't often screwed up).
Okay, I have an idea: an O(log n) sorting algorithm. How brilliant I am! I should patent it and make a bunch of money immediately! Oh, okay, there's the matter of implementation, but that's for the little people to worry about.
You see where I'm going with this? Ideas are easy. Implementation is 99 44/100 % of the work -- always has been, and probably always will be. And yet now, we're at the point where not only are companies patenting specific implementations, which I would have a problem with in and of itself (copyright vs. patent) but ideas before an implementation even exists. It's not like they've done the work and want to protect the fruits of their labor; they're saying, in effect, "If anyone ever does this work, we own their ass."
Open source has created a lot of new ideas, and will continue to create new ideas. These should be embraced, if you hate patens so much, don't use the stuff in the patents.
The new ideas F/OSS has created tend to be in specific implementations, not in Big Ideas. (NB: the Big Ideas tend not to come out of companies like Microsoft, either. Mostly they come from academic research, or from corporate labs like Bell Labs or PARC that function almost as separate entities from the parent corporation.) Now, I'm not saying it will always be this way. We may be starting to see the age of F/OSS doing genuinely new things, not just improving old ones. LAMP, f'rinstance, although it consists of a combination of older ideas, has become a social as well as technical phenomenon, moving waaay beyond Just Another Server Setup. But Most F/OSS and proprietary developers spend most of their time implementing improvements on ideas that have been around in academic CS since the Seventies.
In fact, that time period brings up something I hadn't thought of before. Why, exactly, are almost all of the "modern" programming techniques we use based on academic CS from the Seventies and before? Well, in 1980, there was this little thing called Bayh-Dole...
Well, speaking as a middle-term Mac user (I switched from PC's in 1995, which means that I have roughly the same amount of time using the "Classic" MacOS as I do using OS X) I'd say that OS X has finally caught up in terms of overall usability, but it's taken a while. I had to grit my teeth and make myself use everything below 10.2; I kept doing it since a) I knew I'd have to get used to it, and b) as an old DOS-head, I really did (and still do) appreciate having Unix so close to the surface. With 10.2, I'd say they achieved roughly the same level of usability as they had in the System 7 days; 10.3 is as good as OS 9 overall. Certainly there are things about the old MacOS I miss, even now, but the cool new stuff in OS X more than makes up for it, most of the time.
All things considered, what I really wish they'd done was produce an evolved version of the Classic interface with Unix running underneath, and added in the cool NEXT-derived stuff piece by piece. They had already proven they could this successfully, with A/UX, but I believe that was one of many things that got "Steved."
You can call the systematic study of just about anything, digging through different sources, "research." It's just that this is research on physics papers and their authors, not on physics itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Last number I saw was that ~40% of incoming nursing students are men. Certainly in my medical career, I worked with plenty of male nurses. And go to any high-end salon -- odds are the person running it is a man. (A straight man, at that.) The prejudices are there, to be sure, but the barriers men face in getting into any "female" field are much lower than those faced by women in getting into "male" fields.
No shit. And apparently the implication is that girls can't be geeks? Ggeek-ness is something that cuts quite nicely across gender lines. If they're trying to recruit the kind of girl whose main concern is clothes and makeup and who makes head cheerleader into tech ... well, that's their tough luck. Go for the smart, quiet ones in the back of the room, same as with the boys.
Do you suggest letting pimply-faced nerds run a business?
... um, yes, actually.
Since the nerds are the ones who make the products that actually do something, and MBA's as a group have proven themselves adept at nothing other than wasting money and running companies into the ground
When you figure out a way to sell Hubble-scale missions to suits who generally don't think ahead farther than the next couple of quarters, let us know.
Heh. My company does just fine with techies managing other techies. (The top level are actually scientists, specifically biologists, rather than programmers; the mindsets, while not identical, are similar.) We did have one MBA in the company -- he's no longer with us ...
Management is indeed a skill which has its place. It's just that business "education," in its current form, has nothing to do with skills that actually contribute anything.
Education is always good. MBA's, MCIS's, etc. are not, however, education. They're fake degrees for fake people for the sole purpose of getting fake jobs. If you want to condemn yourself to PHBness as a career ... well, that's your choice. <shrug>
I'm not arguing against distance learning per se, only against the type of people who so often seem to think it's a good idea, and the type of schools that seem to cater to them.
Oh, I agree with you, which is why I'm hopeful for the success of Linux (and F/OSS generally) in the long run. I'm just saying that the "do not worry if they crush our allies, Comrades, the Revolution will continue" attitude that seems to prevail among a lot of F/OSS enthusiasts is unrealistic. Linux came to prominence in a legal, as well as technical and economic, environment that has already changed considerably -- and will no longer exist at all if Microsoft et al. have their way.
The article is followed by a bunch of ads for distance degrees, in which the University of Phoenix features prominently. Has there ever been a greater curse on the CS field than people getting degrees from places like this in the middle of the dot-com boom? The worst aspect, I think, being how many of these degrees are in "IT management" or some such garbage, thus turning out a whole bunch of apprentice PHB's who think they're qualified to tell people with real educations what to do. If the current decline in enrollment trims the fat by getting rid of those people, it won't bother me a bit.
Don't forget, though, this is part of a two-edged strategy. On the business front, they want to turn Linux back into a "hobbyist OS" that doesn't have support from any major corporate users or suppliers. On the legal front, they want to buy legislators who will then effectively outlaw F/OSS with DRM and "security" requirements ... which is only possible if they've removed the corporate support.
I don't think they'll succeed, but don't be too sanguine yet.
[shrug] Different standards for ignorance; most people would recognize the origin of the name*, but wouldn't have any idea what a B. cluster is. And by /. standards, that's igorance. I'm a believer in the "one culture," myself -- if you don't recognize either, there's a serious gap in your knowledge.
*I may be giving "most people" too much credit, of course.
You could mention to your Dad that US troops deployed far from home have been successfully voting by absentee ballot since the Civil War.
I honestly feel that the mere fact of the existence of intelligent life off Earth would be enough to shock a lot of the fanatics into shutting up. This may be wishful thinking on my part. ;)
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.
Are we sure that that's how these gas giants formed, though? I mean, can we get enough of an idea of their atmospheric chemistry (through spectral analysis, I would assume) to be sure that they're made up of the same sort of stuff as our own gas giants? Like I said before, I really do wonder if thinking of them as failed double stars might make more sense, in which case (I assume) the formation process would be different.
My impression is that these particular planets are so close to their stars (closer than Mercury is to the Sun!) that any moons they might have would be sterile chunks of very hot rock -- not to mention that the orbital dynamics would be a nightmare, and a moon would probably end up getting thrown into either the star or the planet pretty fast, or flung out of orbit entirely. OTOH, the idea of Earth-size moons orbiting gas giants a little further out, in the "life band," and supporting life, seems entirely reasonable.
On the other hand, I am not so sure finding another form of life outside of Earth is such a good idea. We have a hard enough time getting along with people on the other side of our own planet.
I suspect that getting alien radio signals would make our differences look rather trivial. Nothing like a common threat (and it would be seen as a threat) to make people stop fighting each other.
"... this may be a case of current technology and techniques being unable to detect planets similar to Earth ..." Yeah, exactly. If the only way you have to detect planets orbiting other stars is to look for the gravitational effects of large, massive planets orbiting close their stars, then is what you're going to find.
It occurs to me that a useful way to think about these "hot Jupiters" may be as failed double stars, not planets equivalent to our own gas giants. And we already know that double stars are more common than singletons like the Sun. (Er, I think -- someone please tell me if I'm wrong.)
One thing that frustrates me about the articles I've seen on this subject is that they don't explain why formation of big, close-in gas giants precludes formation of Earth-like planets farther out. Accretion disks are really, really big; surely parts of them can clump into gas giants while others slowly form smaller, rocky planets?
This is still the United States of America, and battered as the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people may be, it still exists. Don't assume that just because the government does many things to restrict the knowledge of individuals (and the freedom to make well-informed decisions is perhaps the most basic freedom, without which all the other freedoms don't mean much) that all politicians, everywhere, all the time, want to keep everybody ignorant. Knowledge, not money or guns, is the true might of the nation.
You can almost here the oss fighters telling themeselves "finally, a big guy in the corner for the little guy fighting for the cause".
... I think most people know this already. Don't assume that everyone else is a naive little kid who needs you to explain the harsh realities of the world.
clue for the clueless, IBM is in it for IBM, if the tide ever changes and oss's destruction becomes favorable for IBM don't expect any mercy.
Um
Right now, Microsoft vs. IBM is Hitler vs. Stalin: they're both evil, and in fact once upon a time they were allies, but right now, the first is a greater strategic threat and the second is marginally less evil, or at least more rational in its evil, so that's the horse to back. If things change -- and at some point, they will -- then it will be time to re-evaluate.
(Apple is England in this scenario, I think. Novell is the US, maybe? SCO, obviously, is Vichy France. Ah, hell with it, I'm running out of analogies.)
Or, to go even farther back for a political metaphor: F/OSS has no permanent allies, only permanent interests.
I didn't say anything about anyone being forced to patent anything. (Looking back through your original post, I don't see where you did either, even to dismiss the idea.) What I was objecting to was your assertion that "the ideas" are the most valuable part of software. You seem to be ignorant of the fact that anyone, anywhere, any time can come up with a great idea; writing the damn code is where the effort is.
As for the idea that patents on ideas alone are useless -- well, I agree, but obviously for very different reasons. <1/2 g> As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, corporations can and do patent ideas, without implementation, and then use those patents as weapons against the programmers who do the actual work.
I think you may have missed my point. I agree that patenting "do something cool" is stupid -- or more precisely, allowing someone to patent it is stupid; patenting it, if the patent office allows you to get away with it, is very smart. But right now, ideas like "really fast sort algorithm" are patentable, because, apparently, the patent system in the US, and soon in Europe, is run by techno-illiterates. And I suggest that this sort of silliness is where allowing software patents, at all, inevitably leads. Copyright offers adequate protection for implementation; there is no legitimate place in the whole chain of events, from idea to finished application, for patents.
I understand the goal -- calling attention to the problem, and all that -- but honestly, didn't anyone realize that the most likely result of the whole thing would be to encourage Munich and other city governments to stick with Microsoft? This seems just as Quixotic as the US Greens' die-hard support of Ralph Nader in 2000; really classic Green behavior all around.
A word to the wise: throwing monkey wrenches in the system does not work. It doesn't get you what you want. It doesn't highlight the stark injustices of the world and act as a call to arms for the oppressed. All it does is piss people off. And in the end, things go on about the same as, but a little worse than, they were before.
I think what the Greens meant to do was highlight the problems with software patents, not to stop the Linux migration. Unfortunately, in classic Green fashion, their method of doing so was to point a rather large gun directly at their foot, take careful aim, and pull the trigger.
Wow, how brave you are, telling us several times how unpopular your opinion is, and how no doubt you will be modded troll or flamebait for daring to tell The Truth(R)(TM).
... what's wrong with your post isn't that you're trolling (you're not) but the factual errors you make. To wit:
...
Anyway
And before i get flamed, yes I know a license for code is different from a patent, but guess what, in software, the most valuable part of the software is the ideas, the algorithms. It's usually not very hard to implement the ideas(though that doesn't mean it isn't often screwed up).
Okay, I have an idea: an O(log n) sorting algorithm. How brilliant I am! I should patent it and make a bunch of money immediately! Oh, okay, there's the matter of implementation, but that's for the little people to worry about.
You see where I'm going with this? Ideas are easy. Implementation is 99 44/100 % of the work -- always has been, and probably always will be. And yet now, we're at the point where not only are companies patenting specific implementations, which I would have a problem with in and of itself (copyright vs. patent) but ideas before an implementation even exists. It's not like they've done the work and want to protect the fruits of their labor; they're saying, in effect, "If anyone ever does this work, we own their ass."
Open source has created a lot of new ideas, and will continue to create new ideas. These should be embraced, if you hate patens so much, don't use the stuff in the patents.
The new ideas F/OSS has created tend to be in specific implementations, not in Big Ideas. (NB: the Big Ideas tend not to come out of companies like Microsoft, either. Mostly they come from academic research, or from corporate labs like Bell Labs or PARC that function almost as separate entities from the parent corporation.) Now, I'm not saying it will always be this way. We may be starting to see the age of F/OSS doing genuinely new things, not just improving old ones. LAMP, f'rinstance, although it consists of a combination of older ideas, has become a social as well as technical phenomenon, moving waaay beyond Just Another Server Setup. But Most F/OSS and proprietary developers spend most of their time implementing improvements on ideas that have been around in academic CS since the Seventies.
In fact, that time period brings up something I hadn't thought of before. Why, exactly, are almost all of the "modern" programming techniques we use based on academic CS from the Seventies and before? Well, in 1980, there was this little thing called Bayh-Dole
Well, speaking as a middle-term Mac user (I switched from PC's in 1995, which means that I have roughly the same amount of time using the "Classic" MacOS as I do using OS X) I'd say that OS X has finally caught up in terms of overall usability, but it's taken a while. I had to grit my teeth and make myself use everything below 10.2; I kept doing it since a) I knew I'd have to get used to it, and b) as an old DOS-head, I really did (and still do) appreciate having Unix so close to the surface. With 10.2, I'd say they achieved roughly the same level of usability as they had in the System 7 days; 10.3 is as good as OS 9 overall. Certainly there are things about the old MacOS I miss, even now, but the cool new stuff in OS X more than makes up for it, most of the time.
All things considered, what I really wish they'd done was produce an evolved version of the Classic interface with Unix running underneath, and added in the cool NEXT-derived stuff piece by piece. They had already proven they could this successfully, with A/UX, but I believe that was one of many things that got "Steved."
You can call the systematic study of just about anything, digging through different sources, "research." It's just that this is research on physics papers and their authors, not on physics itself.