...how good can a product be whose framework are "set during meetings by Governmment ministers followed by private sector specialists".... it seems like a classic mistake of the horse pushing the cart rather than pulling it...
Oh, absolutely. How fortunate we are that the Internet was designed and implemented by the private sector, without any of that nasty government interference!
AFAIK, there have been several attempts to farm spiders, actually. Sure, spiders are creepy and potentially dangerous, but that's not why the attempts failed. (Having once been caught in the middle of an honest-to-God cattle stampede, I can tell you that a bunch of cows are scarier than a bunch of spiders any day of the week -- which, obviously, doesn't keep us from raising the critters.) The problem is that spiders are just stubborn; they spin webs pretty much only when they feel like it. Silkworms, OTOH, will turn out silk all day if you keep them fed.
Again, this is all AFAIK, based on stuff I heard a long time ago.
The schools should not be doing the students the disservice of getting them involved with Linux and OpenOffice etc. when that is not what they will be using in the real world. Let's try and help these guys out with their education rather than leading them down the path to techie-socialist dreamland.
"Real world":
Artists aren't going to be using Windows, they're going to be using Mac OS.
Engineers and scientists aren't going to be using Windows (unless their employers are idiots), they're going be using Linux or some commercial Unix.
Writers, social scientists, etc. may use Windows by default, but once they're exposed to OS's that allow them to get their work done without having to worry about constant crashes and virus infections, they'll be happy to switch.
The only people for whom the "real world" necessarily involves Windows are the b-school drones, and even that is only true if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (we'll teach you Windows because that's what you will use, because that's what you were taught, because...) and the argument in the paragraph above applies equally here.
I suspect you have very little idea of what the word "education" actually means.
Well, of course ultimately the idea is that the high-paying jobs that go overseas -- high-paying by the standards of the countries they're going to, in any case -- will boost those countries' economies enough that they'll be able to buy our stuff. And long-term, it's reasonable to believe that this is so. Free trade, overall, tends to be good for everyone engaging in it. The problem is that in the short term, or even the medium term, there's a whole lot of chaos involved in the process, and a lot of people suffer from it. Notice that the people making the decisions that lead to this chaos hardly ever suffer themselves.
I have mixed feelings about this. I work in IT, fortunately for a company that is spectacularly unlikely to outsource anything any time soon. (Er, unless I stop wasting time on/. and get back to work, that is. <g>) I know a hell of a lot of people, less lucky than I, who are out of work because of foreign competition. And yet I also believe that economic growth in the Third World is the best thing that could possibly happen for the Earth as a whole, and I am well aware that the export of IT jobs is a major step toward that goal.
You are incredibly off base. I personally look at Net porn very rarely (it was kind of cool when the Web was new; now it's boring and expensive) and when I do it's on my home computer... and yet I'm offended by library filters.
Why? Because the filters are made by private companies that refuse to release their block lists, even when their software is paid for by our tax dollars. Because many of these companies have a clear political agenda in which sites they choose to block (why is NOW on the verboten list, but FoTF isn't?) Because they are insanely overbroad in their blocking (want breast cancer info from your public library terminal? Good luck...) And because, damn it -- you may have heard these words before -- "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
This is only peripherally about "the right to view nekkid people as consenting adults." If you don't understand that, you haven't been paying attention.
It amazes me that people can take this cavalier attitude about legal requirements when it comes to computers. Would you sign a mortgage if the bank said, "Oh, we don't have the paperwork that specifies your rights and responsibilities right now, but just sign here and don't worry about it?" Would you buy a car without a title? Etc. And yet somehow, when it comes to computers, we're just supposed to click through pages of legalese because "everyone else does."
It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates
Citation, please? Last time I had reason to look at the numbers, CO had rates of cervical cancer about twice the national average, and skin cancer higher than that. (A friend just pointed out that we're not doing too well on lung cancer, either.) I'm not saying you're wrong, but since this contradicts everything I'd read previously, I'd like to know a source a little more specific than "it's been known for..."
You seem to be assuming that science exists in a vacuum, and that scientists are automatons who have no interest in or knowledge of the ethical implications of the knowledge they work to discover. This is bullshit. Scientists are people, and moreover they're smart people who are intensely curious about the world -- all of it, not just the part of it they're studying in the lab. As a rule, they know much more about the ethics of their work than any bunch of alarmists ever will.
[shrug] I'm on a dialup connection at home, and I'd say I probably get an average amount of spam -- and I still much prefer downloading everything and looking through the stuff my mail client has filtered as spam. I probably lose a total of, say, fifteen minutes a day waiting for all the spam to download; but although it's rare, the filter has occasionally misidentified "real" e-mail as spam, and I've always been glad I caught it.
Why can't people just take a movie for what it is? These aren't documentaries, you know.
Because it's easy to suspend your disbelief about one thing, or two things, or ten things, than about every goddamn thing in the movie. IMO it's a core value of good SF and fantasy that once you have the central gimmicks established (hyperspace travel, intelligent aliens, a setting that closely but not exactly resembles some period in history, whatever) everything else should be as realistic as possible.
The speech thing makes me think that adapting to a new sense as an adult must be very like learning a foreign language as an adult -- which is of course possible, but it's much easier for a child, especially when they're dealing with other children. I remember having a French cousin, who was four years old and spoke no English (her mother, my aunt, is American, but she's lived in France for years and I believe the family only speaks French in the home) come to visit; I took her to a nearby playground, and after a couple of hours of playing with American kids, she was happily babbling in a 50/50 mix of French and English! I suspect that children also teach each other how to see, to some degree, maybe even more than their parents do; it seems like little kids spend a lot of time pointing things out to each other.
Re:Obligatory rain on parade
on
Spray-On Computers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, so I'll answer seriously: The whole idea of nanotech is to be small and cheap. A lot of useful research can be done with $2 million (equivalent) if you're not wasting money on a marketing dept., executive salaries, and all the other corporate bullshit. The academic research environment has shown time and time again that it gets more done dollar for dollar (pound for pound, euro for euro, whatever) than the corporate research environment, which is why most genuine science (as opposed to engineering) comes out of academic labs. In fact, it's a nice refutation of the "free market is always more efficient" mantra beloved of both "privatize everything" politicians and university administrators -- who are basically whores for the oxymoronic "business schools" and sports teams.
[steps back, looks at post]
Wow, that was a bit of a rant, wasn't it? I didn't realize I had that much venom stored up on this subject.;)
Re:great advantage to Vector in free software.
on
Corel Goes Private
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· Score: 1
That's what we Macheads have been saying for years.;)
Seriously, I think you're right; I just hope Vector/Corel sees it that way. It's blindingly obvious to you, me, and everyone else who pays attention that developing business software for Windows is a mug's game, because if you get successful enough, sooner or later M$ will crush you. (If you're very lucky, they might buy you out, but more likely they'll just whip up a messy hacked copy of your software -- and no matter how good or elegant your product may be, PHB's will buy the M$ product just because it's M$.) OTOH, develop for Linux or Mac OS, especially in a segment where there currently isn't a clearly defined market leader, and you have a good chance of building a fiercely loyal customer base.
Like I said: you know this, I know this, and lots of other people know this -- but does Vector know this? Stay tuned...
Of course Southern culture has changed over the last 30 years; so has Northern culture and Western culture -- they've all become more like each other than they used to be. Thanks to a number of factors (the universality of TV shows and popular music, increased geographical mobility, and yes, damn it, the Net chief among them) the US, like most First World nations, is a lot more homogenous than it used to be; and in fact the same phenomenon is occurring between nations as well as within them. Whether this is a Good Thing or not depends on your point of view, but overall, I'm inclined to say that it is.
Then all I can say is, you're at the wrong school. My undergrad CS courses were nearly 50% female; in the grad courses it's more like 30%, but there's still plenty of eye candy. Hint: try an urban commuter campus that caters more to working adults.
Re:Does anyone see IP issues inthe future?
on
Corel Goes Private
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· Score: 4, Informative
What is that attitude of Vector Capital, for whom Corel is simply now an owned brand?
Good question. Here's a partial answer: a list of software companies owned by Vector. The majority of them seem to be the types of names you don't recognize unless you work in a specific field -- "enterprise software" tailored to a very specific business application. And like it or not, that usually means Windows these days. I'd love to see more Linux and OS X releases from Corel (I'd love an OS X - native WordPerfect) but I'm not terribly optimistic.
OTOH, "simply an owned brand" might be a bit harsh -- I get the impression that VC (nice abbreviation, huh?) is basically a holding company and doesn't necessarily run the businesses they own. So who knows. Maybe given some money to play with and some space to breathe, the forward thinkers at Corel (there must be some left, right?) can come up with some good stuff.
Um... actually, Germany did it first, and then the US and USSR (both building on leftover German equipment and knowledge) did roughly equal amounts of "best."
Yep. And if there's lots of water under the surface, but no native ecosystem to screw up... sounds promising for the whole Red/Green/Blue Mars scenario.
The Gods are different, the religions are different. They are logically contradictory. The Muslim god has a prophet Mohammed, the Christian god does not. The Christian god is in a trinity with his only Son Jesus. The Muslim god, of course, is not.
They cannot be the same, as they contradict each other.
By that logic (always a tricky thing to apply logic to religion, since it's inherently based on faith, not logic) the Christian God and the Jewish God are different too, since the Christian God has a Son, Who is the Messiah; and the Jewish God doesn't, and the Messiah according to Jewish belief has not yet come. And yet Christians have no problem claiming the Jewish God, along with His long collection of prophets found in the Old Testament, as their own. And most Jews acknowledge that the Christians worship the same God they do, even if they believe the Christians were wrong about Jesus being the Messiah.
The fact that so many Christians refuse to acknowledge that the God of Islam and the God of Christianity are the same entity has to do with politics, not theology. Interestingly, a lot of Jews -- f'rinstance, my grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi who is about as reflexively pro-Israel as anyone except Ariel Sharon -- are not nearly so dogmatic on the issue, despite the history of conflict.
Slow down, cowboy. I don't think the poster was questioning the accuracy of the DNA analysis techniques themselves, but rather the degree to which the techniques uniquely identify an individual.
You say:
The chances of two people having exactly the same combination of restriction-snipped fragments is so so so so *so* small it is difficult to express in numbers
This is only true if you get a sufficiently large number of fragments. If you're analyzing someone's entire genome, of course you're right -- the only possible way to get an identical "DNA fingerprint" is on identical twins. But in fact the number of fragments analyzed is fairly small, in the thousands; which means it's possible to get the same analysis out of several million unrelated people, and a much smaller number of closely related people. Considering how many crimes are committed by one family member against another, this is a real concern.
I'm all for DNA analysis as a forensic tool, since it's currently the most accurate tool we have for placing a suspect at the scene of a crime. But it's a long way from perfect. Presumably, as the technology improves and it becomes practical to analyze larger sequences faster, it will get better.
I would argue, quite seriously, the the/. crowd is biased in favor of what works. We're not biased against Microsoft because it's Microsoft, or in favor of Linux because we think penguins are cute. We're biased toward products and services that we feel provide good value for the money and/or work required to use them, and against products and services that are overpriced (in either money or time) for whatever value they may provide.
This is why/. is very enthusiastic about both Linux and OS X. They provide completely different approaches to What An OS Should Be: Linux is cheap (often free) and very DIY, while OS X is expensive (especially if you count the cost of having to buy a new Mac to run it on) and very pre-packaged and relatively difficult to modify. But both of them work, and work well, and provide platforms that are amazingly capable relative to the investment the user must make in them. Honestly, if Microsoft ever comes out with a product that does the same, we'll probably embrace it too. So far, that hasn't happened, and I see no reason to expect that it will.
Technically, you're right -- but the neat thing about AppleCare, as opposed to most other "extended warranty" schemes that are really scams, is that Apple is very generous in their definition of what's covered. I have friends who treat their Apple laptops like absolute hell, and they always get fast, efficient, and most importantly, free repair on their machines through AppleCare. I mean, cracked cases and stuff like that -- clearly the result of abuse, but the AppleCare folks fix it without bitching.
Personally, I treat my iBook like a baby, and it's had very few problems; but the battery did die a while back, and I was very impressed with the service I got. The only other time I've ever used AppleCare was with a desktop Mac, years ago, when the monitor died -- most likely as a result of my very long-haired cat sitting on it all the time and getting hair in all the vents -- and again, I was quite happy with the service.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, there have been several attempts to farm spiders, actually. Sure, spiders are creepy and potentially dangerous, but that's not why the attempts failed. (Having once been caught in the middle of an honest-to-God cattle stampede, I can tell you that a bunch of cows are scarier than a bunch of spiders any day of the week -- which, obviously, doesn't keep us from raising the critters.) The problem is that spiders are just stubborn; they spin webs pretty much only when they feel like it. Silkworms, OTOH, will turn out silk all day if you keep them fed.
Again, this is all AFAIK, based on stuff I heard a long time ago.
Artists aren't going to be using Windows, they're going to be using Mac OS.
Engineers and scientists aren't going to be using Windows (unless their employers are idiots), they're going be using Linux or some commercial Unix.
Writers, social scientists, etc. may use Windows by default, but once they're exposed to OS's that allow them to get their work done without having to worry about constant crashes and virus infections, they'll be happy to switch.
The only people for whom the "real world" necessarily involves Windows are the b-school drones, and even that is only true if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (we'll teach you Windows because that's what you will use, because that's what you were taught, because
I suspect you have very little idea of what the word "education" actually means.
What are these "non-Windows systems" you speak of? I know not these words.
Well, of course ultimately the idea is that the high-paying jobs that go overseas -- high-paying by the standards of the countries they're going to, in any case -- will boost those countries' economies enough that they'll be able to buy our stuff. And long-term, it's reasonable to believe that this is so. Free trade, overall, tends to be good for everyone engaging in it. The problem is that in the short term, or even the medium term, there's a whole lot of chaos involved in the process, and a lot of people suffer from it. Notice that the people making the decisions that lead to this chaos hardly ever suffer themselves.
/. and get back to work, that is. <g>) I know a hell of a lot of people, less lucky than I, who are out of work because of foreign competition. And yet I also believe that economic growth in the Third World is the best thing that could possibly happen for the Earth as a whole, and I am well aware that the export of IT jobs is a major step toward that goal.
I have mixed feelings about this. I work in IT, fortunately for a company that is spectacularly unlikely to outsource anything any time soon. (Er, unless I stop wasting time on
You are incredibly off base. I personally look at Net porn very rarely (it was kind of cool when the Web was new; now it's boring and expensive) and when I do it's on my home computer ... and yet I'm offended by library filters.
...) And because, damn it -- you may have heard these words before -- "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ..."
Why? Because the filters are made by private companies that refuse to release their block lists, even when their software is paid for by our tax dollars. Because many of these companies have a clear political agenda in which sites they choose to block (why is NOW on the verboten list, but FoTF isn't?) Because they are insanely overbroad in their blocking (want breast cancer info from your public library terminal? Good luck
This is only peripherally about "the right to view nekkid people as consenting adults." If you don't understand that, you haven't been paying attention.
It amazes me that people can take this cavalier attitude about legal requirements when it comes to computers. Would you sign a mortgage if the bank said, "Oh, we don't have the paperwork that specifies your rights and responsibilities right now, but just sign here and don't worry about it?" Would you buy a car without a title? Etc. And yet somehow, when it comes to computers, we're just supposed to click through pages of legalese because "everyone else does."
You seem to be assuming that science exists in a vacuum, and that scientists are automatons who have no interest in or knowledge of the ethical implications of the knowledge they work to discover. This is bullshit. Scientists are people, and moreover they're smart people who are intensely curious about the world -- all of it, not just the part of it they're studying in the lab. As a rule, they know much more about the ethics of their work than any bunch of alarmists ever will.
[shrug] I'm on a dialup connection at home, and I'd say I probably get an average amount of spam -- and I still much prefer downloading everything and looking through the stuff my mail client has filtered as spam. I probably lose a total of, say, fifteen minutes a day waiting for all the spam to download; but although it's rare, the filter has occasionally misidentified "real" e-mail as spam, and I've always been glad I caught it.
The speech thing makes me think that adapting to a new sense as an adult must be very like learning a foreign language as an adult -- which is of course possible, but it's much easier for a child, especially when they're dealing with other children. I remember having a French cousin, who was four years old and spoke no English (her mother, my aunt, is American, but she's lived in France for years and I believe the family only speaks French in the home) come to visit; I took her to a nearby playground, and after a couple of hours of playing with American kids, she was happily babbling in a 50/50 mix of French and English! I suspect that children also teach each other how to see, to some degree, maybe even more than their parents do; it seems like little kids spend a lot of time pointing things out to each other.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, so I'll answer seriously: The whole idea of nanotech is to be small and cheap. A lot of useful research can be done with $2 million (equivalent) if you're not wasting money on a marketing dept., executive salaries, and all the other corporate bullshit. The academic research environment has shown time and time again that it gets more done dollar for dollar (pound for pound, euro for euro, whatever) than the corporate research environment, which is why most genuine science (as opposed to engineering) comes out of academic labs. In fact, it's a nice refutation of the "free market is always more efficient" mantra beloved of both "privatize everything" politicians and university administrators -- who are basically whores for the oxymoronic "business schools" and sports teams.
;)
[steps back, looks at post]
Wow, that was a bit of a rant, wasn't it? I didn't realize I had that much venom stored up on this subject.
That's what we Macheads have been saying for years. ;)
...
Seriously, I think you're right; I just hope Vector/Corel sees it that way. It's blindingly obvious to you, me, and everyone else who pays attention that developing business software for Windows is a mug's game, because if you get successful enough, sooner or later M$ will crush you. (If you're very lucky, they might buy you out, but more likely they'll just whip up a messy hacked copy of your software -- and no matter how good or elegant your product may be, PHB's will buy the M$ product just because it's M$.) OTOH, develop for Linux or Mac OS, especially in a segment where there currently isn't a clearly defined market leader, and you have a good chance of building a fiercely loyal customer base.
Like I said: you know this, I know this, and lots of other people know this -- but does Vector know this? Stay tuned
Of course Southern culture has changed over the last 30 years; so has Northern culture and Western culture -- they've all become more like each other than they used to be. Thanks to a number of factors (the universality of TV shows and popular music, increased geographical mobility, and yes, damn it, the Net chief among them) the US, like most First World nations, is a lot more homogenous than it used to be; and in fact the same phenomenon is occurring between nations as well as within them. Whether this is a Good Thing or not depends on your point of view, but overall, I'm inclined to say that it is.
Then all I can say is, you're at the wrong school. My undergrad CS courses were nearly 50% female; in the grad courses it's more like 30%, but there's still plenty of eye candy. Hint: try an urban commuter campus that caters more to working adults.
OTOH, "simply an owned brand" might be a bit harsh -- I get the impression that VC (nice abbreviation, huh?) is basically a holding company and doesn't necessarily run the businesses they own. So who knows. Maybe given some money to play with and some space to breathe, the forward thinkers at Corel (there must be some left, right?) can come up with some good stuff.
Um ... actually, Germany did it first, and then the US and USSR (both building on leftover German equipment and knowledge) did roughly equal amounts of "best."
No, it'll be Gor.
I think that would be "the Godwin-Moore law."
The fact that so many Christians refuse to acknowledge that the God of Islam and the God of Christianity are the same entity has to do with politics, not theology. Interestingly, a lot of Jews -- f'rinstance, my grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi who is about as reflexively pro-Israel as anyone except Ariel Sharon -- are not nearly so dogmatic on the issue, despite the history of conflict.
You say:
This is only true if you get a sufficiently large number of fragments. If you're analyzing someone's entire genome, of course you're right -- the only possible way to get an identical "DNA fingerprint" is on identical twins. But in fact the number of fragments analyzed is fairly small, in the thousands; which means it's possible to get the same analysis out of several million unrelated people, and a much smaller number of closely related people. Considering how many crimes are committed by one family member against another, this is a real concern.
I'm all for DNA analysis as a forensic tool, since it's currently the most accurate tool we have for placing a suspect at the scene of a crime. But it's a long way from perfect. Presumably, as the technology improves and it becomes practical to analyze larger sequences faster, it will get better.
I would argue, quite seriously, the the /. crowd is biased in favor of what works. We're not biased against Microsoft because it's Microsoft, or in favor of Linux because we think penguins are cute. We're biased toward products and services that we feel provide good value for the money and/or work required to use them, and against products and services that are overpriced (in either money or time) for whatever value they may provide.
/. is very enthusiastic about both Linux and OS X. They provide completely different approaches to What An OS Should Be: Linux is cheap (often free) and very DIY, while OS X is expensive (especially if you count the cost of having to buy a new Mac to run it on) and very pre-packaged and relatively difficult to modify. But both of them work, and work well, and provide platforms that are amazingly capable relative to the investment the user must make in them. Honestly, if Microsoft ever comes out with a product that does the same, we'll probably embrace it too. So far, that hasn't happened, and I see no reason to expect that it will.
This is why
Technically, you're right -- but the neat thing about AppleCare, as opposed to most other "extended warranty" schemes that are really scams, is that Apple is very generous in their definition of what's covered. I have friends who treat their Apple laptops like absolute hell, and they always get fast, efficient, and most importantly, free repair on their machines through AppleCare. I mean, cracked cases and stuff like that -- clearly the result of abuse, but the AppleCare folks fix it without bitching.
Personally, I treat my iBook like a baby, and it's had very few problems; but the battery did die a while back, and I was very impressed with the service I got. The only other time I've ever used AppleCare was with a desktop Mac, years ago, when the monitor died -- most likely as a result of my very long-haired cat sitting on it all the time and getting hair in all the vents -- and again, I was quite happy with the service.
So in short, hell yes, get the AppleCare.