We don't give a shit. On the contrary - you've spent over 100 billion dollars in the last year showing just how much you hate other people doing things differently.
IBM had this similar device for CATIA on AIX back in the late 90's. Still a nice idea for modelling programs that have the natural functional split between modify and move.
Well, it's alive in the sense that it's the default scripting language for Radia. And I suppose that there must be an awful lot that you haven't heard of. If you ever do anything on IBM big iron you'll come across rexx. I remember writing rexx programs on RS/6000 in 98/99 when the language was very much still alive within IBM.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
In other news, the American Society for the Sales of Alternative Medicine estimated that new age hippies saved $47.3 trillion by forgoing medical insurance and waving crystals around insead.
Sorry - Have recently started working for a firm where that kind of noun-to-verb conversion is commonplace. Must be strong in the face of corporatespeak.
On that same note, I consider that as one of the better arguments against OO code - It simply does not map well to real-world CPUs, thus introducing inefficiencies in the translation to something the CPU does handle natively
maxim: cycles are cheap, people are expensive. For the *vast majority* of software it is significantly better value to design and build a well architected OO solution than to optimise for performance in languages and methodologies that are more difficult to implement and maintain. Who cares if it's not very efficient - it'll run twice as fast in 18 months, and will be a lot cheaper to change when the client figures out what the actually wanted in the first place. But I guess you already knew that.
I'm guessing from your post you studied a science at Cambridge? Engineering
The male--female ratio is low in most colleges... Was about 50/50 at my college, though CUSU has it at 40% women in the out-of-date alt prospectus.
the state-public school ratio is low in most colleges Compared to other universities this is true, but the situation is certainly improving as admissions tutors increase the amount of positive discrimination in response to government threats.
the colored-white british national ratio is low in most colleges Worryingly few black students (a handful out of ~400 at Pembroke), but plenty of British asian students.
many of the science subjects encourage you to do some kind of low-paid summer research. I never encountered this, and worked for a large IT company and a large bank during the summer holidays. Short terms meant that I could do 11 weeks in the summer and still take a holiday.
I don't honestly think they provide "cheap good lodgings". Whilst the prices are going up, they were still significantly below market rates, and with the exception of my second year I had better rooms than any of my friends at other universities. Also, because the houses I lived in were college owned, I only paid rent when I was there. Cambridge Colleges do, however, stiff you for 100 a term as "Kitchen Fixed Charge", which should be called "Fellows' Wine Levy". Factoring in the various sums of money I received from college to go on holiday and stay in Cambridge during the easter vacation to revise I reckon I got a pretty good deal. It wasn't a patch, however, on what my sister gets at Johns.
If you want an 'ivy-league' your [sic] told Oxford or Cambridge, otherwise, anything ranked between 5 and 70 that does your course (and from what I remember, has a favourable m/f ratio:) is good enough. Oxford or Cambridge is only a significant edge if your name is Clinton or crown prince....
This seems to me to be a load of bollocks. There are about a dozen top flight universities in the UK, and the difference between Oxbridge and the rest of them is, as you say, small. As I graduated in June, and spent a portion of last year finding a graduate job it is pretty clear to me that most of the serious graduate employers don't actually bother recruiting from any universities outside of the top dozen or so. I even spoke to a few that dealt exclusively with people from the top 4, and one that only recruited from Cambridge. So in terms of getting a job, making sure you make the top flight seems pretty important.
Now consider that all universities cost the same for the moment. Assuming that you are prepared to travel, then it's pretty obvious that you should go to the most prestigious university that you can get in to. In the UK, you do not have to pay extra for prestige. In this sense, the people who go to the worst universities get the rawest deal, ad their education doesn't add much to their value, but it costs the same as mine.
Finally consider that Oxbridge are actually far from the mythical institutions that only accept wealthy independently educated kids. They accept on merit, have short 8 week terms so more time to earn in the holidays, provide cheap good lodgings, and are pretty good for financial help.
The big difference is a DUMB ISO programmer (where the data lines are controlled by the PC) and a smart programmer where they have protocols embedded in the hardware ISO programmer to conform to ISO protocol standards. That's a different case all together...
Are you saying that the Towitoko chipDrive readers sitting on my desk are illegal? They contain a couple of PIC microcontrollers which talk to the driver using their own protocol. The APDUs are sent to the reader within a higher level protocol, hence they are not "dumb ISO programmers" as you define it. As far as I remember, most other readers operate in a similar fashion, and hence require a certain amount of logic in a device driver on the host. I'm not sure what you are getting at here.
OK, I haven't read the application and I probably wouldn't understand the legal nicities, but I saw Accenture demo this last autumn in London. The dem used MSN messenger in a three way conversation in which the third participant was a computer doing auto translation. seemed to work in a half hearted way for french, but you had to get the accents correct which seemed a bit strange.
I heard something on the BBC about IM on mobile phones becoming so popular in the UK that the next generation will be using their thumbs to do things we would use our index finger for, like ringing a doorbell.
My sister is currently in Japan and she tells me that this phenomenon is even more pronounced over there. She's spent the past three years learning japanese at university, including countless hours learning to write japanese characters (katakana, hiragana? something like that). She said that so many young japanese use their phones to write in japanese that many can't write with a pen very well, so she cab write better than most students her age. Additionally the use of thumb, as opposed to index finger (pun unintended), is also very common as a result.
However, maybe I'm implicitly assuming that we have settled exactly what Avogadro's number is. yep. Avogadro's number is defined as the number of C12 atoms that weigh 12 grams, so you can't use the number to make the inverse definition. Like a dog chasing it's tail or something.
For what good purpose would you deny the people the same right to Steinbeck as they have to Shakespeare?
Simple answer: I wouldn't. in fact I agree with the point you make; namely that the recent extension of US copyright protection is wrong. This seems to me to be the unfortunate result (amongst many, many others) of a political system in which corporate interests dominate. I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but ISTR the copyright extension was due to Disney's advocacy.
To everyone else that has pointed out that there is a legal difference between copyright infringement and theft, I concede that you are clearly correct. I suppose that my comment was made in response to my perception of the usual tirade of comments claiming that all information should be free; pirating material isn't hurting anyone; the RIAA are evil anyway, so who cares etc.
Clearly there has to be a balance between rewarding the content creator to the extent that (s)he is motivated and financially able to devote further time and energy to making content; and ensuring that this work passes into the public domain once such reward has been enjoyed. There is also the importance of ensuring the legal status of licences such as the GPL by which the author can guarantee the free availability of his work. Thus people like us can continue to contribute to what is essentially the largest volunteer movement in the world secure in the knowledge that our efforts will not be hijacked. To my mind it is clear that open source software will in due course make a great positive contribution to the world, and I hope that I can be a small part of that.
Oh for God's sake. Despite your protestations to the contrary, unlawfully copying somebody else's intellectual property is depriving them of deserved reward. Calling it anything other than theft or stealing is simply trying to make yourself feel better for the enormous collection of MP3's and divX's on your machine.
illegally copying IP *is* theft. Make no bones about that.
now watch me get modded to oblivion as a troll whilst I listen to the music that I have stolen.
You can't have Civil Engineers until you have Physics. And you won't have 100% bulletproof software until you have Software Engineering.
[quote chosen in a feeble attempt to summarise your point.] I don't agree. It's a nice premise, and one that is elegant and would be very easy to accept uncritically, but it simply isn't true. The way civil engineers build the *vast majority* of new structures is to take out a copy of the relevant striuctural code and look up the mandated tolerances for wind, water etc. They then look through the list of existing designs until they get one that roughly fits the problem. This is then altered until analysis shows that it will meet the spec.
Then consider what happens when someone tries to build something new, like the Millennium bridge in London. Even some of the most respected civil engineers in the world slip up, and the thing doesn't quite work as planned. Three years later, we now have a working design for horizontally suspended bridges, and the next one built will work.
so, you see, whilst the analysis lets us make predictions about what will happen structurally, they're only really valid for designs that have been used before.
Finally consider the two failures that you mention. tacoma was caused by vortex shedding, a piece of fluid mechanics that was not understood at the time. Hyatt was caused by a construction error - the engineer's drawings were not followed correctly when constructing the walkway. Drawing the obvious analogy with software engineering, the Tacoma case corresponds to an environmental issue perhaps CPU overheating; the Hyatt case corresponds to a simple bug in the implementation of the design.
I suppose that at least destruction testing on software isn't that destructive when compared with physical engineering projects. So maybe there's hope yet.
Reminds me of a friend of mine who finished his engineering degree a couple of years ago with three thirds. Doing a compulsary mechanics paper in the second year, he hadn't the first idea about how to answer anything. So he got out his pair of compasses and protractor and started drawing a variety of elaborate geometrical constructions. The guys sitting nearby were allegedly very, very confused.
Even at their own sites, Austin TX for example - was still using Token Ring through-out the complex in 1998. Hursley, where I worked, was on 16Mb Token Ring at least until the end of 2000. My group installed our own 100Mb ethernet, since all the machines we had came with on board NICs. The maintenence people weren't too happy about us cutting holes in their walls for the wiring though.:)
Catch an IBM'er and have a frank discussion sometime. And you'll find that the prevailing attitude towards microsoft there is: "One day, maybe not soon, but one day... we WILL bend gates and his minions over a barrel and assrape them HARD. And as they say: 'Revenge is a dish best served cold'".
IBM employs, what, a quarter of a million people? I think you will find that most of them don't give a shit about "assraping" microsoft as you charmingly put it. You are talking a load of bollocks and you are deluded if you think IBM are going to somehow speed up development of a processor, "just to spite Gates". IBM, like every other company, do things to make money and not to spite people. IBMers, like employees of every other large company, care about their project, and maybe even care about the company as a whole; but they don't have vendettas on behalf of the company.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary - you've spent over 100 billion dollars in the last year showing just how much you hate other people doing things differently.
They've been doing this for years. Good to see that the UK is on the global forefront of technologically assisted pugilism.
oooooh. more google whizziness. apprepreciate the pointer.
Who authored this message, Bush or Dick? ;)
ITYM "wrote"
IBM had this similar device for CATIA on AIX back in the late 90's. Still a nice idea for modelling programs that have the natural functional split between modify and move.
Well, it's alive in the sense that it's the default scripting language for Radia. And I suppose that there must be an awful lot that you haven't heard of. If you ever do anything on IBM big iron you'll come across rexx. I remember writing rexx programs on RS/6000 in 98/99 when the language was very much still alive within IBM.
Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.
In other news, the American Society for the Sales of Alternative Medicine estimated that new age hippies saved $47.3 trillion by forgoing medical insurance and waving crystals around insead.
Sorry - Have recently started working for a firm where that kind of noun-to-verb conversion is commonplace. Must be strong in the face of corporatespeak.
On that same note, I consider that as one of the better arguments against OO code - It simply does not map well to real-world CPUs, thus introducing inefficiencies in the translation to something the CPU does handle natively
maxim: cycles are cheap, people are expensive. For the *vast majority* of software it is significantly better value to design and build a well architected OO solution than to optimise for performance in languages and methodologies that are more difficult to implement and maintain. Who cares if it's not very efficient - it'll run twice as fast in 18 months, and will be a lot cheaper to change when the client figures out what the actually wanted in the first place. But I guess you already knew that.
Because us American's have a natural and benificial mistrust of big business and big government!
lol. and get rid of the apostrophe.
There are still plenty of arseholes at trinity, so he shouldn't have too much of a problem.
I'm guessing from your post you studied a science at Cambridge?
Engineering
The male--female ratio is low in most colleges...
Was about 50/50 at my college, though CUSU has it at 40% women in the out-of-date alt prospectus.
the state-public school ratio is low in most colleges
Compared to other universities this is true, but the situation is certainly improving as admissions tutors increase the amount of positive discrimination in response to government threats.
the colored-white british national ratio is low in most colleges
Worryingly few black students (a handful out of ~400 at Pembroke), but plenty of British asian students.
many of the science subjects encourage you to do some kind of low-paid summer research.
I never encountered this, and worked for a large IT company and a large bank during the summer holidays. Short terms meant that I could do 11 weeks in the summer and still take a holiday.
I don't honestly think they provide "cheap good lodgings".
Whilst the prices are going up, they were still significantly below market rates, and with the exception of my second year I had better rooms than any of my friends at other universities. Also, because the houses I lived in were college owned, I only paid rent when I was there. Cambridge Colleges do, however, stiff you for 100 a term as "Kitchen Fixed Charge", which should be called "Fellows' Wine Levy". Factoring in the various sums of money I received from college to go on holiday and stay in Cambridge during the easter vacation to revise I reckon I got a pretty good deal. It wasn't a patch, however, on what my sister gets at Johns.
This seems to me to be a load of bollocks. There are about a dozen top flight universities in the UK, and the difference between Oxbridge and the rest of them is, as you say, small. As I graduated in June, and spent a portion of last year finding a graduate job it is pretty clear to me that most of the serious graduate employers don't actually bother recruiting from any universities outside of the top dozen or so. I even spoke to a few that dealt exclusively with people from the top 4, and one that only recruited from Cambridge. So in terms of getting a job, making sure you make the top flight seems pretty important.
Now consider that all universities cost the same for the moment. Assuming that you are prepared to travel, then it's pretty obvious that you should go to the most prestigious university that you can get in to. In the UK, you do not have to pay extra for prestige. In this sense, the people who go to the worst universities get the rawest deal, ad their education doesn't add much to their value, but it costs the same as mine.
Finally consider that Oxbridge are actually far from the mythical institutions that only accept wealthy independently educated kids. They accept on merit, have short 8 week terms so more time to earn in the holidays, provide cheap good lodgings, and are pretty good for financial help.
you mean "uninterested parties". Disinterested means that they do not hold a stake in the issue. Uninterested means that they do not care.
The big difference is a DUMB ISO programmer (where the data lines are controlled by the PC) and a smart programmer where they have protocols embedded in the hardware ISO programmer to conform to ISO protocol standards. That's a different case all together...
Are you saying that the Towitoko chipDrive readers sitting on my desk are illegal? They contain a couple of PIC microcontrollers which talk to the driver using their own protocol. The APDUs are sent to the reader within a higher level protocol, hence they are not "dumb ISO programmers" as you define it. As far as I remember, most other readers operate in a similar fashion, and hence require a certain amount of logic in a device driver on the host. I'm not sure what you are getting at here.
OK, I haven't read the application and I probably wouldn't understand the legal nicities, but I saw Accenture demo this last autumn in London. The dem used MSN messenger in a three way conversation in which the third participant was a computer doing auto translation. seemed to work in a half hearted way for french, but you had to get the accents correct which seemed a bit strange.
number 57.
Self-made
Pegasus P4 Xeon Cluster 2.2/2.4/2.8 GHz - Giganet - MSWindows/ 400
I heard something on the BBC about IM on mobile phones becoming so popular in the UK that the next generation will be using their thumbs to do things we would use our index finger for, like ringing a doorbell.
My sister is currently in Japan and she tells me that this phenomenon is even more pronounced over there. She's spent the past three years learning japanese at university, including countless hours learning to write japanese characters (katakana, hiragana? something like that). She said that so many young japanese use their phones to write in japanese that many can't write with a pen very well, so she cab write better than most students her age. Additionally the use of thumb, as opposed to index finger (pun unintended), is also very common as a result.
However, maybe I'm implicitly assuming that we have settled exactly what Avogadro's number is.
yep. Avogadro's number is defined as the number of C12 atoms that weigh 12 grams, so you can't use the number to make the inverse definition. Like a dog chasing it's tail or something.
For what good purpose would you deny the people the same right to Steinbeck as they have to Shakespeare?
Simple answer: I wouldn't. in fact I agree with the point you make; namely that the recent extension of US copyright protection is wrong. This seems to me to be the unfortunate result (amongst many, many others) of a political system in which corporate interests dominate. I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but ISTR the copyright extension was due to Disney's advocacy.
To everyone else that has pointed out that there is a legal difference between copyright infringement and theft, I concede that you are clearly correct. I suppose that my comment was made in response to my perception of the usual tirade of comments claiming that all information should be free; pirating material isn't hurting anyone; the RIAA are evil anyway, so who cares etc.
Clearly there has to be a balance between rewarding the content creator to the extent that (s)he is motivated and financially able to devote further time and energy to making content; and ensuring that this work passes into the public domain once such reward has been enjoyed. There is also the importance of ensuring the legal status of licences such as the GPL by which the author can guarantee the free availability of his work. Thus people like us can continue to contribute to what is essentially the largest volunteer movement in the world secure in the knowledge that our efforts will not be hijacked. To my mind it is clear that open source software will in due course make a great positive contribution to the world, and I hope that I can be a small part of that.
illegally copying IP *is* theft. Make no bones about that.
now watch me get modded to oblivion as a troll whilst I listen to the music that I have stolen.
[quote chosen in a feeble attempt to summarise your point.] I don't agree. It's a nice premise, and one that is elegant and would be very easy to accept uncritically, but it simply isn't true. The way civil engineers build the *vast majority* of new structures is to take out a copy of the relevant striuctural code and look up the mandated tolerances for wind, water etc. They then look through the list of existing designs until they get one that roughly fits the problem. This is then altered until analysis shows that it will meet the spec.
Then consider what happens when someone tries to build something new, like the Millennium bridge in London. Even some of the most respected civil engineers in the world slip up, and the thing doesn't quite work as planned. Three years later, we now have a working design for horizontally suspended bridges, and the next one built will work.
so, you see, whilst the analysis lets us make predictions about what will happen structurally, they're only really valid for designs that have been used before.
Finally consider the two failures that you mention. tacoma was caused by vortex shedding, a piece of fluid mechanics that was not understood at the time. Hyatt was caused by a construction error - the engineer's drawings were not followed correctly when constructing the walkway. Drawing the obvious analogy with software engineering, the Tacoma case corresponds to an environmental issue perhaps CPU overheating; the Hyatt case corresponds to a simple bug in the implementation of the design.
I suppose that at least destruction testing on software isn't that destructive when compared with physical engineering projects. So maybe there's hope yet.
Reminds me of a friend of mine who finished his engineering degree a couple of years ago with three thirds. Doing a compulsary mechanics paper in the second year, he hadn't the first idea about how to answer anything. So he got out his pair of compasses and protractor and started drawing a variety of elaborate geometrical constructions. The guys sitting nearby were allegedly very, very confused.
Even at their own sites, Austin TX for example - was still using Token Ring through-out the complex in 1998.
Hursley, where I worked, was on 16Mb Token Ring at least until the end of 2000. My group installed our own 100Mb ethernet, since all the machines we had came with on board NICs. The maintenence people weren't too happy about us cutting holes in their walls for the wiring though.:)
Catch an IBM'er and have a frank discussion sometime. And you'll find that the prevailing attitude towards microsoft there is: "One day, maybe not soon, but one day... we WILL bend gates and his minions over a barrel and assrape them HARD. And as they say: 'Revenge is a dish best served cold'".
IBM employs, what, a quarter of a million people? I think you will find that most of them don't give a shit about "assraping" microsoft as you charmingly put it. You are talking a load of bollocks and you are deluded if you think IBM are going to somehow speed up development of a processor, "just to spite Gates". IBM, like every other company, do things to make money and not to spite people. IBMers, like employees of every other large company, care about their project, and maybe even care about the company as a whole; but they don't have vendettas on behalf of the company.