I understand your sentiment. Don't you think the companies know all that though? Don't you think they're playing it that way, on purpose, because they know that the majority of potential employees don't have any better option?
What do you suggest? Standing firm until one becomes homeless? Heck. I'm _IN_ that situation.
I suggest exactly what I said - decide if you are willing to accept the offer they give you in writing, without any other compensation. If you're in a bind (and most of us have been at one time or another) then that's part of the consideration in evaluating the written offer. If you have no option but to accept what they give you, then you accept it. You can still try to bluff and perhaps they'll commit to relocation or other additional compensation in writing, or perhaps they'll call your bluff and you fold and take the offer they gave you. How long and how hard you bargain is dependent on you and your position. My point isn't concerned with how much or how hard you bargain - what I'm pointing out is that, regardless of what they tell you, the actual offer is what they give you in writing. That's what you have to make your decision based on. Verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're not written on.
Certainly they're not obligated to put anything in writing. However, refusal to do so is at least a strong clue. Ignore anything they've told you during interviews or negotiations, and consider the offer they actually give you - the one that IS in writing. If you're willing to accept the offer as it exists in writing, then consider anything extra you were promised that actually comes through as a bonus. If you're not willing to accept the offer as written, then tell them so and walk away.
That's not what I would call "general purpose". That definition would cover everything with a microprocessor from a toaster to a high-end server. Embedded systems generally have a purpose that is more limited in scope.
My last comments on the subject. Feel free to have the last word if you like.
You're confusing the purpose of the device with the functioning of the device. Pretty much everything from a toaster to a high end server DOES use general purpose microprocessors. That's precisely the point I was making. You'll need a more powerful chip for a server than you will for a toaster, but the fundamental principles of operation are the same. They're all Turing machines. They're all general purpose computing devices. Your toaster and your MP3 player and your home thermostat and your belt-clip pedometer all do very different and very specific things, but they may very well all use the same microprocessor. The CPU is a general purpose device that is capable of doing all those different things given the proper software. For a typical embedded device, there's no need to spec out the microprocessor in detail before determining the OS. When you break it down, almost all embedded devices read bits out of a register, perform some mathematical manipulation of those bits, then store them back in a register. The details vary, but the general function doesn't.
Well, it would be more reasonable to assume that if the discussion wasn't about embedded systems which aren't considered general purpose devices.
An embedded system usually IS a general purpose computing device. That is, most of them are built from a few standard components and are driven by a generic CPU with custom software and/or firmware. (That may be a complete program that performs all functions, including those normally relegated to an OS, or it may be just a custom program running on top of a standard OS.) There are some exceptions. Some embedded devices are designed from the ground up, including a custom microprocessor or logic unit. It's doubtful that any such device would be running anything other than completely custom software, however. If we're talking about using a commercially available OS on an embedded device, then the vast majority of the time we're talking about a general purpose CPU (although not necessarily a desktop computer CPU) being used for a specific application. In most such cases, there's no real technical reason requiring one to pick one OS over another.
There really isn't much serious engineering product design going on outside the context of a business, so when engineers talk of "solving problems in the real world", business considerations are naturally part of the problem.
A large research lab or skunkworks is, perhaps, technically a business but the engineers are seldom concerned with practical business matters. That's someone else's departments. And, of course, there are universities, etc....Not all embedded systems require an OS and those that do may find that an OS that wasn't designed from the ground up to be embedded (Linux, Windows CE, etc) may be inadequate or too bloated to be appropriate.
This is true, but it's doubtful that someone who was planning such an application would be posting to Ask Slashdot on how to find the appropriate hardware. And there are several versions of Linux (MuLinux, uVex, RT-Linux, Blue Cat, etc.) that have been extensively engineered for embedded applications. They're used in mission critical applications, including weapons systems, medical systems, etc. I think they're probably adequate for the poster's question. If not, then he's almost certainly WAY in over his head.
An OS is a general componenet. What one OS can do, pretty much any OS can do. (Proprietary file formats and such may be an occasional exception but that's more of a legal restriction than a technical one.) There are a few other limitations, such as real time responses, that not all OS's can support but there are multiple choices within any specific genre of OS, and all of them generally equal for most tasks.
It's reasonable to assume that, whatever the device in question actually is, it involves general purpose computing/manipulation of data, and there's no compelling technical reason to pick one OS over another. There may be, however, financial reasons to pick one OS. Using Linux is much cheaper than using a proprietary OS that one must pay for. And the choice of OS may very well impact the selection of hardware. Engineers may design systems to solve problems but business men create buisnesses to make money, and Linux can be an important part of that.
I wouldn't agree that saying something is semantics is always foolish. It certainly can be foolish, but so can useless bickering over terminology.
"Sole and necessary cause" is often meaningless, for a number of reasons. We often group multiple events into a single statement, such as talking about the cause of the War in Iraq. The War in Iraq, while conceptially a single thing, is actually a great many events and there is no single cause. Too, if we isolate our consideration down to a single event (although the very definition of "single event" can be problematic), then we often end up with a Rube Goldberg like sequence of events. The "sole and necessary cause" depends a great deal on how far back you're willing to chase the chain. Additionally, there may be multiple necessary conditions where the failure of any single condition is sufficient to prevent the event. There's no way to identify any one as more important than the others, and thus no sole cause.
(I have an e-friend named Rex who's quite fond of distinguishing between necessary and sufficient conditions.)
Sheesh. Now we're getting into semantics. Neither the term "water" nor "wet" were precisely defined. For that matter, neither was "sky" or "blue." That path is an endless loop with no hope of resolution.
As for my first "argument," I didn't make the argument you seem to be attributing to me. I made no statement about smoking causing or not causing cancer at all. I asked a question. Specifically, I asked whether it was true that the existence of someone with lung cancer who did not smoke was evidence that smoking did not cause cancer. Any other inferences or implications you may have taken from my post were unwarranted.
Sigh. You're conflating the truth of the logical assertion with the truth of the statement. They aren't the same thing. In other words, the question of whether or not an implication is logically valid is completely independent of whether or not there is any truth to the implied causation. If I say "The sky is blue, therefore water is wet," both A and B are true and the implication is logically valid. That doesn't mean that the implied causation - that water is wet BECAUSE the sky is blue, is true.
In which case the comment, while true, is irrelevant to this discussion. The context is correlation, which is by definition a phenomenon that occurs in the statistical examination of multiple cases. It may very well be true that A & !B => !(A => B) in the case of a particular B, but that tells you nothing about whether A => C, where C is the same phenomenon (such as lung cancer or drug addiction) in a different individual.
Really? So if we let A be cigarette smoking and B be lung cancer, then the existence of lung cancer in people who do not smoke implies that it is not the case that cigarette smoking causes cancer?
Hence the war on drugs is bullshit.
The war on drugs is bullshit for many reasons. Drug use, in and of itself, either causes little or no harm or it harms only the user. The war on drugs, however, harms many innocent people. Remove the prohibition and, just as with alcohol and gangsters, the violence will go away.
* No guaranteed technical support (reports and questions are welcome though)
* Maximum of 5 objects of every type (table, query, form) allowed per database.
* MS Access tables import: 100 first rows (practically, in random order) is imported for every table. There is no limitations for the number of tables though.
* No documentation.
Apparently, the Linux version is open source but the Windows version is some sort of shareware. It'll cost you $118 for a single license. They whine about the cost of development tools as justification for the cost.
If all ISPs or at least a great majority scan all emails for images and download _all_ the images, then the fact that an image is downloaded doesn't give the sender any information anymore.
Not quite true. If your ISP and Bob's ISP and Alice's ISP are all different and they all download the image, then I know that the email which I sent to you has been forwarded to two different mailboxes. I may not know for sure who those mailboxes belong too - you could have forwarded it to your own home account. But I do know the email was forwarded.
Or use GMail's pop3 capabilities. You can still check your mail via a browser from any other location, and at home (or work, if you prefer) you use a standard email client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, pine, etc.) to get to your GMail.
While there's a great deal of truth to what you're saying, reality often slaps theory in the face. My guess would be that there is no qualified support, there's no money (or no management desire) to hire qualified support, and someone who has an inkling of a clue about computers gets the responsibility dropped in their lap with no real option to say "No". It's not their fault and there's often not much they can do except struggle through and do the best they can. (And, of course, I know some pretty savy people who started out just that way a decade or so ago.)
Your underlying assumption here is that patents protect amazing new "Eureka!" ideas that are novel and imaginative but easy to rip off. There are a few examples of this. I believe the guy who invented the weedeater/string trimmer didn't patent his idea and made almost nothing off it. That's the sort of thing that patents were intended to protect. If they were limited to that, they might be workable and effective. Unfortunately, they aren't. Almost anything and everything can be patented. And if I'm reading this right, this "reform" is REALLY bad news. Why? Because it completely invalidates one of the few defenses we have - prior art. It doesn't matter who invented an idea, or how many people were using it. If no one patented it and you take the time to sit down and fill out a patent form, it belongs to you. Is there a patent on Quick Sort? No? Write one up, wait for it to get approved and if no one beat you to the filing, you own Quick Sort. Sue the hell out of anybody and everybody who's using it.
Playing sort of fast and loose with the definition of "object," aren't they? I generally think of an object as a single item, not a collective. If this is an "object," then why isn't the universe itself an object? And if the universe is an object, then it's necessarily larger than this one.
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well said. Additionally, the article doesn't support the headline. There were only a couple of bogus entries and those were corrected within one or two minutes. The article also takes issue with statements like: "Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial." Where's the problem with that statement? It's clearly labeled as speculation, and many people, rightly or wrongly, still believe the stress of the trial led to his heart attack. Perhaps such speculations are best left out of Wikipedia articles, but one can't reasonably argue that it's incorrect or misleading when it's clearly listed as speculation. In short, this is a desparate attempt to nit-pick Wikipedia and it even fails at that.
Depends on what you mean by "getting started." This case is still in the "getting started" phase - discovery and pre-trial motions. Essentially, other than confusing the terms "defendent" and "plaintif," you're correct. The plaintif does have to provide some evidence, and the fact that SCO didn't is exactly what led to this decision.
Judges do not decide that a plaintif is slimy and therefore I need to be really careful so I can stick it to the slime and make it sticks. If you disagree, provide some real-life examples please...
Guess you didn't bother to read the order that this story is about, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your sentiment. Don't you think the companies know all that though? Don't you think they're playing it that way, on purpose, because they know that the majority of potential employees don't have any better option?
What do you suggest? Standing firm until one becomes homeless? Heck. I'm _IN_ that situation.
I suggest exactly what I said - decide if you are willing to accept the offer they give you in writing, without any other compensation. If you're in a bind (and most of us have been at one time or another) then that's part of the consideration in evaluating the written offer. If you have no option but to accept what they give you, then you accept it. You can still try to bluff and perhaps they'll commit to relocation or other additional compensation in writing, or perhaps they'll call your bluff and you fold and take the offer they gave you. How long and how hard you bargain is dependent on you and your position. My point isn't concerned with how much or how hard you bargain - what I'm pointing out is that, regardless of what they tell you, the actual offer is what they give you in writing. That's what you have to make your decision based on. Verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're not written on.
Certainly they're not obligated to put anything in writing. However, refusal to do so is at least a strong clue. Ignore anything they've told you during interviews or negotiations, and consider the offer they actually give you - the one that IS in writing. If you're willing to accept the offer as it exists in writing, then consider anything extra you were promised that actually comes through as a bonus. If you're not willing to accept the offer as written, then tell them so and walk away.
That's not what I would call "general purpose". That definition would cover everything with a microprocessor from a toaster to a high-end server. Embedded systems generally have a purpose that is more limited in scope.
My last comments on the subject. Feel free to have the last word if you like.
You're confusing the purpose of the device with the functioning of the device. Pretty much everything from a toaster to a high end server DOES use general purpose microprocessors. That's precisely the point I was making. You'll need a more powerful chip for a server than you will for a toaster, but the fundamental principles of operation are the same. They're all Turing machines. They're all general purpose computing devices. Your toaster and your MP3 player and your home thermostat and your belt-clip pedometer all do very different and very specific things, but they may very well all use the same microprocessor. The CPU is a general purpose device that is capable of doing all those different things given the proper software. For a typical embedded device, there's no need to spec out the microprocessor in detail before determining the OS. When you break it down, almost all embedded devices read bits out of a register, perform some mathematical manipulation of those bits, then store them back in a register. The details vary, but the general function doesn't.
Well, it would be more reasonable to assume that if the discussion wasn't about embedded systems which aren't considered general purpose devices.
...Not all embedded systems require an OS and those that do may find that an OS that wasn't designed from the ground up to be embedded (Linux, Windows CE, etc) may be inadequate or too bloated to be appropriate.
An embedded system usually IS a general purpose computing device. That is, most of them are built from a few standard components and are driven by a generic CPU with custom software and/or firmware. (That may be a complete program that performs all functions, including those normally relegated to an OS, or it may be just a custom program running on top of a standard OS.) There are some exceptions. Some embedded devices are designed from the ground up, including a custom microprocessor or logic unit. It's doubtful that any such device would be running anything other than completely custom software, however. If we're talking about using a commercially available OS on an embedded device, then the vast majority of the time we're talking about a general purpose CPU (although not necessarily a desktop computer CPU) being used for a specific application. In most such cases, there's no real technical reason requiring one to pick one OS over another.
There really isn't much serious engineering product design going on outside the context of a business, so when engineers talk of "solving problems in the real world", business considerations are naturally part of the problem.
A large research lab or skunkworks is, perhaps, technically a business but the engineers are seldom concerned with practical business matters. That's someone else's departments. And, of course, there are universities, etc.
This is true, but it's doubtful that someone who was planning such an application would be posting to Ask Slashdot on how to find the appropriate hardware. And there are several versions of Linux (MuLinux, uVex, RT-Linux, Blue Cat, etc.) that have been extensively engineered for embedded applications. They're used in mission critical applications, including weapons systems, medical systems, etc. I think they're probably adequate for the poster's question. If not, then he's almost certainly WAY in over his head.
An OS is a general componenet. What one OS can do, pretty much any OS can do. (Proprietary file formats and such may be an occasional exception but that's more of a legal restriction than a technical one.) There are a few other limitations, such as real time responses, that not all OS's can support but there are multiple choices within any specific genre of OS, and all of them generally equal for most tasks.
It's reasonable to assume that, whatever the device in question actually is, it involves general purpose computing/manipulation of data, and there's no compelling technical reason to pick one OS over another. There may be, however, financial reasons to pick one OS. Using Linux is much cheaper than using a proprietary OS that one must pay for. And the choice of OS may very well impact the selection of hardware. Engineers may design systems to solve problems but business men create buisnesses to make money, and Linux can be an important part of that.
I wouldn't agree that saying something is semantics is always foolish. It certainly can be foolish, but so can useless bickering over terminology.
"Sole and necessary cause" is often meaningless, for a number of reasons. We often group multiple events into a single statement, such as talking about the cause of the War in Iraq. The War in Iraq, while conceptially a single thing, is actually a great many events and there is no single cause. Too, if we isolate our consideration down to a single event (although the very definition of "single event" can be problematic), then we often end up with a Rube Goldberg like sequence of events. The "sole and necessary cause" depends a great deal on how far back you're willing to chase the chain. Additionally, there may be multiple necessary conditions where the failure of any single condition is sufficient to prevent the event. There's no way to identify any one as more important than the others, and thus no sole cause.
(I have an e-friend named Rex who's quite fond of distinguishing between necessary and sufficient conditions.)
Correct. The real semantic issue is what we mean by "cause."
(BTW, your name isn't Rex, is it?)
Sheesh. Now we're getting into semantics. Neither the term "water" nor "wet" were precisely defined. For that matter, neither was "sky" or "blue." That path is an endless loop with no hope of resolution.
As for my first "argument," I didn't make the argument you seem to be attributing to me. I made no statement about smoking causing or not causing cancer at all. I asked a question. Specifically, I asked whether it was true that the existence of someone with lung cancer who did not smoke was evidence that smoking did not cause cancer. Any other inferences or implications you may have taken from my post were unwarranted.
Sigh. You're conflating the truth of the logical assertion with the truth of the statement. They aren't the same thing. In other words, the question of whether or not an implication is logically valid is completely independent of whether or not there is any truth to the implied causation. If I say "The sky is blue, therefore water is wet," both A and B are true and the implication is logically valid. That doesn't mean that the implied causation - that water is wet BECAUSE the sky is blue, is true.
In which case the comment, while true, is irrelevant to this discussion. The context is correlation, which is by definition a phenomenon that occurs in the statistical examination of multiple cases. It may very well be true that A & !B => !(A => B) in the case of a particular B, but that tells you nothing about whether A => C, where C is the same phenomenon (such as lung cancer or drug addiction) in a different individual.
Are you an idiot or do you just play one on Slashdot? I was pointing out the fallacy in the post to which I was replying, not asserting a truth.
Corrolary: Non-correlation disproves causality.
A & !B => !(A => B)
Really? So if we let A be cigarette smoking and B be lung cancer, then the existence of lung cancer in people who do not smoke implies that it is not the case that cigarette smoking causes cancer?
Hence the war on drugs is bullshit.
The war on drugs is bullshit for many reasons. Drug use, in and of itself, either causes little or no harm or it harms only the user. The war on drugs, however, harms many innocent people. Remove the prohibition and, just as with alcohol and gangsters, the violence will go away.
Push it... to what end? To make more money? It's all free!
It is? Then what's the deal with this:
Limitations of Demo Version
* No guaranteed technical support (reports and questions are welcome though)
* Maximum of 5 objects of every type (table, query, form) allowed per database.
* MS Access tables import: 100 first rows (practically, in random order) is imported for every table. There is no limitations for the number of tables though.
* No documentation.
Apparently, the Linux version is open source but the Windows version is some sort of shareware. It'll cost you $118 for a single license. They whine about the cost of development tools as justification for the cost.
If all ISPs or at least a great majority scan all emails for images and download _all_ the images, then the fact that an image is downloaded doesn't give the sender any information anymore.
Not quite true. If your ISP and Bob's ISP and Alice's ISP are all different and they all download the image, then I know that the email which I sent to you has been forwarded to two different mailboxes. I may not know for sure who those mailboxes belong too - you could have forwarded it to your own home account. But I do know the email was forwarded.
Nah, the real scandal is that a web site like IGN couldn't put together two identical decent gaming rigs.
Or use GMail's pop3 capabilities. You can still check your mail via a browser from any other location, and at home (or work, if you prefer) you use a standard email client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, pine, etc.) to get to your GMail.
While there's a great deal of truth to what you're saying, reality often slaps theory in the face. My guess would be that there is no qualified support, there's no money (or no management desire) to hire qualified support, and someone who has an inkling of a clue about computers gets the responsibility dropped in their lap with no real option to say "No". It's not their fault and there's often not much they can do except struggle through and do the best they can. (And, of course, I know some pretty savy people who started out just that way a decade or so ago.)
Your underlying assumption here is that patents protect amazing new "Eureka!" ideas that are novel and imaginative but easy to rip off. There are a few examples of this. I believe the guy who invented the weedeater/string trimmer didn't patent his idea and made almost nothing off it. That's the sort of thing that patents were intended to protect. If they were limited to that, they might be workable and effective. Unfortunately, they aren't. Almost anything and everything can be patented. And if I'm reading this right, this "reform" is REALLY bad news. Why? Because it completely invalidates one of the few defenses we have - prior art. It doesn't matter who invented an idea, or how many people were using it. If no one patented it and you take the time to sit down and fill out a patent form, it belongs to you. Is there a patent on Quick Sort? No? Write one up, wait for it to get approved and if no one beat you to the filing, you own Quick Sort. Sue the hell out of anybody and everybody who's using it.
If you're really interested in the drug companies and patents, here's a reasonably accurate look at how things work:
Of Pills and Profits
The universe isn't in the universe? Then what part of it is outside of it?
Playing sort of fast and loose with the definition of "object," aren't they? I generally think of an object as a single item, not a collective. If this is an "object," then why isn't the universe itself an object? And if the universe is an object, then it's necessarily larger than this one.
Well said. Additionally, the article doesn't support the headline. There were only a couple of bogus entries and those were corrected within one or two minutes. The article also takes issue with statements like: "Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial." Where's the problem with that statement? It's clearly labeled as speculation, and many people, rightly or wrongly, still believe the stress of the trial led to his heart attack. Perhaps such speculations are best left out of Wikipedia articles, but one can't reasonably argue that it's incorrect or misleading when it's clearly listed as speculation. In short, this is a desparate attempt to nit-pick Wikipedia and it even fails at that.
Yep, they have this backwards. What the headline should say is "Drunk drivers are only as dangerous as cell phones."
Depends on what you mean by "getting started." This case is still in the "getting started" phase - discovery and pre-trial motions. Essentially, other than confusing the terms "defendent" and "plaintif," you're correct. The plaintif does have to provide some evidence, and the fact that SCO didn't is exactly what led to this decision.
Judges do not decide that a plaintif is slimy and therefore I need to be really careful so I can stick it to the slime and make it sticks. If you disagree, provide some real-life examples please...
Guess you didn't bother to read the order that this story is about, huh?