Does anyone else find the Oracle branding all over the Sun pages disturbing? They are also cancelling the Sun training programs, saying that you will have to sign up for Oracle Academy - at many times the price. In a nutshell, Oracle is acting as though Sun will be entirely dismantled, and cease to exist as an entity.
I'm also a prof, and here's my take on it... I give lectures in a couple of different majors. The CS students all bring their laptops, the business students never do, and there are some some classes in between.
First off, I do not require attendance. In fact, I usually explicitly say: "if you want to read your email, play games, etc, please do not come to class". If you're in my class, I want you there because you intend to pay attention to the lecture.
Alarindris (in an earlier post) made a really good point: to make a lecture interesting, you need to be able to interact with the class. If everyone is heads down in their laptops, and asking them a question causes them to look up with an expression of "huh? what's going on?" - well, there is just no way to make the lecture work. Over the years, I have had a couple of groups like this - it is really, really awful.
Regarding note-taking: I have never seen a student take notes on a computer. Mostly they load up the slides I've provided (which contain some, but not nearly all of the content). What goes up on the board is developed interactively with the class, and inevitably involves pictures and diagrams - there is just no reasonable way to take notes like that on the computer.
A few students complain that I don't provide complete material to download - thus making note taking unnecessary. These are the same students who expect to be handed an "A" on the final, without actually having to study or do anything difficult. The point of a lecture is for the professor to ensure that the students understand a topic. The material presented changes based on feedback from the class. "Is that clear, or do we need another example here?" If another example, or an alternative explanation is needed, you make one up on the spot. You go faster or slower, show more or less detail, use fewer or more examples based on the students' comprehension of what you are talking about.
If you find yourself talking to the tops of everyone's heads, you have no source of feedback. Did they understand? Are they even listening? One poster on this thread said that it's the prof's own fault if the students aren't interested. The other side is: if the students don't give any feedback, the lecture is guaranteed to be boring - because there is no way to tailor the presentation to the audience.
If you have a really horrible prof (yes, I know some of those), don't take the class. If you have to take the class, save yourself the boredom and don't go to lectures. If attendance is required, life's a bitch, deal with it. Consider it practice for those really exciting business meetings you'll be attending throughout your professional life: if you don't pay attention when the boss is talking, you'll be walking.
All of which is a long way of saying: laptops in lectures are really pretty useless for the students. I wouldn't bother to ban them - too much fuss - but I can and do ban any sort of distracting activities.
Local services funded by community taxes. How to fund those services is up to each community. Normally, schools and such are funded by property taxes.
Limited government also means pushing services and taxes down to the lowest possible level - where the voter has more of a voice in how tax money is raised and spent.
Right...if you want to run Windows without antivirus, you better just not connect to the Internet, and you'd best have auto-play turned off.
Sitting across the room from me is a very IT-savvy person who - just yesterday - browsed to a business-related website. Only to have Kaspersky pop up and notify her that the website had been hacked and wanted to download a trojan.
ROI: You want a reasonable return on investment. If you invest $100, how much interest do you require? Keep in mind that - in this kind of investment - you never get your $100 back, so the savings in electricity bills must also repay your principle.
Lifetime: solar cells degrade with time. The efficiency of 10-year-old cells is less than that of new cells. Eventually, the cells degrade to the point that they must be replaced. 20 years is a generous lifetime estimate.
Maintenance costs. People think solar cells are maintenance free, but the world is not ideal. Water may well intrude, perhaps due to frost. Wiring may need repaired or replaced. Electronic components in the inverter may fail. Etc.
Here's a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. First, assume:
You are an idealist, and don't want to earn any interest on your investment - you just want your initial investment back, plus any maintenance costs.
Maintenance costs run 5% of the intial investment.
Array lifetime is 20 years.
Given all of this, you must recover 10% of the initial cost each year. Electricity costs you $0.20/KWH, you install an array with a maximum output of 10KW. Given seasons, clouds, etc, if you live in a reasonably sunny climate, you might average 60KWH/day, or 22MWH/year. That corresponds to a maximum savings of $4400/year, meaning that you could spend $44,000 for your 10KW solar array. The cheapest manufacturers quote prices in that range (not including installation). Which means that solar power can, just barely, make sense for an idealist.
Moreover, lots of power companies do not really want to buy your excess power, and certainly not at full retail price. Hence, depending on where you live, there may be additional barriers to overcome.
The IOC should broadcast every single event live on the Internet. Especially in the summer Olympics, there are so many things going on simultaneously that you only gets bits and bobs of any single event. Less popular disciplines often get no television coverage at all - even though there are cameras and announcers at the events.
Secondly, they could and should make all recordings of all past events available for viewing via the Internet.
The IOC could still get their advertising revenues, and even direct-charge viewers. These seem like blindingly obvious ideas.
As an instructor, I always tell my students: the only way to become a good programmer is to write programs, more programs, and even more programs.
Make up ideas: write a program to keep track of your music, write a game program, write a program to track recipes. It almost doesn't matter. The important thing is to make the programs a bit challenging. Want to track your music? Store the objects in a file using Java Serialization - a great reason to learn about serialization. If you already know about that, then store the books in a flat-file using Random-I/O. Writing a game? Learn how to use sockets by making it a network game.
Find problems that are fun, and use them to discover and learn about more and more aspects of programming.
As another poster pointed out: including scripting capabilities in "static" documents is just dumb. We've already been through this a few years ago, with people sending around Microsoft Office documents.
Microsoft "fixed" this, in the sense that Office now warns you if a document contains scripting. Better, of course, is that many people have learned not to send or accept such documents in the first place. This was part of what made PDFs popular: a format to send documents that (a) cannot easily be changed and (b) is not a security risk. Millions of business documents are sent as PDFs just for these reasons.
How stupid must Adobe be, to open themselves to this kind of attack. There should be no scripting in PDF documents. Alternatively - second best - scriptiing should be disabled by default, unless the user specifically authorizes it (as with Microsoft Office documents).
I think it is much more likely that they want to just avoid a tangle with the regulatory agencies.
Google is now big enough that they will be asked "why don't you have exactly 0.03274% female black jewish mentally handicapped" employees, to reflect the population?
Hiring should be blind to race, gender, etc. - that is true equality of opportunity. The agencies don't see it that way - they play a numbers game, and it's worth a lot of effort to avoid this discussion, or at least to avoid having the discussion in public.
Great, yet another federal bureaucracy. Guess what, there are plenty of professional consultants who will help with city planning, etc. Using private industry will be a lot cheaper than building another monstrous federal bureaucracy. The services will be paid for by those who use them, rather than by everyone, whether or not they are needed.
AGW had made no, none, zero long-term predictions that have been correct. Increased hurricanes? Wrong, at historical lows. Continued decrease in arctic ice? Wrong, increasing for 2-1/2 years now. Continued increase in global temperature? Wrong, decreasing trend since 1998. Rapid sea level rise? Wrong - increasing at the same rate it has done for hundreds of years. And on and on...
At the moment, AGW fanboys are saying that anything and everything is proof that they are right - hot weather, cold weather, heavy snow, you name it. The problem is, they have predicted none of these - it's all after the fact, and hence worthless. Given false assumptions, you can prove anything at all.
But, sure, have them make public predictions - put them on record. Also generate control sets (randomly generated predictions). If the AGW predictions exceed the random predictions by a substantial margin, over the course of several years, then and only then should anyone pay any attention to them.
None of this, however, is any justification for the government to establish yet another public agency.
If this is a functional language, it presumably makes generous use of recursion. Which brings up something I'd be interest in/. comments on...
There are a lot of algorithms that can best be expressed and (theoretically) most efficiently solved by recursion. However, (a) most programmers are not comfortable with recursion and (b) most programming languages (C++, C#, Java, etc.) make no optimization for recursion. In particular, they use a new stack frame for each recursion, even if the function is tail-recursive. This lack of optimization means that deeply recursive algorithms must be avoided - leading right back to (a).
My question for/. is simply: why? Why co modern OO languages not provide decent optimizations for recursion? Why are most programmers uncomfortable with it? What can be done to break this cycle?
Study this, investigate that, make sure there is a contractor in every important Congressional district. Sick.
They ought to just pay for performance: We need X tons put into orbit no later than date Y, and we'll pay you this much to do it. Pick a payment that is half of what they are going to spend the "big government" way, and the contractors will still make a whopping profit.
Of course, that wouldn't put pork in the right pockets...
That is a school (and prof) in need of a clue. No one should submit finished documents in an editable format. Formatting problems, accidental changes, intentional changes - this is just asking for trouble. If the school's anti-plagiarism software can't deal with PDFs, it is bad software and ought to be replaced.
The scans can be as detailed as they want. The two scans shown in TFA are almost the only ones you can find in the Internet - precisely because they look pretty harmless. Go to the manufacturers' sites, and you will find no sample images at all.
Why? Because the scanners can see the pores on your skin if they want to. The general public won't like that, so they restrict real samples of what the scanners are capable of. It would be a public service if some/.er could provide real samples of what the scanners can do.
They may well start out providing only vague images; there are also efforts to provide some sort of pre-analysis so that the operator only sees a sketch. However, once the scanners are in place, it will be easy to justify increasing the resolution to provide better security. In the end, it's a fair bet that the scanners will display the equivalent of high-resolution, black-and-white photographs.
Anyway, it really is all theater. As pointed out in other posts, obese people can hide objects under their fat rolls. Non-obese people can hide objects in bodily orifices (this is already a standard tactic in drug-smuggling - nothing new at all). Anyway, just get an accomplice in the duty-free, and pick up your package after clearing security. These scanners are so entirely irrelevant to the real security issues that one wonders what the real motivations are...
...it's that this is typical, self-indulgent stuff that does not deserve the name "art". Like painting a canvas all black, etc - this has nothing to do with providing pleasure to the viewer and everything to do with the artist's ego.
The 4th amendment does not apply. As with every other country, the US considers domestic law to only apply when you are inside the country. If you have not yet cleared customs, you are technically not in the country. Therefore, you do not benefit from the protections of domestic law. This may seem like quibbling, but it is how every country controls its borders.
The BSA (and similar organization) earn their collective salaries by collecting fines. They have zero financial interest in customer satisfaction, because they do not sell anything. The vendors that contract with these organizations need to realize that this damages their customer relationships.
Our small company could transition to open-source pretty easily. The servers are already Linux, but we haven't gotten farther than that - it is extra effort that no one really has time for. If the BSA were to come calling, our story would be much like the parent: we are in compliance, but the sheer irritation of an audit would be the impetus to throw out our remaining Adobe and Microsoft products.
One simplification that Microsoft should make in their license terms is to eliminate the provision for audits. If they think you are in violation of software licensing terms, they could still take you to court like anyone else. By eliminating their use of the BSA, they would do a lot for their customer relations.
As of a few seconds ago there were 30 replies, of which four or five said that the heirs should no longer be profiting from the copyrights, since Philip K. Dick is long dead. All of those posts have been marked "troll".
Would our budding copyright attorney like to explain this? Guess what: "troll" is not a substitute for "disagree".
Given that he has been dead for 28 years, his works should be in the public domain. Then there would be no dispute.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence?
on
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· Score: 3, Informative
Two reasons
Many programmers are not particularly competent. Add in the untrained people writing scripts, VBA applications, etc, who have no clue about software engineering, testing, etc. No surprise that simple errors crop up.
Dates are really, really horrible. If you have not had the privilege of writing an international application, worrying about different date and time representations, simultaneity across different time-zones (and the date line) - well, it's an adventure, and even careful testing may not catch everything. Gratuitous real-world example: WinXP allows users to set date-separators and the like in a way that makes unambiguous date/time parsing impossible.
Flash is just evil (for that matter, so is Silverlight). I understand why designers like it, but it breaks the very paradigms that make the Internet great.
Example: I recently ran across the web-site of a very nice little company in my neighborhood. Whoever they hired to do their website put the whole thing into Flash: the menus, the content, even the contact information. Result: you can't find their sitein Google, not even under their company name and address. Accessibility to the blind: none. But the website looks pretty...
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find the Oracle branding all over the Sun pages disturbing? They are also cancelling the Sun training programs, saying that you will have to sign up for Oracle Academy - at many times the price. In a nutshell, Oracle is acting as though Sun will be entirely dismantled, and cease to exist as an entity.
It may be time to move away from Java...
I'm also a prof, and here's my take on it... I give lectures in a couple of different majors. The CS students all bring their laptops, the business students never do, and there are some some classes in between.
First off, I do not require attendance. In fact, I usually explicitly say: "if you want to read your email, play games, etc, please do not come to class". If you're in my class, I want you there because you intend to pay attention to the lecture.
Alarindris (in an earlier post) made a really good point: to make a lecture interesting, you need to be able to interact with the class. If everyone is heads down in their laptops, and asking them a question causes them to look up with an expression of "huh? what's going on?" - well, there is just no way to make the lecture work. Over the years, I have had a couple of groups like this - it is really, really awful.
Regarding note-taking: I have never seen a student take notes on a computer. Mostly they load up the slides I've provided (which contain some, but not nearly all of the content). What goes up on the board is developed interactively with the class, and inevitably involves pictures and diagrams - there is just no reasonable way to take notes like that on the computer.
A few students complain that I don't provide complete material to download - thus making note taking unnecessary. These are the same students who expect to be handed an "A" on the final, without actually having to study or do anything difficult. The point of a lecture is for the professor to ensure that the students understand a topic. The material presented changes based on feedback from the class. "Is that clear, or do we need another example here?" If another example, or an alternative explanation is needed, you make one up on the spot. You go faster or slower, show more or less detail, use fewer or more examples based on the students' comprehension of what you are talking about.
If you find yourself talking to the tops of everyone's heads, you have no source of feedback. Did they understand? Are they even listening? One poster on this thread said that it's the prof's own fault if the students aren't interested. The other side is: if the students don't give any feedback, the lecture is guaranteed to be boring - because there is no way to tailor the presentation to the audience.
If you have a really horrible prof (yes, I know some of those), don't take the class. If you have to take the class, save yourself the boredom and don't go to lectures. If attendance is required, life's a bitch, deal with it. Consider it practice for those really exciting business meetings you'll be attending throughout your professional life: if you don't pay attention when the boss is talking, you'll be walking.
All of which is a long way of saying: laptops in lectures are really pretty useless for the students. I wouldn't bother to ban them - too much fuss - but I can and do ban any sort of distracting activities.
Local services funded by community taxes. How to fund those services is up to each community. Normally, schools and such are funded by property taxes.
Limited government also means pushing services and taxes down to the lowest possible level - where the voter has more of a voice in how tax money is raised and spent.
Right...if you want to run Windows without antivirus, you better just not connect to the Internet, and you'd best have auto-play turned off.
Sitting across the room from me is a very IT-savvy person who - just yesterday - browsed to a business-related website. Only to have Kaspersky pop up and notify her that the website had been hacked and wanted to download a trojan.
Consider the following reasons:
Here's a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. First, assume:
Given all of this, you must recover 10% of the initial cost each year. Electricity costs you $0.20/KWH, you install an array with a maximum output of 10KW. Given seasons, clouds, etc, if you live in a reasonably sunny climate, you might average 60KWH/day, or 22MWH/year. That corresponds to a maximum savings of $4400/year, meaning that you could spend $44,000 for your 10KW solar array. The cheapest manufacturers quote prices in that range (not including installation). Which means that solar power can, just barely, make sense for an idealist.
Moreover, lots of power companies do not really want to buy your excess power, and certainly not at full retail price. Hence, depending on where you live, there may be additional barriers to overcome.
"reeks of corruption and incompetence" This is, after all, Italy: the country that elected and then re-elected Berlusconi.
Two points:
The IOC could still get their advertising revenues, and even direct-charge viewers. These seem like blindingly obvious ideas.
Why haven't they done this yet?
As an instructor, I always tell my students: the only way to become a good programmer is to write programs, more programs, and even more programs.
Make up ideas: write a program to keep track of your music, write a game program, write a program to track recipes. It almost doesn't matter. The important thing is to make the programs a bit challenging. Want to track your music? Store the objects in a file using Java Serialization - a great reason to learn about serialization. If you already know about that, then store the books in a flat-file using Random-I/O. Writing a game? Learn how to use sockets by making it a network game.
Find problems that are fun, and use them to discover and learn about more and more aspects of programming.
Pournelle's Iron Law
The IOC no longer promotes sport - it promotes its own interests using sport as a tool
As another poster pointed out: including scripting capabilities in "static" documents is just dumb. We've already been through this a few years ago, with people sending around Microsoft Office documents.
Microsoft "fixed" this, in the sense that Office now warns you if a document contains scripting. Better, of course, is that many people have learned not to send or accept such documents in the first place. This was part of what made PDFs popular: a format to send documents that (a) cannot easily be changed and (b) is not a security risk. Millions of business documents are sent as PDFs just for these reasons.
How stupid must Adobe be, to open themselves to this kind of attack. There should be no scripting in PDF documents. Alternatively - second best - scriptiing should be disabled by default, unless the user specifically authorizes it (as with Microsoft Office documents).
Bad Adobe, no donut.
Because it works? Adobe reader may be bloated, but Foxit is primitive. KPDF has issues when printing.
I think it is much more likely that they want to just avoid a tangle with the regulatory agencies.
Google is now big enough that they will be asked "why don't you have exactly 0.03274% female black jewish mentally handicapped" employees, to reflect the population?
Hiring should be blind to race, gender, etc. - that is true equality of opportunity. The agencies don't see it that way - they play a numbers game, and it's worth a lot of effort to avoid this discussion, or at least to avoid having the discussion in public.
Great, yet another federal bureaucracy. Guess what, there are plenty of professional consultants who will help with city planning, etc. Using private industry will be a lot cheaper than building another monstrous federal bureaucracy. The services will be paid for by those who use them, rather than by everyone, whether or not they are needed.
AGW had made no, none, zero long-term predictions that have been correct. Increased hurricanes? Wrong, at historical lows. Continued decrease in arctic ice? Wrong, increasing for 2-1/2 years now. Continued increase in global temperature? Wrong, decreasing trend since 1998. Rapid sea level rise? Wrong - increasing at the same rate it has done for hundreds of years. And on and on...
At the moment, AGW fanboys are saying that anything and everything is proof that they are right - hot weather, cold weather, heavy snow, you name it. The problem is, they have predicted none of these - it's all after the fact, and hence worthless. Given false assumptions, you can prove anything at all.
But, sure, have them make public predictions - put them on record. Also generate control sets (randomly generated predictions). If the AGW predictions exceed the random predictions by a substantial margin, over the course of several years, then and only then should anyone pay any attention to them.
None of this, however, is any justification for the government to establish yet another public agency.
If this is a functional language, it presumably makes generous use of recursion. Which brings up something I'd be interest in /. comments on...
There are a lot of algorithms that can best be expressed and (theoretically) most efficiently solved by recursion. However, (a) most programmers are not comfortable with recursion and (b) most programming languages (C++, C#, Java, etc.) make no optimization for recursion. In particular, they use a new stack frame for each recursion, even if the function is tail-recursive. This lack of optimization means that deeply recursive algorithms must be avoided - leading right back to (a).
My question for /. is simply: why? Why co modern OO languages not provide decent optimizations for recursion? Why are most programmers uncomfortable with it? What can be done to break this cycle?
Study this, investigate that, make sure there is a contractor in every important Congressional district. Sick.
They ought to just pay for performance: We need X tons put into orbit no later than date Y, and we'll pay you this much to do it. Pick a payment that is half of what they are going to spend the "big government" way, and the contractors will still make a whopping profit.
Of course, that wouldn't put pork in the right pockets...
Sadly, I am out of mod points. Equally sadly, I doubt the TSA would allow this.
That is a school (and prof) in need of a clue. No one should submit finished documents in an editable format. Formatting problems, accidental changes, intentional changes - this is just asking for trouble. If the school's anti-plagiarism software can't deal with PDFs, it is bad software and ought to be replaced.
The scans can be as detailed as they want. The two scans shown in TFA are almost the only ones you can find in the Internet - precisely because they look pretty harmless. Go to the manufacturers' sites, and you will find no sample images at all.
Why? Because the scanners can see the pores on your skin if they want to. The general public won't like that, so they restrict real samples of what the scanners are capable of. It would be a public service if some /.er could provide real samples of what the scanners can do.
They may well start out providing only vague images; there are also efforts to provide some sort of pre-analysis so that the operator only sees a sketch. However, once the scanners are in place, it will be easy to justify increasing the resolution to provide better security. In the end, it's a fair bet that the scanners will display the equivalent of high-resolution, black-and-white photographs.
Anyway, it really is all theater. As pointed out in other posts, obese people can hide objects under their fat rolls. Non-obese people can hide objects in bodily orifices (this is already a standard tactic in drug-smuggling - nothing new at all). Anyway, just get an accomplice in the duty-free, and pick up your package after clearing security. These scanners are so entirely irrelevant to the real security issues that one wonders what the real motivations are...
...it's that this is typical, self-indulgent stuff that does not deserve the name "art". Like painting a canvas all black, etc - this has nothing to do with providing pleasure to the viewer and everything to do with the artist's ego.
The 4th amendment does not apply. As with every other country, the US considers domestic law to only apply when you are inside the country. If you have not yet cleared customs, you are technically not in the country. Therefore, you do not benefit from the protections of domestic law. This may seem like quibbling, but it is how every country controls its borders.
It is not only laptops: many people have also been required to show the photos on their cameras, as well as the contents of other electronic devices.
Whether or not such searches make any sense is another question altogether.
The BSA (and similar organization) earn their collective salaries by collecting fines. They have zero financial interest in customer satisfaction, because they do not sell anything. The vendors that contract with these organizations need to realize that this damages their customer relationships.
Our small company could transition to open-source pretty easily. The servers are already Linux, but we haven't gotten farther than that - it is extra effort that no one really has time for. If the BSA were to come calling, our story would be much like the parent: we are in compliance, but the sheer irritation of an audit would be the impetus to throw out our remaining Adobe and Microsoft products.
One simplification that Microsoft should make in their license terms is to eliminate the provision for audits. If they think you are in violation of software licensing terms, they could still take you to court like anyone else. By eliminating their use of the BSA, they would do a lot for their customer relations.
Some copyright attorney must be reading /.
As of a few seconds ago there were 30 replies, of which four or five said that the heirs should no longer be profiting from the copyrights, since Philip K. Dick is long dead. All of those posts have been marked "troll".
Would our budding copyright attorney like to explain this? Guess what: "troll" is not a substitute for "disagree".
Given that he has been dead for 28 years, his works should be in the public domain. Then there would be no dispute.
Two reasons
Flash is just evil (for that matter, so is Silverlight). I understand why designers like it, but it breaks the very paradigms that make the Internet great.
Example: I recently ran across the web-site of a very nice little company in my neighborhood. Whoever they hired to do their website put the whole thing into Flash: the menus, the content, even the contact information. Result: you can't find their sitein Google, not even under their company name and address. Accessibility to the blind: none. But the website looks pretty...
Flash: just say "no"!