Showing my age here, but when I was in high school, I did the teaching. Mostly to fellow students, but I did have two of the math & physics teachers in my "class" off and on. I taught Pascal on an Apple II. A little later, the high school down the road from mine actually set up proper programming classes (teaching Basic on Commodore computers). A bunch of work colleagues who are about my own age had similar experiences -- few high schools were set up to teach anything about computers at the time, so the nerds amongst us got to see the "other side" of teaching.
Which would be consistent with the iPhone doing very well in European countries where either the carrier was better then AT&T, or where there was a choice of carriers.
Could be the iPhone carrier -- for the longest time, there was only AT&T, and I know many people who really wanted an iPhone but refused to get it via AT&T. Some of them picked an Android phone instead. For the iPad, choice of cellular carrier may not be that important (different usage model), which might explain why people aren't looking that hard for alternatives.
If it requires software changes that are not 100% automated, then this won't fly. Programmers have a hard enough time writing sequential programs, let alone multithreaded ones. Now they're supposed to also foresee and check hardware errors? I think not. I note that the entire idea hinges on the s/w component, yet the article hides the complexity under the harmless-sounding term "robustification". Another idea from the ivory towers that is good at generating papers, but not actual machines. IMHO.
Compare this with an atheist who might believe that life is futile, fleeting, and nothing they do matters in the long run... they might be more accepting and complacent.
Now just what makes you believe that atheists think life is futile? That's a pretty bigoted view...
So the public at large funds universities so those can do research, which they then patent so that it costs the public more money to use the patents than had they been public domain.
Personally, I believe that there are two reasonable options: (a) any research funded by public monies ought to be in the public domain, at least in the country of origin; or (b) any proceeds from patent license fees (or lawsuits) ought to go back to the public purse, not directly into the university's pocket.
Plus, the public or its trusted (hah) representatives ought to have a say, for a given patent, whether to pursue (a) or (b); that way inventions (e.g., in the area of health care) that are really beneficial to the public can follow path (a) and encourage quick and widespread adoption.
The whole thing sounds like a Weekly World News article, where all kinds of things usually happen in some foreign country, conveniently making it hard to refute. I call it FUD.
I personally would not sign this as-is. I'd cross out the ludicrous parts (like the 6 months post-employment), or amend (e.g, section B should only apply to IP conceived during the period of employment), then sign and return it. If they don't like it, I'd either get a lawyer or a new job. You already work there, so that creates a bit of a hurdle for them; I suspect not many companies would risk firing people over refusal to sign a document of questionable legality (not to mention ethics). The more secure you feel about your skills and ability to find a new job, the less you should be concerned about refusing such a contract.
Quite some time back, I read an article on the NC2000, an early-ish DSLR that really had a big impact on wire services and newspapers. It's very entertaining and amusing to read the travails of photographers working with this camera, including early experiences with color balance, anti-alias filters, or undesirable infrared sensitivity. Well worth a read:
By making a fuss over this, Apple (1) creates more buzz (ooops, sorry) about the iPod, while (2) keeping its squeaky-clean image. And of course Ann Summers makes a boatload of money. In fact, it's so much of a win-win-situation for both parties that I wonder whether Apple put Ann Summers up to this. If they didn't, they should've!:-)
(Hmmm... rebember the iBrator of many years ago? [http://www.geneffects.com/briarskin/ibrator/ibrat or.html] Okay, so that one *was* a parody.)
More seriously, though, Apple do have a point about the "look" of their ads getting ripped off. And Ann Summers cannot really claim it's a parody --- after all, they're trying to sell product. Trademark protection and all that. But really, great for both parties, and good entertainment for the rest of us.
In the past, Apple had tied itself to a single CPU vendor (68000), or at least a type of CPU with very little competitive pressure between vendors (PowerPC), with the consequence of falling behind the PC performance curve. Right now, it can pick between different x86 vendors as it wishes, based on price, performance and/or features.
Why on earth would Apple buy a moribund, debt-laden x86 company, and tie itself once again to a single vendor?
Okay, I misspoke -- I *have* used Windows, just not at home (until I switched, all my home machines used to run Linux). There are a handful of programs that are Windows-only, and that I'd like to be able to run at home (especially after changing jobs). I've never been willing to buy a dedicated Windows machine, but now that I can run Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac, I'm interested. (Never mind the additional security benefits of running a virtual machine!) If plain Vista won't let me do that (and incidentally requires a machine way more powerful that what I have now), then I better buy XP before it "disappears".
I don't really care. I switched to Mac a few yars ago (from Linux, though; I never used Windows), and I just today orderd one copy of Parallels, and also one copy of WindowsXP -- before MS discontinues it. As I upgrade my hardware over the years, I'll just keep moving the (virtual machine) WinXP image from one machine to the other. Because I use Parallels, the underlying hardware will appear to never change, so WinXP should run "forever", no matter how often I upgrade the actual hardware. So with any luck, I wont ever have to deal with Vista, virtualized or not.
On a separate note, is anyone seeing a spike in retail WinXP sales? Just curious...
While I'll agree that MS is not longer as relevant or threatening as it was a few years ago, Graham seriously overstates the case when he claims that "the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web--not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop." He points to snipshot (snipshot.com) as a web-based photoshop replacement. One, that's like saying the MS notepad is a replacement for Word. Two, snipshot is not a bit of Java or Javascript that you download, but it's an extension that plugs into your browser. So it's more like a desktop app that uses the browser to display its GUI. I fail to see how that heralds the "death of the desktop". Maybe MS is "dead", but Graham is seriously overreaching when he claims that the desktop is "dead", too.
This sounds like a lot of hooey to me. Basically, this guys supposes that there could possibly be a form of life that would have gotten killed by the various Viking experiments. As far as I can tell from the article, there is absolutely no evidence that (a) such life forms exist, or (b) he has found signatures of such in Viking experiments. I think science demands a bit more evidence before making such suppositions. Of course, "human probe kills martians" does make for good copy...
Reuters headline: "Bush calls Saddam conviction milestone in Iraq".
I don't quite understand just what kind of a "milestone" this is, but it does make me think that we sure spent a lot of money (and dead bodies) to get one man executed.
So I cannot run Vista in the Parallels virtual environment on my Intel Mac; I have to use dual-boot? How inconvenient! Is that to make sure that users don't defect to Apple too quickly? Because I have to tell you, it's nice to run in Mac OS X all the time, and just fire up a virtual machine for the occasional Windows-only app. Rebooting is a heck more tedious.
Of course, I suspect that Microsoft's real reason for this is to make sure that enterprises cannot get the benefit of virtualization without paying Microsoft an extra fee (by buying the unencumbered version).
Exactly! Also, the article only points out how many jobs disappeared in the US. To make the point that outsourcing is at fault, you'd have to show that many of these jobs were in fact outsourced rather than just eliminated. I'd like to see a better study, rather than a bunch of FUD.
That's *capital* cost, so you have to look at it over the lifetime of the school, and is largely irrelevant in determining how "wasteful" this school may or may not be.
What you want to know (and what the article does not mention) are the annual *operating* costs of the school. I'd imagine that, this being a public school, teacher salaries would be the same as elsewhere. So it comes down to things like: what's the student-teacher ratio, do they need additional IT staff absent at a "normal" school, and what extra maintenance is required for all the fancy gadgets?
The article was pretty scant on detail, especially exactly *what* the merchants are complaining about. Has the system gotten inefficient? Are buyers having a hard time finding items? Basically, what faults do the merchants feel can be fixed by a new CEO? Anyone here at Slashdot have any educated guesses?
Well, you'd still be running Windows (if that's your poison), and so your users would still be subject to (say) all the Outlook or Explorer weaknesses and exploits. The main upsides I'd see are (a) presumably all VMs have the same device model, so you'd be running the same image everywhere, and (b) assuming you carfully partition out the users' data to a different volume, you can give them a "fresh" virtual machine (a fresh Windows registry!) every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Showing my age here, but when I was in high school, I did the teaching. Mostly to fellow students, but I did have two of the math & physics teachers in my "class" off and on. I taught Pascal on an Apple II. A little later, the high school down the road from mine actually set up proper programming classes (teaching Basic on Commodore computers). A bunch of work colleagues who are about my own age had similar experiences -- few high schools were set up to teach anything about computers at the time, so the nerds amongst us got to see the "other side" of teaching.
Which would be consistent with the iPhone doing very well in European countries where either the carrier was better then AT&T, or where there was a choice of carriers.
Could be the iPhone carrier -- for the longest time, there was only AT&T, and I know many people who really wanted an iPhone but refused to get it via AT&T. Some of them picked an Android phone instead.
For the iPad, choice of cellular carrier may not be that important (different usage model), which might explain why people aren't looking that hard for alternatives.
If it requires software changes that are not 100% automated, then this won't fly. Programmers have a hard enough time writing sequential programs, let alone multithreaded ones. Now they're supposed to also foresee and check hardware errors? I think not.
I note that the entire idea hinges on the s/w component, yet the article hides the complexity under the harmless-sounding term "robustification".
Another idea from the ivory towers that is good at generating papers, but not actual machines. IMHO.
Compare this with an atheist who might believe that life is futile, fleeting, and nothing they do matters in the long run... they might be more accepting and complacent.
Now just what makes you believe that atheists think life is futile? That's a pretty bigoted view...
So the public at large funds universities so those can do research, which they then patent so that it costs the public more money to use the patents than had they been public domain.
Personally, I believe that there are two reasonable options:
(a) any research funded by public monies ought to be in the public domain, at least in the country of origin; or
(b) any proceeds from patent license fees (or lawsuits) ought to go back to the public purse, not directly into the university's pocket.
Plus, the public or its trusted (hah) representatives ought to have a say, for a given patent, whether to pursue (a) or (b); that way inventions (e.g., in the area of health care) that are really beneficial to the public can follow path (a) and encourage quick and widespread adoption.
The whole thing sounds like a Weekly World News article, where all kinds of things usually happen in some foreign country, conveniently making it hard to refute. I call it FUD.
I personally would not sign this as-is. I'd cross out the ludicrous parts (like the 6 months post-employment), or amend (e.g, section B should only apply to IP conceived during the period of employment), then sign and return it. If they don't like it, I'd either get a lawyer or a new job. You already work there, so that creates a bit of a hurdle for them; I suspect not many companies would risk firing people over refusal to sign a document of questionable legality (not to mention ethics).
The more secure you feel about your skills and ability to find a new job, the less you should be concerned about refusing such a contract.
Quite some time back, I read an article on the NC2000, an early-ish DSLR that really had a big impact on wire services and newspapers. It's very entertaining and amusing to read the travails of photographers working with this camera, including early experiences with color balance, anti-alias filters, or undesirable infrared sensitivity. Well worth a read:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6463-7191
By making a fuss over this, Apple :-)
t or.html] Okay, so that one *was* a parody.)
(1) creates more buzz (ooops, sorry) about the iPod, while
(2) keeping its squeaky-clean image.
And of course Ann Summers makes a boatload of money. In fact, it's so much of a win-win-situation for both parties that I wonder whether Apple put Ann Summers up to this. If they didn't, they should've!
(Hmmm... rebember the iBrator of many years ago? [http://www.geneffects.com/briarskin/ibrator/ibra
More seriously, though, Apple do have a point about the "look" of their ads getting ripped off. And Ann Summers cannot really claim it's a parody --- after all, they're trying to sell product. Trademark protection and all that. But really, great for both parties, and good entertainment for the rest of us.
In the past, Apple had tied itself to a single CPU vendor (68000), or at least a type of CPU with very little competitive pressure between vendors (PowerPC), with the consequence of falling behind the PC performance curve. Right now, it can pick between different x86 vendors as it wishes, based on price, performance and/or features.
Why on earth would Apple buy a moribund, debt-laden x86 company, and tie itself once again to a single vendor?
Okay, I misspoke -- I *have* used Windows, just not at home (until I switched, all my home machines used to run Linux). There are a handful of programs that are Windows-only, and that I'd like to be able to run at home (especially after changing jobs). I've never been willing to buy a dedicated Windows machine, but now that I can run Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac, I'm interested. (Never mind the additional security benefits of running a virtual machine!) If plain Vista won't let me do that (and incidentally requires a machine way more powerful that what I have now), then I better buy XP before it "disappears".
I don't really care. I switched to Mac a few yars ago (from Linux, though; I never used Windows), and I just today orderd one copy of Parallels, and also one copy of WindowsXP -- before MS discontinues it. As I upgrade my hardware over the years, I'll just keep moving the (virtual machine) WinXP image from one machine to the other. Because I use Parallels, the underlying hardware will appear to never change, so WinXP should run "forever", no matter how often I upgrade the actual hardware. So with any luck, I wont ever have to deal with Vista, virtualized or not.
On a separate note, is anyone seeing a spike in retail WinXP sales? Just curious...
While I'll agree that MS is not longer as relevant or threatening as it was a few years ago, Graham seriously overstates the case when he claims that "the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web--not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop." He points to snipshot (snipshot.com) as a web-based photoshop replacement. One, that's like saying the MS notepad is a replacement for Word. Two, snipshot is not a bit of Java or Javascript that you download, but it's an extension that plugs into your browser. So it's more like a desktop app that uses the browser to display its GUI. I fail to see how that heralds the "death of the desktop". Maybe MS is "dead", but Graham is seriously overreaching when he claims that the desktop is "dead", too.
This sounds like a lot of hooey to me. Basically, this guys supposes that there could possibly be a form of life that would have gotten killed by the various Viking experiments. As far as I can tell from the article, there is absolutely no evidence that (a) such life forms exist, or (b) he has found signatures of such in Viking experiments. I think science demands a bit more evidence before making such suppositions. Of course, "human probe kills martians" does make for good copy...
Reuters headline: "Bush calls Saddam conviction milestone in Iraq".
I don't quite understand just what kind of a "milestone" this is, but it does make me think that we sure spent a lot of money (and dead bodies) to get one man executed.
So I cannot run Vista in the Parallels virtual environment on my Intel Mac; I have to use dual-boot? How inconvenient! Is that to make sure that users don't defect to Apple too quickly? Because I have to tell you, it's nice to run in Mac OS X all the time, and just fire up a virtual machine for the occasional Windows-only app. Rebooting is a heck more tedious.
Of course, I suspect that Microsoft's real reason for this is to make sure that enterprises cannot get the benefit of virtualization without paying Microsoft an extra fee (by buying the unencumbered version).
Just to quibble with your numbers...
> 3 bedroom house price increase: 22 times
> 1954 $ 10,250
> 2006 $219,375
From http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi, an inflation calculator:
"What cost $10250 in 1954 would cost $70773.86 in 2005."
Therefore, the increase is only about 3 times in real dollars.
Exactly! Also, the article only points out how many jobs disappeared in the US. To make the point that outsourcing is at fault, you'd have to show that many of these jobs were in fact outsourced rather than just eliminated. I'd like to see a better study, rather than a bunch of FUD.
That's *capital* cost, so you have to look at it over the lifetime of the school, and is largely irrelevant in determining how "wasteful" this school may or may not be.
What you want to know (and what the article does not mention) are the annual *operating* costs of the school. I'd imagine that, this being a public school, teacher salaries would be the same as elsewhere. So it comes down to things like: what's the student-teacher ratio, do they need additional IT staff absent at a "normal" school, and what extra maintenance is required for all the fancy gadgets?
The article was pretty scant on detail, especially exactly *what* the merchants are complaining about. Has the system gotten inefficient? Are buyers having a hard time finding items? Basically, what faults do the merchants feel can be fixed by a new CEO? Anyone here at Slashdot have any educated guesses?
Well, you'd still be running Windows (if that's your poison), and so your users would still be subject to (say) all the Outlook or Explorer weaknesses and exploits. The main upsides I'd see are
(a) presumably all VMs have the same device model, so you'd be running the same image everywhere, and
(b) assuming you carfully partition out the users' data to a different volume, you can give them a "fresh" virtual machine (a fresh Windows registry!) every time.
Nice and useful, but still not bomb-proof.