COBOL is a far less capable language than most. In fact, COBOL was rarely the only language used to make a system because COBOL itself was practically useless. It was little more than a fixed field record store manager. RPG was used for generating reports. Screen I/O was a COBOL extension which generally consisted of designing an input UI in another language and calling functions in COBOL... although there are some direct COBOL UI toolkits, but they are barely useful for anything.
COBOL unlike SQL is not a structured query language. Typically, raw COBOL works on fixed field records connected to a fixed field ISAM. With DB2 (or other modern multiuser ISAMS), COBOL can often be mixed with SQL... giving us all the power of another bug ridden SQL implementation. If the form developer allows it, then it could in theory be used to execute SQL code through injection just as easily as in other languages.
COBOL is a crappy ass language that allows for implementing fixed field databases relatively efficiently.... but pretty much every other language is going to be flawed with regards to security in comparison as COBOL itself is pretty much incapable of handling the nasty nasties like dynamic memory allocation and such.
Let's not suggest that COBOL is more secure because of its maturity. Let's instead suggest it's more secure because it can do what it can do an pretty much nothing else.
On that note... COBOL is as secure as the terminal it is running on. But this is where maturity matters. COBOL is generally being run on a IBM mainframe virtual machine (IBM mainframes never run native code) which is still running almost the same operating system as it was in 1969 with additional features. Things like Ethernet aren't even supported by the operating system. They're handled by add-ons which map a terminal session to a telnet, 3270, 5250 or ssh session. Oh... but there was a major update in recent years which made it so most new things are running with UTF-8 instead of EBCDIC.
It really depends on your needs, but for me, I needed a tablet which actually had the ability to run real software. Atom and ARM processors are just not in the same category as Sandy Bridge. The Series 7 Slate only suffers one major problem, the RAM is only 4GB and is not upgradeable. It's soldered to the motherboard, but oddly enough, this is specifically the type of device which will be hacked on and I'm sure that so long as the address lines are available, someone will find a way to upgrade the memory at least to 8GB using a BGA rework station. I paid a rework shop to install a Core 2 Duo into my Sony Vaio UX at one point... money well spent.
It's a Core i5, which is dual core + hyper threading, 4GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD with moderate performance. It's pretty good battery life too. I don't run Linux as the default OS on it, I use Windows 8, but I do use VirtualBox to run Kubuntu. Performance-wise, it's in a totally different class than the other tablets. I don't know where NVidia will be in a year, but I'd imagine that they are focuses mostly on Windows 8 support on tablets. And they aren't all that well known for stable Linux drivers. Also, there still isn't a proper "This is how ARM should boot from USB" spec out there, so updating Linux distros will be hackish for a while.
Oddly, the major success of the PC BIOS and the newer EFI has been almost entirely based on simply being able to boot the computer. After all, once the computer is boot, the BIOS is entirely unused.... drivers take over. ARM doesn't have a standard, flexible boot environment which is universal yet. Maybe they'll sort that out with Microsoft, but I have a really bad feeling that we'll be stuck with vendor provided boot loaders which will limit the lifespan of a device.
Netflix is trying to go all digital which turns them into just another video streaming peddler. They're a dime a dozen now... which is great. I can rent or buy from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Apple etc... quite easily these days.
The point being that Netflix is/was a great source to rent physical DVDs and that's what made them special. It is obvious that the remaining lifespan of mail order DVD rental can be measured in years... not decades. But NetFlix is making a huge mistake by being a media company as opposed to what they really are which is a logistics company. Instead of trying to find a new way of selling/renting films to their customers they instead should be finding a way to use their warehouses to provide items other than DVDs.
I don't want to sound like a noob... but last I checked, ActiveSync is really just a device syncing protocol with an support through a desktop application and support through Microsoft Exchange to do it. I thought that the blackberry network was pretty much just a mail and messaging service.
It seems to me that these are pretty much features that are pretty common on mobile devices these days... Android and iOS sync pretty well with Google calendars/mail etc... and iOS syncs pretty well with exchange... and then you can choose to use iCloud on iOS as well if you really want to.
There are also open source servers which support the exchange active sync protocol so far as I know.
Does Blackberry network or ActiveSync do anything special that isn't pretty much available everywhere else.. and I mean other than try to lock you into a specific vendor?
Yep... my Christmas gift from my family to me is a Samsung Series 7 Slate. I even bought it from the Microsoft online store (best price by a fairly large percentage oddly enough) and am anxious to receive it once my dad reships it to me from the states.
Who would want it is a good question.
1) People who like iPad but can't find anything useful to do with it. 2) People who like iPad but have to carry an iPad AND a laptop to be productive. Now we can carry a tablet and a dock 3) People who don't like being DRM'd to death by Apple and Google. 4) People who like to do things like programming and can't on their other tablets... unless you're going to write lame ass HTML5 and EcmaScript apps. 5) People who want to run a full version of Chrome or Opera on their tablets instead of the clunky ass Android or iOS browsers. 6) People who like to be able to choose their hardware features and pay for them... or people who want to be able to upgrade the disk space without buying a new tablet. What I like most about the windows 8 tablet is that using an inductive charger attachment, I can leave my tablet in my backpack when I get to the office and simply lay the backpack on my desk and using Intel Wireless Display and Bluetooth, just push a button, connect to the tablet and have a 24" Windows desktop on a machine suitable to write video codecs on (which is what I'll use it for) and be ready to go.
Windows 8 will be the first operating system to fully replace the desktop and tablet operating systems with one which does both. If you consider that iOS is entirely capable of running almost all OS X apps Apple could do it to, but they would damage their store based business model completely if for example you could just use uTorrent or any other service to get media on your device. Not to mention that with a Sandy Bridge Core i5, I can rip a DVD with an external DVD drive to my tablet at about 12x using QuickSync... sure the quality is crap compared to x264, but that's not the point.
The only things missing from the Samsung Series 7 Slate are :
1) USB 3:( that was a lame move... the dock has gigabit ethernet though and for what I need, it'll make up for it
2) Internal inductive charging. Will have to rig a charger for that
3) Upgradable RAM.. they actually soldered the 4GB of RAM to the motherboard, but since Windows 8 seems to use much less RAM than Windows 7 (using it now), that shouldn't be a problem.
And ideally, the #1 feature upgrade this device could have is :
Make it the size of a phone instead of a tablet. Then I can have a single device which does everything instead of having a phone, a tablet and a PC.
I'm an early adopter as well as an impulse shopper. I set things up in my house and it generally isn't longer before my neighbors are knocking on my door asking to see what their kids are talking about. Then before you know it, they're asking me how to get it in their houses and before you know it, they're asking if it would be suitable for their 80 year old mothers.
For the past 9 years, my kids have had media center PCs in their rooms... no TV signal as it isn't important. From collecting seasons of TV shows, they have an assortment of roughly 1500 cartoons on their PCs which they can watch by clicking a few buttons. My daughter has a 22" TV as a screen which was handed down by mamma when she bullied me to give her a bigger TV in the bedroom. My son has a 24" BenQ screen with some Logitech speakers. Their computers are their TVs, video game consoles and web browsers etc... I can safely say that with the exception of maybe on show a night before bed... lasting about 20 minutes, they never really watched TV... well except when visiting houses with technonoobs.
On the top floor, I have a laser/led projector that gives me a 110" screen and a sound system able to do the room it is in justice. It's connected to a media center PC where we often play games we buy from Steam or movies we buy from iTunes and I often find myself web browsing from the couch there.
On the bottom floor we have a 46" Sony LCD with the cable box which my wife watches reality TV on.
All of us have iPhones, we have two iPads and I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Samsung Series 7 Slate) which I use as a PC for Windows, Mac and Linux development as well as watching films, playing games and pretty much everything else. These are our books. I am entirely unable to throw away a paper book on principal. So, I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have received a single piece of mail in the past 13 years which was addressed to me other than a bill. I haven't received a bill in the mail in about 6 years as they come through email. The one piece of mail I received was actually a paper based Nigerian 419 scam presenting itself as a letter from a law firm.
We get out mail on any of the screens in the house. We get our movies entirely electronically. We get our games and music also electronically. If we want to watch broadcast TV, we do it through a streaming web site. If we want to listen to the radio, we do it through a streaming site. Of course, we have a sling box setup just in case someone calls and says "You have to turn on channel 9!" But, it's collecting dust.
I just opened a new bank account inside the U.S. (I'm an American abroad) and I was in utter shock how ridiculously paper based the U.S. still is. I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages? They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that. In the end, they agreed to let my dad send them a bank check or money order for $1 to get it open. They also required a color photocopy of my passport picture page and social security card. It wasn't good enough to e-mail them. They had to have genuine photocopies. So, I scanned them, sent them to my dad and he mailed them to the bank.
I didn't have a social security card anymore and although I provided them with my number, they needed proof it was mine... so I asked the american embassy for a letter saying so... it was printed out and signed. After all... somehow a piece of linen stationary from 1975 which was printed in blue ink by a cheap press and then put into an IBM electric type writer is obviously more proof that the number is mine than me saying so.. DUH!!!!
Let's be blunt... this is 2011. The task he set forth will be tied up in bureaucracy for a minimum of a year. There will be arguments such as "Where will we get the budget to do this?" and there will be arguments like "Who will do it?" and such. Even if the program gets started, the company who will provide the obviously custom system will underbid the others involved to land the contract and once the contract itself IS started, then whoever won the contract will then stop part way and claim "The agency misinformed us as to how much would need to be digitized and therefore we need more money." at which time the project will be placed on hold pending an audit to which time it will be made known that there was corruption involved in choosing the given vendor.
Agencies who have thus far opted to NOT digitize their records have done so for many reasons. And even though they're being forced to digitize now, they'll find many different methods of making the process cost substantially more than it should have and drag the process out over extended periods. Let us not forget that most of these documents can only be handled by certain staff with high enough clearance given their confidential nature. If the expose writers are to be trusted, there are entire rooms of records of paper where only one highly trusted person is allowed to enter.
Let us also point out that many of these records have been written in cursive which unlike block is a screaming nightmare to handle automatically. That means that the people who hold the clearance to view the records will need to manually enter these records themselves. There will be issues of encrypting the records so that only certain individuals will have access to them. While Obama would like to make it so that there could be some central database per organization, I'd imagine that there will be many individual, sealed networks to guarantee security.
With all these issues, let's be blunt...
1) The agencies will fight it... outright AND through bureaucratic means. 2) The agencies will say "Sure... we did it" and since many of the records are highly classified, no one can actually contradict the statement... so it most likely won't happen. When a given record is asked for they'll claim "oh...we must have missed that box" 3) It will take decades to complete as there are rooms of records where only a single individual is likely to have access and I'm guessing their typing speed isn't 100wpm. 4) Obama is on his way out. Even if he survives this coming election by some miracle (he sucks as much as the next guy, but people know he sucks and are more likely to trust someone else with less of a known suckage) by the time the project is likely to start, it's almost certain whoever takes over will pull the funds from that budget within hours of getting into office. 5) For data security sake, the agencies will most likely have to design the systems themselves using whatever crap engineers they manage to find with high enough clearance that's willing to actually code document management systems. And truthfully... this isn't a TV show... if the agencies have "Super Hackers" on staff, they're probably just as lame as the self promoting idiots you find everywhere else.
So, I'm willing to say... this will cost a tremendous amount to talk about... but will go nowhere. Sad:(
I'm not a huge fan of religion or religious beliefs.... but maybe he discounted the concept that the god as the bible thumpers know him is different. Maybe he saw god as something far bigger and greater... possibly someone/thing responsible for the big bang and evolution itself. If you look at it from that perspective and suggest that he doesn't play dice then the laws of physics and theories of quantum mechanics can been seen as designed by divinity as they should all be explainable by suggesting that this god created these concepts when he created the laws of the universe.
If anything, this argument which constantly is used by the bible thumpers to say that even one of the greatest scientific minds in known human history agreed with them as opposed to us. I'd prefer to believe that he perceived the bible as a book of rules meant to keep a desert dwelling race with no education from killing themselves off and instead saw the universe and what we can perceive from scientific study as the work of something greater.
I don't believe in a god or any other divine being. I don't believe in a heaven, hell spirit or afterlife. I do however think that if you must believe in a god of such greatness, at least give him his due and admit that maybe an eternal being of infinite greatness could have spent a few billion years making something that is supposedly his masterpiece as opposed to slapping some shit together in 7 days to support the lives of a few billion specs of dust.
Unlike when I was starting off in a similar situation 20 years ago, we have the Internet these days. Actively brand yourself and none of this flash bang nonsense. Actually show what you can do... most importantly focus on professionalism... make sure you don't leave unfinished projects everywhere. Remember that to many companies a university degree says "This guy is willing to follow through with any crap assignment he gets in order to achieve a goal".
The next thing is... be better than the university guys. University grads almost never graduate with any actual usable skills. They're generally just people who proved they can accomplish hard jobs they didn't know how to do before they started... And they can follow through (think I said that already). You need to have better skills and most importantly, the proven ability to follow through. If you open source some code, it should be documented and pristine.
One thing a great computer programmer with a degree from a university understands which a self-educated guy doesn't is data structures. I recommend religiously studying Knuth, become an algorithms expert. Study patterns from the Gang of Four. Be modern and learn parallel programming patterns as well. In reality, if a university grad came out of school with nothing else, those topics alone is enough to make them far more useful than most others.
Good luck... it's a hard journey and in a modern time when there are IT grads falling off of trees left and right, it'll be a tough journey for you.
Best teachers I had weren't teachers at all.
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Reading, Writing, Ruby?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In high school... I went to a special one called W.T. Clarke in Westbury New York... I had four teachers which were really amazing. The principle of the school decided that to teach computer programming, he'd hire a programmer. To teach electro-mechanical engineering, he'd hire a robotics engineer. To teach architecture, he'd hire an architect and to teach electronics repair, he's hire a TV repair technician. Oh... did the same for carpentry and other things as well.
He believed that if he could find these people with a love for what they do, who felt that it would be more productive to teach 30 new kids each year than to do the work themselves. The initial pay was that of an entry level person of the field which they were specialists in and the costs to cover tuition to the university to become a certified teacher as well. Upon completion of their degree, they would gain the additional money that had been paying for their university classes as salary. The end result was, nearly every person on my friends list on FaceBook from those classes are now working high level positions in those fields..... or as teachers. That's about a 70% success rate.
A key thing to understand about these courses is... they were elective courses. You had to do well in your normal classes or you'd be dropped from these courses. So, the students in these courses actually did better in their other classes than the other students as well. It's like forcing an athlete to pass their other classes or no football for them.
This system worked incredibly... the problem was, the principle had to fight for this. He demanded of the school district the funds to make this happen. He probably interviewed 50 people for each position before choosing someone. After all, with the investment he would need to make in a person like this, he didn't want to have to do it every 3 years. So he picked the right person for the job. Of course, in that school, he did pretty much the same for nearly all his teachers and in a school with 1500 students, that's a huge job. But, the end result was one of the best schools in New York and possibly the whole of the U.S.. He didn't piss away money on fancy landscaping projects like they do in California. Whenever he got the money to do anything, he improved the academics of the school first and if there was any money left over, he bought a lawn mower. He would even attempt to convince the football team and cheerleading squad to run fund raisers for those things to avoid having to use the normal budget for those things.
Mind you this was in the 80s and 90s. He set aside an area of the parking lot for kids to smoke. He felt strongly that he'd rather keep the students at school even if it meant letting them smoke on school grounds as opposed to having them skip classes to avoid getting caught smoking. These days, the parents almost certainly would lynch him for such a decision. Unlike other schools where the principle was some loser who deal out punishments. He let his subordinates take care of punishments. He on the other hand would take personal interest in any student he felt was going the wrong way. He understood that the kids who looked like "The wrong kind" could often simply be trying to define themselves as nonconformists. If some kids needed a "tough guy" reputation, he'd even pull them across the school and into his office by their ear for everyone to see, then sit down and play a game of chess with them and talk about things. Fact is, we as students didn't fear him for punishments. We feared that he would be disappointed in us... a raised eyebrow from him was enough to put nearly all the students in line.
I can go on and on about him. But the important thing more than anything else is that he made the school what it was. He built a team of the right teachers. He sacrificed new paint in the hallways for better text books. He focused on what was important in a school. People always talk about "The right teachers" and "Higher pay", but in retrospect, I must admit that the key to success is great leadership. Start with that.
Using SlingBox or a variety of HDMI capture devices with built in H.264 codecs, you can capture the compressed stream. Those other devices are designed to function on HDMI but do not function with HDCP equipped devices.
That being said... I managed to hack a board like this together months ago... it wasn't even complicated. Did it using a $149 FPGA board and a $299 HDMI In/Out adapter for it. I needed it not for copying, but for SlingBox.
Yep... I live in Norway and for some dumb ass reason, I am forced by Disney to buy a DVD of the Lego of the Pirates of the Caribbean as opposed to downloading from Steam or elsewhere. Sure this is no big deal... well except that the computer connected to my living room TV is a new Mac Mini without a DVD drive.
So.... I just downloaded a pirated copy of the game instead and we play that. I'm waiting for an electronic release of it... preferably on Steam where I have Lego Harry Potter, Lego Universe, Lego Star Wars, Lego Star Wars III, Lego Indiana Jones and probably another I'm forgetting... but I haven't purchased the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean yet since I can't use the DVD version.
Up yours Disney... feel free to knock on my door now that you know who I am...
You need to dig up a history on money. Money was created almost entirely AS a religion... or at least as a tool to make religions more profitable... at least that's one of the more standard versions of the story.
Liberty is an unalienable right... but Merriam Webster has changed the definition periodically over the past few decades to cope with the issue that liberty was far to broad for things like some of the U.S. presidential administrations. The best part about liberty is that we all demand it, we all insist it is an underlying component of living in a civilized country and yet there are people who spend 12 years in a university studying what that one word actually means (well they did until it was deemed unprofitable).
And... just in case you don't know... the communist party which represents a total of approximately 4% of the Chinese population but rules with an iron fist has absolutely no requirement to guarantee civil rights to their people. You're confusing them with those other nations. On the brighter side... seeing that the legalists will almost certainly take over the Chinese government after the eminent collapse of the communist regime as only the legalists have the power to control the country afterwards, the communists look like happy happy smiley people in comparison. You thought America was the worst two party system... China has two parties and a third which is temporarily in control until the other two take over again and they've had that system for eons.
The beauty of the monstrous government which China has is that the government can't possibly be bothered with the gazillion people living under their regime and therefore most people don't even notice it's there... well until they want to live in a city. But there's probably no more than a hundred million or so that fall into that category.
Don't make the mistake of thinking China is anything like a western country... they don't bitch about shit not being done by the government... they just do it. It's the nanzy panzy cry babies who learned to be useless from westerners like us that sit there whining about how they got a degree and can't get a job.
You're 100% right... it just took an amazingly huge amount for someone to get to the point. They could have easily recompiled without that feature and altered the installer and everything would have been fine in a week or two. In fact, they probably did. But let's look at the real fact of this.
Word for Windows was the slowest program EVER MADE. I mean... HOLY SHIT it was slow. I remember typing and waiting for keystrokes to show up seconds later...
That was also during the dark era of computers when EISA quadrupled the price of computers, Intel didn't make chipsets and only Micron made a good chipset and when all the other motherboards cost $50-$75, a Micron motherboard cost $350. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of RAM manufacturers too.. unless you were willing to pay triple or more to Kingston, RAM was crap. I remember running memory tests while burning in computers for 12 hours in a run and almost always needing to replace the memory. The reason for this was that AMD and Cyrix started shipping chips with 40Mhz front side buses and Intel had the nerve to ship a 50Mhz front side bus. This was a major problem since we hadn't yet learned how to resolve the wave reflection issues that occurred at more than 33Mhz. So 99% of the motherboards, RAM, CPUs and others that were shipped during that era SUCKED BALLS!!!! VESA Local Bus made it 100x worse since even at 33Mhz, it was highly unreliable. Computers just really really sucked at the time. Let's also add that S3 has still not released the first consumer Windows graphics accelerators, so the pathetic 33-66Mhz 486 based computers at the time (most without math coprocessors) couldn't handle simply moving Windows around the screen without making life suck. To be brief, it wasn't until Intel had designed the 440BX chipset for use with the Pentium II and most of the crap RAM manufacturers died that the PC really began to be great.
Wordperfect however refused to believe that Windows would ever amount to anything... so instead of writing a Windows version, they released WordPerfect 5.2 and sad on their thumbs for a long ass time. When they released WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, it was the biggest half assed hack ever produced from a big company like them. For years after, WordPerfect got better in increments of "This release sucks less than the previous". By the time Windows 95 came out... Microsoft had already released Word 6.0 and it was great (though slow for reasons mentioned earlier) and on the day of releasing Windows 95, they released Word 95 and at that point Wordperfect was better known as "Wordperfect who?".
The Windows 95 release WAS NOT!!! by any means the death of WordPerfect. Windows 3.0 was... and it wasn't Microsoft's fault. When Microsoft ported rewrote for Windows, WordPerfect should have as well.
You could say "Windows was a big gamble.. if people wanted Windows, they could buy Mac". Or "Windows was too complicated to program for since Visual C++ hadn't been released until way after Windows 3.0 and no one had a clue how to program for it". Or "Turbo C++ cost $99 per developer and Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 cost $495 with the Windows SDK, 50 copies and the training involved would have been a mess". Or "Windows SDK was SOOOO awful (still is) that writing anything useful in it without first spending months wrapping the SDK in something usable would have been impossible".... all of these things would be right... but Word had a HUGE head start on WordPerfect and when Windows 3.1 was released, for the first time, nearly everyone had at least a 386SX and could run it and the world rushed out and bought/pirated the hell out of it.
In fact, if Windows 3.1 had copy protection on it... the world would have been much different. It was almost entirely because of how easy it was to pirate that Windows 3.1 ended up on nearly every PC able to run it practically overnight.
WordPerfect was a joke.... their product was crap and by 1995... they just weren't relevant anymore.... OH... and as a final nail in the coffin.... Word for Windows did a slightly better job opening WordPerfect 5.1 files than WordPerfect did in their own Windows version.
Apple has a long an glorious history of competing with their developers. I use Windows all the time and frankly, I just don't see features that are included for free in Windows which are not actually OS related things.
1) You can think of the After Dark/Screen Saver thing Screen savers were going to be part of Windows someday... AfterDark could have adapted their executables to fit into the API... get over it.
2) You can think of Winzip Unzipping is easy in stock windows... still need a third part app for zipping.
3) You can think of Nero The crappy, limited CD/DVD burning that is part of Windows is pretty bare bones. Though, if you think Microsoft should have left it out... so be it. Frankly, it's a mute point now anyway as CD/DVD is dead.
4) You can think of media players Um... yeh, cause people actually use Windows Media player
5) You can think of video and DVD editors Just don't.
6) You can think of mail programs Yeh... Windows Live Mail sucks less than many these days... took 15 years.
7) You can think of web browsers If people still use IE... kudos to them... man... those people really have endurance.
8) Antivirus tools Really? You think Microsoft shouldn't put their own in as standard when nearly all the 3rd party antivirus tools are as bad as the viruses themselves? Twice in the past month or two I got infected by Norton Security Scan from programs I installed. I actually convinced my wife's IT boss at her company to switch 800 computers in their organization from Symantec to Microsoft's tools because you can't trust a company that behaves like that. McAfee is nearly as bad these days... Adobe makes it an opt out instead of opt-in option.
Yeh... pretty much covered all the programs that are included with Windows... if you want more, you'll have to pay for them. So what are you actually getting at?
Oh... you probably mean that Linux distros are better... you know the ones that have about 60 different clones of every program ever commercially produced.
Pretty much everything of the time opened multimate files. Just find something like an old copy of Word or Wordperfect, get the appropriate filter and import. Then import with a newer version. I managed to google things like dataviz which costs money but does it directly.
I bought a piece of Orea Dream Cake from Deli Deluca in Oslo, Norway last night and it was $10. That's a little high, but pretty reasonable based on the fact that a dozen eggs here costs $8.
You hire Ph.D.s because they can put Ph.D. on their business card and make them sit in mundane, boring ass meetings with customers so that they'll think you have a bunch of smart people working for you. After all, if you can waste such a special person on a stupid sales meeting you must be overflowing with super smart people. The company I work for has already turned most of their Ph.D.s into little doggies to keep in the customer conferences. The masters on the other hand are doing all the research and development.
A Ph.D. from an Ivy League school is almost guaranteed to land you a great sales job at a tech company. If you want to actually use your Ph.D. as more than just toilet paper, then take a professorship at a private university or a teaching position at a high end secondary school. I used to dream of a degree like the on you mentioned, but after seeing what it's done to most of my friends, I am really glad I didn't.
Oh... there is one tech job which you could get and actually write some code and papers at.... wall street... they're hiring people like you to write high speed trading algorithms. They don't actually know shit about shit, so they assume that guys with a Ph.D. from the Ivy League or MIT are the best people for hacking and using trial and error to manipulate the trading system and win more at gambling than they lose.
I have a neat little handheld Sony Vaio which has a 1.33Ghz Core Solo and a Intel GMA945 graphics adapter oh... and 1Gb RAM. It's an awesome machine but Windows XP was too heavy for it. Windows Vista was far to heavy for it. Windows 7 runs pretty nice on it. Windows 8 beta is much nicer, very usable. Android is ok on it... but I still don't know what the point of Android is. Meego wasn't too bad on it. Mac OS X Lion is a laughing joke on it.
All things considered, the operating systems are seriously improving on performance now.... The more they accelerate the desktop with the GPU and the more they work on power savings, the better the operating systems get. I think it pretty much started as functionality... then the trend went in to stability and security and now is moving in the direction of performance. With the world trying to fit more and more computer into their pockets instead of backpacks, the operating systems are being tuned for that.
Now apps on the other hand are another issue. One day, someone will even write an e-mail client that doesn't make my Core i7 2600K with 16 gigs of RAM and 500MB/s r/w SSD cry whenever I search my mail.
Did you just suggest that T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint or Verizon has a full national network?
I just drove from New York City to Tampa Florida and back this summer. This is by far the most densely populated part of the country... straight down I95... I had a GSM phone with a T-Mobile card, another GSM phone with my Norwegian card (which bounces from network to network) and I had a Sprint phone which I bought a while back... between the three of them, I managed to have slightly better than despicable coverage while driving. Oh... I also had a T-Mobile 4G wireless modem.
For nearly 50% of the trip, I had no Internet access. For about 80% of the trip, I couldn't get anything better than edge. For about 20% of the trip, voice was not available. For another 20% of the trip, the call quality was so shitty that there wasn't even any point of calling. In the many of the gigantic malls we stopped in (for food and air conditioning... it was July and my family is Norwegian... HOT!!!) we'd run around begging for wifi access from stores because 2G, 3G and 4G wouldn't work in the malls. Hell, I thought it was hilarious that the Best Buy where I bought the 4G modem didn't even have 4G access... or 3G... or 2G... or even respectable voice. Then later at a different mall, I stopped into a Radio Shack to get a T-Mobile refill card and I couldn't even use it until I drove 20 miles because I couldn't get internet access anywhere near there. Can you say Microcell?!?!?!
Anyway, if the FCC gave a shit, they would not only let this happen, but they would also require that the PCS network was gradually replaced with a GSM network and that AT&T and Sprint should have to share access to their networks with each other so that the consumer would benefit. The FCC would then on top of that start providing funding to either of those companies or to smaller startups to build out the GSM network so that maybe one day, the U.S. might have better mobile phone service than most third world countries..... P.S. - I know the U.S. is big... but when I drove from Oslo, through rural Sweden, through Rural Denmark, Rural Germany, Rural Luxembourg, Rural Belgium, and Rural France to Disney Paris 7 years ago, there wasn't a single point on that trip I didn't have good Internet access. I have also visited cabins in central Norway where the population density is approximately 1 person per 10km sq. and had no problem getting 3G and that was 3-4 years ago.
The law is almost certainly because the Starcraft, Wow, CoD etc... players are showing up for school each day looking like they're dead on their feet. Then on top of that, a huge number of guys staying up to 4am on a school day watching "The Pro's Play".
In the west we simply assume that the kids who do that will one day make an excellent addition to the staff at McDonalds... After all, if their parents are stupid enough to let their kids stay up late like that on school nights, then the kids are most likely equally worthless... so screw them. Korea on the other hand appears to think that these kids shouldn't be showing up looking dead to school each day, getting poor grades and taking away from the students who will be more motivated.
Now... I on the other hand stayed up until 4am on school days programming and designing electronics which made me utterly worthless in school each day... if I deigned to present myself there at all. I was more interested in learning than attending school (though I did read all the text books cover to cover... hence learning). I'm not quite sure that becoming a better Starcraft player counts as educational though.
- $1200 is a lot to pay for a license and a license generally needs to be renewed once a year. - He would need to produce an additional 200-300 units a year to justify the cost of the license and this is a lot of units to produce. - He's 88 years old. He most probably produces the product for his love of the technology than for profit by this time.
Let's be pretty blunt about this... I'd imagine that it all started with the $1200. While the DEA is obviously trying to do their job, their job policing the drug trade in the U.S. should not be impact legitimate uses of these chemicals by stopping the small and up and coming businesses from being able to function. It would be like saying that since a bomb maker would likely need a resistor or relay to make a detonator, then anyone who wishes to build anything with a resistor or relay should have to pay DHS a $1200 fee before they could purchase them. This would eliminate a tremendous number of small businesses from starting up and would seriously hurt America as a result. We as computer geeks often forget that things like crystalline iodine is a component to a guy like this in the same way that a resistor is to a electronics nerd.
The DEA is a publicly funded entity. They already receive their budgets from the government and we as a people pay their operating expenses as a whole because we recognize that they "fight an evil" which most of us believe needs to be fought. I am disappointed to see that they are penalizing this guy. Yes, you have many great and valid points about how he dealt poorly with this situation...but... he's justifiably pissed off that the DEA is penalizing him for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I makes absolutely no difference which organization it is that is trying to take his money... honest inventors and businessmen shouldn't have to pay stipends such as this because there's a few bad apples screwing it up for him.
No he obviously is not a diplomat. He almost certainly isn't someone you'd want negotiating contracts for your company. But he is a guy who produces and probably regularly improves upon a technical innovation and provides it to a group of people who wish to buy it and see a utility with it. The DEA is obviously aware of him now. They had the budget to track him down and communicate with him. Asking $1200 for a license to a chemical he obviously knows how to handle was just plain stupid. As to the bulk purchasers thing... this is obviously what was most important or should have been to the DEA. Instead of putting the guy out of business, they instead should have been more diplomatic and asked him "If someone orders more of these things than they could actually use, could you give them a call and say 'Hi... wow you're my best customer this month... it's a big order and I don't want to make you wait unjustifiably long, what are you using all these filters for? Can I send you the first 1/4 of the order today as I have that many on my shelf and I'll send the remaining 3/4 when I finish producing them?' and call us if they sound like they aren't buying them for the filtering itself.". I bet you anything, the old fella would have been much more amenable, and then the DEA would have accomplished something meaningful instead of shutting down a small, legitimate business.
There are three operating systems of note.
1) Linux - by far the most powerful, incredible system. Nothing can possibly break beyond fixing but you might need a Ph.D. in computer science to change the IP address of your network adapter. And the best part is, if you can't find it for Linux, you can code it yourself (which I often do).
2) Mac OS X - It just works... well until it doesn't, then you can do a really really easy reinstall, losing all your crap (but you have time machine right?) and you're back up and running in a little while. This is the ultimate OS for anyone who doesn't care whether a platform has a standard gaming controller. It's wonderful if you love your angry birds. But, it's a bit of a tinker toy. Oh... and there's no decent anti-virus software for Mac and it's insecure as hell. (Don't challenge this, if we accept that the user is the #1 exploitable hole in security, it is a fact). File sharing just works... until it doesn't, then you're utterly screwed. Software crashes a lot, but at least there is an easily accessible "Force Quit" which works about 92% of the time. Oh... and programming on a Mac laptop without being able to use page up and page down without using both hands makes me want to kill myself. I often use a keysonic bluetooth keyboard resting on top of my mac keyboard just to be able to type.
3) Windows - pretty much everything on Windows is pretty easy to fix. Shit goes wrong all the time, but a simple google will almost always solve your problems. When Windows gets an app store with a review process (like the mac store), it'll be absolutely superb. It has most of the functionality of Unix and is as easy to use as Mac OS X (often easier), networking and file sharing works. Thanks to active directory and all the deployment tools and 3rd party support for Windows, if a competent IT administrator plans and deploys a Windows network, it is a beautiful thing. There's Visual Studio which has to be the nicest development tool in the world. To this day, no other development tool provides a means of compiling C/C++ projects quickly and as far as debuggers go... well, nothing else is in the same category... I have hope for LLVM one day... but that's a long time off.
So.. the best platform is... ALL THREE... but using iRapp and SSH to connect a Windows laptop to an Mac Mini and a Linux box/cluster is by far the best solution.
You'd think if they'd market it anywhere, it would be at the Lego Land in Denmark... but apparently, they figured little Danish speaking kids would be disappointed to play a game which they couldn't understand.
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COBOL is a far less capable language than most. In fact, COBOL was rarely the only language used to make a system because COBOL itself was practically useless. It was little more than a fixed field record store manager. RPG was used for generating reports. Screen I/O was a COBOL extension which generally consisted of designing an input UI in another language and calling functions in COBOL... although there are some direct COBOL UI toolkits, but they are barely useful for anything.
COBOL unlike SQL is not a structured query language. Typically, raw COBOL works on fixed field records connected to a fixed field ISAM. With DB2 (or other modern multiuser ISAMS), COBOL can often be mixed with SQL... giving us all the power of another bug ridden SQL implementation. If the form developer allows it, then it could in theory be used to execute SQL code through injection just as easily as in other languages.
COBOL is a crappy ass language that allows for implementing fixed field databases relatively efficiently.... but pretty much every other language is going to be flawed with regards to security in comparison as COBOL itself is pretty much incapable of handling the nasty nasties like dynamic memory allocation and such.
Let's not suggest that COBOL is more secure because of its maturity. Let's instead suggest it's more secure because it can do what it can do an pretty much nothing else.
On that note... COBOL is as secure as the terminal it is running on. But this is where maturity matters. COBOL is generally being run on a IBM mainframe virtual machine (IBM mainframes never run native code) which is still running almost the same operating system as it was in 1969 with additional features. Things like Ethernet aren't even supported by the operating system. They're handled by add-ons which map a terminal session to a telnet, 3270, 5250 or ssh session. Oh... but there was a major update in recent years which made it so most new things are running with UTF-8 instead of EBCDIC.
It really depends on your needs, but for me, I needed a tablet which actually had the ability to run real software. Atom and ARM processors are just not in the same category as Sandy Bridge. The Series 7 Slate only suffers one major problem, the RAM is only 4GB and is not upgradeable. It's soldered to the motherboard, but oddly enough, this is specifically the type of device which will be hacked on and I'm sure that so long as the address lines are available, someone will find a way to upgrade the memory at least to 8GB using a BGA rework station. I paid a rework shop to install a Core 2 Duo into my Sony Vaio UX at one point... money well spent.
It's a Core i5, which is dual core + hyper threading, 4GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD with moderate performance. It's pretty good battery life too. I don't run Linux as the default OS on it, I use Windows 8, but I do use VirtualBox to run Kubuntu. Performance-wise, it's in a totally different class than the other tablets. I don't know where NVidia will be in a year, but I'd imagine that they are focuses mostly on Windows 8 support on tablets. And they aren't all that well known for stable Linux drivers. Also, there still isn't a proper "This is how ARM should boot from USB" spec out there, so updating Linux distros will be hackish for a while.
Oddly, the major success of the PC BIOS and the newer EFI has been almost entirely based on simply being able to boot the computer. After all, once the computer is boot, the BIOS is entirely unused.... drivers take over. ARM doesn't have a standard, flexible boot environment which is universal yet. Maybe they'll sort that out with Microsoft, but I have a really bad feeling that we'll be stuck with vendor provided boot loaders which will limit the lifespan of a device.
Netflix is trying to go all digital which turns them into just another video streaming peddler. They're a dime a dozen now... which is great. I can rent or buy from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Apple etc... quite easily these days.
The point being that Netflix is/was a great source to rent physical DVDs and that's what made them special. It is obvious that the remaining lifespan of mail order DVD rental can be measured in years... not decades. But NetFlix is making a huge mistake by being a media company as opposed to what they really are which is a logistics company. Instead of trying to find a new way of selling/renting films to their customers they instead should be finding a way to use their warehouses to provide items other than DVDs.
I don't want to sound like a noob... but last I checked, ActiveSync is really just a device syncing protocol with an support through a desktop application and support through Microsoft Exchange to do it. I thought that the blackberry network was pretty much just a mail and messaging service.
It seems to me that these are pretty much features that are pretty common on mobile devices these days... Android and iOS sync pretty well with Google calendars/mail etc... and iOS syncs pretty well with exchange... and then you can choose to use iCloud on iOS as well if you really want to.
There are also open source servers which support the exchange active sync protocol so far as I know.
Does Blackberry network or ActiveSync do anything special that isn't pretty much available everywhere else.. and I mean other than try to lock you into a specific vendor?
Yep... my Christmas gift from my family to me is a Samsung Series 7 Slate. I even bought it from the Microsoft online store (best price by a fairly large percentage oddly enough) and am anxious to receive it once my dad reships it to me from the states.
:( that was a lame move... the dock has gigabit ethernet though and for what I need, it'll make up for it
Who would want it is a good question.
1) People who like iPad but can't find anything useful to do with it.
2) People who like iPad but have to carry an iPad AND a laptop to be productive. Now we can carry a tablet and a dock
3) People who don't like being DRM'd to death by Apple and Google.
4) People who like to do things like programming and can't on their other tablets... unless you're going to write lame ass HTML5 and EcmaScript apps.
5) People who want to run a full version of Chrome or Opera on their tablets instead of the clunky ass Android or iOS browsers.
6) People who like to be able to choose their hardware features and pay for them... or people who want to be able to upgrade the disk space without buying a new tablet. What I like most about the windows 8 tablet is that using an inductive charger attachment, I can leave my tablet in my backpack when I get to the office and simply lay the backpack on my desk and using Intel Wireless Display and Bluetooth, just push a button, connect to the tablet and have a 24" Windows desktop on a machine suitable to write video codecs on (which is what I'll use it for) and be ready to go.
Windows 8 will be the first operating system to fully replace the desktop and tablet operating systems with one which does both. If you consider that iOS is entirely capable of running almost all OS X apps Apple could do it to, but they would damage their store based business model completely if for example you could just use uTorrent or any other service to get media on your device. Not to mention that with a Sandy Bridge Core i5, I can rip a DVD with an external DVD drive to my tablet at about 12x using QuickSync... sure the quality is crap compared to x264, but that's not the point.
The only things missing from the Samsung Series 7 Slate are :
1) USB 3
2) Internal inductive charging. Will have to rig a charger for that
3) Upgradable RAM.. they actually soldered the 4GB of RAM to the motherboard, but since Windows 8 seems to use much less RAM than Windows 7 (using it now), that shouldn't be a problem.
And ideally, the #1 feature upgrade this device could have is :
Make it the size of a phone instead of a tablet. Then I can have a single device which does everything instead of having a phone, a tablet and a PC.
I'm an early adopter as well as an impulse shopper. I set things up in my house and it generally isn't longer before my neighbors are knocking on my door asking to see what their kids are talking about. Then before you know it, they're asking me how to get it in their houses and before you know it, they're asking if it would be suitable for their 80 year old mothers.
For the past 9 years, my kids have had media center PCs in their rooms... no TV signal as it isn't important. From collecting seasons of TV shows, they have an assortment of roughly 1500 cartoons on their PCs which they can watch by clicking a few buttons. My daughter has a 22" TV as a screen which was handed down by mamma when she bullied me to give her a bigger TV in the bedroom. My son has a 24" BenQ screen with some Logitech speakers. Their computers are their TVs, video game consoles and web browsers etc... I can safely say that with the exception of maybe on show a night before bed... lasting about 20 minutes, they never really watched TV... well except when visiting houses with technonoobs.
On the top floor, I have a laser/led projector that gives me a 110" screen and a sound system able to do the room it is in justice. It's connected to a media center PC where we often play games we buy from Steam or movies we buy from iTunes and I often find myself web browsing from the couch there.
On the bottom floor we have a 46" Sony LCD with the cable box which my wife watches reality TV on.
All of us have iPhones, we have two iPads and I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Samsung Series 7 Slate) which I use as a PC for Windows, Mac and Linux development as well as watching films, playing games and pretty much everything else. These are our books. I am entirely unable to throw away a paper book on principal. So, I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have received a single piece of mail in the past 13 years which was addressed to me other than a bill. I haven't received a bill in the mail in about 6 years as they come through email. The one piece of mail I received was actually a paper based Nigerian 419 scam presenting itself as a letter from a law firm.
We get out mail on any of the screens in the house. We get our movies entirely electronically. We get our games and music also electronically. If we want to watch broadcast TV, we do it through a streaming web site. If we want to listen to the radio, we do it through a streaming site. Of course, we have a sling box setup just in case someone calls and says "You have to turn on channel 9!" But, it's collecting dust.
I just opened a new bank account inside the U.S. (I'm an American abroad) and I was in utter shock how ridiculously paper based the U.S. still is. I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages? They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that. In the end, they agreed to let my dad send them a bank check or money order for $1 to get it open. They also required a color photocopy of my passport picture page and social security card. It wasn't good enough to e-mail them. They had to have genuine photocopies. So, I scanned them, sent them to my dad and he mailed them to the bank.
I didn't have a social security card anymore and although I provided them with my number, they needed proof it was mine... so I asked the american embassy for a letter saying so... it was printed out and signed. After all... somehow a piece of linen stationary from 1975 which was printed in blue ink by a cheap press and then put into an IBM electric type writer is obviously more proof that the number is mine than me saying so.. DUH!!!!
Ok... so Fancy-frangled-ass-shit-equipment then?
:)
Was wondering what the proper name for it was
Let's be blunt... this is 2011. The task he set forth will be tied up in bureaucracy for a minimum of a year. There will be arguments such as "Where will we get the budget to do this?" and there will be arguments like "Who will do it?" and such. Even if the program gets started, the company who will provide the obviously custom system will underbid the others involved to land the contract and once the contract itself IS started, then whoever won the contract will then stop part way and claim "The agency misinformed us as to how much would need to be digitized and therefore we need more money." at which time the project will be placed on hold pending an audit to which time it will be made known that there was corruption involved in choosing the given vendor.
:(
Agencies who have thus far opted to NOT digitize their records have done so for many reasons. And even though they're being forced to digitize now, they'll find many different methods of making the process cost substantially more than it should have and drag the process out over extended periods. Let us not forget that most of these documents can only be handled by certain staff with high enough clearance given their confidential nature. If the expose writers are to be trusted, there are entire rooms of records of paper where only one highly trusted person is allowed to enter.
Let us also point out that many of these records have been written in cursive which unlike block is a screaming nightmare to handle automatically. That means that the people who hold the clearance to view the records will need to manually enter these records themselves. There will be issues of encrypting the records so that only certain individuals will have access to them. While Obama would like to make it so that there could be some central database per organization, I'd imagine that there will be many individual, sealed networks to guarantee security.
With all these issues, let's be blunt...
1) The agencies will fight it... outright AND through bureaucratic means.
2) The agencies will say "Sure... we did it" and since many of the records are highly classified, no one can actually contradict the statement... so it most likely won't happen. When a given record is asked for they'll claim "oh...we must have missed that box"
3) It will take decades to complete as there are rooms of records where only a single individual is likely to have access and I'm guessing their typing speed isn't 100wpm.
4) Obama is on his way out. Even if he survives this coming election by some miracle (he sucks as much as the next guy, but people know he sucks and are more likely to trust someone else with less of a known suckage) by the time the project is likely to start, it's almost certain whoever takes over will pull the funds from that budget within hours of getting into office.
5) For data security sake, the agencies will most likely have to design the systems themselves using whatever crap engineers they manage to find with high enough clearance that's willing to actually code document management systems. And truthfully... this isn't a TV show... if the agencies have "Super Hackers" on staff, they're probably just as lame as the self promoting idiots you find everywhere else.
So, I'm willing to say... this will cost a tremendous amount to talk about... but will go nowhere. Sad
I'm not a huge fan of religion or religious beliefs.... but maybe he discounted the concept that the god as the bible thumpers know him is different. Maybe he saw god as something far bigger and greater... possibly someone/thing responsible for the big bang and evolution itself. If you look at it from that perspective and suggest that he doesn't play dice then the laws of physics and theories of quantum mechanics can been seen as designed by divinity as they should all be explainable by suggesting that this god created these concepts when he created the laws of the universe.
If anything, this argument which constantly is used by the bible thumpers to say that even one of the greatest scientific minds in known human history agreed with them as opposed to us. I'd prefer to believe that he perceived the bible as a book of rules meant to keep a desert dwelling race with no education from killing themselves off and instead saw the universe and what we can perceive from scientific study as the work of something greater.
I don't believe in a god or any other divine being. I don't believe in a heaven, hell spirit or afterlife. I do however think that if you must believe in a god of such greatness, at least give him his due and admit that maybe an eternal being of infinite greatness could have spent a few billion years making something that is supposedly his masterpiece as opposed to slapping some shit together in 7 days to support the lives of a few billion specs of dust.
Unlike when I was starting off in a similar situation 20 years ago, we have the Internet these days. Actively brand yourself and none of this flash bang nonsense. Actually show what you can do... most importantly focus on professionalism... make sure you don't leave unfinished projects everywhere. Remember that to many companies a university degree says "This guy is willing to follow through with any crap assignment he gets in order to achieve a goal".
The next thing is... be better than the university guys. University grads almost never graduate with any actual usable skills. They're generally just people who proved they can accomplish hard jobs they didn't know how to do before they started... And they can follow through (think I said that already). You need to have better skills and most importantly, the proven ability to follow through. If you open source some code, it should be documented and pristine.
One thing a great computer programmer with a degree from a university understands which a self-educated guy doesn't is data structures. I recommend religiously studying Knuth, become an algorithms expert. Study patterns from the Gang of Four. Be modern and learn parallel programming patterns as well. In reality, if a university grad came out of school with nothing else, those topics alone is enough to make them far more useful than most others.
Good luck... it's a hard journey and in a modern time when there are IT grads falling off of trees left and right, it'll be a tough journey for you.
In high school... I went to a special one called W.T. Clarke in Westbury New York... I had four teachers which were really amazing. The principle of the school decided that to teach computer programming, he'd hire a programmer. To teach electro-mechanical engineering, he'd hire a robotics engineer. To teach architecture, he'd hire an architect and to teach electronics repair, he's hire a TV repair technician. Oh... did the same for carpentry and other things as well.
He believed that if he could find these people with a love for what they do, who felt that it would be more productive to teach 30 new kids each year than to do the work themselves. The initial pay was that of an entry level person of the field which they were specialists in and the costs to cover tuition to the university to become a certified teacher as well. Upon completion of their degree, they would gain the additional money that had been paying for their university classes as salary. The end result was, nearly every person on my friends list on FaceBook from those classes are now working high level positions in those fields..... or as teachers. That's about a 70% success rate.
A key thing to understand about these courses is... they were elective courses. You had to do well in your normal classes or you'd be dropped from these courses. So, the students in these courses actually did better in their other classes than the other students as well. It's like forcing an athlete to pass their other classes or no football for them.
This system worked incredibly... the problem was, the principle had to fight for this. He demanded of the school district the funds to make this happen. He probably interviewed 50 people for each position before choosing someone. After all, with the investment he would need to make in a person like this, he didn't want to have to do it every 3 years. So he picked the right person for the job. Of course, in that school, he did pretty much the same for nearly all his teachers and in a school with 1500 students, that's a huge job. But, the end result was one of the best schools in New York and possibly the whole of the U.S.. He didn't piss away money on fancy landscaping projects like they do in California. Whenever he got the money to do anything, he improved the academics of the school first and if there was any money left over, he bought a lawn mower. He would even attempt to convince the football team and cheerleading squad to run fund raisers for those things to avoid having to use the normal budget for those things.
Mind you this was in the 80s and 90s. He set aside an area of the parking lot for kids to smoke. He felt strongly that he'd rather keep the students at school even if it meant letting them smoke on school grounds as opposed to having them skip classes to avoid getting caught smoking. These days, the parents almost certainly would lynch him for such a decision. Unlike other schools where the principle was some loser who deal out punishments. He let his subordinates take care of punishments. He on the other hand would take personal interest in any student he felt was going the wrong way. He understood that the kids who looked like "The wrong kind" could often simply be trying to define themselves as nonconformists. If some kids needed a "tough guy" reputation, he'd even pull them across the school and into his office by their ear for everyone to see, then sit down and play a game of chess with them and talk about things. Fact is, we as students didn't fear him for punishments. We feared that he would be disappointed in us... a raised eyebrow from him was enough to put nearly all the students in line.
I can go on and on about him. But the important thing more than anything else is that he made the school what it was. He built a team of the right teachers. He sacrificed new paint in the hallways for better text books. He focused on what was important in a school. People always talk about "The right teachers" and "Higher pay", but in retrospect, I must admit that the key to success is great leadership. Start with that.
Using SlingBox or a variety of HDMI capture devices with built in H.264 codecs, you can capture the compressed stream. Those other devices are designed to function on HDMI but do not function with HDCP equipped devices.
That being said... I managed to hack a board like this together months ago... it wasn't even complicated. Did it using a $149 FPGA board and a $299 HDMI In/Out adapter for it. I needed it not for copying, but for SlingBox.
Yep... I live in Norway and for some dumb ass reason, I am forced by Disney to buy a DVD of the Lego of the Pirates of the Caribbean as opposed to downloading from Steam or elsewhere. Sure this is no big deal... well except that the computer connected to my living room TV is a new Mac Mini without a DVD drive.
... preferably on Steam where I have Lego Harry Potter, Lego Universe, Lego Star Wars, Lego Star Wars III, Lego Indiana Jones and probably another I'm forgetting... but I haven't purchased the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean yet since I can't use the DVD version.
So.... I just downloaded a pirated copy of the game instead and we play that. I'm waiting for an electronic release of it
Up yours Disney... feel free to knock on my door now that you know who I am...
You need to dig up a history on money. Money was created almost entirely AS a religion... or at least as a tool to make religions more profitable... at least that's one of the more standard versions of the story.
Liberty is an unalienable right... but Merriam Webster has changed the definition periodically over the past few decades to cope with the issue that liberty was far to broad for things like some of the U.S. presidential administrations. The best part about liberty is that we all demand it, we all insist it is an underlying component of living in a civilized country and yet there are people who spend 12 years in a university studying what that one word actually means (well they did until it was deemed unprofitable).
And... just in case you don't know... the communist party which represents a total of approximately 4% of the Chinese population but rules with an iron fist has absolutely no requirement to guarantee civil rights to their people. You're confusing them with those other nations. On the brighter side... seeing that the legalists will almost certainly take over the Chinese government after the eminent collapse of the communist regime as only the legalists have the power to control the country afterwards, the communists look like happy happy smiley people in comparison. You thought America was the worst two party system... China has two parties and a third which is temporarily in control until the other two take over again and they've had that system for eons.
The beauty of the monstrous government which China has is that the government can't possibly be bothered with the gazillion people living under their regime and therefore most people don't even notice it's there... well until they want to live in a city. But there's probably no more than a hundred million or so that fall into that category.
Don't make the mistake of thinking China is anything like a western country... they don't bitch about shit not being done by the government... they just do it. It's the nanzy panzy cry babies who learned to be useless from westerners like us that sit there whining about how they got a degree and can't get a job.
You're 100% right... it just took an amazingly huge amount for someone to get to the point. They could have easily recompiled without that feature and altered the installer and everything would have been fine in a week or two. In fact, they probably did. But let's look at the real fact of this.
Word for Windows was the slowest program EVER MADE. I mean... HOLY SHIT it was slow. I remember typing and waiting for keystrokes to show up seconds later...
That was also during the dark era of computers when EISA quadrupled the price of computers, Intel didn't make chipsets and only Micron made a good chipset and when all the other motherboards cost $50-$75, a Micron motherboard cost $350. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of RAM manufacturers too.. unless you were willing to pay triple or more to Kingston, RAM was crap. I remember running memory tests while burning in computers for 12 hours in a run and almost always needing to replace the memory. The reason for this was that AMD and Cyrix started shipping chips with 40Mhz front side buses and Intel had the nerve to ship a 50Mhz front side bus. This was a major problem since we hadn't yet learned how to resolve the wave reflection issues that occurred at more than 33Mhz. So 99% of the motherboards, RAM, CPUs and others that were shipped during that era SUCKED BALLS!!!! VESA Local Bus made it 100x worse since even at 33Mhz, it was highly unreliable. Computers just really really sucked at the time. Let's also add that S3 has still not released the first consumer Windows graphics accelerators, so the pathetic 33-66Mhz 486 based computers at the time (most without math coprocessors) couldn't handle simply moving Windows around the screen without making life suck. To be brief, it wasn't until Intel had designed the 440BX chipset for use with the Pentium II and most of the crap RAM manufacturers died that the PC really began to be great.
Wordperfect however refused to believe that Windows would ever amount to anything... so instead of writing a Windows version, they released WordPerfect 5.2 and sad on their thumbs for a long ass time. When they released WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, it was the biggest half assed hack ever produced from a big company like them. For years after, WordPerfect got better in increments of "This release sucks less than the previous". By the time Windows 95 came out... Microsoft had already released Word 6.0 and it was great (though slow for reasons mentioned earlier) and on the day of releasing Windows 95, they released Word 95 and at that point Wordperfect was better known as "Wordperfect who?".
The Windows 95 release WAS NOT!!! by any means the death of WordPerfect. Windows 3.0 was... and it wasn't Microsoft's fault. When Microsoft ported rewrote for Windows, WordPerfect should have as well.
You could say "Windows was a big gamble.. if people wanted Windows, they could buy Mac". Or "Windows was too complicated to program for since Visual C++ hadn't been released until way after Windows 3.0 and no one had a clue how to program for it". Or "Turbo C++ cost $99 per developer and Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 cost $495 with the Windows SDK, 50 copies and the training involved would have been a mess". Or "Windows SDK was SOOOO awful (still is) that writing anything useful in it without first spending months wrapping the SDK in something usable would have been impossible".... all of these things would be right... but Word had a HUGE head start on WordPerfect and when Windows 3.1 was released, for the first time, nearly everyone had at least a 386SX and could run it and the world rushed out and bought/pirated the hell out of it.
In fact, if Windows 3.1 had copy protection on it... the world would have been much different. It was almost entirely because of how easy it was to pirate that Windows 3.1 ended up on nearly every PC able to run it practically overnight.
WordPerfect was a joke.... their product was crap and by 1995... they just weren't relevant anymore.... OH... and as a final nail in the coffin.... Word for Windows did a slightly better job opening WordPerfect 5.1 files than WordPerfect did in their own Windows version.
Apple has a long an glorious history of competing with their developers. I use Windows all the time and frankly, I just don't see features that are included for free in Windows which are not actually OS related things.
1) You can think of the After Dark/Screen Saver thing
Screen savers were going to be part of Windows someday... AfterDark could have adapted their executables to fit into the API... get over it.
2) You can think of Winzip
Unzipping is easy in stock windows... still need a third part app for zipping.
3) You can think of Nero
The crappy, limited CD/DVD burning that is part of Windows is pretty bare bones. Though, if you think Microsoft should have left it out... so be it. Frankly, it's a mute point now anyway as CD/DVD is dead.
4) You can think of media players
Um... yeh, cause people actually use Windows Media player
5) You can think of video and DVD editors
Just don't.
6) You can think of mail programs
Yeh... Windows Live Mail sucks less than many these days... took 15 years.
7) You can think of web browsers
If people still use IE... kudos to them... man... those people really have endurance.
8) Antivirus tools
Really? You think Microsoft shouldn't put their own in as standard when nearly all the 3rd party antivirus tools are as bad as the viruses themselves? Twice in the past month or two I got infected by Norton Security Scan from programs I installed. I actually convinced my wife's IT boss at her company to switch 800 computers in their organization from Symantec to Microsoft's tools because you can't trust a company that behaves like that. McAfee is nearly as bad these days... Adobe makes it an opt out instead of opt-in option.
Yeh... pretty much covered all the programs that are included with Windows... if you want more, you'll have to pay for them. So what are you actually getting at?
Oh... you probably mean that Linux distros are better... you know the ones that have about 60 different clones of every program ever commercially produced.
Pretty much everything of the time opened multimate files. Just find something like an old copy of Word or Wordperfect, get the appropriate filter and import. Then import with a newer version. I managed to google things like dataviz which costs money but does it directly.
I bought a piece of Orea Dream Cake from Deli Deluca in Oslo, Norway last night and it was $10. That's a little high, but pretty reasonable based on the fact that a dozen eggs here costs $8.
You hire Ph.D.s because they can put Ph.D. on their business card and make them sit in mundane, boring ass meetings with customers so that they'll think you have a bunch of smart people working for you. After all, if you can waste such a special person on a stupid sales meeting you must be overflowing with super smart people. The company I work for has already turned most of their Ph.D.s into little doggies to keep in the customer conferences. The masters on the other hand are doing all the research and development.
A Ph.D. from an Ivy League school is almost guaranteed to land you a great sales job at a tech company. If you want to actually use your Ph.D. as more than just toilet paper, then take a professorship at a private university or a teaching position at a high end secondary school. I used to dream of a degree like the on you mentioned, but after seeing what it's done to most of my friends, I am really glad I didn't.
Oh... there is one tech job which you could get and actually write some code and papers at.... wall street... they're hiring people like you to write high speed trading algorithms. They don't actually know shit about shit, so they assume that guys with a Ph.D. from the Ivy League or MIT are the best people for hacking and using trial and error to manipulate the trading system and win more at gambling than they lose.
I have a neat little handheld Sony Vaio which has a 1.33Ghz Core Solo and a Intel GMA945 graphics adapter oh... and 1Gb RAM. It's an awesome machine but Windows XP was too heavy for it. Windows Vista was far to heavy for it. Windows 7 runs pretty nice on it. Windows 8 beta is much nicer, very usable. Android is ok on it... but I still don't know what the point of Android is. Meego wasn't too bad on it. Mac OS X Lion is a laughing joke on it.
All things considered, the operating systems are seriously improving on performance now.... The more they accelerate the desktop with the GPU and the more they work on power savings, the better the operating systems get. I think it pretty much started as functionality... then the trend went in to stability and security and now is moving in the direction of performance. With the world trying to fit more and more computer into their pockets instead of backpacks, the operating systems are being tuned for that.
Now apps on the other hand are another issue. One day, someone will even write an e-mail client that doesn't make my Core i7 2600K with 16 gigs of RAM and 500MB/s r/w SSD cry whenever I search my mail.
Did you just suggest that T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint or Verizon has a full national network?
.... P.S. - I know the U.S. is big... but when I drove from Oslo, through rural Sweden, through Rural Denmark, Rural Germany, Rural Luxembourg, Rural Belgium, and Rural France to Disney Paris 7 years ago, there wasn't a single point on that trip I didn't have good Internet access. I have also visited cabins in central Norway where the population density is approximately 1 person per 10km sq. and had no problem getting 3G and that was 3-4 years ago.
I just drove from New York City to Tampa Florida and back this summer. This is by far the most densely populated part of the country... straight down I95... I had a GSM phone with a T-Mobile card, another GSM phone with my Norwegian card (which bounces from network to network) and I had a Sprint phone which I bought a while back... between the three of them, I managed to have slightly better than despicable coverage while driving. Oh... I also had a T-Mobile 4G wireless modem.
For nearly 50% of the trip, I had no Internet access. For about 80% of the trip, I couldn't get anything better than edge. For about 20% of the trip, voice was not available. For another 20% of the trip, the call quality was so shitty that there wasn't even any point of calling. In the many of the gigantic malls we stopped in (for food and air conditioning... it was July and my family is Norwegian... HOT!!!) we'd run around begging for wifi access from stores because 2G, 3G and 4G wouldn't work in the malls. Hell, I thought it was hilarious that the Best Buy where I bought the 4G modem didn't even have 4G access... or 3G... or 2G... or even respectable voice. Then later at a different mall, I stopped into a Radio Shack to get a T-Mobile refill card and I couldn't even use it until I drove 20 miles because I couldn't get internet access anywhere near there. Can you say Microcell?!?!?!
Anyway, if the FCC gave a shit, they would not only let this happen, but they would also require that the PCS network was gradually replaced with a GSM network and that AT&T and Sprint should have to share access to their networks with each other so that the consumer would benefit. The FCC would then on top of that start providing funding to either of those companies or to smaller startups to build out the GSM network so that maybe one day, the U.S. might have better mobile phone service than most third world countries.
The law is almost certainly because the Starcraft, Wow, CoD etc... players are showing up for school each day looking like they're dead on their feet. Then on top of that, a huge number of guys staying up to 4am on a school day watching "The Pro's Play".
In the west we simply assume that the kids who do that will one day make an excellent addition to the staff at McDonalds... After all, if their parents are stupid enough to let their kids stay up late like that on school nights, then the kids are most likely equally worthless... so screw them. Korea on the other hand appears to think that these kids shouldn't be showing up looking dead to school each day, getting poor grades and taking away from the students who will be more motivated.
Now... I on the other hand stayed up until 4am on school days programming and designing electronics which made me utterly worthless in school each day... if I deigned to present myself there at all. I was more interested in learning than attending school (though I did read all the text books cover to cover... hence learning). I'm not quite sure that becoming a better Starcraft player counts as educational though.
- $1200 is a lot to pay for a license and a license generally needs to be renewed once a year.
- He would need to produce an additional 200-300 units a year to justify the cost of the license and this is a lot of units to produce.
- He's 88 years old. He most probably produces the product for his love of the technology than for profit by this time.
Let's be pretty blunt about this... I'd imagine that it all started with the $1200. While the DEA is obviously trying to do their job, their job policing the drug trade in the U.S. should not be impact legitimate uses of these chemicals by stopping the small and up and coming businesses from being able to function. It would be like saying that since a bomb maker would likely need a resistor or relay to make a detonator, then anyone who wishes to build anything with a resistor or relay should have to pay DHS a $1200 fee before they could purchase them. This would eliminate a tremendous number of small businesses from starting up and would seriously hurt America as a result. We as computer geeks often forget that things like crystalline iodine is a component to a guy like this in the same way that a resistor is to a electronics nerd.
The DEA is a publicly funded entity. They already receive their budgets from the government and we as a people pay their operating expenses as a whole because we recognize that they "fight an evil" which most of us believe needs to be fought. I am disappointed to see that they are penalizing this guy. Yes, you have many great and valid points about how he dealt poorly with this situation...but... he's justifiably pissed off that the DEA is penalizing him for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I makes absolutely no difference which organization it is that is trying to take his money... honest inventors and businessmen shouldn't have to pay stipends such as this because there's a few bad apples screwing it up for him.
No he obviously is not a diplomat. He almost certainly isn't someone you'd want negotiating contracts for your company. But he is a guy who produces and probably regularly improves upon a technical innovation and provides it to a group of people who wish to buy it and see a utility with it. The DEA is obviously aware of him now. They had the budget to track him down and communicate with him. Asking $1200 for a license to a chemical he obviously knows how to handle was just plain stupid. As to the bulk purchasers thing... this is obviously what was most important or should have been to the DEA. Instead of putting the guy out of business, they instead should have been more diplomatic and asked him "If someone orders more of these things than they could actually use, could you give them a call and say 'Hi... wow you're my best customer this month... it's a big order and I don't want to make you wait unjustifiably long, what are you using all these filters for? Can I send you the first 1/4 of the order today as I have that many on my shelf and I'll send the remaining 3/4 when I finish producing them?' and call us if they sound like they aren't buying them for the filtering itself.". I bet you anything, the old fella would have been much more amenable, and then the DEA would have accomplished something meaningful instead of shutting down a small, legitimate business.
There are three operating systems of note.
1) Linux - by far the most powerful, incredible system. Nothing can possibly break beyond fixing but you might need a Ph.D. in computer science to change the IP address of your network adapter. And the best part is, if you can't find it for Linux, you can code it yourself (which I often do).
2) Mac OS X - It just works... well until it doesn't, then you can do a really really easy reinstall, losing all your crap (but you have time machine right?) and you're back up and running in a little while. This is the ultimate OS for anyone who doesn't care whether a platform has a standard gaming controller. It's wonderful if you love your angry birds. But, it's a bit of a tinker toy. Oh... and there's no decent anti-virus software for Mac and it's insecure as hell. (Don't challenge this, if we accept that the user is the #1 exploitable hole in security, it is a fact). File sharing just works... until it doesn't, then you're utterly screwed. Software crashes a lot, but at least there is an easily accessible "Force Quit" which works about 92% of the time. Oh... and programming on a Mac laptop without being able to use page up and page down without using both hands makes me want to kill myself. I often use a keysonic bluetooth keyboard resting on top of my mac keyboard just to be able to type.
3) Windows - pretty much everything on Windows is pretty easy to fix. Shit goes wrong all the time, but a simple google will almost always solve your problems. When Windows gets an app store with a review process (like the mac store), it'll be absolutely superb. It has most of the functionality of Unix and is as easy to use as Mac OS X (often easier), networking and file sharing works. Thanks to active directory and all the deployment tools and 3rd party support for Windows, if a competent IT administrator plans and deploys a Windows network, it is a beautiful thing. There's Visual Studio which has to be the nicest development tool in the world. To this day, no other development tool provides a means of compiling C/C++ projects quickly and as far as debuggers go... well, nothing else is in the same category... I have hope for LLVM one day... but that's a long time off.
So.. the best platform is... ALL THREE... but using iRapp and SSH to connect a Windows laptop to an Mac Mini and a Linux box/cluster is by far the best solution.
You'd think if they'd market it anywhere, it would be at the Lego Land in Denmark... but apparently, they figured little Danish speaking kids would be disappointed to play a game which they couldn't understand.