Actually, if you read the books or watch the movies with your kids you should point out that the hard working and honest Hermione does actually do a lot of the good and heroic work in the story.
Definitely. Hermione is the Spock to Harry's Kirk. And Ron is the McCoy-archetype.
A non-Windows system is not a guarantee of invulnerability, but keeping a Windows system is guaranteed to put you at risk.
Let's parse this sentence for actual meaning:
"If you don't use Windows you are at risk, if you do use Windows you are at risk".
The entire article can be summarized in one sentence: "C is too difficult for me, and I've heard it's cool to bash Windows". Looking at his pages, he no commercial experience, and not even a CS degree. There are people writing on software quality, like Yourdon and McConnell, who have more experience than this kid's been alive. The fact that this article got posted at all speaks volumes for the editor's own software engineering expertise. Baracella is full of contradictions, like don't use C, but use C to verify the underlying platform. What? Or his ideas on reinventing the wheel, how are you supposed to do that if you on;y have high-level scripting languages? I haven't read so much rubbish since/. posted that article by someone who wanted Oracle to rewrite their server in Perl.
I used to use Mesa years ago as a software-only OpenGL-like API, on a system for which there was no OpenGL implementation, but I was writing code to run on a system that did have it (these were MacOS 7.x and an Indy, if memory serves). But if you have an OpenGL driver, what does Mesa do? Surely the libraries that come with the driver implement the API? Or does it just let you write 1.4 code with a card/driver that only supports up to 1.2 in the hardware, and do the new 1.4 features in software?
They'll chip away at Sony and Nintendo's profits until even these successful companies can't make a profit.
The thing you must understand about Sony is that, in corporate terms, they are badasses. Seriously. They have elevated the integration of strategy, technology, operations and marketing to a level that few organizations can match - and Microsoft isn't one of them. On Sony's home turf, like consumer electronics, Microsoft are not only heavily outnumbered, they're facing an organization at least as intelligent, agile and ruthless as themselves. And Microsoft have little experience in facing a competitor like that.
The question is, are consumer electronics becoming like PCs, or are PCs becoming like consumer electronics? It's looking more and more like the latter, and that suits Sony just fine.
You know why I like LotR more than Harry Potter? The Harry Potter books are elitist. You're worthless unless you have innate magical ability - just look at how people without these abilities are ridiculed time and time again. LotR is about how even the most normal, average people can make a difference
Well, yes and no. You can be a wizard/witch born to a non-magical family, like Hermione, or lack magical powers even though you were born into a magical family (like the caretaker at Hogwarts). And even those born with powerful magic have to go to school to learn how to use it, where they are treated as equals with their classmates. And often Harry's magic isn't enough, he needs non-magical help or advice from someone like Hagrid the gamekeeper.
It's like real life, you can be born with intellectual or athletic potential, but if you want to realize it, you have to work for it.
You do have a (weak) point, though, about Tolkien's characterization (although, *cough* I find it laughable that you'd suggest that Rowling does anything other than caricatures). I would argue that the richness of Tolkien's world is not in the characters but in their vast history, which is only barely hinted at in LOTR. Not to mention, Tolkien's work is fundamentally preoccupied with heavy theological issues, like good and evil, whereas the charactizations are of secondary importance.
The problem with Tolkein's work is that what you are born is what you are. Elves are good, orcs are bad, and so forth. Given that axiom, it's difficult to have really meaningful character development. Say you're a hero, born or heroes, you do heroic things, and that's they (Aragorn, for example). Further, the moral problem is that, given that orcs have no choice about what they are, they haven't made any moral decision to act as they do. If you have to kill one in self defence, that's OK, but killing them because of what they are is ethically very dubious. That's the logic that has justified slavery and genocide throughout history. Of course Tolkien was a product of his time, but that doesn't excuse his work from a more modern appraisal.
Rowling's message is different. What you are born matters, but not as much as what you choose to do with it. Characters have to make choices, and the outcomes are often ambigious, reflecting the complexity of the scenarios in which they find themselves. And they can develop as characters, because they aren't locked into predestined fates like Tolkein's characters are.
It really depends. It's impossible to get Novell work without a CNA/CNE. CCNA/CCIE is valuable if you're looking Cisco work, but it's not an essential requirement. If you are looking for Java work, a Sun Java cert probably won't give you any advantage at all. A friend of mine in HR once told me that experienced Java people were refusing to do the certification, they thought having it would actually reduce their saleability.
Remember that vendors don't pay for training and exams in order to promote their products - training is a profit center for them. They'll want you to pay them for the certificate whether or not it's actually good for your career.
Sounds like she is still blaming you for her network problems and expected you to solve it even though you aren't there anymore. Pretty ballsy... Also, you don't mention if you were laid off, fired or just quit. That information would contribute to the "how burned you just got" question.
Absolutely. Unless he got a decent severance package (say 3 months salary, access to an "outplacement" service, email forwarding from his old address and his laptop) then he practically has a moral obligation to give his ex-boss a good shafting. Nothin' personal, as thr Man With No Name would say. Karma doesn't just happen, it's up to people to make it happen. Plus he was an idiot for not getting a billing structure in place up front - email should be fine, fax is better. Say $100/hr, min 4 hrs, + expenses.
have always been amazed by how almost every country pays MS tax even if they have both the skills and the industry to make their own software. Migrating to something from your own country would indeed put the money back in your pocket instead of shipping it abroad.
You think? Why do you suppose the countries have the same railway gauge, the same electrical outlet voltage, the same basic design for telephones and kitchen sinks? Because doing your own thing doesn't work in the modern world, what matters is interoperability. Spending money in your own country's software is a red herring, because it will sacrifice economies of scale and waste resources on compatibility with other country's software. If a country spends as much on development as MS but only has a local market to sell into, then everyone will be paying a multiple of what MS changes now.
Consider other industries. Protecting the US steel industry is great for American steel producers, but it kinda sucks for American steel users, like automakers, who're paying over the odds. Subsidizing European farmers is great for European farmers, but it kinda sucks for the average family, whose grocery bill is higher than it should be.
The distance from a company in the USA to EU, Japan etc. is big both in culture and in communication. Microsoft develops mainly for the american culture wich shines through the product.
The whole business world is Western-oriented. English is the global language, global corporations stock is listed in Tokyo, New York and London. You can bet that if an Indian businessman and a Japanese sit down to do business, they'll do it in English.
And Microsoft spend billions on localizing their products to local markets. They aren't an American company any more than Sony is a Japanese country: they both take a global view.
Having the development in your country should atleast in theory give a much better adapted set of applications that if you buy a ironed out fit_all_suit-everything version like Microsofts products.
Working the same way everywhere is a strength, not a weakness.
If the trend continues local tax dollars will increasingly be spent to buy access to information the federal government used to provide."
The Federal Government provides nothing. It has no money of its own. Every cent comes from the taxpayer. There is no reason that a taxpayer should have to pay twice for any government service. Alternatively, taxes should be cut and all services should be offered on a pay-for-what-you-use system. Governments and NGOs need to learn that they can't have it both ways - that's nothing more than common theft.
"A multiple choice aptitude test may discriminate against minority applicants or female applicants because it really reflects test-taking ability rather than actual job skills."
That's very strange - surely it's also "discriminatory" to say that women and minorities aren't as good at test taking as white men? And isn't it strange that they could potentially be worse at test-taking, but not worse at job-doing? A well designed test will be statistically well correlated with job ability. If it's not, then we might as well not bother licensing surgeons!
Yet another way to contribute to the environment. Let's just dump more trash rather than get off our lazy asses to take the DVD back to the shop... Jesus...
What would be great for the rental market is a disc on which the data fades after a period of time, but the disc itself is fine, and reusable. You could then take your disc back to the store and get a new time-limited movie imprinted onto it. This would massively reduce the physical resources consumed by the industry.
As the end of my college career ends, I start to look toward the future. After recieving my BS in Computer Science, I could go on to get a job right away, or continue my formal education and get a Masters in Computer Science. Thinking about it, I've decided that I would like to further my knowledge of Computer Science, and pursue a masters degree. The only problem is that there are too many schools to choose from! What are your experiences with computer science at different schools around the country, and which do you think offers the best program for a Masters in Computer Science?"
First question: do you want a "generalist" MS CS or do you want to specialize in a particular area, such as software engineering, AI, computer graphics, or do you want to go into research?
Decide this, then narrow down your potential list of schools using their strengths in the area(s) you are most interested in. If you can't decide, get a job and work for 3-4 years, maybe spend a year or two in different roles, then you will have a much better idea of what your goals and interests are, and you might even have made a dent in your student debt!
I've been searching for a good school to get a Masters in computer science from. The catch: I want to do it as an online degree since I do not have the time during the day to take classes and am not interested in moving/switching jobs right now. I'm not interested in something like University of Phoenix or one of the other schools like that but a traditional brick and mortar school where I can get a Masters degree that is the same as being at that school's location
You can't. A Master's degree, a good one, isn't taught like an undergraduate degree, with a lecture hall of students taking notes while a professor lectures at the front. It's much more interactive; lots of small groups, discussions with fellow students and faculty, collaborative learning. The benefits of a well-respected course include the quality of the other students, remember, not just the quality of the faculty and facilities. You aren't just soaking up data, you're exercising the application of new heuristics. The best professors I had during my Masters would start a discussion, then expect the class to arrive at a solution, guiding it along the way where necessary. Active participation makes for a much richer learning experience, one that both gives a good grasp of the theory and can be applied to the real world. All an "online" degree offers is a reading list and a test of how well you've memorized it.
You can get an online Masters if you just want the letters after your name, but if you really want an education, you will have to do it the old-fashioned way, there are no shortcuts.
Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?
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Redirecting NASA
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So some astronaut who's devoted his career to the hope that someday he'd get picked for a mission, gets to take a few things he can share with his kids and grandkids. Why can't you just let it ride?
I'd have zero problem with this if they paid for all the "frivolous" stuff out of their own pockets, but unfortunately the taxpayer foots the bill. Astronauts are enormously privileged individuals; they receive training, equipment and opportunities that are orders of magnitude more expensive than the value they create for society. Using the shuttle to manufacture souvenirs for their friends is borderline theft.
And according to my economics textbook, in perfect competition, no company ever makes a profit. After all, if one company was selling their goods at a price that brought them a profit, than some other company should be able to sell for less, and naturally everyone would buy from the cheaper company.
This is like those high-school physics textbooks with statements like "assume a spherical elephant". The "perfect economy" you refer to is completely abstract and bears as much relation to the real world as a perfectly spherical elephant does to real aerodynamics. Example: Say a haircut costs a corporation $0.99. It doesn't matter if Corporation X is selling haircuts for $1 in Delaware, if Corporation Y is selling them for $2 in Anchorage, then you pay $2 because it would cost you more than $1 to get to a Corporation X branch.
You can only have a "perfect economy" if the cost of price data, knowledge of all competing products (including storing and processing the data) and shipping between any two points, and storage at either end is zero, and information and product distribution is instantaneous.
it makes sense that no good company would ever actually have "profits", although I'm having trouble coming up with a good way to explain why...
The reason a corporation would avoid profit is to avoid tax on that profit. But remember that corporations do pay a lot of tax whether or not they make a profit (payroll taxes like NI in the UK, for example), VAT, etc.
Even without this distortion, the reason a company wouldn't have profits carried over from year to year is because any money left over at the end of the year would be paid to shareholders as dividends.
As if Stan Lee were just some burger flipper, instead of the person who created the character that they made $400 millions dollars from.
Maybe the studio/distributor made $400M (and that's revenue not profit), but Marvel only made $12M - that's what they sold the rights for. 10% of $12M is $1.2M. The article doesn't say that Stan Lee had a contract with New Line (or whoever).
I would start to tax coorporations and individuals in similar manors so that the little guy, the driving force behind the economy, has more money to spend to keep the economy going. Right now coorporate tax law dictates that coorporations do not pay income tax, they pay a profit tax, in other words, no increase in net worth, no taxes.
If a corporation makes no profits but has to pay taxes anyway, where does the money come from? it might come from the cash reserve (but you can't build a cash reserve without profits in the first place). When the cash reserves are exhausted, without profit the only way a corporation could pay the tax you demand would be by selling assets, making it even less able to make profits the next year, when it would have to sell more assets to meet the tax demands, until it's destroyed. No companies == no jobs for the "little guy".
I believe it as Abraham Lincoln who said that you cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor.
In between I've done microcontroller development and programming in Assembler, robotics, graphics design and 3-D animation for TV, PC build and repair, Website design etc.
You've got embedded systems, web site design and animation. That looks like a good fit for programming mobile devices, like phones and PDAs. 3G was an embarassment to all concerned the last time around, but phones are gradually getting better bandwidth, better displays, faster processors and more memory. This time around, telcos and vendors are going to know that adoption will be driven by real applications, not by trying to shoehorn PC applications like email and web browsing onto a tiny screen and keyboard.
And also (correct me if I'm wrong) I thought that OpenGL had to be integrated with the operating system. When MS dropped support, they effectively froze progress for OpenGL on that platform.
You are wrong. OpenGL drivers are just that, hardware drivers. Updating OpenGL on Windows is simply a matter of replacing a DLL. Microsoft's support or lack thereof simply means that those DLLs will have to be written by 3d parties.
What is OpenPlay? OpenPlay is a cross-platform network abstraction layer designed to simplify the task of creating programs which communicate across multiple computers
Umm, remember Game Sprockets? That was when Apple last tried to provide a framework for game developers. Like OpenDoc, any developers who adopted it were out of luck when Apple decided to abandon it. It'll be a while before Apple are trusted again.
I work for a used SGI reseller. You need to go SGI if you need I/O bandwidth. The bus on Intel-based machines doesn't cut it, no matter how fast the mhz. Pay for I/O performance, not fast, but mostly useless CPU speed.
This is excellent advice. You can get a 2nd hand entry-level Octane for around EUR 1200 (say 256M RAM, 4 or 9G UW-SCSI disk, SE graphics, single 250mhz R10K). The beauty of this system is it's upgradeability... you can go up to 2G RAM, 3 9G disks, add TRAM (hardware texturing) or a VPro graphics card, dual R12000 processors.
Integer CPU performance of the first system is on the order of a 400-500mhz PII, which doesn't sound like a lot, but you can sustain peak computation power on an SGI for far longer than you can on a PC, because of the bus issues. The Octane has a switch, like a mainframe. I would taker a slower-CPU, faster memory bandwidth and disk I/O SGI (or Sun) over a fast PC any day. Doesn't do so well on a 1-minute benchmark, but in the real world it gets the job done.
Scientific clusters are not the only type of cluster you know. For instance Oracle Real Application Cluster is what Oracle thinks will be the companies future. These clusters may need the bandwidth of firewire et al and can live with the latencies.
What RAC uses the cluster interconnect for is cache fusion. If a data block is in the buffer cache of another RAC node, the local node will get it via the interconnect rather than from the disk. So we need many fast small transfers, rather than few large fast transfers. If the latency of the interconnect is greater than the latency of the storage array (which may be a massively cached EMC) then it's not worth it.
Users on each end of the computer knowledge spectrum associate any and everything Linux with free. Even when we tried to get people to beta test it for us they said, 'It runs on Linux so why isn't it free?' Another comment from a reporter in response to our telling him of our Linux release was 'So it is open source then right?
I think this might be an "urban legend", or perhaps your choice of sample for your researched was biased in some unintentional way. For example, Oracle is available on Linux, and it's very much a pay-for product. Oracle, as far as I know, haven't come under any serious pressure to make the Linux version free (speech or beer) - at least not any freer than it is on any other platform. I don't think anyone seriously expects MATLAB or Houdini or any other serious application to be free on Linux either.
If you face any expectation of no-cost it's most likely because MSN, ICQ, AIM and all the rest are free. You're better off positioning your product as something other than IM/chat and selling it on what it does that free chat doesn't.
It will be interesting to see if the US are actually able to extradite a Brit for having commited cyber crimes. Wouldn't the penalties be a fair bit harsher over the pond than in Europe?
It depends on the exact wording of the law. I can't remember if the EU forbids extradition if there is a risk of the death penalty, or to any country that supports the death penalty. If it's the latter, then he'll be safe from extradition.
The system is pretty strange tho'. For example, the British government offered no support to its citizens arrested in Turkey for photographing an air show, but it protects foreign terrorists from extradition because of aformentioned EU law.
In practice, I suspect that if the hacker is an "asylum seeker" Britain will protect him, and if he's an otherwise law-abiding tax-paying citizen, they'll serve him up on a plate.
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Actually, if you read the books or watch the movies with your kids you should point out that the hard working and honest Hermione does actually do a lot of the good and heroic work in the story.
Definitely. Hermione is the Spock to Harry's Kirk. And Ron is the McCoy-archetype.
A non-Windows system is not a guarantee of invulnerability, but keeping a Windows system is guaranteed to put you at risk.
/. posted that article by someone who wanted Oracle to rewrite their server in Perl.
Let's parse this sentence for actual meaning:
"If you don't use Windows you are at risk, if you do use Windows you are at risk".
The entire article can be summarized in one sentence: "C is too difficult for me, and I've heard it's cool to bash Windows". Looking at his pages, he no commercial experience, and not even a CS degree. There are people writing on software quality, like Yourdon and McConnell, who have more experience than this kid's been alive. The fact that this article got posted at all speaks volumes for the editor's own software engineering expertise. Baracella is full of contradictions, like don't use C, but use C to verify the underlying platform. What? Or his ideas on reinventing the wheel, how are you supposed to do that if you on;y have high-level scripting languages? I haven't read so much rubbish since
I used to use Mesa years ago as a software-only OpenGL-like API, on a system for which there was no OpenGL implementation, but I was writing code to run on a system that did have it (these were MacOS 7.x and an Indy, if memory serves). But if you have an OpenGL driver, what does Mesa do? Surely the libraries that come with the driver implement the API? Or does it just let you write 1.4 code with a card/driver that only supports up to 1.2 in the hardware, and do the new 1.4 features in software?
They'll chip away at Sony and Nintendo's profits until even these successful companies can't make a profit.
The thing you must understand about Sony is that, in corporate terms, they are badasses. Seriously. They have elevated the integration of strategy, technology, operations and marketing to a level that few organizations can match - and Microsoft isn't one of them. On Sony's home turf, like consumer electronics, Microsoft are not only heavily outnumbered, they're facing an organization at least as intelligent, agile and ruthless as themselves. And Microsoft have little experience in facing a competitor like that.
The question is, are consumer electronics becoming like PCs, or are PCs becoming like consumer electronics? It's looking more and more like the latter, and that suits Sony just fine.
You know why I like LotR more than Harry Potter? The Harry Potter books are elitist. You're worthless unless you have innate magical ability - just look at how people without these abilities are ridiculed time and time again. LotR is about how even the most normal, average people can make a difference
Well, yes and no. You can be a wizard/witch born to a non-magical family, like Hermione, or lack magical powers even though you were born into a magical family (like the caretaker at Hogwarts). And even those born with powerful magic have to go to school to learn how to use it, where they are treated as equals with their classmates. And often Harry's magic isn't enough, he needs non-magical help or advice from someone like Hagrid the gamekeeper.
It's like real life, you can be born with intellectual or athletic potential, but if you want to realize it, you have to work for it.
You do have a (weak) point, though, about Tolkien's characterization (although, *cough* I find it laughable that you'd suggest that Rowling does anything other than caricatures). I would argue that the richness of Tolkien's world is not in the characters but in their vast history, which is only barely hinted at in LOTR. Not to mention, Tolkien's work is fundamentally preoccupied with heavy theological issues, like good and evil, whereas the charactizations are of secondary importance.
The problem with Tolkein's work is that what you are born is what you are. Elves are good, orcs are bad, and so forth. Given that axiom, it's difficult to have really meaningful character development. Say you're a hero, born or heroes, you do heroic things, and that's they (Aragorn, for example). Further, the moral problem is that, given that orcs have no choice about what they are, they haven't made any moral decision to act as they do. If you have to kill one in self defence, that's OK, but killing them because of what they are is ethically very dubious. That's the logic that has justified slavery and genocide throughout history. Of course Tolkien was a product of his time, but that doesn't excuse his work from a more modern appraisal.
Rowling's message is different. What you are born matters, but not as much as what you choose to do with it. Characters have to make choices, and the outcomes are often ambigious, reflecting the complexity of the scenarios in which they find themselves. And they can develop as characters, because they aren't locked into predestined fates like Tolkein's characters are.
Vendor certification
It really depends. It's impossible to get Novell work without a CNA/CNE. CCNA/CCIE is valuable if you're looking Cisco work, but it's not an essential requirement. If you are looking for Java work, a Sun Java cert probably won't give you any advantage at all. A friend of mine in HR once told me that experienced Java people were refusing to do the certification, they thought having it would actually reduce their saleability.
Remember that vendors don't pay for training and exams in order to promote their products - training is a profit center for them. They'll want you to pay them for the certificate whether or not it's actually good for your career.
Sounds like she is still blaming you for her network problems and expected you to solve it even though you aren't there anymore. Pretty ballsy... Also, you don't mention if you were laid off, fired or just quit. That information would contribute to the "how burned you just got" question.
Absolutely. Unless he got a decent severance package (say 3 months salary, access to an "outplacement" service, email forwarding from his old address and his laptop) then he practically has a moral obligation to give his ex-boss a good shafting. Nothin' personal, as thr Man With No Name would say. Karma doesn't just happen, it's up to people to make it happen. Plus he was an idiot for not getting a billing structure in place up front - email should be fine, fax is better. Say $100/hr, min 4 hrs, + expenses.
have always been amazed by how almost every country pays MS tax even if they have both the skills and the industry to make their own software. Migrating to something from your own country would indeed put the money back in your pocket instead of shipping it abroad.
You think? Why do you suppose the countries have the same railway gauge, the same electrical outlet voltage, the same basic design for telephones and kitchen sinks? Because doing your own thing doesn't work in the modern world, what matters is interoperability. Spending money in your own country's software is a red herring, because it will sacrifice economies of scale and waste resources on compatibility with other country's software. If a country spends as much on development as MS but only has a local market to sell into, then everyone will be paying a multiple of what MS changes now.
Consider other industries. Protecting the US steel industry is great for American steel producers, but it kinda sucks for American steel users, like automakers, who're paying over the odds. Subsidizing European farmers is great for European farmers, but it kinda sucks for the average family, whose grocery bill is higher than it should be.
The distance from a company in the USA to EU, Japan etc. is big both in culture and in communication. Microsoft develops mainly for the american culture wich shines through the product.
The whole business world is Western-oriented. English is the global language, global corporations stock is listed in Tokyo, New York and London. You can bet that if an Indian businessman and a Japanese sit down to do business, they'll do it in English.
And Microsoft spend billions on localizing their products to local markets. They aren't an American company any more than Sony is a Japanese country: they both take a global view.
Having the development in your country should atleast in theory give a much better adapted set of applications that if you buy a ironed out fit_all_suit-everything version like Microsofts products.
Working the same way everywhere is a strength, not a weakness.
If the trend continues local tax dollars will increasingly be spent to buy access to information the federal government used to provide."
The Federal Government provides nothing. It has no money of its own. Every cent comes from the taxpayer. There is no reason that a taxpayer should have to pay twice for any government service. Alternatively, taxes should be cut and all services should be offered on a pay-for-what-you-use system. Governments and NGOs need to learn that they can't have it both ways - that's nothing more than common theft.
"A multiple choice aptitude test may discriminate against minority applicants or female applicants because it really reflects test-taking ability rather than actual job skills."
That's very strange - surely it's also "discriminatory" to say that women and minorities aren't as good at test taking as white men? And isn't it strange that they could potentially be worse at test-taking, but not worse at job-doing? A well designed test will be statistically well correlated with job ability. If it's not, then we might as well not bother licensing surgeons!
Yet another way to contribute to the environment. Let's just dump more trash rather than get off our lazy asses to take the DVD back to the shop... Jesus...
What would be great for the rental market is a disc on which the data fades after a period of time, but the disc itself is fine, and reusable. You could then take your disc back to the store and get a new time-limited movie imprinted onto it. This would massively reduce the physical resources consumed by the industry.
As the end of my college career ends, I start to look toward the future. After recieving my BS in Computer Science, I could go on to get a job right away, or continue my formal education and get a Masters in Computer Science. Thinking about it, I've decided that I would like to further my knowledge of Computer Science, and pursue a masters degree. The only problem is that there are too many schools to choose from! What are your experiences with computer science at different schools around the country, and which do you think offers the best program for a Masters in Computer Science?"
First question: do you want a "generalist" MS CS or do you want to specialize in a particular area, such as software engineering, AI, computer graphics, or do you want to go into research?
Decide this, then narrow down your potential list of schools using their strengths in the area(s) you are most interested in. If you can't decide, get a job and work for 3-4 years, maybe spend a year or two in different roles, then you will have a much better idea of what your goals and interests are, and you might even have made a dent in your student debt!
I've been searching for a good school to get a Masters in computer science from. The catch: I want to do it as an online degree since I do not have the time during the day to take classes and am not interested in moving/switching jobs right now. I'm not interested in something like University of Phoenix or one of the other schools like that but a traditional brick and mortar school where I can get a Masters degree that is the same as being at that school's location
You can't. A Master's degree, a good one, isn't taught like an undergraduate degree, with a lecture hall of students taking notes while a professor lectures at the front. It's much more interactive; lots of small groups, discussions with fellow students and faculty, collaborative learning. The benefits of a well-respected course include the quality of the other students, remember, not just the quality of the faculty and facilities. You aren't just soaking up data, you're exercising the application of new heuristics. The best professors I had during my Masters would start a discussion, then expect the class to arrive at a solution, guiding it along the way where necessary. Active participation makes for a much richer learning experience, one that both gives a good grasp of the theory and can be applied to the real world. All an "online" degree offers is a reading list and a test of how well you've memorized it.
You can get an online Masters if you just want the letters after your name, but if you really want an education, you will have to do it the old-fashioned way, there are no shortcuts.
So some astronaut who's devoted his career to the hope that someday he'd get picked for a mission, gets to take a few things he can share with his kids and grandkids. Why can't you just let it ride?
I'd have zero problem with this if they paid for all the "frivolous" stuff out of their own pockets, but unfortunately the taxpayer foots the bill. Astronauts are enormously privileged individuals; they receive training, equipment and opportunities that are orders of magnitude more expensive than the value they create for society. Using the shuttle to manufacture souvenirs for their friends is borderline theft.
And according to my economics textbook, in perfect competition, no company ever makes a profit. After all, if one company was selling their goods at a price that brought them a profit, than some other company should be able to sell for less, and naturally everyone would buy from the cheaper company.
This is like those high-school physics textbooks with statements like "assume a spherical elephant". The "perfect economy" you refer to is completely abstract and bears as much relation to the real world as a perfectly spherical elephant does to real aerodynamics. Example: Say a haircut costs a corporation $0.99. It doesn't matter if Corporation X is selling haircuts for $1 in Delaware, if Corporation Y is selling them for $2 in Anchorage, then you pay $2 because it would cost you more than $1 to get to a Corporation X branch.
You can only have a "perfect economy" if the cost of price data, knowledge of all competing products (including storing and processing the data) and shipping between any two points, and storage at either end is zero, and information and product distribution is instantaneous.
it makes sense that no good company would ever actually have "profits", although I'm having trouble coming up with a good way to explain why...
The reason a corporation would avoid profit is to avoid tax on that profit. But remember that corporations do pay a lot of tax whether or not they make a profit (payroll taxes like NI in the UK, for example), VAT, etc.
Even without this distortion, the reason a company wouldn't have profits carried over from year to year is because any money left over at the end of the year would be paid to shareholders as dividends.
As if Stan Lee were just some burger flipper, instead of the person who created the character that they made $400 millions dollars from.
Maybe the studio/distributor made $400M (and that's revenue not profit), but Marvel only made $12M - that's what they sold the rights for. 10% of $12M is $1.2M. The article doesn't say that Stan Lee had a contract with New Line (or whoever).
I would start to tax coorporations and individuals in similar manors so that the little guy, the driving force behind the economy, has more money to spend to keep the economy going. Right now coorporate tax law dictates that coorporations do not pay income tax, they pay a profit tax, in other words, no increase in net worth, no taxes.
If a corporation makes no profits but has to pay taxes anyway, where does the money come from? it might come from the cash reserve (but you can't build a cash reserve without profits in the first place). When the cash reserves are exhausted, without profit the only way a corporation could pay the tax you demand would be by selling assets, making it even less able to make profits the next year, when it would have to sell more assets to meet the tax demands, until it's destroyed. No companies == no jobs for the "little guy".
I believe it as Abraham Lincoln who said that you cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor.
In between I've done microcontroller development and programming in Assembler, robotics, graphics design and 3-D animation for TV, PC build and repair, Website design etc.
You've got embedded systems, web site design and animation. That looks like a good fit for programming mobile devices, like phones and PDAs. 3G was an embarassment to all concerned the last time around, but phones are gradually getting better bandwidth, better displays, faster processors and more memory. This time around, telcos and vendors are going to know that adoption will be driven by real applications, not by trying to shoehorn PC applications like email and web browsing onto a tiny screen and keyboard.
And also (correct me if I'm wrong) I thought that OpenGL had to be integrated with the operating system. When MS dropped support, they effectively froze progress for OpenGL on that platform.
You are wrong. OpenGL drivers are just that, hardware drivers. Updating OpenGL on Windows is simply a matter of replacing a DLL. Microsoft's support or lack thereof simply means that those DLLs will have to be written by 3d parties.
What is OpenPlay? OpenPlay is a cross-platform network abstraction layer designed to simplify the task of creating programs which communicate across multiple computers
Umm, remember Game Sprockets? That was when Apple last tried to provide a framework for game developers. Like OpenDoc, any developers who adopted it were out of luck when Apple decided to abandon it. It'll be a while before Apple are trusted again.
I work for a used SGI reseller. You need to go SGI if you need I/O bandwidth. The bus on Intel-based machines doesn't cut it, no matter how fast the mhz. Pay for I/O performance, not fast, but mostly useless CPU speed.
This is excellent advice. You can get a 2nd hand entry-level Octane for around EUR 1200 (say 256M RAM, 4 or 9G UW-SCSI disk, SE graphics, single 250mhz R10K). The beauty of this system is it's upgradeability... you can go up to 2G RAM, 3 9G disks, add TRAM (hardware texturing) or a VPro graphics card, dual R12000 processors.
Integer CPU performance of the first system is on the order of a 400-500mhz PII, which doesn't sound like a lot, but you can sustain peak computation power on an SGI for far longer than you can on a PC, because of the bus issues. The Octane has a switch, like a mainframe. I would taker a slower-CPU, faster memory bandwidth and disk I/O SGI (or Sun) over a fast PC any day. Doesn't do so well on a 1-minute benchmark, but in the real world it gets the job done.
Scientific clusters are not the only type of cluster you know. For instance Oracle Real Application Cluster is what Oracle thinks will be the companies future. These clusters may need the bandwidth of firewire et al and can live with the latencies.
What RAC uses the cluster interconnect for is cache fusion. If a data block is in the buffer cache of another RAC node, the local node will get it via the interconnect rather than from the disk. So we need many fast small transfers, rather than few large fast transfers. If the latency of the interconnect is greater than the latency of the storage array (which may be a massively cached EMC) then it's not worth it.
Users on each end of the computer knowledge spectrum associate any and everything Linux with free. Even when we tried to get people to beta test it for us they said, 'It runs on Linux so why isn't it free?' Another comment from a reporter in response to our telling him of our Linux release was 'So it is open source then right?
I think this might be an "urban legend", or perhaps your choice of sample for your researched was biased in some unintentional way. For example, Oracle is available on Linux, and it's very much a pay-for product. Oracle, as far as I know, haven't come under any serious pressure to make the Linux version free (speech or beer) - at least not any freer than it is on any other platform. I don't think anyone seriously expects MATLAB or Houdini or any other serious application to be free on Linux either.
If you face any expectation of no-cost it's most likely because MSN, ICQ, AIM and all the rest are free. You're better off positioning your product as something other than IM/chat and selling it on what it does that free chat doesn't.
It will be interesting to see if the US are actually able to extradite a Brit for having commited cyber crimes. Wouldn't the penalties be a fair bit harsher over the pond than in Europe?
It depends on the exact wording of the law. I can't remember if the EU forbids extradition if there is a risk of the death penalty, or to any country that supports the death penalty. If it's the latter, then he'll be safe from extradition.
The system is pretty strange tho'. For example, the British government offered no support to its citizens arrested in Turkey for photographing an air show, but it protects foreign terrorists from extradition because of aformentioned EU law.
In practice, I suspect that if the hacker is an "asylum seeker" Britain will protect him, and if he's an otherwise law-abiding tax-paying citizen, they'll serve him up on a plate.