i'm in a position where if I just had a burger flipping job, I could go back to school.
Then you can go back to school, if it's what you want. Fill out a FAFSA. If last year's 1040 makes you look like Richie Rich, contact your Financial Aid office and explain that you are currently unemployed. Get Stafford loans. Look for work-study opportunities or part-time jobs on campus.
The number of financial breaks and opportunities given to people who want to go to college is simply immense.
There are so many choices at each stage of the game that it's hard to model. The tree branches too often. See this discussion with the inventor. Octi is online. It also happens to be a lot of fun and pretty easy to teach to people.
This is exactly my point. Yahoo should accept being banned from China's network instead of sanitizing its content as the Chinese government dictates.
IANAL, but wouldn't the officers of Yahoo! then be liable to the shareholders if they decided to sue? Their one and only job, as I understand it, is to increase shareholder value. If they fail to do obvious things to open new markets, they could be in legal trouble. (Again, IANAL, but this is as I understand the concept.)
Iceland gets about 40% of it's energy from fossil fuels, this is what it wants to get away from.
All of this fuel is for cars, busses and ships.
[Emphasis mine]
Airplanes? Tractors? Lawnmowers? Chainsaws? Rototillers? Mobile worksite generators? What about cooking? Are there no gas grills or propane camp stoves in Iceland? I think you're overlooking some things.
Yes, that explains why Unix is so secure. Thank goodness it was designed to use OpenSSH and shadow passwords so many years back. Can you imagine how hard it would be to "add" something like that later, like some feature?
High-level languages don't always result in slow code. Probably the strongest counterexample is Objective Caml. Functional (1st class functions; lexical closures), OO, exceptions, strictly typed, type inferencing, parameterized modules (and classes), a macro system that lets you extend and modify syntax (in camlp4) and more. The language is probably 10x as expressive as C (e.g. it takes, on average, 1/10 the space to say the same thing in OCaml as C), but it compiles to near-C speeds and sizes (sometimes beats it). This is a 15-year old project with a liberal license (LGPL) that works on UNIX, Windows and Mac OS! An older version (Caml Light) works on Palm OS. More people should be considering languages like this for complicated problems where performance is an issue!
For example, us drivers in
hydroelectric rich British Columbia (Motto: Keeping California's Lights Burning) would be able to
enjoy guilt-free driving right now.
Actually, hydroelectric dams produce lots of pollution, in the form of methane (a greenhouse gas) produced when vegetation washed into the stagnant dam water rots. See a blurb about this here. The report was produced by the World Comission on Dams, and I think this graphic does an admirable job of illustrating some of the pluses and minuses of hydroelectric energy. It's not perfectly clean, although it certainly has advantages.
When playing non-zero sum games, kids will often still try to see who gets "more." So effectively
turning in a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game.
It is worth noting that just because a game is competitive, that does not imply that it is zero-sum. Consider, for example, a competitive game where a "tie" is possible. If two kids play this game, the possible outcomes are 1 win-1 lose, and both tie. Unless you assign the value 0 to a tie, the game has a variable sum.
Also, just because a game is cooperative in nature, that does not mean it is not zero sum. Proof is left as an exercise for the reader.:-)
Before the days of Illuminati New World Order (a Magic The Gathering type card game), Steve Jackson made a mini-game and a full box sized game called Illuminati. It was possible to win alone or to produce a shared win by cooperation. The entire game focuses on cooperation and deception. It was a lot of fun, but I think it is now out of print. I highly recommend it, and I highly recommend cheating (which the rules encourage!).
Whoops, I was wrong. This game is still in production! Go buy a copy, but be sure to leave your friendships at the door. Non-zero-sum does not mean no losers!;-)
If you have a heterogeneous environment and are interested in harvesting spare cycles, then Condor might be a better bet than Sun's Grid. Condor is free as in beer, but the license does not cover source, and source is not freely available at this time. Condor works on more UNIX variants and also works (in limited fashion) on NT. I have done a little work with Condor and it is a very advanced and well-put-together system.
It is very easy for each machine-owner to restrict or preference which jobs will run on his machine, for each job to preference certain machine attributes, and also for the queueing system to fairly distribute net CPU time across all active users of the system. All of this works using a very simple C-like language in which you express you desires.
A great website from someone who's done what you're about to do (and advice on why you should do it) is calevans.com.
Also, along with the good recommendations I've seen here, consider Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This is a great book on what management can do to make the people in software development more effective. Some of DeMarco's other books are quite good too. Check them out!
/. is a community and a resource rallied around the principle of intellectual property. The GPL, which is the foundation of its very existence, relies entirely on the notion of Copyright in order to support the notion of free software.
/. also works well primarily due to communal discussion and the free exchange of ideas.
Yet, when a potentially controversial IP issue came up, the folks at/. did none of the two obvious things. Like:
Respect all authors' rights in their work (that is, only publish work with permission).
Try to gauge community sentiment on the issue by discussing (and possibly resolving) it openly before acting.
The sentiment that work should not be excluded because someone changed their email address might sound nice at first approach. But the flipside is that lots of peoples' work was INcluded because they weren't contacted at all. The scale of doing the job right (namely trying diligently to contact all authors) meant that they abandoned it.
Frankly, I'm upset. Can this new, self-righteous/. be trusted as the steward of this community and its thoughts any longer? Maybe. But the messages from/. staff that I've read in this thread do not indicate that they have realized the mistake they have made. There is no admission of "mistake made, lesson learned, next time we'll do better"; only attempts to justify what was obviously the wrong course of action.
Regarding distribution of profits: Of course, your profits (a small portion of the money all parties will make from this book) are going to charity. You would be crucified by your readership if they weren't! That is the only tasteful course of action, regardless of whether you get permission or not. It is a non sequitur to imply that what you did was "right" based on that.
Let's get to the heart of the matter, because the staff of/. have some hard questions to answer. What have they learned from this lesson, and how do they plan to treat the material they handle with more respect in the future? How could they have handled this situation better?
Slashdot Mirror
Then you can go back to school, if it's what you want. Fill out a FAFSA. If last year's 1040 makes you look like Richie Rich, contact your Financial Aid office and explain that you are currently unemployed. Get Stafford loans. Look for work-study opportunities or part-time jobs on campus.
The number of financial breaks and opportunities given to people who want to go to college is simply immense.
There are so many choices at each stage of the game that it's hard to model. The tree branches too often. See this discussion with the inventor. Octi is online. It also happens to be a lot of fun and pretty easy to teach to people.
IANAL, but wouldn't the officers of Yahoo! then be liable to the shareholders if they decided to sue? Their one and only job, as I understand it, is to increase shareholder value. If they fail to do obvious things to open new markets, they could be in legal trouble. (Again, IANAL, but this is as I understand the concept.)
[Emphasis mine]
Airplanes? Tractors? Lawnmowers? Chainsaws? Rototillers? Mobile worksite generators? What about cooking? Are there no gas grills or propane camp stoves in Iceland? I think you're overlooking some things.
Yes, that explains why Unix is so secure. Thank goodness it was designed to use OpenSSH and shadow passwords so many years back. Can you imagine how hard it would be to "add" something like that later, like some feature?
High-level languages don't always result in slow code. Probably the strongest counterexample is Objective Caml. Functional (1st class functions; lexical closures), OO, exceptions, strictly typed, type inferencing, parameterized modules (and classes), a macro system that lets you extend and modify syntax (in camlp4) and more. The language is probably 10x as expressive as C (e.g. it takes, on average, 1/10 the space to say the same thing in OCaml as C), but it compiles to near-C speeds and sizes (sometimes beats it). This is a 15-year old project with a liberal license (LGPL) that works on UNIX, Windows and Mac OS! An older version (Caml Light) works on Palm OS. More people should be considering languages like this for complicated problems where performance is an issue!
Actually, hydroelectric dams produce lots of pollution, in the form of methane (a greenhouse gas) produced when vegetation washed into the stagnant dam water rots. See a blurb about this here. The report was produced by the World Comission on Dams, and I think this graphic does an admirable job of illustrating some of the pluses and minuses of hydroelectric energy. It's not perfectly clean, although it certainly has advantages.
It is worth noting that just because a game is competitive, that does not imply that it is zero-sum. Consider, for example, a competitive game where a "tie" is possible. If two kids play this game, the possible outcomes are 1 win-1 lose, and both tie. Unless you assign the value 0 to a tie, the game has a variable sum.
Also, just because a game is cooperative in nature, that does not mean it is not zero sum. Proof is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)
Whoops, I was wrong. This game is still in production! Go buy a copy, but be sure to leave your friendships at the door. Non-zero-sum does not mean no losers! ;-)
It is very easy for each machine-owner to restrict or preference which jobs will run on his machine, for each job to preference certain machine attributes, and also for the queueing system to fairly distribute net CPU time across all active users of the system. All of this works using a very simple C-like language in which you express you desires.
Also, along with the good recommendations I've seen here, consider Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This is a great book on what management can do to make the people in software development more effective. Some of DeMarco's other books are quite good too. Check them out!
Yet, when a potentially controversial IP issue came up, the folks at /. did none of the two obvious things. Like:
- Respect all authors' rights in their work (that is, only publish work with permission).
- Try to gauge community sentiment on the issue by discussing (and possibly resolving) it openly before acting.
The sentiment that work should not be excluded because someone changed their email address might sound nice at first approach. But the flipside is that lots of peoples' work was INcluded because they weren't contacted at all. The scale of doing the job right (namely trying diligently to contact all authors) meant that they abandoned it.Frankly, I'm upset. Can this new, self-righteous /. be trusted as the steward of this community and its thoughts any longer? Maybe. But the messages from /. staff that I've read in this thread do not indicate that they have realized the mistake they have made. There is no admission of "mistake made, lesson learned, next time we'll do better"; only attempts to justify what was obviously the wrong course of action.
Regarding distribution of profits: Of course, your profits (a small portion of the money all parties will make from this book) are going to charity. You would be crucified by your readership if they weren't! That is the only tasteful course of action, regardless of whether you get permission or not. It is a non sequitur to imply that what you did was "right" based on that.
Let's get to the heart of the matter, because the staff of /. have some hard questions to answer. What have they learned from this lesson, and how do they plan to treat the material they handle with more respect in the future? How could they have handled this situation better?