For a change, I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than add a random -1 = I disagree. It's no secret that Canonical wants to make money. Unlike competing Linux distros with a commercial and a free version, Canonical refused to split their distro in two. This decision has hampered their financial growth, but helped their community growth. I applaud them for it. Canonical has some financial interest but is clearly willing to sacrifice earnings to be good world citizens. Big American companies passed up valuable opportunities to partner with Canonical. HP and Dell, screwed up, though Dell at least gave it a an incompetent effort. The Chinese and Canonical working together makes sense. The Chinese like to steal whatever they can, but Canonical has already offered everything for free. There's nothing to steal. For example, Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it. Rather than eating the lost from buying thousands of bad displays, they decided to screw over all their ThinkPad customers in America. It's the Chinese way. The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed. Most companies can't even imagine a productive relationship with the Chinese government. However, there's no downside to Canonical, and tons of upside for China. If a billion Chinese benefit, and Canonical grows from a tiny company to a medium company, everyone wins. Mr Shuttleworth has always cared more about helping a billion people than making another hundred million. The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity. I get so tired of how people prefer to tear down good work. What have you done to improve the human condition? Does it compare to Mark's work?
The a-holes above calling Mark a communist pinko can suck my ever-hard wang.
of a lot of jokes. Yeah, they screwed up... Again. However, most people don't know that West Virgina was part of Virginia up until the Civil War. They believed so strongly in free labor (as opposed to slave labor) that they succeeded from their state. I can forgive them for a lot of crap after that. It's sad seeing them struggle over basic internet access, but I think it's always been a challenge in WV.
You're right. I had a plumber fix all our leaks last year, and I think the savings already paid for the service. I'd guess we were losing $10-$30/month just on leaks. My point is basically that Earth Hour is about teaching people, kids in particular, about turning off the lights and generally being sensitive to wasting energy. I'm highly ADHD, as are my kids, and trying to remember to turn off the lights is likely a lost cause. These new high efficiency LEDs will save me a lot.
Here's some math: my kids waste about 1KW 24/7 by not turning lights off. Our house stays lit up all the time. If there are 100M families like mine out of the 1.6B viewers who watched last year's event, there's about 100GW just waiting to be saved through turning off lights when you leave a room.
Even better, how about just replacing all the 60W bulbs in my house (about 100 of them) with $13 Cree LED bulbs? I'd cost me $1,300, but I'd save about $700/year (900W * 24hours/day * 356days/year * 0.08/KWH). Payback time: under 2 years. Sweet.
Earth Hour is a good idea, and is about raising awareness, not saving 1 hour's worth of lighting. I've begged my kids for years to turn off lights when they leave a room. We probably burn a kilowatt 24/7 just due to these lights. I'm slowly replacing the lights they leave on the most with LED bulbs, but they're very expensive.
If Earth Hour can help a 100 million kids like mine learn to turn off the freaking lights, we'd save 50 gigawatts of power. Now, I doubt there are 100 million kids wasting a kilowatt non-stop, but according to Wikipedia, 1.6 billion people watched coverage of Earth Hour last year. That's a lot of kids.
I tried to beat ARC4 a decade ago, and had to admit defeat. It's a fine stream crypto system, so long as you have a solid nounce and drop the first few hundred bytes of output. I use ARC4-DROP(1024) in tinycrypt, a simple encryption tool I published on sourceforge because I couldn't find one that was simple. Back then, crypto gurus had found that with 1G of data they could determine that an encrypted stream of 0's was ARC4. I think that's been reduced to around 10Mb. So the question is "how do I make use of 1 part in 100 million non-randomness". Well, I guess such a plan involves sending the same data a billion times.
This attack requires that the encrypting server be compromised to allow a known plain text to be encrypted millions of times and the results published. If you're there already, you're in trouble. However, ARC4 remains useful in most streaming situations. Would you rather stick it out with an algorithm as well known and attacked as ARC4, or take a risk with the new kid on the block?
Nice! I love how slashdot can ferret out people who know about topic. I'd post a wonderful article written several months before the election that clearly explained Gallup's poll bias in terms of several errors, such as pretending people without phones don't exist, while those people are likely to vote for Obama. However, the freaking pundits have buried it so far down in Google search results, I can't find it.
Right on! And if they can't make the grades or find an employer, then ship them home, but hopefully, most would be people we need. We could be a lot nicer about the process, though...
Thank God somebody finally decided to talk about TFA! Even though the poster didn't name the party that pisses him off, it's obvious what he meant, and that sent all the flamers over the edge. I can't recall such a long sequence of useless posts on slashdot, and that's really saying something!
Yes, Nate Silver called out the Pundits. Even I could have done that. He went further, and pointed out a significant discrepancy between the national and state polls. He made a gut call and pointed the finger of bias at the national polls, and based his model mostly on the state polls. That he was right isn't what impressed me. Most of the Democratic pundits were already screaming about national poll bias. What impressed me was that he had the guts to point that finger right at the most respected name in polling, Gallup. He totally put his reputation and career on the line. He explained in clear detail why Gallup was wrong, and by how much. He predicted how much Gallup would be wrong, and explained how Gallup would spin their errors as being due to Hurricane Sandy, all before Gallup's final errors. Faced with this onslaught from Nate, Gallup, the most experienced polling organization in the world, following the script Nate predicted point by point. Gallup is about as useful as used toilet paper. They're frankly stupid morons. So, thanks for letting us know, Nate!
TFA is a load of BS. H1-B students need an MS to get hired, compared to most Americans who can be hired with a BS. Thus, we push weak F1 students into grad school. An American white guy with an MS in EE or CS is a strange bird. Did he fail to get a job with a BS, or fail to get his Ph.D.? If the study compared a typical H1-B MS to a typical American MS, I think we'd see the Americans doing poorly. On the other hand, an American with a Ph.D. is often someone who loves the kind of research he can do in grad school. These people could have made tons of money at some startup with just a BS, but decided to go for the Ph.D. anyway. I'm not surprised they are higher caliber geeks. The author of this study carefully picked his data to make a political statement. It's trash.
Now on the issue of H1-Bs, I think America should be greedy and do what's best for America. Foreign talent like some of the H1-Bs I've helped hire have done wonders for the US while crippling foreign competition through brain-drain. The group I've know have been amazing overall. So, when labor is tight, let's open the gates and suck the best talent we can, and when jobs are scarce, let's keep them for Americans.
I take Vyvance, a modified form of Adderall. It helps. I should be putting together boring controls on a web page right now, but I'm wasting time on slashdot instead... time to get out of the chair, make coffee, and take Vyvance. I only discovered it in my 40's after seeing how it effects my kids. Sometimes I wonder how my life so far might have been different something like this been available when I was a kid. Instead, I found pot, and for a year went to school stoned. That worked well enough to get my D- average to an A average, and after that I became obsessed enough with math, physics, and computers to push my self through high school and college without pot. Still... it was hard. I got graded down for refusing to do pointless homework.
Just a data point... I am effectively "dropping" Udacity's GPU parallel programming course. So, I'm in the 90%. My company just dropped a freaking enormous but very cool project in my lap that for some unknown reason has to be functional by April 1. So, I postponed this class (it will take me all of a week to complete later this year), dropped workouts at the gym, and I'm once again coding on weekends... and loving it! I suspect that a fair number of that 90% are not struggling at-risk students.
Scala is on the bubble for being a mainstream language. I'm personally very excited about it. I wouldn't call it a Lisp dialect... just highly lisp influenced. However, I'm totally ignorant of Scala's history. Lisp lives on in many languages.
I'm just guessing that you and I are of a similar age (I'm 49). Ken McElvain said that Lisp ruined me. Even when coding in C, I program in Lisp. I love Prolog, and wrote a tiny version of it at one point. I never learned Smalltalk, and suspect I missed out on something huge, but I love Forth and of course had to write my own version. As for Fortran, my first programming job was in Fortran IV. Some of the most brilliant people I've ever known are physicists who continue to program in Fortran to this day, even if they're programming in C or some other language.
I love Scheme. I even wrote my own scheme interpreter way back and used it as the embedded control language in QuickLogic's P&R tools. However, only software geeks like Scheme, making it a terrible language for tool control for anything but software dev tools. TCL beat the heck out of Scheme in terms of popularity for this purpose. Python beat the heck out of Scheme as well. Perl got adopted by the text mashing crowd. Also, Guile, at least in the 1.0 version had issues. For example, it really wanted to have main in it's code, while your entire application was something it called. TCL has a better architecture for embedding. Anyway, this is nice, but I don't personally see a significant future for Scheme.
EasyPBI is the closest think to what's needed, IMO. Better still would be running apps in jails, but EasyPBI is a good start. Also detecting file duplication and using hard links to save on disk space would be an improvement. So... I think you can get there starting with EasyPBI, but staring with apt-get or yum looks impossible to me. The whole architecture is different, and I believe fairly close to totally wrong. Arch has a simple package format, and they rubber stamp user packages, which is awesome. I'll probably switch to Arch when I install Linux next. However, it still uses the fragile Debian system of dependencies, rather than installing dependencies with each applications, like we do in Windows, Android, Mac OS X, and iOS.
Great idea, though several sites try to do this to some extent. The fact is that they fail, or we'd all be more aware of them. In the end, the main problem is there aren't enough hackers with enough hours to contribute. There are lot's of projects that need people, and just not enough willing coders.
I think the main problem the FLOSS community faces is inability to innovate, due to shackles we've placed on ourselves. We need to dump the popular binary package managers from Debian and Red Hat and start over. Compare Debian's 30K-ish packages to Android and Apple's million-ish apps each. Debian is what you want running an Apache server, but it's terrible for running the latest and greatest software. By the time you get your new app into Debian Unstable, you've already had it in Android and iOS for months, where every user is able to install your app, not just the adventurous few.
So, if you're willing to think big, consider a new package manager, perhaps like Zero Install. I think it should enable P2P sharing of both binary and source packages, and apps should run in a jail similar to what Android does. Like Android, all libraries used by an app should be installed with it, but hard links should be used to share identical libraries and eliminate duplication. We need a Linux distro where any fool can publish their latest hack.
A person's track record is the best indication of their skill. The poster needs as great a marketing guy as he can get, but we didn't get any specific info about his company, not even it's location. The best tech marketing people are mostly in Silicon Valley. I started a small software startup in NC, near RTP, and I found plenty of very talented engineers. Marketing talent outside of Silicon Valley is extremely hard to come by. Try not to use a friend. It will likely just damage your company and friendship. Being a big geek rather than a marketing genius, I can't offer better advice than looking at their track record. A good sales guy will snow you, but it's hard to fake a track record. However, I can give some stories that helped me understand how marketing wins the race.
At QuickLogic, in 1990, our first parts we put in shake-and-bake failed. This is not unusual for a new technology, but we were running out of cash and had to sell the parts we had. Our CEO got all the teams together for a brain storming meeting and we came up with three solutions: one was to modify a couple of layers of the IC to provide more programming current, one was to modify the process a bit, and I offered using multiple programming paths in parallel to provide more current to just the fuses that were likely to fail. We all then focused like crazy on our solutions, all of which eventually succeeded in parallel, though I won the race because all I had to do was modify software. To determine peak currents, I read a paper on RICE, or Rapid InterConnect Estimator, or some such thing. The math was a bit fuzzy, so I had to wing a lot of it, but I came up with the world's first production ready AWE tool, which I used for delay estimation and also to identify "critical" links that were in danger of failing. With good current estimation, I identified the critical links and upped the programming current on them dramatically, using parallel current paths. It got us to market, but we were terrified that our competition would hear about our critical link failures and spread FUD. Here's where marketing came in. Our marketing guy called EETimes and every other electronic news rag and told them we'd just created the world's best interconnect timing estimator, based on AWE. He told them it allowed us to identify the "timing critical" links, and program them to lower their resistance. He claimed it increased the speed of our FPGA by as much as 2X. It was a complete load of bull, but the press ate it up. It was a huge win for us. That's when I finally began to understand the difference between marketing and sales.
However, Actel kept on hammering us. They had more effective marketing. They did spread FUD about our parts not being reliable, even though our parts were very reliable. Somehow they got hold of our customer list, and they faxed it to all their sales guys, who then called on all our accounts. At every turn, Actel was in our way. They had Andy Hanes, a marketing genius, IMO. However, our technology was still awesome and QuickLogic eventually started doing OK. I quit to work at Synplicity, who was looking for a marketing guy. I recommended Synplicity to Andy, and Andy to Synplicity, and when he hired on as our VP of marketing, things really started going well, though Rick Carlson, or VP of sales, was already quite effective. One thing these guys did (I can't remember which is responsible) was to use Xilinx and Altera as a sales channel. We kept begging them to work with us in reaching their customers, but we got stonewalled by corporate at both companies. Then, our guys got the idea of giving free copies of our software to Xilinx and Altera FAEs without permission from corporate. The FAEs gladly accepted the software, and used it to great effect at customer sites to get better density and performance. These Xilinx and Altera FAEs became great salesmen for us.
Things were going quite well until Synopsys jumped into our market with FPGA express. They'd hired Don Faria who had been VP of marketing (I t
Is there some way to stop people from seeing evolution as a threat? It is possible to believe in a literal creation and an old age earth.
Something has to give in that sentence, either "literal creation", or "old age earth." I have a number of deeply religious smart friends who have faced this paradox and found resolutions they can live with. One way is to accept that the Bible was written by imperfect people, who may not have had the capacity to grasp the true story of creation. Regardless, if you're going to demand that what you believe makes logical sense, be prepared to chart your own personal spiritual journey. I certainly have.
It's only the people who blind themselves to reality that find evolution a threat. I don't personally mind all these people believing whatever they want. They can believe in fairies, UFOs... whatever. No problem. That's what religious freedom is all about. It's only when they start pushing their ignorance on me and my family that I take offense. Bills like this cross the line from religious freedom to banning knowledge.
Originally, you would be correct, but the Supreme Court made it clear that the entire Bill of Rights applies to states as well in several rulings in the 1800's. Originally, some states had official state religions. That's no longer allowed, thank God.
What are you smoking, because I want some! Our charter school, which is a public school, gets $7,000/year per student. The cheapest private school nearby charges $10,000/year, and they are always critically short on cash, and get huge donations. I always get a good laugh when rednecks in states with underfunded schools make statements like yours.
Slashdot Mirror
Like taking the red pill.
For a change, I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than add a random -1 = I disagree. It's no secret that Canonical wants to make money. Unlike competing Linux distros with a commercial and a free version, Canonical refused to split their distro in two. This decision has hampered their financial growth, but helped their community growth. I applaud them for it. Canonical has some financial interest but is clearly willing to sacrifice earnings to be good world citizens. Big American companies passed up valuable opportunities to partner with Canonical. HP and Dell, screwed up, though Dell at least gave it a an incompetent effort. The Chinese and Canonical working together makes sense. The Chinese like to steal whatever they can, but Canonical has already offered everything for free. There's nothing to steal. For example, Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it. Rather than eating the lost from buying thousands of bad displays, they decided to screw over all their ThinkPad customers in America. It's the Chinese way. The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed. Most companies can't even imagine a productive relationship with the Chinese government. However, there's no downside to Canonical, and tons of upside for China. If a billion Chinese benefit, and Canonical grows from a tiny company to a medium company, everyone wins. Mr Shuttleworth has always cared more about helping a billion people than making another hundred million. The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity. I get so tired of how people prefer to tear down good work. What have you done to improve the human condition? Does it compare to Mark's work?
The a-holes above calling Mark a communist pinko can suck my ever-hard wang.
NIce!
of a lot of jokes. Yeah, they screwed up... Again. However, most people don't know that West Virgina was part of Virginia up until the Civil War. They believed so strongly in free labor (as opposed to slave labor) that they succeeded from their state. I can forgive them for a lot of crap after that. It's sad seeing them struggle over basic internet access, but I think it's always been a challenge in WV.
You're right. I had a plumber fix all our leaks last year, and I think the savings already paid for the service. I'd guess we were losing $10-$30/month just on leaks. My point is basically that Earth Hour is about teaching people, kids in particular, about turning off the lights and generally being sensitive to wasting energy. I'm highly ADHD, as are my kids, and trying to remember to turn off the lights is likely a lost cause. These new high efficiency LEDs will save me a lot.
Here's some math: my kids waste about 1KW 24/7 by not turning lights off. Our house stays lit up all the time. If there are 100M families like mine out of the 1.6B viewers who watched last year's event, there's about 100GW just waiting to be saved through turning off lights when you leave a room.
Even better, how about just replacing all the 60W bulbs in my house (about 100 of them) with $13 Cree LED bulbs? I'd cost me $1,300, but I'd save about $700/year (900W * 24hours/day * 356days/year * 0.08/KWH). Payback time: under 2 years. Sweet.
Earth Hour is a good idea, and is about raising awareness, not saving 1 hour's worth of lighting. I've begged my kids for years to turn off lights when they leave a room. We probably burn a kilowatt 24/7 just due to these lights. I'm slowly replacing the lights they leave on the most with LED bulbs, but they're very expensive.
If Earth Hour can help a 100 million kids like mine learn to turn off the freaking lights, we'd save 50 gigawatts of power. Now, I doubt there are 100 million kids wasting a kilowatt non-stop, but according to Wikipedia, 1.6 billion people watched coverage of Earth Hour last year. That's a lot of kids.
I tried to beat ARC4 a decade ago, and had to admit defeat. It's a fine stream crypto system, so long as you have a solid nounce and drop the first few hundred bytes of output. I use ARC4-DROP(1024) in tinycrypt, a simple encryption tool I published on sourceforge because I couldn't find one that was simple. Back then, crypto gurus had found that with 1G of data they could determine that an encrypted stream of 0's was ARC4. I think that's been reduced to around 10Mb. So the question is "how do I make use of 1 part in 100 million non-randomness". Well, I guess such a plan involves sending the same data a billion times.
This attack requires that the encrypting server be compromised to allow a known plain text to be encrypted millions of times and the results published. If you're there already, you're in trouble. However, ARC4 remains useful in most streaming situations. Would you rather stick it out with an algorithm as well known and attacked as ARC4, or take a risk with the new kid on the block?
Nice! I love how slashdot can ferret out people who know about topic. I'd post a wonderful article written several months before the election that clearly explained Gallup's poll bias in terms of several errors, such as pretending people without phones don't exist, while those people are likely to vote for Obama. However, the freaking pundits have buried it so far down in Google search results, I can't find it.
Right on! And if they can't make the grades or find an employer, then ship them home, but hopefully, most would be people we need. We could be a lot nicer about the process, though...
Thank God somebody finally decided to talk about TFA! Even though the poster didn't name the party that pisses him off, it's obvious what he meant, and that sent all the flamers over the edge. I can't recall such a long sequence of useless posts on slashdot, and that's really saying something!
Yes, Nate Silver called out the Pundits. Even I could have done that. He went further, and pointed out a significant discrepancy between the national and state polls. He made a gut call and pointed the finger of bias at the national polls, and based his model mostly on the state polls. That he was right isn't what impressed me. Most of the Democratic pundits were already screaming about national poll bias. What impressed me was that he had the guts to point that finger right at the most respected name in polling, Gallup. He totally put his reputation and career on the line. He explained in clear detail why Gallup was wrong, and by how much. He predicted how much Gallup would be wrong, and explained how Gallup would spin their errors as being due to Hurricane Sandy, all before Gallup's final errors. Faced with this onslaught from Nate, Gallup, the most experienced polling organization in the world, following the script Nate predicted point by point. Gallup is about as useful as used toilet paper. They're frankly stupid morons. So, thanks for letting us know, Nate!
TFA is a load of BS. H1-B students need an MS to get hired, compared to most Americans who can be hired with a BS. Thus, we push weak F1 students into grad school. An American white guy with an MS in EE or CS is a strange bird. Did he fail to get a job with a BS, or fail to get his Ph.D.? If the study compared a typical H1-B MS to a typical American MS, I think we'd see the Americans doing poorly. On the other hand, an American with a Ph.D. is often someone who loves the kind of research he can do in grad school. These people could have made tons of money at some startup with just a BS, but decided to go for the Ph.D. anyway. I'm not surprised they are higher caliber geeks. The author of this study carefully picked his data to make a political statement. It's trash.
Now on the issue of H1-Bs, I think America should be greedy and do what's best for America. Foreign talent like some of the H1-Bs I've helped hire have done wonders for the US while crippling foreign competition through brain-drain. The group I've know have been amazing overall. So, when labor is tight, let's open the gates and suck the best talent we can, and when jobs are scarce, let's keep them for Americans.
I take Vyvance, a modified form of Adderall. It helps. I should be putting together boring controls on a web page right now, but I'm wasting time on slashdot instead... time to get out of the chair, make coffee, and take Vyvance. I only discovered it in my 40's after seeing how it effects my kids. Sometimes I wonder how my life so far might have been different something like this been available when I was a kid. Instead, I found pot, and for a year went to school stoned. That worked well enough to get my D- average to an A average, and after that I became obsessed enough with math, physics, and computers to push my self through high school and college without pot. Still... it was hard. I got graded down for refusing to do pointless homework.
Just a data point... I am effectively "dropping" Udacity's GPU parallel programming course. So, I'm in the 90%. My company just dropped a freaking enormous but very cool project in my lap that for some unknown reason has to be functional by April 1. So, I postponed this class (it will take me all of a week to complete later this year), dropped workouts at the gym, and I'm once again coding on weekends... and loving it! I suspect that a fair number of that 90% are not struggling at-risk students.
Scala is on the bubble for being a mainstream language. I'm personally very excited about it. I wouldn't call it a Lisp dialect... just highly lisp influenced. However, I'm totally ignorant of Scala's history. Lisp lives on in many languages.
I'm just guessing that you and I are of a similar age (I'm 49). Ken McElvain said that Lisp ruined me. Even when coding in C, I program in Lisp. I love Prolog, and wrote a tiny version of it at one point. I never learned Smalltalk, and suspect I missed out on something huge, but I love Forth and of course had to write my own version. As for Fortran, my first programming job was in Fortran IV. Some of the most brilliant people I've ever known are physicists who continue to program in Fortran to this day, even if they're programming in C or some other language.
Huh? Here's Python's lambda expressions. And of course, from the fountain of all knowledge, Python has first class functions. Now, that said, it's still not Scheme.
I love Scheme. I even wrote my own scheme interpreter way back and used it as the embedded control language in QuickLogic's P&R tools. However, only software geeks like Scheme, making it a terrible language for tool control for anything but software dev tools. TCL beat the heck out of Scheme in terms of popularity for this purpose. Python beat the heck out of Scheme as well. Perl got adopted by the text mashing crowd. Also, Guile, at least in the 1.0 version had issues. For example, it really wanted to have main in it's code, while your entire application was something it called. TCL has a better architecture for embedding. Anyway, this is nice, but I don't personally see a significant future for Scheme.
EasyPBI is the closest think to what's needed, IMO. Better still would be running apps in jails, but EasyPBI is a good start. Also detecting file duplication and using hard links to save on disk space would be an improvement. So... I think you can get there starting with EasyPBI, but staring with apt-get or yum looks impossible to me. The whole architecture is different, and I believe fairly close to totally wrong. Arch has a simple package format, and they rubber stamp user packages, which is awesome. I'll probably switch to Arch when I install Linux next. However, it still uses the fragile Debian system of dependencies, rather than installing dependencies with each applications, like we do in Windows, Android, Mac OS X, and iOS.
Great idea, though several sites try to do this to some extent. The fact is that they fail, or we'd all be more aware of them. In the end, the main problem is there aren't enough hackers with enough hours to contribute. There are lot's of projects that need people, and just not enough willing coders.
I think the main problem the FLOSS community faces is inability to innovate, due to shackles we've placed on ourselves. We need to dump the popular binary package managers from Debian and Red Hat and start over. Compare Debian's 30K-ish packages to Android and Apple's million-ish apps each. Debian is what you want running an Apache server, but it's terrible for running the latest and greatest software. By the time you get your new app into Debian Unstable, you've already had it in Android and iOS for months, where every user is able to install your app, not just the adventurous few.
So, if you're willing to think big, consider a new package manager, perhaps like Zero Install. I think it should enable P2P sharing of both binary and source packages, and apps should run in a jail similar to what Android does. Like Android, all libraries used by an app should be installed with it, but hard links should be used to share identical libraries and eliminate duplication. We need a Linux distro where any fool can publish their latest hack.
A person's track record is the best indication of their skill. The poster needs as great a marketing guy as he can get, but we didn't get any specific info about his company, not even it's location. The best tech marketing people are mostly in Silicon Valley. I started a small software startup in NC, near RTP, and I found plenty of very talented engineers. Marketing talent outside of Silicon Valley is extremely hard to come by. Try not to use a friend. It will likely just damage your company and friendship. Being a big geek rather than a marketing genius, I can't offer better advice than looking at their track record. A good sales guy will snow you, but it's hard to fake a track record. However, I can give some stories that helped me understand how marketing wins the race.
At QuickLogic, in 1990, our first parts we put in shake-and-bake failed. This is not unusual for a new technology, but we were running out of cash and had to sell the parts we had. Our CEO got all the teams together for a brain storming meeting and we came up with three solutions: one was to modify a couple of layers of the IC to provide more programming current, one was to modify the process a bit, and I offered using multiple programming paths in parallel to provide more current to just the fuses that were likely to fail. We all then focused like crazy on our solutions, all of which eventually succeeded in parallel, though I won the race because all I had to do was modify software. To determine peak currents, I read a paper on RICE, or Rapid InterConnect Estimator, or some such thing. The math was a bit fuzzy, so I had to wing a lot of it, but I came up with the world's first production ready AWE tool, which I used for delay estimation and also to identify "critical" links that were in danger of failing. With good current estimation, I identified the critical links and upped the programming current on them dramatically, using parallel current paths. It got us to market, but we were terrified that our competition would hear about our critical link failures and spread FUD. Here's where marketing came in. Our marketing guy called EETimes and every other electronic news rag and told them we'd just created the world's best interconnect timing estimator, based on AWE. He told them it allowed us to identify the "timing critical" links, and program them to lower their resistance. He claimed it increased the speed of our FPGA by as much as 2X. It was a complete load of bull, but the press ate it up. It was a huge win for us. That's when I finally began to understand the difference between marketing and sales.
However, Actel kept on hammering us. They had more effective marketing. They did spread FUD about our parts not being reliable, even though our parts were very reliable. Somehow they got hold of our customer list, and they faxed it to all their sales guys, who then called on all our accounts. At every turn, Actel was in our way. They had Andy Hanes, a marketing genius, IMO. However, our technology was still awesome and QuickLogic eventually started doing OK. I quit to work at Synplicity, who was looking for a marketing guy. I recommended Synplicity to Andy, and Andy to Synplicity, and when he hired on as our VP of marketing, things really started going well, though Rick Carlson, or VP of sales, was already quite effective. One thing these guys did (I can't remember which is responsible) was to use Xilinx and Altera as a sales channel. We kept begging them to work with us in reaching their customers, but we got stonewalled by corporate at both companies. Then, our guys got the idea of giving free copies of our software to Xilinx and Altera FAEs without permission from corporate. The FAEs gladly accepted the software, and used it to great effect at customer sites to get better density and performance. These Xilinx and Altera FAEs became great salesmen for us.
Things were going quite well until Synopsys jumped into our market with FPGA express. They'd hired Don Faria who had been VP of marketing (I t
Do you teach in the US? No school system in the country spends less than $6K/student. That $3K/student is a number I've heard before, but I think it has to do with dinging schools for students who don't show up. Here's a link where you can find how much is spent on average in any state.
Something has to give in that sentence, either "literal creation", or "old age earth." I have a number of deeply religious smart friends who have faced this paradox and found resolutions they can live with. One way is to accept that the Bible was written by imperfect people, who may not have had the capacity to grasp the true story of creation. Regardless, if you're going to demand that what you believe makes logical sense, be prepared to chart your own personal spiritual journey. I certainly have.
It's only the people who blind themselves to reality that find evolution a threat. I don't personally mind all these people believing whatever they want. They can believe in fairies, UFOs... whatever. No problem. That's what religious freedom is all about. It's only when they start pushing their ignorance on me and my family that I take offense. Bills like this cross the line from religious freedom to banning knowledge.
Originally, you would be correct, but the Supreme Court made it clear that the entire Bill of Rights applies to states as well in several rulings in the 1800's. Originally, some states had official state religions. That's no longer allowed, thank God.
What are you smoking, because I want some! Our charter school, which is a public school, gets $7,000/year per student. The cheapest private school nearby charges $10,000/year, and they are always critically short on cash, and get huge donations. I always get a good laugh when rednecks in states with underfunded schools make statements like yours.