With apologies to no one, some comic relief was needed after that much excitement over an early alpha. Seriously, editors, please try to get some perspective. The unending slant gets old.
Nearly 10 years after announcing spysat pixels for sale, Slashdot.org has released the first release of Slashdot with unbiased truth that can finally run without slant! An alpha is available for viewing today, but a lot of help is still needed to make Slashdot more truthy. The site is very blunt: 'WARNING: THIS SITE MAY CONFUSE THE MEANING OF ALPHA AND RELEASE. DO NOT READ THIS SITE IF YOUR BRAIN IS USED FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. This is an alpha test version so that Linux fanboys and OSX users can get way too excited and blow things entirely out of proportion, and make comments on how to improve profit.' Currently missing functionality includes critical thinking, peer review, spellcheck, and multiple opinions. That said, if you're interested in participating you can sign up for an account to figure out how you can start trolling today.
Please RTFP. One-click isn't just "buy stuff with one click", and I'm tired of hearing people rail on it without at least understanding what it is.
The patent's claims are specifically for storing payment and shipping information so that a one-click transaction can be done. It's a narrow scope, and I don't think anyone has shown prior art for the limited situations it applies to. So IMO Amazon did invent *something*.
What I think needs to be questioned is if that specific, limited scope is significant and non-obvious enough of an invention to deserve a patent.
You need cross-site IP address takeover. You can accomplish this generically with BGP (but if you're asking these questions, I'd stay away from this for now), or work with your ISP to set up a simple way to accomplish this.
Coding games as a hobby and working in the games industry are *vastly* different experiences. If he's hoping to find a career doing what you do for a hobby, he's in for a rough time.
Vocational education will teach him how to code. A college education will teach a much broader range of things. Note that the games industry isn't all about coding, and if/when he gets sick of it, the college degree will be applicable to a much wider range of jobs.
I'd suggest that he intern at a games company for a little while and see if it's really what he has in mind. And if he thinks it is, then he can choose between learning to code and learning a broad range of skills, depending what he sees himself doing there.
I agree that that question should be asked. I sort of fell into syseng. It's a good career, but I've not found it particularly fulfilling in the long run. Changing to networking has helped some, but I don't think this'll last forever.
However, given what it sounds like his goals are - get off the front line and into a job with a little more dignity and mental stimulation - syseng is a pretty easy choice. It certainly doesn't require a degree to get started, so you can try it for a while and see if you like it, and if you don't, you can still go back to school and learn something else, because you're not already buried in school debt.
BTW, to the OP: I protest the idea of hiring people who get certs. I have none. People should hire me for my brain, not for my paper. I feel that if someone won't even look at me for lack of a cert, I'm probably better passing that job up anyway. Perhaps conditions have changed since when I was getting started ten years ago, and certs are how you get your foot in the door in entry level jobs these days, but I know that I've never been asked if I had any, and no one at the companies I work for has even brought it up when we were hiring other people.
It sounds like you should move up to a run of the mill sysadmin position. You have the basic skills, you've paid your dues with a little time in a tech support job... Look for "System Administrator I" positions on your favorite job listings site. Apply to them. See what happens.
This is a textbook career move. Why do you even need to ask us?
I have no delusion that most companies out there have no commitment to you as an individual beyond where their profit ends. (There are exceptions, and you can find them, but there are tradeoffs to be had.)
However, it's usually in a company's best interest to commit to keeping a person around as long as they can. Hiring expenses, training, and acquired know-how are all investments they make in you which pay off only if you stick around long enough.
Some companies don't invest as much of those in you. Those are the ones that'll hire you easiest despite a job-hopper resume, and drop you the soonest when you don't meet their short-term needs.
#1 - If you're finding jobs offering that much more money every 4 months or so, it means you sold yourself too cheap at first. Take a moment and figure out what you're really worth. Then, when you get an offer, ignore the number if it's low, and counteroffer for what you're really worth.
#2 - Job hopping will change the kind of job offers you'll get. If you've been changing jobs every 4 months, you're going to get hired by people who have a short-term interest in you. If you show that you're committed to a job for 4 years at a time, you'll get hired by places that are looking to keep you around a long time.
#3 - If you LIKE changing jobs frequently, become a contractor! People will hire you expecting you to be there 6 months, and you'll get to try out a whole range of places. This will probably be a good thing for you until you figure out what you really want. Plus, if you decide to settle down, all you have to say is all the short jobs you did were contracts, and no one will count it against you.
#4 - Being a job hopper isn't inherently bad as long as you're representing your intentions truthfully, but don't be surprised if you end up having to seriously pay your dues to change your image if you decide you want to work somewhere more committed to YOU in the future.
One link is not an obsession with Wikipedia. And then, despite giving it no credence, you quote the article.
I reiterate my original request. Link me to an article that describes the collapse you forsee in a small (say, 2x) increase in traffic beyond capacity.
I don't deny that congestion is a problem. I just don't believe that congestive collapse occurs under the kind of conditions we're talking about here (gradual, relatively small increases in traffic). I'd like to see what makes you think it does.
* Children should be raised in a sheltered environment, so that they don't encounter controversial opinions they might not understand without the proper context.
* Children should have free access to information, and shouldn't get a rose-tinted view of the world. The only way they'll get the context to complex issues is by being exposed to discussion about them.
Or another pair:
* The law should be respected regardless of if you agree with it, because it's the foundation of civilization.
* What's right and what's legal aren't always the same, and I prefer to do what's right.
I think that someone who believes in any of the opinions above, and lives by them, can be a moral person. You need to think about what YOU believe in. We can't answer that for you.
You have a very interesting point of view, there. OK, I'm gonna say that back, but a little more directly. I don't think you know WTF you're talking about either.:)
The exponential backoff of TCP would only help if a large number of hosts were doing it at the same time. That doesn't happen. Large numbers of hosts using a tuned backoff mechanism is *exactly* what's happening across the backbone.
Slow start may help slightly, but the way in which TCP goes ever faster, until it fails again, is really the cause of the problem, not the solution to it. OK, again, I disagree with your premise. Sawtoothing is how TCP probes out congestion, and copes with it. At a given loss rate, TCP will back off to a corresponding transmit rate, until things balance out. This works even when scaled across very large numbers of connections and hosts. This has its problems as well, especially when trying to efficiently utilize extremely high bandwidth connections, but it doesn't pose a problem for congestion.
With something like UDP, you'll still be able to get some traffic through, while TCP will backoff almost into a standstill, but continue to send, and send. Actually, UDP tends to have worse problems. UDP doesn't specify a flow control mechanism, so it's up to the application to do it, and generally, the *best* you can hope for is someone did it as well as TCP. Generally, it'll be done worse. Getting "some" data through doesn't mean anything. Most tasks are stream data... Loading web pages, ssh, etc... And even if you reimplemented those over UDP, you're not going to avoid the problem of congestion collapse. TCP is good specifically because it *doesn't* send and send. It backs off, in a way that large numbers of hosts can cooperate, and alleviate a congested router.
This is what will happen if the level of traffic (gradually) increases over time, while the backbone does not (and that's not just IMHO). No sudden, surge route failures, etc. are needed to set this off. If a router is operating at 90% capacity, and you gradually increase utilization 20%, you don't go into congestion collapse with TCP. The router's buffer fills, latency increases a little bit and the router gradually starts dropping random packets, providing the elasticity for all the TCP stacks involved to back off, and settle out at a lower transmit rate. Everything just runs a little slower, but it's not the end of the world.
If you disagree with any of this, I suggest you do a little reading. Start with Wikipedia: Congestion Collapse, and RFC 2914, specifically section 3.1, Preventing Congestion Collapse. If you still think this isn't just IYHO, cite me back some sources, instead of just stating a bunch of unsubstantiated opinions, because as far as I can see, everything you just said is wrong.:)
What you're describing is called "congestion collapse". Several features in TCP, such as slow start and exponential backoff, were carefully tuned to make sure this doesn't happen. Additionally, things like RED queueing on routers (which is a widespread feature on backbones) help provide more elasticity to the network so a sudden jolt doesn't result in this behavior.
It can still happen if you have a very sudden, severe spike in traffic, but even in that case it recovers in a few minutes. It's not the sort of thing that happens because traffic picked up a few percent.
To get the internet to go into unrecoverable congestion collapse, you'd have to have enough traffic that even slow start couldn't slow things down enough to cope. That's not likely to happen.
Preventing these problems is one reason why work to improve TCP's performance goes so slowly. There are a lot of gotchas that have to be taken into account.
Actually, there's a bigger problem: If you turn off the gas, everyone's pilot lights go out. When it's turned back on, you'll get a lot of fires from people failing to relight them, or doing it wrong. Also, you're still going to have the leaks in the system to deal with, although under better circumstances.
I'd suspect turning the gas off might make things worse, not better.
I actually suspect VHS won't go the way of the 8-Track. 8-Track has a small cult following that's endeared to it because of it's impractical quirkiness. No fast forward, no rewind. You wanna hear your favorite song again? Wait for it to work its way around.
VHS, on the other hand, didn't have any cute annoyances. It wasn't a great standard, but it had no major drawbacks. And for that reason, I don't expect it's nostalgia to hang on nearly so long.
The point is/. is a poor place to ask these kinds of questions. They'd do much better asking a home improvement forum, rather than a bunch of computer nerds.
Oil: We've found mineral oil works very well for cooling processors. Give it a try.
Pens: Not only do they write poorly, but you don't have access to the blueprints to improve them. You're forever stuck in Bic's pen goes scratchy - buy a new pen upgrade cycle. Try OpenOffice on Ubuntu.
Dog: Aibo.
Piece: I've played a lot of Quake2. In my time in lmctf, I've experimented a lot, and the HyperBlaster is *the* all-around offense weapon to have. However, I haven't found any in the local gun shops, so I'd recommend looking into an AK-74, which has served me well in BF2.
I can believe the bits about passenger flow and efficiency, but what security is this supposed to add? The security in airports is theoretically based on keeping Bad People (by whatever definition) out. Assuming some Bad Person gets in, what is tracking their movements within 1m ever going to do to indicate that they're doing something Bad?
To me, this sounds like an efficiency study that they tacked on the word "Security" in order to sidestep the civil liberties issues. We've seen this done plenty of times before, but I'm amazed at how transparent it is here.
Politics aside, this is a bad idea because it fragments the user base, divides the focus, and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare.
No, trying to fight those things IS politics. The Debian project has never been interested in fighting those kinds of battles. They don't care about market share. They have a single focus: Making the best possible distribution, which can absolutely, no questions asked, be used by anyone for any purpose.
I for one am glad they put those principles first. I don't want compromises for the sake of market share.
Slashdot Mirror
With apologies to no one, some comic relief was needed after that much excitement over an early alpha. Seriously, editors, please try to get some perspective. The unending slant gets old.
Nearly 10 years after announcing spysat pixels for sale, Slashdot.org has released the first release of Slashdot with unbiased truth that can finally run without slant! An alpha is available for viewing today, but a lot of help is still needed to make Slashdot more truthy. The site is very blunt: 'WARNING: THIS SITE MAY CONFUSE THE MEANING OF ALPHA AND RELEASE. DO NOT READ THIS SITE IF YOUR BRAIN IS USED FOR REAL WORK IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. This is an alpha test version so that Linux fanboys and OSX users can get way too excited and blow things entirely out of proportion, and make comments on how to improve profit.' Currently missing functionality includes critical thinking, peer review, spellcheck, and multiple opinions. That said, if you're interested in participating you can sign up for an account to figure out how you can start trolling today.
Please RTFP. One-click isn't just "buy stuff with one click", and I'm tired of hearing people rail on it without at least understanding what it is.
The patent's claims are specifically for storing payment and shipping information so that a one-click transaction can be done. It's a narrow scope, and I don't think anyone has shown prior art for the limited situations it applies to. So IMO Amazon did invent *something*.
What I think needs to be questioned is if that specific, limited scope is significant and non-obvious enough of an invention to deserve a patent.
You need cross-site IP address takeover. You can accomplish this generically with BGP (but if you're asking these questions, I'd stay away from this for now), or work with your ISP to set up a simple way to accomplish this.
Coding games as a hobby and working in the games industry are *vastly* different experiences. If he's hoping to find a career doing what you do for a hobby, he's in for a rough time.
Vocational education will teach him how to code. A college education will teach a much broader range of things. Note that the games industry isn't all about coding, and if/when he gets sick of it, the college degree will be applicable to a much wider range of jobs.
I'd suggest that he intern at a games company for a little while and see if it's really what he has in mind. And if he thinks it is, then he can choose between learning to code and learning a broad range of skills, depending what he sees himself doing there.
I agree that that question should be asked. I sort of fell into syseng. It's a good career, but I've not found it particularly fulfilling in the long run. Changing to networking has helped some, but I don't think this'll last forever.
However, given what it sounds like his goals are - get off the front line and into a job with a little more dignity and mental stimulation - syseng is a pretty easy choice. It certainly doesn't require a degree to get started, so you can try it for a while and see if you like it, and if you don't, you can still go back to school and learn something else, because you're not already buried in school debt.
BTW, to the OP: I protest the idea of hiring people who get certs. I have none. People should hire me for my brain, not for my paper. I feel that if someone won't even look at me for lack of a cert, I'm probably better passing that job up anyway. Perhaps conditions have changed since when I was getting started ten years ago, and certs are how you get your foot in the door in entry level jobs these days, but I know that I've never been asked if I had any, and no one at the companies I work for has even brought it up when we were hiring other people.
AES is just encryption. AACS also specifies a lot of key handling procedure.
So no, it's not just AES, but IMO that doesn't make their claim much more credible.
It sounds like you should move up to a run of the mill sysadmin position. You have the basic skills, you've paid your dues with a little time in a tech support job... Look for "System Administrator I" positions on your favorite job listings site. Apply to them. See what happens.
This is a textbook career move. Why do you even need to ask us?
I have no delusion that most companies out there have no commitment to you as an individual beyond where their profit ends. (There are exceptions, and you can find them, but there are tradeoffs to be had.)
However, it's usually in a company's best interest to commit to keeping a person around as long as they can. Hiring expenses, training, and acquired know-how are all investments they make in you which pay off only if you stick around long enough.
Some companies don't invest as much of those in you. Those are the ones that'll hire you easiest despite a job-hopper resume, and drop you the soonest when you don't meet their short-term needs.
#1 - If you're finding jobs offering that much more money every 4 months or so, it means you sold yourself too cheap at first. Take a moment and figure out what you're really worth. Then, when you get an offer, ignore the number if it's low, and counteroffer for what you're really worth.
#2 - Job hopping will change the kind of job offers you'll get. If you've been changing jobs every 4 months, you're going to get hired by people who have a short-term interest in you. If you show that you're committed to a job for 4 years at a time, you'll get hired by places that are looking to keep you around a long time.
#3 - If you LIKE changing jobs frequently, become a contractor! People will hire you expecting you to be there 6 months, and you'll get to try out a whole range of places. This will probably be a good thing for you until you figure out what you really want. Plus, if you decide to settle down, all you have to say is all the short jobs you did were contracts, and no one will count it against you.
#4 - Being a job hopper isn't inherently bad as long as you're representing your intentions truthfully, but don't be surprised if you end up having to seriously pay your dues to change your image if you decide you want to work somewhere more committed to YOU in the future.
One link is not an obsession with Wikipedia. And then, despite giving it no credence, you quote the article.
I reiterate my original request. Link me to an article that describes the collapse you forsee in a small (say, 2x) increase in traffic beyond capacity.
I don't deny that congestion is a problem. I just don't believe that congestive collapse occurs under the kind of conditions we're talking about here (gradual, relatively small increases in traffic). I'd like to see what makes you think it does.
Or another pair:
I think that someone who believes in any of the opinions above, and lives by them, can be a moral person. You need to think about what YOU believe in. We can't answer that for you.
If you disagree with any of this, I suggest you do a little reading. Start with Wikipedia: Congestion Collapse, and RFC 2914, specifically section 3.1, Preventing Congestion Collapse. If you still think this isn't just IYHO, cite me back some sources, instead of just stating a bunch of unsubstantiated opinions, because as far as I can see, everything you just said is wrong.
What you're describing is called "congestion collapse". Several features in TCP, such as slow start and exponential backoff, were carefully tuned to make sure this doesn't happen. Additionally, things like RED queueing on routers (which is a widespread feature on backbones) help provide more elasticity to the network so a sudden jolt doesn't result in this behavior.
It can still happen if you have a very sudden, severe spike in traffic, but even in that case it recovers in a few minutes. It's not the sort of thing that happens because traffic picked up a few percent.
To get the internet to go into unrecoverable congestion collapse, you'd have to have enough traffic that even slow start couldn't slow things down enough to cope. That's not likely to happen.
Preventing these problems is one reason why work to improve TCP's performance goes so slowly. There are a lot of gotchas that have to be taken into account.
That's not entirely true. Plasma also has better contrast and brightness, and viewing angle, though the gap is closing.
I was going to write up a quick bit about this, but then I realized that someone probably already has. Sure enough, second hit for "Plasma vs lcd": http://www.flattvpeople.com/tutorials/lcd-vs-plasm a.asp
They've already covered what I was going to say, and more.
Bottom line: Neither is superior in all ways. Pick the things that matter to you.
Edmunds already publishes a calculated TCO: http://www.edmunds.com/apps/cto/CTOintroController
Actually, there's a bigger problem: If you turn off the gas, everyone's pilot lights go out. When it's turned back on, you'll get a lot of fires from people failing to relight them, or doing it wrong. Also, you're still going to have the leaks in the system to deal with, although under better circumstances.
I'd suspect turning the gas off might make things worse, not better.
I actually suspect VHS won't go the way of the 8-Track. 8-Track has a small cult following that's endeared to it because of it's impractical quirkiness. No fast forward, no rewind. You wanna hear your favorite song again? Wait for it to work its way around.
VHS, on the other hand, didn't have any cute annoyances. It wasn't a great standard, but it had no major drawbacks. And for that reason, I don't expect it's nostalgia to hang on nearly so long.
CA = Computer Associates for those who are WTFing.
The question is ambiguous and too broad, just like "Web 2.0".
Until you frame the question by defining what the heck you mean by that, this discussion will be useless.
The point is /. is a poor place to ask these kinds of questions. They'd do much better asking a home improvement forum, rather than a bunch of computer nerds.
Oil: We've found mineral oil works very well for cooling processors. Give it a try.
Pens: Not only do they write poorly, but you don't have access to the blueprints to improve them. You're forever stuck in Bic's pen goes scratchy - buy a new pen upgrade cycle. Try OpenOffice on Ubuntu.
Dog: Aibo.
Piece: I've played a lot of Quake2. In my time in lmctf, I've experimented a lot, and the HyperBlaster is *the* all-around offense weapon to have. However, I haven't found any in the local gun shops, so I'd recommend looking into an AK-74, which has served me well in BF2.
Alternatively: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
Chair: When your ass has to sit in front of a computer for 16 hours a day: The Aeron. Accept no substitute.
Lifeline: Hook up with Forum2000. I've found the Forum to be insightful on any subject.
I can believe the bits about passenger flow and efficiency, but what security is this supposed to add? The security in airports is theoretically based on keeping Bad People (by whatever definition) out. Assuming some Bad Person gets in, what is tracking their movements within 1m ever going to do to indicate that they're doing something Bad?
To me, this sounds like an efficiency study that they tacked on the word "Security" in order to sidestep the civil liberties issues. We've seen this done plenty of times before, but I'm amazed at how transparent it is here.
No, trying to fight those things IS politics. The Debian project has never been interested in fighting those kinds of battles. They don't care about market share. They have a single focus: Making the best possible distribution, which can absolutely, no questions asked, be used by anyone for any purpose.
I for one am glad they put those principles first. I don't want compromises for the sake of market share.