Why do you think that english or philosophy are inherantly easier then OS design or quantum mechanics?
As my best friend (a chemistry major) put it to me in college: "I've seen a lot of people switch from a science major to a humanities major because science was too hard, but I've never seen someone switch from humanities to science because humanities was too hard." Your milage may vary.
A friend of mine has worked in the nightclub/DJ/music industry for quite a number of years, and I remember he once told me that it's astounding how little you need to pay someone as long as you put their name up in lights. As long as you are giving them that, they are elated. It's all about fame and popularity, especially when you are young and don't realize just how much what you've got can really be worth.
You're dealing with an adult who has demonstrated that they are irresponsible and a danger to society, not a minor who has avoided screwing up in real life even though he loves playing GTA. You're also dealing with a guy who is in prison: he doesn't get the bennies the good guys do. This is hardly a case of The Man being scared that video games will create monsters. The judge realized that with normal people that isn't going to happen, but with people who have demonstrated they can't manage their behavior and steal cars at knifepoint and lead police on high speed chases, it's a valid concern.
Intellectual property and genetic engineering is a red herring here. This is a weak excuse by a despot who is benefiting from a famine he is both helping to sustain and working to worsen.
Robert Mugabe banned white farmers from growing food in the middle of a famine -- what are the odds he will allow imported food to pick up the slack? It's just a happy coincidence for Mugabe that he can use this issue to flex his muscles against the US, Canada, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom have allied against his government for stealing the recent election. This famine gives Mugabe an excuse to maintain a state of emergency, giving him additional emergency powers, including tight control over food distribution. Who's getting food distributed to them? Hint: not the regions where Mugabe's political opposition is strong.
Famines happen, but actual starvation generally only happens when its in a tyrant's political interest for certain people to die.
I have mixed feelings: I hate MacOS, far more than I hate MSWindows, but I loved NextStep.
In that case you should absolutely check out OS X. Apple
calls it a Macintosh, but in reality it's BSD/NextStep
with a flashy new paintjob and extra libraries
implementing the old Mac APIs so you can run old
programs. They replaced Display Postscript with "Display PDF" (Apple calls it Quartz) and they
added things like QuickTime, OpenGL, and Java.
But it's just NextStep rebranded, don't be fooled
by the name.
Alan needs to realize that, although the DMCA does have important and evil implications for the freedom to code and speak in the U.S., it would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself.
Care to back this up with anything? Felton is a legitimate security researcher, and he was threatened. If I was a media conglomerate who felt threatened by free software why wouldn't I use this as an opportunity to "take out" the #2 Linux kernel guy? The Felton/Skylrov cases seem to indicate they don't care much about public opinion. Adobe backed off the Skylrov case, but
Skylrov is still facing criminal charges. It is naive to assume that "oh, this law won't apply to me, because they never intended the law to be used like that." Get real.
Lots of questions in your post. I might sum up by saying that book learning is no substitute for experience, but experience is no substitute for book learning either. What are your goals? Is college just job training for the first few years of your working life? Or are you actually trying to learn something that will be useful for your whole life? What companies want are intelligent people who can work well with others to accomplish goals. They want people who can communicate well with other people. They might need genius coders as well. The skills you need depend on the job you want. Ideally college should help you learn how to learn, not just fill your mind with facts and skills useful for your first five years in the industry.
As an undergrad I majored in Math and
Philosophy and minored in Comp Sci (graduated 1991) at a small liberal arts college. It happens this college is hardly a technical powerhouse, although their Math and Science departments are quite solid. I took a lot of courses in philosophy which taught me writing and discussion skills as well as logic skills. Just under half my course load was foreign language, psychology, literature, writing, history, chemistry, fine arts. In other words: writing, speaking, logic, math, science, art -- the classical liberal arts. "Well rounded" doesn't mean a little of everything, it means the things that are fundamentally useful, the skills that other skills are founded on.
After graduating I got a masters in Comp Sci at a huge state engineering school. I learned a lot about computers there, so much more than I did in college or on my own. But what I learned there is less useful in the long term I think. The liberal arts are useful in industry, they just don't show up as keywords in an HR skills database.
Finally, you might like to take a look at Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software. Although he doesn't specifically address curriculums, he does talk about his experiences in school and in the business world, as well as how to write software. I found it quite valuable, I think you might too.
As others have mentioned, the failed OpenDoc initiative was very much in this vein. NextStep
(the "new" Apple initiative, now renamed Cocoa)
has long had a reputation of allowing one to quickly string together custom applications from
preexisting object classes, making it very popular in businesses that custom made in house applications. It is also worth noting that this framework allows for what are called "Services". Applications can "export" functionality to other applications. So for example you can hilite text in a text editor, then go to the mail services submenu in the system menu and from there tell the mail program to open a new message window with the hilighted item pasted inside. This also enables generalized filters, etc, in some ways like Unix shell pipes.
Of course, it's not open source,
but what is GNUStep doing these days?
Still, a good page nonetheless, Sagan is certainly missed. I also note Sagan
included "Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence)" as one of his common fallacies of logic. Nonetheless, ad hominem attacks on theists seem rampant on/.
I just don't buy into the idea that the laws that I have to follow should be based on someone else's religion.
Well, what do you suggest they be based on, your own religion? Or just your own "experience", "reason" and "common sense"? Common sense is just the intuition we've developed for things we are familiar with. Reason can prove anything you want as long as you start with the right assumptions. My experience is that Christianity has some valuable truths to teach. So why is your basis any better or worse than mine? More to the point, why are you basically saying "Oh, you believe in a religion, sorry that disqualifies you from having any input at all in making laws." Would you support a Constitutional amendment excluding citizens with religious beliefs from holding elected office and from voting? Or would you merely rule as unconstitutional any law that happened to coincide with the teachings of some religion?
I don't see any indication that believers in one or another religion are any nicer... than believers in some other religion or non-believers.
This in no way invalidates religion from being a valid basis for moral values. In fact, the existence of a single person who has done great good exclusively as a result of religious beliefs proves religion can be a valid basis for moral values. (Mother Teresa fits this criterion I think, just to throw out a name.) Note I never claimed religion was the only valid basis, nor did I claim that religious beliefs guarantee good civic behavior. But then lack of religious beliefs hardly guarantees that either.
I can't tell how serious Taco was about the clone mowing his lawn,
but I suspect there are people out there who would be serious about
that. Slave labor was great for the South for a while. But we have to
deal with massive racial problems for the next couple centuries as a
result. Do we really want that again? Are clones people? If not, why
not? Do people have any inherent dignity? Or are they just tools to be
used at the pleasure of the powerful, and human dignity something something you own in proportion to your bank account?
as things that all good Xians should oppose. It's as if they'd never
heard of the separation of the church and state
Separation of church and state doesn't mean that religious people should
have no voice in government or that some laws should not be motivated by
religious beliefs. It merely means that there must be no requirement
that laws be in conformance to the teachings of some religion. It's not
illegal for me to murder you in the United States because we all signed a
social contract that says the party of the first part agrees not to do
that to the party of the second part. It's illegal because Christianity
condemns such actions as being morally wrong. Despite the Rousseauxian
delusion of a social contract our society is based on a more or less
shared view of morality. And religion is a valid basis for moral
values.
Retailers profit from ads not sales
on
XBox Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
Although Nintendo makes a good point that it can't be wise to tell customers to not buy the stuff in stock because there's something better coming later, it's worth remembering that M$ has deep pockets. Don't think the M$ propaganda at the retailers showed up for free, M$ paid a lot of $$$ to get it there, although they can well afford it. Working at a video game company for a year introduced me to the strange concept that the games you see on a retailer's shelf arent there because the retailer thinks they will sell but because the distributor/publisher paid to get them there. It also costs $$$ to get your game mentioned in advertisements that the retailers publish. And retailers basically make just as much if not more $$$ selling ads, endcaps, and prominent placement on the shelves as they do from product sales. So when $$$ shows up with a big wad of cash, not only is it business as usual for the retailer, but they could still make money even though their sales might drop.
Los Alamos is just trying to make themselves look good here by "saving the world" a lot of money by giving us our cake and letting us eat it too. The reality is betrayed by the quote
"When you flip back and forth between the original and our encoded HDTV signal, you can barely tell the difference"
I work at a lab that does HDTV, and if you're flipping back and forth between HDTV and NTSC and you can't tell the difference, you're doing something wrong. In this case what you're doing wrong is lossy compressing the image stream until you've degraded it to NTSC quality. So you spent time and money to give me two essentially identical copies of the data. Yippee, great work guys. If this catches on, I can spend extra money on an HDTV set but still get the crappy quality of NTSC. Really, what would this be good for anyway? If NTSC quality is all you are getting, just use NTSC.
Luckily, if this article is accurate the whole thing is just bogus hype from Los Alamos' PR weenies making claims that the inventor himself never even made.
If you need to search a large number of peers for dynamic content in real time, you
need to reach all of them to do it.
This isn't really true. You seem to be describing
a search algorithm with O(N) run time (your
benchmark page even states this). Linear
search algorithms *suck*! Real world search
algorithms run in O(log N) time, or even O(1)
time. Admittedly this is not an easy problem,
but don't bother going to the implementation
phase if you can't do better than linear search
time in the design phase -- it won't scale.
The only way to effectively search for something
is to be able to avoid searching the majority
of your storage locations. This is essentially
what things like sorted trees/arrays and hash functions buy you. The fact that your storage
locations are distributed, come and go from the
network, and have changing content does *nothing*
change this simple fact.
You must impose some kind
of order on the set of peers to facilitate
searching. Otherwise you are doomed.
Incidently, if you're curious as to why downloading from Napster is not illegal, or immoral, read
paragraph 1008.
I am not sure this is really true, because I am not sure Title 17
considers a computer to be a digital audio recording device. The
definition
requires such a device to be designed or marketed for the primary
purpose of making digital audio copies. It is arguable that a PC
qualifies. Furthermore,
Section 1002 requires all such devices to have copy protection/notification
schemes built into them, it being illegal to import/manufacture/distribute
devices that don't. Certainly PCs don't qualify here. Are you trying to
say it is illegal to sell PCs as we currently know them? Are you arguing
that PCs should have such a copy protection device integral to them? Or
would you rather want to claim a PC isn't an audio recording device?
If it were done right, it would be
funny, get the message across, and lead the viewer to 'click-thru' on the logo.
One problem I have with ads (tv, web, anywhere) is that they basically suck. Show me something cool.
Yeah, that's hard to do, but you better do it if you want me to notice, 'cause you've got a lot of competition out there for my attention. I remember way back in 93 when Wired was still new -- they had the coolest ads I'd ever seen before. I read every one. Those guys probably rejected ads that weren't cool enough. Give me ads that are worth my time!
About four years ago the Soft tried to make a revolutionary graphics leap
forward with the Talisman chip. It was actually a pretty cool design. And like this new chip,
Talisman could "take it to the next level", something MS felt it needed to
do to make Windows a competitive game platform. It failed for a number of
reasons. One of them was the complexity level was higher than any of
their fab partners were used to dealing with. Another was that other graphics chip
manufacturers became scared to talk to them -- they didn't really want to
support Talisman, but felt they needed to get Direct3D support for their
chips, and Direct3D and Talisman capabilities were getting intertwined
inside MS. The result was a giant mess, and it was finally dropped. My
point is that MS doesn't have a very good track record with this sort of
thing. Not predicting doom, but I see some similarities between the two.
I doubt this was really invented for government use. I work at at military lab doing IT research, one of the "new" things the military is doing is aggressively pursuing COTS (commercial off the shelf) technology. It used to be the government/military would come to you and say "here's our spec, build it for us." More and more, you'll tell them to get lost if they do that because they no longer represent a huge share of your market. It's less and less worth it to you for you to special design stuff for government. The commercial sector payoff for this end-to-end tech, if it flies, dwarfs the government payoff. I knew a guy who worked for Thrustmaster, and the military wanted to use their joystick in a flight sim. They said sure, but then an officer showed up with a four inch thick book of "specs", and they said hang on, we'll be happy to see you the best joystick we can make, but if we have to mess with THAT THING (pointing to book) its not worth it to us, forget it. Sure, Thrustmaster is tiny compared to Intel, but this is happening more and more. Now, once they develop it, I'm sure the military will happy they can get a cheap one. That's what's driving the COTS push.
but they're still entitled the same protections you and I enjoy
IANAL either, but, BS! Microsoft is a corporation. There is no reason for a corporation to get the same protections a person does. There is no "person" on trial here. Be careful of giving all sorts of "rights" to corporations. We don't have a government "of the corps, for the corps," we have a government of and for citizens. The US Constitution give zero "rights" to corps. Its bad enough for corps to have so much power today simply because they are rich. Don't go giving them extra "rights" for free that they have no basis for having. BTW, I am not anti-corporation, and I generally see Big Business as a positive thing for society. But they have their place, and that place is not as a citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
classic.
well, i think there was/is a "personal" version for windows and linux that's free but limits the number of classes you can have in a program.
if you want a "free speech" compiler, don't overlook SmartEiffel, a pretty good GPL'ed implementation of the language.
As my best friend (a chemistry major) put it to me in college: "I've seen a lot of people switch from a science major to a humanities major because science was too hard, but I've never seen someone switch from humanities to science because humanities was too hard." Your milage may vary.
A friend of mine has worked in the nightclub/DJ/music industry for quite a number of years, and I remember he once told me that it's astounding how little you need to pay someone as long as you put their name up in lights. As long as you are giving them that, they are elated. It's all about fame and popularity, especially when you are young and don't realize just how much what you've got can really be worth.
You're dealing with an adult who has demonstrated that they are irresponsible and a danger to society, not a minor who has avoided screwing up in real life even though he loves playing GTA. You're also dealing with a guy who is in prison: he doesn't get the bennies the good guys do. This is hardly a case of The Man being scared that video games will create monsters. The judge realized that with normal people that isn't going to happen, but with people who have demonstrated they can't manage their behavior and steal cars at knifepoint and lead police on high speed chases, it's a valid concern.
more recreational math
some lego
Famines happen, but actual starvation generally only happens when its in a tyrant's political interest for certain people to die.
----------
In that case you should absolutely check out OS X. Apple calls it a Macintosh, but in reality it's BSD/NextStep with a flashy new paintjob and extra libraries implementing the old Mac APIs so you can run old programs. They replaced Display Postscript with "Display PDF" (Apple calls it Quartz) and they added things like QuickTime, OpenGL, and Java. But it's just NextStep rebranded, don't be fooled by the name.
Care to back this up with anything? Felton is a legitimate security researcher, and he was threatened. If I was a media conglomerate who felt threatened by free software why wouldn't I use this as an opportunity to "take out" the #2 Linux kernel guy? The Felton/Skylrov cases seem to indicate they don't care much about public opinion. Adobe backed off the Skylrov case, but Skylrov is still facing criminal charges. It is naive to assume that "oh, this law won't apply to me, because they never intended the law to be used like that." Get real.
As an undergrad I majored in Math and Philosophy and minored in Comp Sci (graduated 1991) at a small liberal arts college. It happens this college is hardly a technical powerhouse, although their Math and Science departments are quite solid. I took a lot of courses in philosophy which taught me writing and discussion skills as well as logic skills. Just under half my course load was foreign language, psychology, literature, writing, history, chemistry, fine arts. In other words: writing, speaking, logic, math, science, art -- the classical liberal arts. "Well rounded" doesn't mean a little of everything, it means the things that are fundamentally useful, the skills that other skills are founded on. After graduating I got a masters in Comp Sci at a huge state engineering school. I learned a lot about computers there, so much more than I did in college or on my own. But what I learned there is less useful in the long term I think. The liberal arts are useful in industry, they just don't show up as keywords in an HR skills database.
Finally, you might like to take a look at Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software. Although he doesn't specifically address curriculums, he does talk about his experiences in school and in the business world, as well as how to write software. I found it quite valuable, I think you might too.
"finger zaphod@idsoftware.com" reports "The Quake 3 1.30 Mac Classic installer is on the id ftp site." Hopefully the MacOS X one will come as well.
Of course, it's not open source, but what is GNUStep doing these days?
Hmm, appeal to authority. ;)
Still, a good page nonetheless, Sagan is certainly missed. I also note Sagan included "Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence)" as one of his common fallacies of logic. Nonetheless, ad hominem attacks on theists seem rampant on /.
This post only slightly tongue in cheek.
Well, what do you suggest they be based on, your own religion? Or just your own "experience", "reason" and "common sense"? Common sense is just the intuition we've developed for things we are familiar with. Reason can prove anything you want as long as you start with the right assumptions. My experience is that Christianity has some valuable truths to teach. So why is your basis any better or worse than mine? More to the point, why are you basically saying "Oh, you believe in a religion, sorry that disqualifies you from having any input at all in making laws." Would you support a Constitutional amendment excluding citizens with religious beliefs from holding elected office and from voting? Or would you merely rule as unconstitutional any law that happened to coincide with the teachings of some religion?
I don't see any indication that believers in one or another religion are any nicer ... than believers in some other religion or non-believers.
This in no way invalidates religion from being a valid basis for moral values. In fact, the existence of a single person who has done great good exclusively as a result of religious beliefs proves religion can be a valid basis for moral values. (Mother Teresa fits this criterion I think, just to throw out a name.) Note I never claimed religion was the only valid basis, nor did I claim that religious beliefs guarantee good civic behavior. But then lack of religious beliefs hardly guarantees that either.
I can't tell how serious Taco was about the clone mowing his lawn, but I suspect there are people out there who would be serious about that. Slave labor was great for the South for a while. But we have to deal with massive racial problems for the next couple centuries as a result. Do we really want that again? Are clones people? If not, why not? Do people have any inherent dignity? Or are they just tools to be used at the pleasure of the powerful, and human dignity something something you own in proportion to your bank account?
as things that all good Xians should oppose. It's as if they'd never heard of the separation of the church and state
Separation of church and state doesn't mean that religious people should have no voice in government or that some laws should not be motivated by religious beliefs. It merely means that there must be no requirement that laws be in conformance to the teachings of some religion. It's not illegal for me to murder you in the United States because we all signed a social contract that says the party of the first part agrees not to do that to the party of the second part. It's illegal because Christianity condemns such actions as being morally wrong. Despite the Rousseauxian delusion of a social contract our society is based on a more or less shared view of morality. And religion is a valid basis for moral values.
Although Nintendo makes a good point that it can't be wise to tell customers to not buy the stuff in stock because there's something better coming later, it's worth remembering that M$ has deep pockets. Don't think the M$ propaganda at the retailers showed up for free, M$ paid a lot of $$$ to get it there, although they can well afford it. Working at a video game company for a year introduced me to the strange concept that the games you see on a retailer's shelf arent there because the retailer thinks they will sell but because the distributor/publisher paid to get them there. It also costs $$$ to get your game mentioned in advertisements that the retailers publish. And retailers basically make just as much if not more $$$ selling ads, endcaps, and prominent placement on the shelves as they do from product sales. So when $$$ shows up with a big wad of cash, not only is it business as usual for the retailer, but they could still make money even though their sales might drop.
"When you flip back and forth between the original and our encoded HDTV signal, you can barely tell the difference"
I work at a lab that does HDTV, and if you're flipping back and forth between HDTV and NTSC and you can't tell the difference, you're doing something wrong. In this case what you're doing wrong is lossy compressing the image stream until you've degraded it to NTSC quality. So you spent time and money to give me two essentially identical copies of the data. Yippee, great work guys. If this catches on, I can spend extra money on an HDTV set but still get the crappy quality of NTSC. Really, what would this be good for anyway? If NTSC quality is all you are getting, just use NTSC. Luckily, if this article is accurate the whole thing is just bogus hype from Los Alamos' PR weenies making claims that the inventor himself never even made.
This isn't really true. You seem to be describing a search algorithm with O(N) run time (your benchmark page even states this). Linear search algorithms *suck*! Real world search algorithms run in O(log N) time, or even O(1) time. Admittedly this is not an easy problem, but don't bother going to the implementation phase if you can't do better than linear search time in the design phase -- it won't scale.
The only way to effectively search for something is to be able to avoid searching the majority of your storage locations. This is essentially what things like sorted trees/arrays and hash functions buy you. The fact that your storage locations are distributed, come and go from the network, and have changing content does *nothing* change this simple fact. You must impose some kind of order on the set of peers to facilitate searching. Otherwise you are doomed.
I am not sure this is really true, because I am not sure Title 17 considers a computer to be a digital audio recording device. The definition requires such a device to be designed or marketed for the primary purpose of making digital audio copies. It is arguable that a PC qualifies. Furthermore, Section 1002 requires all such devices to have copy protection/notification schemes built into them, it being illegal to import/manufacture/distribute devices that don't. Certainly PCs don't qualify here. Are you trying to say it is illegal to sell PCs as we currently know them? Are you arguing that PCs should have such a copy protection device integral to them? Or would you rather want to claim a PC isn't an audio recording device?
One problem I have with ads (tv, web, anywhere) is that they basically suck. Show me something cool. Yeah, that's hard to do, but you better do it if you want me to notice, 'cause you've got a lot of competition out there for my attention. I remember way back in 93 when Wired was still new -- they had the coolest ads I'd ever seen before. I read every one. Those guys probably rejected ads that weren't cool enough. Give me ads that are worth my time!
About four years ago the Soft tried to make a revolutionary graphics leap forward with the Talisman chip. It was actually a pretty cool design. And like this new chip, Talisman could "take it to the next level", something MS felt it needed to do to make Windows a competitive game platform. It failed for a number of reasons. One of them was the complexity level was higher than any of their fab partners were used to dealing with. Another was that other graphics chip manufacturers became scared to talk to them -- they didn't really want to support Talisman, but felt they needed to get Direct3D support for their chips, and Direct3D and Talisman capabilities were getting intertwined inside MS. The result was a giant mess, and it was finally dropped. My point is that MS doesn't have a very good track record with this sort of thing. Not predicting doom, but I see some similarities between the two.
I doubt this was really invented for government use. I work at at
military lab doing IT research, one of the "new" things the military is
doing is aggressively pursuing COTS (commercial off the shelf)
technology. It used to be the government/military would come to you
and say "here's our spec, build it for us." More and more, you'll
tell them to get lost if they do that because they no longer represent
a huge share of your market. It's less and less worth it to you for
you to special design stuff for government. The commercial sector
payoff for this end-to-end tech, if it flies, dwarfs the government
payoff. I knew a guy who worked for Thrustmaster, and the military
wanted to use their joystick in a flight sim. They said sure, but then
an officer showed up with a four inch thick book of "specs", and they
said hang on, we'll be happy to see you the best joystick we can make,
but if we have to mess with THAT THING (pointing to book) its not
worth it to us, forget it. Sure, Thrustmaster is tiny compared to Intel,
but this is happening more and more. Now, once they develop it, I'm
sure the military will happy they can get a cheap one. That's what's
driving the COTS push.
IANAL either, but, BS! Microsoft is a corporation. There is no reason for a corporation to get the same protections a person does. There is no "person" on trial here. Be careful of giving all sorts of "rights" to corporations. We don't have a government "of the corps, for the corps," we have a government of and for citizens. The US Constitution give zero "rights" to corps. Its bad enough for corps to have so much power today simply because they are rich. Don't go giving them extra "rights" for free that they have no basis for having. BTW, I am not anti-corporation, and I generally see Big Business as a positive thing for society. But they have their place, and that place is not as a citizen.