A better title would be "Games portray the gender and ethnicity of their creators". Which should be completely obvious. "Write what you know", as the adage goes.
I don't understand why Christians resort to such histrionics to combat science on science's terms.
Want a retort to evolution? Here's one: God created it. He created earth, made it look 4+ billion years old, added fossils, plate tectonics, bosons, whatever you want. Why does this discussion always require God to start the game at the beginning? He started in the middle. He's all powerful.
Now, this "answer" doesn't advance our understanding of the world any. But maybe it will give us some peace and quiet.
Remember, these are the same companies that will probably never find a cure for anything because there is no money in a cure. If they can research how to cure your cancer for a one time charge, or keep you alive for an extra 10-20 years on expensive treatments which do you think they will pick?
I disagree. If Big Bad Parmacorp A bilks people with a non-cure treatment spread over 20 years, then Big Bad Pharmacorp B is incented to trump that "treatment" with a cure. Competition should take care of this.
Parent's got it right. In terms of subscriber numbers:
In 2005, US market was about 200M phones, so 1% is 2M phones. AT&T (then Cingular) had 61M subscribers. Thus, 2/61 = 3.3% of AT&T subscribers.
Also, roughly 1/3 of all mobile phones in the US are replaced each year, so 20M AT&T subscribers would be expected to upgrade this year, even in the absence of the iPhone as enticement. So 10% of this more motivated group would also net the desired 1%.
As parent mentioned, this doesn't account for carrier hoppers.
Dvorak thinks Apple's success formula has been simple: "play the fashion game", and advertise. I think this analysis is completely off the mark.
Apple has been crazy successful because of their single minded devotion to one thing: USABILITY.
The iPhone nails nearly all the usability problems left unsolved by previous "smart" phones. BIG screen. TOUCH screen (finger, not stylus). Usable audio/video software. Sweet maps. Sufficient storage for music. WiFi (fast, and untethers you from the carrier). Large onscreen keyboard for fast text entry. All apps just ONE tap away.
It's not just "jazzy", with an impressive list of bullet points. It promises to be so easy to use -- even fun -- that people who only use their phone for calls today will actually CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR, and begin to see their phone as a portal to the web, to email, to maps. I'm talking mainstream users, here, not techies.
That's huge. This won't be "passe" three months from now, as he contends. I think it will establish a new standard for usability, and leave the Nokias and Motorolas scrambling to play catch up.
Audiophiles will always want massive storage -- 8Gb won't do. Photogs will always want a real camera with a camera's form-factor and controls, not a watered-down point-and-shoot in the shape of a phone. The price-conscious won't drop $500. People who hate Cingular won't switch providers. People who want "just a phone" won't want their battery drained by superfluous services. PDA users seem to want third party apps, which Apple won't allow. Some people don't want to be tethered to iTunes. (And on and on...)
The iPhone looks slick. The pre-loaded software looks pretty, and intuitive. The touch-screen display is where "smart" phones should have been all along. But this thing just won't be for everyone, for all the reasons above, and surely dozens more. Apple will not be putting any special purpose device makers out of business with this.
I would suggest something from the iAudio line (can get most of them at newegg). All of their models offer USB mass storage accessibility, as well as play OGGs out of the box (my two main screening criteria). I just got the iAudio G3 two weeks ago and it's great (if you don't mind the ho-hum looks and the nipple-stick interface).
Well, as long as we're just advertising in this thread....why not come by and try Earthcomber! (I'm one of the engineers there...)
We've built a free (as in beer) location finding utility with integrated mapping which runs on the PalmOS. Lets you mark spots out in the field (with or without GPS), then push them back to the mothership where you can share them with location-based interest groups in the Earthcomber Community area (think Yahoo Groups with maps). It's an early version, so we've got lots of issues (coverage area is US-only right now, our maps aren't the prettiest, the desired features list is a mile long, etc.).
And technically, you don't even need a Palm to use the interest groups -- we let you mark and view spots right on the web. But the Palm makes it cooler. You could use this to keep a travel log, go geocaching, start a group for great photography spots -- whatever you want. Come on by and let us know what you think. We'd love to get feedback from tech savvy users.
If you have a Palm handheld, you might want to give Earthcomber a try. (I'm one of the engineers there). We've built software and service similar to what you describe here.
We maintain a database of locations labelled by keywords. As a user, you can create search lists containing the keywords you want to find. Then the software looks for every place nearby which is labelled by a keyword in your active search list. Simple. The keywords attached to locations are picked by the proprietors themselves, so as a business you're not at the mercy of a relevance-scoring algorithm.
And it's all free to the user, including pan/zoom maps of the entire US to take with you.
We're really just getting started, so the service has several known (big) issues. To wit:
It's Palm-only
Not much commercial data (right now, it's mostly historic, civic, and geographic points of interest)
Our coverage area is limited to the US
It's not "over the airwaves" -- you have to download map and location data to your PC, then sync to your device (we offer a utility which helps)
Missing lots of little features, niceties (at this point, our enhancements list is a mile long)
We also have a non-commercial offering which I think is really unique, and that's Earthcomber Community. It's like Yahoo Groups, but it's location-based. Our groups let you drop points on the maps, which you can then download and take with you. Or just view them on the web (no handheld required to use Community).
Again, we're brand new, so there aren't tons of groups. But you could start one today!;-) If your thing is photography, create a group marking great spots to take a photo. If you like hiking, mark the hiking trail heads in your area. Solicit others to join and do the same, and pretty soon there's a whole world of locations relevant to your area of interest that you never even knew were there. Anyway, I think it could be cool. It just needs people.
OK, I'll stop pimping. But since what we are doing is relevant to your point, I thought I'd toss our hat in the ring.
Also experienced the innacuracy issue (the YP record was for a store at street number 940, the images were all of a building with a prominent '800' on their awning).
I suspect the problem could be that the geocoding database which they use to translate a street address into a latitude & longitude is inaccurate (a common problem). Even if the photos they took are perfectly coordinated with the street map vectors, the lat/long that the geocoder produced could be off by as much as a block or two.
Well, I can't address all your concerns, but with respect to mapping software...
<shameless-self-promotion> ...we've just recently released Earthcomber, which is a point-of-interest (POI) locator with integrated digital mapping for Palm handhelds (and soon PocketPC, around February). In order to get this early version out the door, we left some important features on the cutting room floor, so it is admittedly a little rough around the edges, mapping-wise (we are working hard to remedy that). However, we do support a great many GPS devices. And the software, maps, and service are all COMPLETELY FREE (as in beer) to end users. Why don't you come by and give it a try (and maybe give us some feedback)?
Think of it kind of like an on-board yellow pages with built-in search agent that's always hunting for the places you want to find. Unlike the yellow pages, however, we don't just want commercial POIs. We want really cool, non-commercial POIs, too (e.g. hiking trail heads, great picnic spots, scenic overlooks, houses with cool holiday lights displays, or whatever crazy stuff you can think of). We've got about 1.3 million POIs right now, mostly non-commercial stuff loaded from various free sources. Perhaps there's something in there for you. And if it takes some time for us to get POIs you care about, well....in the meantime you can still use the free maps.;-) </shameless-self-promotion>
Your point is completely tangential to mine. I neither stated nor implied anything about what is done with that remaining 4/5 after the hypothetical job shift. But, since you brought this up......are you implying that the remaining 4/5 would NOT go back into the economy if it was still in the first worker's hands, rather than the owner's?
Just because a single wage could support five Indians doesn't mean it's going to. If the needs of the project are ONE peson, they will hire ONE Indian at 1/5 the cost, and someone with an ownership deed will pocket the other 4/5 as profit. So the tally sheet is: one person loses a job, one person gains a job, and ownership keeps more of the fruits of labor for themselves. That seems a more reasonable assumption than thinking more people will get jobs out of this.
It's really common to build something, step back, examine its warts, and start over again with a new perspective and understanding. It's called prototyping. Some people actually build the first one with the intent of throwing it away. Others release it as v1.0, and introduce issues of the kind this author is referring to.
There are many reasons you might prefer a rewrite. The main one, to me, is that complicated applications contain layers and dependencies, not all of which are obvious to a new programmer. If, after some analysis, your assumptions about these dependencies are wrong, you'll break the original code faster than you can say "global variable". In the end, you could easily spend more time and effort patching and praying than you would rebuilding from the ground up.
Of course, if some of the original architects are still involved in the project, arhictectural knowledge and assumptions can be transferred to new programmers in a fairly fluid way, and I suspect it is in these cases where you can confidently add on to an existing code base.
And it's always helpful if the previous programmers were actually good programmers, and who wrote code and comments that were mindful of those who might follow them later. But that's not within your control.
I don't think it would even matter if they could claim "that's not really us". If some previous holder of the SysV source code rights knowingly contributed their "derivative works" (JFS, NUMA, etc.) under the GPL, the game is up -- whether that is the same company as today's holder or not.
Couldn't someone just slip nefarious code into the source they are hosting on their mirror, then compute new hashes so that everything appears legit? You could also rebuild the binaries that you are hosting to include this evil code. And even if you are not mirroring, the GPL lets you create your own distro as long as you publish source. Just add the nasty code, publish it, and trust that none of the users will go hunting for problems. After all, it was the source MAINTAINERS who found this particular attempted exploit, thanks to some tools they were running.
I'm certainly no expert on Linux mirrors and the like. Does anyone know if there is a way to prevent what I describe?
I just read the claims in the patent. This is completely outrageous.
In a nutshell, it covers the universal mechanism of delivering user-specific dynamic web content: tag the user with a unique ID (usually by way of a cookie), then use this ID as a lookup key into a database where user-specific settings reside (which the user provided at some earlier point by submitting an HTML form), then deliver HTML pages that are customized based on the stored user information (e.g. "This page was generated by a Barrel of Attack Elephants for cdunworth.")
If this patent is enforceable, nearly every single web application ever written would be subject to it. Your online bank uses this mechanism. Slashdot uses this mechanism. Amazon uses this mechanism.
There must be prior art to invalidate this. Aren't there any software developers that work at the patent office???
I read many of your other replies, and the picture is now clearer.
First of all, my comment about $$$ is now even more relevant. You'll be giving up a cush high-paying job to become a grad student. That's several years of income you'll have to compensate for if your goals are financial ones -- maybe $50k or more per annum of gross loss during your grad school years. That's a $200k shortfall in four years, possibly more. It'll take 20 additional years to break even if a PhD means $10k per annum more when you get out. And with the way the tech market is going, with jobs migrating across the globe to locales where the cost of living is lower and labor supply higher, this gap is going to be even harder to overcome, if not impossible.
It sounds like your goals are not primarily financial, but center on job satisfaction. In that case, all other commentary regarding research and academia seems more relevant. To switch gears from software to hardware will almost certainly require additional schooling, assuming your current Master's degree is not in hardware.
Committing to a PhD program is great (essential, even) for finding a research or academic position, but is probably a waste of time if your objective is to get an applied IT job (programming, network admin, system architecture, etc.).
A PhD program means four or more years of low-paid graduate student life. While you could be out there gaining real project experience and earning a good salary, you will instead be slaving away on some niche research effort that only a tiny handful of people care about.
In practical terms, we could be talking about $12k per year as a student, versus $40k as entry level IT. After four years, the net difference is astounding. And if your program takes longer than that, it grows larger. And you still won't have acquired the credentials that employers really care about first: "years of experience" with a needed skill set. Unless, of course, you spend your grad student years replacing Linux SMP and RCU with clean-room implementations free of potential IP entanglements.
So my larger point is, think also about your bottom line when making this decision.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
This was reviewed a few months ago here on Slashdot. On the recommendation, I picked it up -- and it is absolutely fascinating (I am 80% finished).
The author does a formidable job chronicling the Manhattan Project, deftly blending politics, biography, history, and science into a suspenseful and intensely engaging story. The science and the scientists really take center stage, which endows the book with unmistakable geek appeal. It's long (800+ pages), but so very worth the time.
Slashdot Mirror
A better title would be "Games portray the gender and ethnicity of their creators". Which should be completely obvious. "Write what you know", as the adage goes.
I don't understand why Christians resort to such histrionics to combat science on science's terms.
Want a retort to evolution? Here's one: God created it. He created earth, made it look 4+ billion years old, added fossils, plate tectonics, bosons, whatever you want. Why does this discussion always require God to start the game at the beginning? He started in the middle. He's all powerful.
Now, this "answer" doesn't advance our understanding of the world any. But maybe it will give us some peace and quiet.
I don't think most folks can push tiny, tightly packed hardware keyboard buttons easily or accurately with gloves on.
I disagree. If Big Bad Parmacorp A bilks people with a non-cure treatment spread over 20 years, then Big Bad Pharmacorp B is incented to trump that "treatment" with a cure. Competition should take care of this.
Parent's got it right. In terms of subscriber numbers:
In 2005, US market was about 200M phones, so 1% is 2M phones. AT&T (then Cingular) had 61M subscribers. Thus, 2/61 = 3.3% of AT&T subscribers.
Also, roughly 1/3 of all mobile phones in the US are replaced each year, so 20M AT&T subscribers would be expected to upgrade this year, even in the absence of the iPhone as enticement. So 10% of this more motivated group would also net the desired 1%.
As parent mentioned, this doesn't account for carrier hoppers.
Dvorak thinks Apple's success formula has been simple: "play the fashion game", and advertise. I think this analysis is completely off the mark.
Apple has been crazy successful because of their single minded devotion to one thing: USABILITY.
The iPhone nails nearly all the usability problems left unsolved by previous "smart" phones. BIG screen. TOUCH screen (finger, not stylus). Usable audio/video software. Sweet maps. Sufficient storage for music. WiFi (fast, and untethers you from the carrier). Large onscreen keyboard for fast text entry. All apps just ONE tap away.
It's not just "jazzy", with an impressive list of bullet points. It promises to be so easy to use -- even fun -- that people who only use their phone for calls today will actually CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR, and begin to see their phone as a portal to the web, to email, to maps. I'm talking mainstream users, here, not techies.
That's huge. This won't be "passe" three months from now, as he contends. I think it will establish a new standard for usability, and leave the Nokias and Motorolas scrambling to play catch up.
All MHO, of course....
Audiophiles will always want massive storage -- 8Gb won't do. Photogs will always want a real camera with a camera's form-factor and controls, not a watered-down point-and-shoot in the shape of a phone. The price-conscious won't drop $500. People who hate Cingular won't switch providers. People who want "just a phone" won't want their battery drained by superfluous services. PDA users seem to want third party apps, which Apple won't allow. Some people don't want to be tethered to iTunes. (And on and on...)
The iPhone looks slick. The pre-loaded software looks pretty, and intuitive. The touch-screen display is where "smart" phones should have been all along. But this thing just won't be for everyone, for all the reasons above, and surely dozens more. Apple will not be putting any special purpose device makers out of business with this.
I would suggest something from the iAudio line (can get most of them at newegg). All of their models offer USB mass storage accessibility, as well as play OGGs out of the box (my two main screening criteria). I just got the iAudio G3 two weeks ago and it's great (if you don't mind the ho-hum looks and the nipple-stick interface).
Well, as long as we're just advertising in this thread....why not come by and try Earthcomber! (I'm one of the engineers there...)
We've built a free (as in beer) location finding utility with integrated mapping which runs on the PalmOS. Lets you mark spots out in the field (with or without GPS), then push them back to the mothership where you can share them with location-based interest groups in the Earthcomber Community area (think Yahoo Groups with maps). It's an early version, so we've got lots of issues (coverage area is US-only right now, our maps aren't the prettiest, the desired features list is a mile long, etc.).
And technically, you don't even need a Palm to use the interest groups -- we let you mark and view spots right on the web. But the Palm makes it cooler. You could use this to keep a travel log, go geocaching, start a group for great photography spots -- whatever you want. Come on by and let us know what you think. We'd love to get feedback from tech savvy users.
Regards,
-Chris
We maintain a database of locations labelled by keywords. As a user, you can create search lists containing the keywords you want to find. Then the software looks for every place nearby which is labelled by a keyword in your active search list. Simple. The keywords attached to locations are picked by the proprietors themselves, so as a business you're not at the mercy of a relevance-scoring algorithm.
And it's all free to the user, including pan/zoom maps of the entire US to take with you.
We're really just getting started, so the service has several known (big) issues. To wit:
It's Palm-only
Not much commercial data (right now, it's mostly historic, civic, and geographic points of interest)
Our coverage area is limited to the US
It's not "over the airwaves" -- you have to download map and location data to your PC, then sync to your device (we offer a utility which helps)
Missing lots of little features, niceties (at this point, our enhancements list is a mile long)
;-) If your thing is photography, create a group marking great spots to take a photo. If you like hiking, mark the hiking trail heads in your area. Solicit others to join and do the same, and pretty soon there's a whole world of locations relevant to your area of interest that you never even knew were there. Anyway, I think it could be cool. It just needs people.
We also have a non-commercial offering which I think is really unique, and that's Earthcomber Community . It's like Yahoo Groups, but it's location-based. Our groups let you drop points on the maps, which you can then download and take with you. Or just view them on the web (no handheld required to use Community).
Again, we're brand new, so there aren't tons of groups. But you could start one today!
OK, I'll stop pimping. But since what we are doing is relevant to your point, I thought I'd toss our hat in the ring.
Regards,
Chris
Also experienced the innacuracy issue (the YP record was for a store at street number 940, the images were all of a building with a prominent '800' on their awning).
I suspect the problem could be that the geocoding database which they use to translate a street address into a latitude & longitude is inaccurate (a common problem). Even if the photos they took are perfectly coordinated with the street map vectors, the lat/long that the geocoder produced could be off by as much as a block or two.
---
http://www.earthcomber.com/
Earthcomber: The world according to you!
Well, I can't address all your concerns, but with respect to mapping software...
...we've just recently released Earthcomber, which is a point-of-interest (POI) locator with integrated digital mapping for Palm handhelds (and soon PocketPC, around February). In order to get this early version out the door, we left some important features on the cutting room floor, so it is admittedly a little rough around the edges, mapping-wise (we are working hard to remedy that). However, we do support a great many GPS devices. And the software, maps, and service are all COMPLETELY FREE (as in beer) to end users. Why don't you come by and give it a try (and maybe give us some feedback)?
;-)
<shameless-self-promotion>
www.earthcomber.com
Think of it kind of like an on-board yellow pages with built-in search agent that's always hunting for the places you want to find. Unlike the yellow pages, however, we don't just want commercial POIs. We want really cool, non-commercial POIs, too (e.g. hiking trail heads, great picnic spots, scenic overlooks, houses with cool holiday lights displays, or whatever crazy stuff you can think of). We've got about 1.3 million POIs right now, mostly non-commercial stuff loaded from various free sources. Perhaps there's something in there for you. And if it takes some time for us to get POIs you care about, well....in the meantime you can still use the free maps.
</shameless-self-promotion>
Hope that helps...
-chris
Your point is completely tangential to mine. I neither stated nor implied anything about what is done with that remaining 4/5 after the hypothetical job shift. But, since you brought this up......are you implying that the remaining 4/5 would NOT go back into the economy if it was still in the first worker's hands, rather than the owner's?
Just because a single wage could support five Indians doesn't mean it's going to. If the needs of the project are ONE peson, they will hire ONE Indian at 1/5 the cost, and someone with an ownership deed will pocket the other 4/5 as profit. So the tally sheet is: one person loses a job, one person gains a job, and ownership keeps more of the fruits of labor for themselves. That seems a more reasonable assumption than thinking more people will get jobs out of this.
It's really common to build something, step back, examine its warts, and start over again with a new perspective and understanding. It's called prototyping. Some people actually build the first one with the intent of throwing it away. Others release it as v1.0, and introduce issues of the kind this author is referring to.
There are many reasons you might prefer a rewrite. The main one, to me, is that complicated applications contain layers and dependencies, not all of which are obvious to a new programmer. If, after some analysis, your assumptions about these dependencies are wrong, you'll break the original code faster than you can say "global variable". In the end, you could easily spend more time and effort patching and praying than you would rebuilding from the ground up.
Of course, if some of the original architects are still involved in the project, arhictectural knowledge and assumptions can be transferred to new programmers in a fairly fluid way, and I suspect it is in these cases where you can confidently add on to an existing code base.
And it's always helpful if the previous programmers were actually good programmers, and who wrote code and comments that were mindful of those who might follow them later. But that's not within your control.
I don't think it would even matter if they could claim "that's not really us". If some previous holder of the SysV source code rights knowingly contributed their "derivative works" (JFS, NUMA, etc.) under the GPL, the game is up -- whether that is the same company as today's holder or not.
Couldn't someone just slip nefarious code into the source they are hosting on their mirror, then compute new hashes so that everything appears legit? You could also rebuild the binaries that you are hosting to include this evil code. And even if you are not mirroring, the GPL lets you create your own distro as long as you publish source. Just add the nasty code, publish it, and trust that none of the users will go hunting for problems. After all, it was the source MAINTAINERS who found this particular attempted exploit, thanks to some tools they were running.
I'm certainly no expert on Linux mirrors and the like. Does anyone know if there is a way to prevent what I describe?
I meant "hordes", but accidentally conflated it with "hoards". Was it _really_ necessary to be a prick about it? Mistakes happen.
I was being sarcastic. "Scant tens of hoodwinked saps" would have been more accurate.
I just read the claims in the patent. This is completely outrageous.
In a nutshell, it covers the universal mechanism of delivering user-specific dynamic web content: tag the user with a unique ID (usually by way of a cookie), then use this ID as a lookup key into a database where user-specific settings reside (which the user provided at some earlier point by submitting an HTML form), then deliver HTML pages that are customized based on the stored user information (e.g. "This page was generated by a Barrel of Attack Elephants for cdunworth.")
If this patent is enforceable, nearly every single web application ever written would be subject to it. Your online bank uses this mechanism. Slashdot uses this mechanism. Amazon uses this mechanism.
There must be prior art to invalidate this. Aren't there any software developers that work at the patent office???
...but if the parallax "sweet spot" is too small, you might need a head brace to lock your skull in the proper position.
Where can we see one of these in person?
Any chance you can post the content of those letters for the rest of us to take a look at?
I read many of your other replies, and the picture is now clearer.
First of all, my comment about $$$ is now even more relevant. You'll be giving up a cush high-paying job to become a grad student. That's several years of income you'll have to compensate for if your goals are financial ones -- maybe $50k or more per annum of gross loss during your grad school years. That's a $200k shortfall in four years, possibly more. It'll take 20 additional years to break even if a PhD means $10k per annum more when you get out. And with the way the tech market is going, with jobs migrating across the globe to locales where the cost of living is lower and labor supply higher, this gap is going to be even harder to overcome, if not impossible.
It sounds like your goals are not primarily financial, but center on job satisfaction. In that case, all other commentary regarding research and academia seems more relevant. To switch gears from software to hardware will almost certainly require additional schooling, assuming your current Master's degree is not in hardware.
Good luck, however you choose to go.
Committing to a PhD program is great (essential, even) for finding a research or academic position, but is probably a waste of time if your objective is to get an applied IT job (programming, network admin, system architecture, etc.).
A PhD program means four or more years of low-paid graduate student life. While you could be out there gaining real project experience and earning a good salary, you will instead be slaving away on some niche research effort that only a tiny handful of people care about.
In practical terms, we could be talking about $12k per year as a student, versus $40k as entry level IT. After four years, the net difference is astounding. And if your program takes longer than that, it grows larger. And you still won't have acquired the credentials that employers really care about first: "years of experience" with a needed skill set. Unless, of course, you spend your grad student years replacing Linux SMP and RCU with clean-room implementations free of potential IP entanglements.
So my larger point is, think also about your bottom line when making this decision.
The author does a formidable job chronicling the Manhattan Project, deftly blending politics, biography, history, and science into a suspenseful and intensely engaging story. The science and the scientists really take center stage, which endows the book with unmistakable geek appeal. It's long (800+ pages), but so very worth the time.