This is about consistency and completeness
on
Get a Free MIT Education
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes you may be able to find the information you need on Google, but this will almost always be data in isolation. MIT will leverage the fact that all of the data is contained within one logical system in order to enhance cross referencing, indexing, searching and metadata generation. Done correctly it will be a truly cohesive, intelligent library. I contend that we have only scaped the surface of what can be achieved with the web in terms of information management and I suspect the MIT project is also interested in advacning the state of the art.
Don't underestimate the cost of web publishing
on
Get a Free MIT Education
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· Score: 5, Insightful
MIT is about to create a huge web repository that will easily rival Yahoo and MSN in its engineering needs. Almost all of the web pages will have to be redone to create a uniform look, feel and functionality. Outside of that there will have to be mechanisms in place for new material to be published in an efficient manner. Factor in server costs, database licenses, and the biggest cost - labor - and you can easily get into large dollar amounts.
Its not just about setting up a web site - its the cost of migrating the practices of an entire institution around a new model of information dispersal. This will definitely erode the value of journals as graduate work starts filtering in to the system.
MIT may even be attempting somehting more daunting by trying to productize the process to be sold to other institutions, I'm not sure, but that would raise costs even higher.
He hasn't even the slightest fantasy of taking over America. He just wants us to leave them alone. Sounds simple to me.
How about the many times that bin Laden has called for the destruction of Israel? Its clear the man has a broader objective that fits in with the established pattern of Islamic fundamentalist dogma.
Time and again, the leaders of the Taleban have stated their desire to speak with us
Please, you aren't interviewing on CNN. Don't insult our intelligence.
The Soviets were using Hind gunships to clean up the desert. The Afghans were being slaughtered. The US came in and brought the Stinger, which was an effective countermeasure against the best tech the Soviets had for suppresing the mujahudeen.
Without the Stinger the Afghans may very well have been wiped out - the Hind was the perfect weapon for the job - fast enough to find mujahudeen before they could clear the firing range, and controllable enough to allow incredibly focused firepower.
Once the Soviets were unable to control the skies, the forces were more or less equilized. Needing a 3-1 advantage as any attacker does, the odds were against the Soviets.
The Stinger has a 3-4 year lifespan on some parts - it is unlikely that Stingers from the 80s are a threat now - they probably do not function at this point.
The Sept 11 gang was in the US for a long time soaking up our vices, and one of them was even observed in a porn shop. Beer and tits didn't give them pause. In fact its likely that they had the same reaction most intolerant people do - they soaked up the porn, but later in the guilt phase it probably made them hate the US more for presenting them with the means to betray their faith.
And I don't mean in Afghanistan. A by-product of this conflict will be vastly increased surveillance and observation. When Bush said "you are either with us or against us", you can interpret that to say that in the future, the US will only do business with and allow travel to/from nations that observe and track as closely as we will. This means profiling and tracking by key demographics.
Once you seal up the US as "secure" through surveillance and tracking, the "interfaces" to the US will also required to be secured, and those nations that do not engage in similar practices will simply be part of the "them". No one is going to risk lowering security through transitivity.
Note that I am not being cynical about this - in this instance, racial profiling and surveillance based on that profiling would have worked. We know its not the 70 year old granny from Boca Raton that is seeding the water supply with poisons. We should use that information to make better guesses about who is tracked.
Your computer spends most of its time just waiting for you to do something. If you have purchased a PC in the last six months (Athlon or P4) you certainly have far more CPU capacity than your I/O merits.
As for "code bloat" - deal with it, you are getting something bacl. Look at the memeory consumption for KDE2 vs. blackbox. sure, you are using ten times the memory, but in return you are getting a great deal of functionality. Your computer is there to be used, not preserved. Why not fill up that RAM? Why not saturate that CPU?
With general purpose processors becoming blindingly fast, there will be even less need for ASICs - over time, what can't be solved with repackaged commodoty circuitry can simply be farmed off to the CPU or done in software.
This will be key in driving down the cost of computing, as custom logic will always be more expensive than commodity logic.
While I would expect these developments to also obviously drive down the cost of developing custom logic, volume production will always make commodity logic more cost effective.
Why on earth would the KDE team move from a flexible, well known, openly standardized multiparadigm language to one that is closed, monoparadigm, and barely out of the gates????
KDE should consider using a interpreted language for desktop productivity apps exactly one year after Microsoft does. Try again in 2005.
I believe there is extensive remodelling called for by the current Perl6 gameplan, although I think this will further distance Perl 6 from Perl 5 programmers, and most likely some of them will simply move on to other languages which don't seem like such moving targets (although with Python claiming a signficant rewrite in the future, there may not be much of a safe harbor outside of yuck Java).
It might have stood a chance. At this point I really don't see much motivation for moving to Ruby. It doesn bring much to the table that Perl and Python don't already.
You may see some new Ruby programmers afte the Perl 6 fallout - I think there is going to be a severe backlash when Larry unleashses a language so vastly different from the pervious version that it really requires even experienced Perl programmers to go back to square one.
Hopefully you won't be marked as a troll, because I think in a way you are correct. Larry is recreating the language to be even more palatable to perl gurus but I think more hostile to newbies.
On the other hand, if you can obscure complex operations into short syntactic sequences, you can keep the programmer from shooting himself in the foot. Look at Java - its syntax is probably as plain and up-front as you can get, but the need to spell most things out explicitly means most programmers spell them out incorrectly. Therein lies the magic of some syntactic freakshows like regular expressions - imagine programmers defining their own NDFAs? I understand this is not a great example as other languages support perl-like regexes, but maybe you get my drift.
I think the conlcusion is that perl will be like Haskell and Lisp in a way (not a functional language per se) in that programming in perl will simply require a different approach and strategy. You'll have to think in perl in order to properly program in perl. It simply won't be for translating C into an interpreted environment or sh into a portable syntax, it'll be its own paradigm.
Larry is always interesting
on
Apocalypse 3
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Regardless of your opinion of perl, I find Larry's writings to be consistently insightful and although the humor os a bit corny, somewhat amusing.
How perl 6 will fare is another issue. The language is going to change radically - will developers follow Larry into perl 6, just use perl 5 compatibility mode, or move on altogether?
Retrofitting the thousands of commercial jets in use with new engines simply isn't practical.
As it stands, the terrorists have already blown their wad with reference to planes - they likely wouldn't use them in a subsequent attack - there are still plenty of transportation systems (land, sea) that are still wide open and completely insecure.
The reason experienced people cost more is that they can give educated opinions when fresh college grads often give blank stares.
Blank stares are cheaper. This is a business we are talking about - you hire the most cost-effective employee for the job they are doing. You simply cannot argue that every position in your office requires heavily experienced developers. This is absurd. Web page management, testing, QA and other tasks can easily be farmed out to less experienced developers who will appreciate the chance to learn and will also get you there a bit cheaper.
Added to whice, you haven't even introduced the jadedness factor. Older programmers are usually so crusty that its nearly impossible to sign them on as enthusiastic frontline developers - hardly any I know (myself included) are remotely interested in making a sacrifice play for any project. News grads on the other hand can't wait.
I aggree with you. It is better to teach fashionable stuff like Java and XML to highly-experienced employees than to hire college-students who happened to learn Java in college.
Not hiring younger employees is silly. What are you going to do when your older employees leave? Hiring other older programmers really doens't buy you much - they haven't spent nay time in your organization either, so really they aren't much further ahead of the college grads (they just cost a lot more).
Added to which, not all programming jobs are chief architect positions. You will not be able to hire experienced people to do grunt level work. This is where the college grads come in.
While there are some benefits for consumers, these efforts are about securing and tracking rights managment for content.
By grouping together enough content partners into one system, it will be impossible for consumers to avoid becoming enrolled. At that point, rights management will be effectively tracked through one authorization hierarchy.
Once again the naivety of people's views on surveillance rears its ugly head. Most urban centers are already heavily surveilled - they don't need advances in technology to provide 100% observational capabilities.
Go into any mall or major store and you are on camera. Go into any major office complex and you are on camera. Most cities have cameras at busy intersections. Satellites can provide amazing surveillance of ground activity anywhere.
Basically the only place you can be assured that you are not on candid camera is inside your home with the blinds drawn. Soon even this will evaporate - within five years there will be technologies that will allow someone to deposit a wireless camera in your house that will be too small for you to detect if it is well placed.
Its a quaint protest effort raised by some amusing cranks, but it has to be said, once again, that you have no real privacy left to protect.
Your credit history, purchasing habits, biographical information, tv viewing habits, web surfing habits and almost anything else you would care to keep to yourself can be revealed to people who do not know you with very little real effort. For most people reading slashdot, most societal notions of privacy were erased before they were born.
Use a credit card? Use your SSN as an id? Have a driver's license? If you answered yes to two out of three, then you can pretty much forget about personal privacy because you started building your own consumer database long ago.
If my employer deliberately behaves outside the law towards me, what obligation do I have to behave within the law to the company?
Well, if you go after them in a court of law you at least won't risk getting a criminal record yourself. This would strike me as common sense...aren't people here afraid of getting caught? You could ruin your chances of ever getting another decent job.
Try to always have six months pay saved up
on
Morals and Layoffs
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· Score: 2
Some of the best advice I was given early in my working life was to always have six months of wages saved up in case that "rainy day" should come.
Yes, its hard to save, but forgoing a new PC or a few DVDs here and there can keep you living the way you are accustomed to when the shit hits the fan.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you may be able to find the information you need on Google, but this will almost always be data in isolation. MIT will leverage the fact that all of the data is contained within one logical system in order to enhance cross referencing, indexing, searching and metadata generation. Done correctly it will be a truly cohesive, intelligent library. I contend that we have only scaped the surface of what can be achieved with the web in terms of information management and I suspect the MIT project is also interested in advacning the state of the art.
Its not just about setting up a web site - its the cost of migrating the practices of an entire institution around a new model of information dispersal. This will definitely erode the value of journals as graduate work starts filtering in to the system.
MIT may even be attempting somehting more daunting by trying to productize the process to be sold to other institutions, I'm not sure, but that would raise costs even higher.
As it stands MIT has a great endowment and they can easily fund this project without dipping into the funds you donated to graduate work.
How about the many times that bin Laden has called for the destruction of Israel? Its clear the man has a broader objective that fits in with the established pattern of Islamic fundamentalist dogma.
Time and again, the leaders of the Taleban have stated their desire to speak with us
Please, you aren't interviewing on CNN. Don't insult our intelligence.
Without the Stinger the Afghans may very well have been wiped out - the Hind was the perfect weapon for the job - fast enough to find mujahudeen before they could clear the firing range, and controllable enough to allow incredibly focused firepower.
Once the Soviets were unable to control the skies, the forces were more or less equilized. Needing a 3-1 advantage as any attacker does, the odds were against the Soviets.
The Stinger has a 3-4 year lifespan on some parts - it is unlikely that Stingers from the 80s are a threat now - they probably do not function at this point.
The Sept 11 gang was in the US for a long time soaking up our vices, and one of them was even observed in a porn shop. Beer and tits didn't give them pause. In fact its likely that they had the same reaction most intolerant people do - they soaked up the porn, but later in the guilt phase it probably made them hate the US more for presenting them with the means to betray their faith.
Once you seal up the US as "secure" through surveillance and tracking, the "interfaces" to the US will also required to be secured, and those nations that do not engage in similar practices will simply be part of the "them". No one is going to risk lowering security through transitivity.
Note that I am not being cynical about this - in this instance, racial profiling and surveillance based on that profiling would have worked. We know its not the 70 year old granny from Boca Raton that is seeding the water supply with poisons. We should use that information to make better guesses about who is tracked.
Welcome to the Panopticon!
As for "code bloat" - deal with it, you are getting something bacl. Look at the memeory consumption for KDE2 vs. blackbox. sure, you are using ten times the memory, but in return you are getting a great deal of functionality. Your computer is there to be used, not preserved. Why not fill up that RAM? Why not saturate that CPU?
This will be key in driving down the cost of computing, as custom logic will always be more expensive than commodity logic.
While I would expect these developments to also obviously drive down the cost of developing custom logic, volume production will always make commodity logic more cost effective.
KDE should consider using a interpreted language for desktop productivity apps exactly one year after Microsoft does. Try again in 2005.
I believe there is extensive remodelling called for by the current Perl6 gameplan, although I think this will further distance Perl 6 from Perl 5 programmers, and most likely some of them will simply move on to other languages which don't seem like such moving targets (although with Python claiming a signficant rewrite in the future, there may not be much of a safe harbor outside of yuck Java).
You may see some new Ruby programmers afte the Perl 6 fallout - I think there is going to be a severe backlash when Larry unleashses a language so vastly different from the pervious version that it really requires even experienced Perl programmers to go back to square one.
On the other hand, if you can obscure complex operations into short syntactic sequences, you can keep the programmer from shooting himself in the foot. Look at Java - its syntax is probably as plain and up-front as you can get, but the need to spell most things out explicitly means most programmers spell them out incorrectly. Therein lies the magic of some syntactic freakshows like regular expressions - imagine programmers defining their own NDFAs? I understand this is not a great example as other languages support perl-like regexes, but maybe you get my drift.
I think the conlcusion is that perl will be like Haskell and Lisp in a way (not a functional language per se) in that programming in perl will simply require a different approach and strategy. You'll have to think in perl in order to properly program in perl. It simply won't be for translating C into an interpreted environment or sh into a portable syntax, it'll be its own paradigm.
How perl 6 will fare is another issue. The language is going to change radically - will developers follow Larry into perl 6, just use perl 5 compatibility mode, or move on altogether?
As it stands, the terrorists have already blown their wad with reference to planes - they likely wouldn't use them in a subsequent attack - there are still plenty of transportation systems (land, sea) that are still wide open and completely insecure.
Its called planned obsolesence.
Blank stares are cheaper. This is a business we are talking about - you hire the most cost-effective employee for the job they are doing. You simply cannot argue that every position in your office requires heavily experienced developers. This is absurd. Web page management, testing, QA and other tasks can easily be farmed out to less experienced developers who will appreciate the chance to learn and will also get you there a bit cheaper.
Added to whice, you haven't even introduced the jadedness factor. Older programmers are usually so crusty that its nearly impossible to sign them on as enthusiastic frontline developers - hardly any I know (myself included) are remotely interested in making a sacrifice play for any project. News grads on the other hand can't wait.
Not hiring younger employees is silly. What are you going to do when your older employees leave? Hiring other older programmers really doens't buy you much - they haven't spent nay time in your organization either, so really they aren't much further ahead of the college grads (they just cost a lot more).
Added to which, not all programming jobs are chief architect positions. You will not be able to hire experienced people to do grunt level work. This is where the college grads come in.
See if you can pass any of the first year courses at IIT in India and get back to me.
By grouping together enough content partners into one system, it will be impossible for consumers to avoid becoming enrolled. At that point, rights management will be effectively tracked through one authorization hierarchy.
Go into any mall or major store and you are on camera. Go into any major office complex and you are on camera. Most cities have cameras at busy intersections. Satellites can provide amazing surveillance of ground activity anywhere.
Basically the only place you can be assured that you are not on candid camera is inside your home with the blinds drawn. Soon even this will evaporate - within five years there will be technologies that will allow someone to deposit a wireless camera in your house that will be too small for you to detect if it is well placed.
Your credit history, purchasing habits, biographical information, tv viewing habits, web surfing habits and almost anything else you would care to keep to yourself can be revealed to people who do not know you with very little real effort. For most people reading slashdot, most societal notions of privacy were erased before they were born.
Use a credit card? Use your SSN as an id? Have a driver's license? If you answered yes to two out of three, then you can pretty much forget about personal privacy because you started building your own consumer database long ago.
I know people who have are techies and have records - they cannot find gainful employment and have been reduced to day laboring and odd jobs.
Besides the fact that it will ruin your life, theft is just wrong. Isn't your dignity worth more than a laptop?
Well, if you go after them in a court of law you at least won't risk getting a criminal record yourself. This would strike me as common sense...aren't people here afraid of getting caught? You could ruin your chances of ever getting another decent job.
Yes, its hard to save, but forgoing a new PC or a few DVDs here and there can keep you living the way you are accustomed to when the shit hits the fan.