I'm a US citizen by birth, and living in the US. I'm employed by a technology staffing services corporation, which is based in India, and I'm working at a US technology corporation.
So, that US corporation, outsourcing to India, hired workers born in the US, as well as workers who were born in several other countries.
It's the 21st century. You can't tell who's doing what where just from the mailing addresses anymore, especially not when you're dealing with information technology.
Saying all that I work for a company which has invested millions into Java applications. Considering how Oracle has been acting the tech leads are pushing to moving us back to C++.
The super-rich gamble enormous amounts of wealth at their fancy gambling tables, wealth which takes years of hard work and ingenuity to create. They profit from the fallacy of the broken window.
This is sad. These are exactly the sorts of dilemmas from which FLOSS is intended to save us.
Well, as a manager, that's his job - to maximise the wealth of the company shareholders. If Java isn't making money (directly or indirectly), then he needs to institute change so that it *does* make money one way or another. Otherwise he wouldn't be doing his job (and then he'd be fired and replaced by the board of directors).
In other news, experts suggest that eliminating health benefits and blocking single-payer healthcare may lead to decreased worker productivity, that low taxation rates may lead to infrastructure decay, and that destroying the biosphere may have a negative impact on the long-term profitability of energy companies.
There is no such thing as free will in the first place.
Bullshit. The fact that I could read your comment and reply, or not, in any manner I see fit negates your statement. I can choose to have wine or a beer or nothing with my supper tonight, or I could choose to go out and spend my money elsewhere. Etc. It's the asshats who want to predetermine or legislate your free will that are the problem.
It depends on your definition of "free will." David Hume said that people believe in free will because they remember when they acted a particular way and imagine they might have acted differently; whereas others who know them could have predicted they would have acted just as they did.
One's personality is a constraint on one's actions, and personalities develop under particular social and material circumstances. If personality wasn't a constraint, no one could predict even their own actions, nor take responsibility for them after the fact; actions would be random.
So you either have to define "free will" in such a way as to acknowledge that the will can never be entirely free of any constraint, or else reject the concept of "free will." The latter approach makes it difficult to describe what it is we want when we want to eliminate constraints upon our actions; the former approach requires a complex definition for what seems at first a simple concept.
One of the things I found frustrating about calculus was that we had a lot of drill, with little or no explanation of what we were being drilled upon.
For instance, I remember spending about two weeks on l'Hospital's rule, in two different classes. One instructor laboriously worked through proofs, and was scrupulous about terminology. The other instructor offered cute mnemonic devices. The same textbook was used both times: a paragraph introducing l'Hospital's rule talked about a "struggle" between two derivatives with an uncertain conclusion. It was clearly an incomplete thought.
Later, it dawned on me that it amounted to, "If you can't work out what happens when comparing two rates of change, try comparing the rates of change of the rates of change. Recurse as needed." That, some of the caveats, and a few illustrative sketches would have explained it clearly in a single lecture; a handful of problems would have verified that I understood it. Instead, I got weeks of confusing lectures and about a hundred increasingly complicated problems that drilled me on a procedure that, at that point, I didn't understand.
If you don't understand the point of the procedure, how are you to recognize when it would be useful to apply it, if it's outside the context of a homework problem set or an exam? Yet there never seemed to be any concern with whether we understood mathematics conceptually, only whether we could grind through meaningless assignments.
If the US Supreme Court has the authority to suspend the death penalty on the basis of its unconstitutionally arbitrary imposition, as the court did in 1972, it would follow that the federal government has the authority to set limits to the use of the death penalty.
See A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart. At least follow that link, even if you ignore the rest of what I write.
I was taking community college courses until recently. Initially, my plan was to take the prerequisites for a computer science degree, then transfer. I found the computer related courses interesting and generally well within my abilities; in particular, I found programming courses very easy, even the ones in which I was sitting next to professional software developers who were brushing up their skills. The courses on mathematics were quite another story. In my first semester as a (returning) full time student, I found I spent over 90% of my study time on Calculus I.
What really struck me as puzzling was that on the one hand, I could not keep up with the complex transformations on the chalkboard and the homework assignments that the other students could. On the other hand, outside of that classroom, I found that the same students showed no particular intellectual strengths beyond mine; those that were in the same programming classes that I was in weren't as good as I was at programming, or even at understanding the mathematical applications of programming. The students showed no curiosity about nor enthusiasm for mathematics; for that matter, neither did the instructors. Yet I was curious and enthusiastic about mathematics. I actually have read books on algebra for pleasure.
Years ago, when I was in college for the first time, I was an English major; for years afterwards, I was astonished when I would meet former classmates who couldn't remember any of the literature we'd studied together. Now, I find that when I talk to engineers and developers, I'm astonished that many of them remember little mathematics beyond basic algebra.
I understand Lockhart's point to be that the model for teaching mathematics is at odds with the nature of mathematics; that we waste years of students' time teaching them gibberish, which they will not remember or use, while discouraging those that would actually love mathematics from actually encountering the subject. The way mathematics is taught now is something like the way Latin used to be taught: its necessity is exaggerated, those elements that are necessary are passed over quickly, and both its real utility and its intellectual appeal is buried under tons of meaningless busywork.
The last time I saw a price for a 100 MB Zip disk, it was still more expensive than the 2 GB USB flash drives that were for sale in the "impulse buy" area at the checkout line in a drugstore.
Babylon 5 established that having a multi-season plot arc is a good and viable approach to writing a television series. It allows you to do things possible in novels that aren't possible in the traditional model of television series in which each episode hits the reset button. In particular, you can set up mysteries and enigmas, connected to a larger-scale plot, that extends beyond each episode; this gives viewers a reason to watch each episode closely and take pains to avoid missing an episode.
However, to be effective, plot arcs must be written first, and kept in mind as each episode is written. If a writer simply throws in enigmas without the writer actually knowing what those enigmas signify, than eventually the entire thing will fall apart.
What amazes me is that while story arcs have become increasingly common, it still seems rare that the writers actually have the story arc plotted out first.
I was very angry at the conclusion of BSG. I had foolishly assumed that the plot arc had been meticulously written out from the beginning; I kept extending credit to the series, expecting that many of the enigmas would have some significance, and that everything would come together in the end in some intellectually satisfying resolution. I kept extending credit after the New Caprica episodes, ignoring the evidence that the writers were just winging it.
One example that I found particularly irritating about BSG, that I'm surprised I haven't seen pointed out elsewhere: at the end of one of the earliest episodes (was it the pilot?), Adama returns to his cabin to find a note, saying only, "There are twelve Cylon models," with no indication where that note came from. We never find out who left the note, or why they thought Adama should know this. Worse, since the conclusion of the series, I found out that not only had they not worked out the identity of the Final Five, but that they hadn't even planned for the Final Five to be part of the plot; the writers even forgot that they'd only invented six of the Significant Seven. So, the writers called attention to an enigma -- why exactly twelve Cylon models -- which they hadn't even thought about themselves, and which they never explained.
In short, while BSG had some interesting elements, while at the episode level the writing was good, there was very bad writing, to the level of incompetent and amateurish, at the overall plot level.
I'm tempted to think that this is a problem of sloppy postmodernism: suspicion of meta-narratives lapses into blindly neglecting meta-narratives, forgetting their importance to good storytelling.
(I'm writing too much already, but in fantasy, "A Song of Fire and Ice" seems to me to suffer from a similar problem.)
And that article even admits they were teaching class for 5th and 6th grades in desks made for 3rd graders.
I'm very thin, and was noted as very thin as a child, yet I found the seats I had to sit in uncomfortably small. Come to think of it, one of the things I liked about visits to school computer labs was that they had adult-sized cushioned chairs, so they were comfortable.
The school buses we rode in had seats that, supposedly, accommodated three children each; seating was enforced on that basis. Even for very small children, the seats had space for, perhaps, two and a half children. For older kids, with the seats full (as they inevitably were), this meant that the kids in the aisle sides of the seats would have just part of one thigh on the seat, and would be leaning against each other across the aisle, completely blocking the aisles. The crowding meant that riding the bus was physically painful, and getting off the bus meant literally walking over other children's thighs. It often occurred to me that as a child, that in the event of a traffic accident, many of the children riding the bus would be trampled to death in a panic when trying to exit the bus.
In the US at least, and it sounds as if this is the case in Australia as well, decades of shorting public school budgets have resulted in institutionalized cruelty to children through the establishment of standards that are literally insane.
My understanding was that the major reason for/64 blocks being the minimum was that the standard addressing scheme uses a node's 64 bit MAC address for the host portion of the IPv6 address.
We're already almost done implementing IPv6. Most operating systems and Internet applications support IPv6 and have for years. There are some exception -- MySQL comes to mind -- but they're delaying mostly because IPv6 isn't in general use yet. The biggest roadblock is that ISPs are dragging their feet.
The plan was, we were supposed to have a transitional period in which both IPv4 and IPv6 were in use. But there aren't enough IPv4 addresses left for a comfortable transitional period. We'll have to use complex, problematic approaches such as ISP-level NATs to stretch out the use of IPv4.
One explanation of Firefly I'd heard was that, while Fox didn't like Joss Whedon, they knew he was too good to allow the competition to have him. So they got him on contract, then ran the show in a terrible slot for its demographic, messed up the order of episodes, and generally, did everything they could to submerge the show without outright killing it.
I think people generally think of what they see in the day to day world as a 2D scene. Sure you rely on depth perception, but it's sort of at a lower level of thought.
I think that's quite accurate.
I enjoyed Avatar. As I watched it, I was struggling to understand what the point was of using 3D in Avatar. Before long, it dawned on me that in the scenes which genuinely had depth effects (many didn't), my eyes were drawn to the specific focal point of that scene. 3D effects were a tool for the filmmakers to control where the audience is looking.
I have mixed feelings about that: sure, it's another tool for filmmakers, but it comes at a cost. In addition to the discomfort of the apparatus, I felt for much of the movie as if I was being coerced, by being forced to look at what the filmmaker wanted me to look at, not what I wanted to look at.
I'd been puzzled at some of the negative response to Avatar -- reviews often complain how manipulative and conventional the plot is, but that's hardly unusual in an action movie. I wonder now if some of the negative response is from the physical experience of watching the movie, being attributed to the narrative form of the movie.
Anyway, I think the utility of this technique is limited.
I want to like Abiword -- it's much lighter weight than OpenOffice.org Writer, and pretty much just the features I want for document creation. Unfortunately, it's buggy, particularly in displaying documents and editing tables. I'd like an Abiword without additional features, just without the bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations on completely missing the point.
What's sad about it?
Well, aside from using staffing companies to avoid paying benefits. But it's the same scenario if the staffing company is based in the US.
But that aside, it's an illustration of the point made in the summary: trade between the US and India goes in both directions.
I'm a US citizen by birth, and living in the US. I'm employed by a technology staffing services corporation, which is based in India, and I'm working at a US technology corporation.
So, that US corporation, outsourcing to India, hired workers born in the US, as well as workers who were born in several other countries.
It's the 21st century. You can't tell who's doing what where just from the mailing addresses anymore, especially not when you're dealing with information technology.
Saying all that I work for a company which has invested millions into Java applications. Considering how Oracle has been acting the tech leads are pushing to moving us back to C++.
The super-rich gamble enormous amounts of wealth at their fancy gambling tables, wealth which takes years of hard work and ingenuity to create. They profit from the fallacy of the broken window.
This is sad. These are exactly the sorts of dilemmas from which FLOSS is intended to save us.
Well, as a manager, that's his job - to maximise the wealth of the company shareholders. If Java isn't making money (directly or indirectly), then he needs to institute change so that it *does* make money one way or another. Otherwise he wouldn't be doing his job (and then he'd be fired and replaced by the board of directors).
THE MAN AND THE GOLDEN EGGS
In other news, experts suggest that eliminating health benefits and blocking single-payer healthcare may lead to decreased worker productivity, that low taxation rates may lead to infrastructure decay, and that destroying the biosphere may have a negative impact on the long-term profitability of energy companies.
There is no such thing as free will in the first place.
Bullshit. The fact that I could read your comment and reply, or not, in any manner I see fit negates your statement. I can choose to have wine or a beer or nothing with my supper tonight, or I could choose to go out and spend my money elsewhere. Etc. It's the asshats who want to predetermine or legislate your free will that are the problem.
It depends on your definition of "free will." David Hume said that people believe in free will because they remember when they acted a particular way and imagine they might have acted differently; whereas others who know them could have predicted they would have acted just as they did.
One's personality is a constraint on one's actions, and personalities develop under particular social and material circumstances. If personality wasn't a constraint, no one could predict even their own actions, nor take responsibility for them after the fact; actions would be random.
So you either have to define "free will" in such a way as to acknowledge that the will can never be entirely free of any constraint, or else reject the concept of "free will." The latter approach makes it difficult to describe what it is we want when we want to eliminate constraints upon our actions; the former approach requires a complex definition for what seems at first a simple concept.
One of the things I found frustrating about calculus was that we had a lot of drill, with little or no explanation of what we were being drilled upon.
For instance, I remember spending about two weeks on l'Hospital's rule, in two different classes. One instructor laboriously worked through proofs, and was scrupulous about terminology. The other instructor offered cute mnemonic devices. The same textbook was used both times: a paragraph introducing l'Hospital's rule talked about a "struggle" between two derivatives with an uncertain conclusion. It was clearly an incomplete thought.
Later, it dawned on me that it amounted to, "If you can't work out what happens when comparing two rates of change, try comparing the rates of change of the rates of change. Recurse as needed." That, some of the caveats, and a few illustrative sketches would have explained it clearly in a single lecture; a handful of problems would have verified that I understood it. Instead, I got weeks of confusing lectures and about a hundred increasingly complicated problems that drilled me on a procedure that, at that point, I didn't understand.
If you don't understand the point of the procedure, how are you to recognize when it would be useful to apply it, if it's outside the context of a homework problem set or an exam? Yet there never seemed to be any concern with whether we understood mathematics conceptually, only whether we could grind through meaningless assignments.
If the US Supreme Court has the authority to suspend the death penalty on the basis of its unconstitutionally arbitrary imposition, as the court did in 1972, it would follow that the federal government has the authority to set limits to the use of the death penalty.
See A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart. At least follow that link, even if you ignore the rest of what I write.
I was taking community college courses until recently. Initially, my plan was to take the prerequisites for a computer science degree, then transfer. I found the computer related courses interesting and generally well within my abilities; in particular, I found programming courses very easy, even the ones in which I was sitting next to professional software developers who were brushing up their skills. The courses on mathematics were quite another story. In my first semester as a (returning) full time student, I found I spent over 90% of my study time on Calculus I.
What really struck me as puzzling was that on the one hand, I could not keep up with the complex transformations on the chalkboard and the homework assignments that the other students could. On the other hand, outside of that classroom, I found that the same students showed no particular intellectual strengths beyond mine; those that were in the same programming classes that I was in weren't as good as I was at programming, or even at understanding the mathematical applications of programming. The students showed no curiosity about nor enthusiasm for mathematics; for that matter, neither did the instructors. Yet I was curious and enthusiastic about mathematics. I actually have read books on algebra for pleasure.
Years ago, when I was in college for the first time, I was an English major; for years afterwards, I was astonished when I would meet former classmates who couldn't remember any of the literature we'd studied together. Now, I find that when I talk to engineers and developers, I'm astonished that many of them remember little mathematics beyond basic algebra.
I understand Lockhart's point to be that the model for teaching mathematics is at odds with the nature of mathematics; that we waste years of students' time teaching them gibberish, which they will not remember or use, while discouraging those that would actually love mathematics from actually encountering the subject. The way mathematics is taught now is something like the way Latin used to be taught: its necessity is exaggerated, those elements that are necessary are passed over quickly, and both its real utility and its intellectual appeal is buried under tons of meaningless busywork.
The last time I saw a price for a 100 MB Zip disk, it was still more expensive than the 2 GB USB flash drives that were for sale in the "impulse buy" area at the checkout line in a drugstore.
Babylon 5 established that having a multi-season plot arc is a good and viable approach to writing a television series. It allows you to do things possible in novels that aren't possible in the traditional model of television series in which each episode hits the reset button. In particular, you can set up mysteries and enigmas, connected to a larger-scale plot, that extends beyond each episode; this gives viewers a reason to watch each episode closely and take pains to avoid missing an episode.
However, to be effective, plot arcs must be written first, and kept in mind as each episode is written. If a writer simply throws in enigmas without the writer actually knowing what those enigmas signify, than eventually the entire thing will fall apart.
What amazes me is that while story arcs have become increasingly common, it still seems rare that the writers actually have the story arc plotted out first.
I was very angry at the conclusion of BSG. I had foolishly assumed that the plot arc had been meticulously written out from the beginning; I kept extending credit to the series, expecting that many of the enigmas would have some significance, and that everything would come together in the end in some intellectually satisfying resolution. I kept extending credit after the New Caprica episodes, ignoring the evidence that the writers were just winging it.
One example that I found particularly irritating about BSG, that I'm surprised I haven't seen pointed out elsewhere: at the end of one of the earliest episodes (was it the pilot?), Adama returns to his cabin to find a note, saying only, "There are twelve Cylon models," with no indication where that note came from. We never find out who left the note, or why they thought Adama should know this. Worse, since the conclusion of the series, I found out that not only had they not worked out the identity of the Final Five, but that they hadn't even planned for the Final Five to be part of the plot; the writers even forgot that they'd only invented six of the Significant Seven. So, the writers called attention to an enigma -- why exactly twelve Cylon models -- which they hadn't even thought about themselves, and which they never explained.
In short, while BSG had some interesting elements, while at the episode level the writing was good, there was very bad writing, to the level of incompetent and amateurish, at the overall plot level.
I'm tempted to think that this is a problem of sloppy postmodernism: suspicion of meta-narratives lapses into blindly neglecting meta-narratives, forgetting their importance to good storytelling.
(I'm writing too much already, but in fantasy, "A Song of Fire and Ice" seems to me to suffer from a similar problem.)
And that article even admits they were teaching class for 5th and 6th grades in desks made for 3rd graders.
I'm very thin, and was noted as very thin as a child, yet I found the seats I had to sit in uncomfortably small. Come to think of it, one of the things I liked about visits to school computer labs was that they had adult-sized cushioned chairs, so they were comfortable.
The school buses we rode in had seats that, supposedly, accommodated three children each; seating was enforced on that basis. Even for very small children, the seats had space for, perhaps, two and a half children. For older kids, with the seats full (as they inevitably were), this meant that the kids in the aisle sides of the seats would have just part of one thigh on the seat, and would be leaning against each other across the aisle, completely blocking the aisles. The crowding meant that riding the bus was physically painful, and getting off the bus meant literally walking over other children's thighs. It often occurred to me that as a child, that in the event of a traffic accident, many of the children riding the bus would be trampled to death in a panic when trying to exit the bus.
In the US at least, and it sounds as if this is the case in Australia as well, decades of shorting public school budgets have resulted in institutionalized cruelty to children through the establishment of standards that are literally insane.
I think it's on the GRUB menu somewhere, but I can't remember the key to access the menu when I boot up my mind in the morning.
Doh!
Thanks for the correction.
My D-Link DIR-615 supports IPv6, with the manufacturer's firmware, and it cost $50.
My understanding was that the major reason for /64 blocks being the minimum was that the standard addressing scheme uses a node's 64 bit MAC address for the host portion of the IPv6 address.
We're already almost done implementing IPv6. Most operating systems and Internet applications support IPv6 and have for years. There are some exception -- MySQL comes to mind -- but they're delaying mostly because IPv6 isn't in general use yet. The biggest roadblock is that ISPs are dragging their feet.
The plan was, we were supposed to have a transitional period in which both IPv4 and IPv6 were in use. But there aren't enough IPv4 addresses left for a comfortable transitional period. We'll have to use complex, problematic approaches such as ISP-level NATs to stretch out the use of IPv4.
One explanation of Firefly I'd heard was that, while Fox didn't like Joss Whedon, they knew he was too good to allow the competition to have him. So they got him on contract, then ran the show in a terrible slot for its demographic, messed up the order of episodes, and generally, did everything they could to submerge the show without outright killing it.
Exactly. You can get support contracts from Red Hat or Canonical, for two examples.
Mod parent up!
This strikes me as genuinely useful advice.
It is a basic principle of composition that the important stuff is in the foreground; any background, realistic or not, is kind of optional.
I think people generally think of what they see in the day to day world as a 2D scene. Sure you rely on depth perception, but it's sort of at a lower level of thought.
I think that's quite accurate.
I enjoyed Avatar. As I watched it, I was struggling to understand what the point was of using 3D in Avatar. Before long, it dawned on me that in the scenes which genuinely had depth effects (many didn't), my eyes were drawn to the specific focal point of that scene. 3D effects were a tool for the filmmakers to control where the audience is looking.
I have mixed feelings about that: sure, it's another tool for filmmakers, but it comes at a cost. In addition to the discomfort of the apparatus, I felt for much of the movie as if I was being coerced, by being forced to look at what the filmmaker wanted me to look at, not what I wanted to look at.
I'd been puzzled at some of the negative response to Avatar -- reviews often complain how manipulative and conventional the plot is, but that's hardly unusual in an action movie. I wonder now if some of the negative response is from the physical experience of watching the movie, being attributed to the narrative form of the movie.
Anyway, I think the utility of this technique is limited.
I want to like Abiword -- it's much lighter weight than OpenOffice.org Writer, and pretty much just the features I want for document creation. Unfortunately, it's buggy, particularly in displaying documents and editing tables. I'd like an Abiword without additional features, just without the bugs.
The trouble I have with the ribbon is that the set of features I use frequently is not the set of features displayed on the ribbon.