Would you seriously consider taking 20K/year for an IT job??? That's like $10/hr.. I made more than that when I worked IT in high school ten years ago.
Also, what kind of job are you talking about.. you mention college grads, but who goes to college to get an IT job? When I think of college grads, I'm thinking software developers and if you're a software developing who is at all good at what they do, you should even be considering an offer less than $40K, unless maybe you live in some backwater place in the south/west where you can get a house for like $300/month.
All of this is somewhat true, but I don't think it really makes your point. First, dynamic compilation is not a continuous process. Most code is quite cyclical, and the JVM does a good job of compiling the things that are used most in a highly optimized way. This is actually an advantage of dynamic compilation, the compiler can get information about what code is most used and optimize for that case. There are some compiler optimizations that only increase speed if they can be amortized over a large number of calls.
Also, memory footprint has nothing to do with dynamic compilation and everything to do with garbage collection. Again, there are a lot of advantages to garbage collection especially if your program is long running and uses a lot of dynamically allocated memory. It certainly does increase the memory footprint, but as other posters have mentioned, who cares? My G5 has 4GB and I could put another 4GB in if I felt like I needed it.
Java is built around the idea that programmer time is always more valuable than machine time. You'll notice that in the above comments several people have said that Azereus (which I have never used) is slow and bloated, but overall is simply better quality software. Slow, well-designed programs can be fixed by better hardware. Bad code can't be fixed by any machine. Therefore I'll always take the "bloated" language that helps me write better code over the "streamlined" one (i.e. C++) that encourages people to write obfuscated crap.
"Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist, is the degree to which you are free" -Joseph Campbell
The interesting thing though, is the amount of Powerbooks in TV and movies you see with their Apple logos blanked out (usually a gray disc over the Apple logo). TV shows and movies often uses Apple simply because they look like a computer should look (in the eyes of studio execs I guess). I suppose its possible Apple paid for these placements as well (albiet less than if the logo was displayed), but it seems unlikely.
This comment is pretty short-sighted. While I agree that Apple made a terrific choice with OS X, it is certainly not the only choice and maybe not even the best choice. UNIX-style operating systems have a lot of merit, but again, they're not the ONLY Right Way to write an OS. The NT kernel actually has a lot of good design in it and a lot of smart people worked on the early versions of it. In particular the message passing facilities in NT are much nicer than on many Unix systems.
Windows can easily be a viable platform without totally scrapping the fundamental design. I think its cool to see that Microsoft is willing to take the risk of starting over and trying to get a good platform to build on.
I've wondered for a long time why it was so hard for Microsoft to make good software. We all know that there are massive amounts of incredibly smart people there (most of the smartest people I knew in school work there). I think this article speaks to a lot of the reason and I think its neat to see that things _MIGHT_ be turning around.
There are plenty of places that implement runoff voting so this sort of thing doesn't happen. Unfortunately here, there's too much money invested in the two-party system its unlikely it will change soon.
The kind of ironic thing about this is that in a strange, round about way he's sort of right, though for reasons I'm sure he doesn't understand.
We all know that Mac OS X is based on Mach, of which one of the principal developers was Rick Rashid of RIT and later CMU. Funny thing is that after completing his studies, Rashid was hired by, you guessed it, Microsoft, to design a new operating system called NT. If you look at the kernel design of NT, there's a lot of Mach in there, though admittedly quite warped so that they could get decent performance out of it.
And before people get out their flame-throwers, yes I know this is a ridiculous stretch, its just what came to mind when I saw Metcalfe idiotic ramblings. Why is it that somebody "invents" one decently cool thing (along with a whole bunch of other people I imagine) and then feels like they have license to blather on about the future of technology as if they were suddenly granted some kind of oracular vision.
While I agree with your fundamental point, I'm a software engineer at Mot, and you can get a BASH prompt on the thing - you can also telnet and ssh into it. Granted, this isn't available to the average customer, its still cool. In addition many of the system services are run with SysV style init script. I don't know that anyone's actually done it, but there is speculation that we could make the phone software run on a regular PC, if we did a little emulation of a few hardware components. This is very useful for testing and debugging.
I actually think that having a 'real' OS on the phone is a big step. If you could see the code for the current OS used on most Motorola phones today, you would appreciate what a step forward going to Linux really is.
I'm thinking you're not a math major. Let's say between you and your wife, you're making 200K, pretax. Lop off 30% for Uncle Sam and you're left with 11.5K per month. So drop 5K on mortgage and you're left with 6.5K.. Take out 1500 for cars (those are nice cars too), save half the rest and you're still left with 2500/month. That's a lotta steaks..
Unfortunately, I think Eclipse pretty much blows under X11 (GTK+). At least compared to the GUI toolkits available on Win32 and OS X, GTK just doesn't cut it. I'm holding out hope that someday we'll have SWT bindings for QT, but due to licensing issues I doubt it will happen anytime soon.
No they aren't. Plaintiffs in civil lawsuits are awarded punitive damages all the time. This is where much of the money in "wrongful death" suits comes from. If I run over your 98 year old grandma and I'm sued in _civil_ court, you can't really argue any _actual damages_ becuase objectively your grandma isn't worth anything (you might be able to get funeral costs, etc..). However, you can argue that I'm a bastard and deserve to be punished monetarily. Now in this case, the cops might also be after me for vehicular manslaughter or something, but that's an entirely separate issue.
I call foul! To those of us who aren't gay, 'MJ' will always be reserved for number 23. Call him Jacko or 'has-been sick fuck popstar', anything but MJ.
VINCENT Yeah, it breaks down like this: it's legal to buy it, it's legal to own it and, if you're the proprietor of a hash bar, it's legal to sell it. It's legal to carry it, which doesn't really matter 'cause -- get a load of this -- if the cops stop you, it's illegal for this to search you. Searching you is a right that the cops in Amsterdam don't have.
>Economists come up with models, and test the >models, see results, and argue about the >interpretations when refining or rewriting >their models. What part of that isn't a >component of science?
The problem is that you left out a component: Any results that don't conform to the model, economists generally throw out. Specifically, the fundamental assumption of nearly all economic model is that of the rational actor. It says that, ceteris paribus, everyone acts in his own self-interest. We have myriad examples in real life to show that this isn't true, or rather, it isn't true for the economic definition of self-interest.
So the standard economic 'proof' of a model is: assume the model is true, gather results that fits your assumption, show results fit the model. This has a long way to go to be called science.
Disclaimer: I love economics and study a lot of it, however I can't really argue with the pseudo-science claim. I hope with some more advanced mathematics, economics can eventually move into the realm of real science.
Incidentally, I found that my brother, who is a freshman in high school, learned multiplication several years ago in one messed-up way (I'm 13 years older than him). While we would simply write this:
137 x23...he was taught to break it down into:
137 x 20 + 137 x 3
I'm not sure why this is so bad. This is actually how I usually do multiplication in my head. This is really equivalent to the traditional method of adding zeroes and carrying, it's just not as compact to write. Frankly, I think it explains the concepts behind multiplication than the traditional 'below the line' method.
If you want a messed up method for multiplication check out Russian peasant multiplication. It's actually surprisingly efficient for multiplying large numbers.
In any event, my point is that we should be teaching more of this kind of thing, not less. Get kids to actually think about the math they're doing, instead of just memorizing the mechanics.
It's nice to have concise little quips to shoot around, but with today's multi-state lotteries, this isn't exactly true anymore. In the Mega-Millions game the odds of winning the jackpot are about 135M to 1. If you combine this with the odds for all of the fixed value prizes, it turns that that expected value of a $1 ticket when the jackpot is $43M is about $1. Thus you can expect to get back your dollar if you bet a dollar. If the jackpot is $230M (like it was a few months ago), then expected value is close to $3.50, make a lottery ticket a very good bet (much better than any casino game). Granted this is a little off, since you can only expect this return on a large number of bets, but speaking from a strictly mathematical view, it's a good play.
So, it would be more accurate to say that when the jackpot is small (precisely, less than $43M for 5+1 ball lottery) the lottery is a tax on fools (or those who can't do math, whichever you like).
If you're just in it for the money, the lottery may be a better option. A detailed analysis is here.
Seriously, get a Ph.D only if you love it. I love being a graduate student, I'd do it for the rest of my life if I could (different fields of course). If you don't think you'd go to school just for the hell of it, I wouldn't pursue a Ph.D.
Doesn't Wired Have Their Own Website?
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
So I know that Slashdot is just a collection of links to other places, but really, does _every_ story from Wired have to be posted here? Granted this was a little better because it was posted in some proximity to the magazine being published, but don't most of us get Wired? At the very least, can we have a new category for "Wired Repost" so that those of us who do subscribe can filter it out??
So tell us, how long have you been involved with Amway?
This is a pyramid scheme. The problem is, it only works as long people are buying into the bottom. While I agree that there are lots of alternative ways to sell music, this isn't one of them.
If I'm Joe Indie, why would I want to let someone else take half the profit for "distributing" my music (which amounts to keeping it on their hard drive and running Kazaa or whatever), when I could do the same thing myself and get all of the profit?
Just for trivia's sake, here's a better example: Auto-summarize. I don't know if it's still in there, but it was feature in like Word 97, where you could highlight some portion of text and it would use your own words to extract a summary. When I first saw it I was pretty impressed with how good it was.. but who ever actually used this?
Not true. You need to be "authorized" to play it using sharing too. We just tried it a few hours ago. As soon as you try to play a song on some one else's computer that they purchased using Apple's service it asks you to input that person's password to authorize this computer.
This may be what they say, but it's not entirely accurate. I'm friends with one of the professors on the Purdue CS admissions committee, and he told me that the number one most important factor, far outwieghing anything else is recommendations. So, even if you came from a no-name school, but worked with someone who's respected in the community, it goes a long way. You have to remember that all they're trying to do is measure the likely-hood that you will complete the Ph.D program and do good work. Whatever you can do to prove that to them is all that matters.
There's a key difference here though. Java requires a run-time stack to do all of it's safety checking. This project aims to all of it's checking at compile time, so it's static, rather than dynamic. This is _VERY_ hard problem, and is where virtually all of the programming languages research is centered today. However, you're instinct that this is not a new concept is correct. Microsoft is actually doing very similar research in the form of a project called Vault.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you seriously consider taking 20K/year for an IT job??? That's like $10/hr.. I made more than that when I worked IT in high school ten years ago.
Also, what kind of job are you talking about.. you mention college grads, but who goes to college to get an IT job? When I think of college grads, I'm thinking software developers and if you're a software developing who is at all good at what they do, you should even be considering an offer less than $40K, unless maybe you live in some backwater place in the south/west where you can get a house for like $300/month.
All of this is somewhat true, but I don't think it really makes your point. First, dynamic compilation is not a continuous process. Most code is quite cyclical, and the JVM does a good job of compiling the things that are used most in a highly optimized way. This is actually an advantage of dynamic compilation, the compiler can get information about what code is most used and optimize for that case. There are some compiler optimizations that only increase speed if they can be amortized over a large number of calls.
Also, memory footprint has nothing to do with dynamic compilation and everything to do with garbage collection. Again, there are a lot of advantages to garbage collection especially if your program is long running and uses a lot of dynamically allocated memory. It certainly does increase the memory footprint, but as other posters have mentioned, who cares? My G5 has 4GB and I could put another 4GB in if I felt like I needed it.
Java is built around the idea that programmer time is always more valuable than machine time. You'll notice that in the above comments several people have said that Azereus (which I have never used) is slow and bloated, but overall is simply better quality software. Slow, well-designed programs can be fixed by better hardware. Bad code can't be fixed by any machine. Therefore I'll always take the "bloated" language that helps me write better code over the "streamlined" one (i.e. C++) that encourages people to write obfuscated crap.
We should all get this tatooed on our foreheads:
"Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist, is the degree to which you are free"
-Joseph Campbell
The interesting thing though, is the amount of Powerbooks in TV and movies you see with their Apple logos blanked out (usually a gray disc over the Apple logo). TV shows and movies often uses Apple simply because they look like a computer should look (in the eyes of studio execs I guess). I suppose its possible Apple paid for these placements as well (albiet less than if the logo was displayed), but it seems unlikely.
This comment is pretty short-sighted. While I agree that Apple made a terrific choice with OS X, it is certainly not the only choice and maybe not even the best choice. UNIX-style operating systems have a lot of merit, but again, they're not the ONLY Right Way to write an OS. The NT kernel actually has a lot of good design in it and a lot of smart people worked on the early versions of it. In particular the message passing facilities in NT are much nicer than on many Unix systems.
Windows can easily be a viable platform without totally scrapping the fundamental design. I think its cool to see that Microsoft is willing to take the risk of starting over and trying to get a good platform to build on.
I've wondered for a long time why it was so hard for Microsoft to make good software. We all know that there are massive amounts of incredibly smart people there (most of the smartest people I knew in school work there). I think this article speaks to a lot of the reason and I think its neat to see that things _MIGHT_ be turning around.
You left out a word in your post..
The funny thing about U.S. elections...
There are plenty of places that implement runoff voting so this sort of thing doesn't happen. Unfortunately here, there's too much money invested in the two-party system its unlikely it will change soon.
The kind of ironic thing about this is that in a strange, round about way he's sort of right, though for reasons I'm sure he doesn't understand.
We all know that Mac OS X is based on Mach, of which one of the principal developers was Rick Rashid of RIT and later CMU. Funny thing is that after completing his studies, Rashid was hired by, you guessed it, Microsoft, to design a new operating system called NT. If you look at the kernel design of NT, there's a lot of Mach in there, though admittedly quite warped so that they could get decent performance out of it.
And before people get out their flame-throwers, yes I know this is a ridiculous stretch, its just what came to mind when I saw Metcalfe idiotic ramblings. Why is it that somebody "invents" one decently cool thing (along with a whole bunch of other people I imagine) and then feels like they have license to blather on about the future of technology as if they were suddenly granted some kind of oracular vision.
While I agree with your fundamental point, I'm a software engineer at Mot, and you can get a BASH prompt on the thing - you can also telnet and ssh into it. Granted, this isn't available to the average customer, its still cool. In addition many of the system services are run with SysV style init script. I don't know that anyone's actually done it, but there is speculation that we could make the phone software run on a regular PC, if we did a little emulation of a few hardware components. This is very useful for testing and debugging.
I actually think that having a 'real' OS on the phone is a big step. If you could see the code for the current OS used on most Motorola phones today, you would appreciate what a step forward going to Linux really is.
I'm thinking you're not a math major. Let's say between you and your wife, you're making 200K, pretax. Lop off 30% for Uncle Sam and you're left with 11.5K per month. So drop 5K on mortgage and you're left with 6.5K.. Take out 1500 for cars (those are nice cars too), save half the rest and you're still left with 2500/month. That's a lotta steaks..
Unfortunately, I think Eclipse pretty much blows under X11 (GTK+). At least compared to the GUI toolkits available on Win32 and OS X, GTK just doesn't cut it. I'm holding out hope that someday we'll have SWT bindings for QT, but due to licensing issues I doubt it will happen anytime soon.
No they aren't. Plaintiffs in civil lawsuits are awarded punitive damages all the time. This is where much of the money in "wrongful death" suits comes from. If I run over your 98 year old grandma and I'm sued in _civil_ court, you can't really argue any _actual damages_ becuase objectively your grandma isn't worth anything (you might be able to get funeral costs, etc..). However, you can argue that I'm a bastard and deserve to be punished monetarily. Now in this case, the cops might also be after me for vehicular manslaughter or something, but that's an entirely separate issue.
I call foul! To those of us who aren't gay, 'MJ' will always be reserved for number 23. Call him Jacko or 'has-been sick fuck popstar', anything but MJ.
Horseshit.. this is directly from the script.
VINCENT
Yeah, it breaks down like this:
it's legal to buy it, it's legal to
own it and, if you're the
proprietor of a hash bar, it's
legal to sell it. It's legal to
carry it, which doesn't really
matter 'cause -- get a load of this
-- if the cops stop you, it's
illegal for this to search you.
Searching you is a right that the
cops in Amsterdam don't have.
Damn, you beat me to it.. Exactly what I was thinking when I read the ancestry of post above you.. wish i had mod points...
>Economists come up with models, and test the >models, see results, and argue about the >interpretations when refining or rewriting >their models. What part of that isn't a >component of science?
The problem is that you left out a component: Any results that don't conform to the model, economists generally throw out. Specifically, the fundamental assumption of nearly all economic model is that of the rational actor. It says that, ceteris paribus, everyone acts in his own self-interest. We have myriad examples in real life to show that this isn't true, or rather, it isn't true for the economic definition of self-interest.
So the standard economic 'proof' of a model is: assume the model is true, gather results that fits your assumption, show results fit the model. This has a long way to go to be called science.
Disclaimer: I love economics and study a lot of it, however I can't really argue with the pseudo-science claim. I hope with some more advanced mathematics, economics can eventually move into the realm of real science.
I'm not sure why this is so bad. This is actually how I usually do multiplication in my head. This is really equivalent to the traditional method of adding zeroes and carrying, it's just not as compact to write. Frankly, I think it explains the concepts behind multiplication than the traditional 'below the line' method.
If you want a messed up method for multiplication check out Russian peasant multiplication. It's actually surprisingly efficient for multiplying large numbers.
In any event, my point is that we should be teaching more of this kind of thing, not less. Get kids to actually think about the math they're doing, instead of just memorizing the mechanics.
The lottery is just a tax on fools.
It's nice to have concise little quips to shoot around, but with today's multi-state lotteries, this isn't exactly true anymore. In the Mega-Millions game the odds of winning the jackpot are about 135M to 1. If you combine this with the odds for all of the fixed value prizes, it turns that that expected value of a $1 ticket when the jackpot is $43M is about $1. Thus you can expect to get back your dollar if you bet a dollar. If the jackpot is $230M (like it was a few months ago), then expected value is close to $3.50, make a lottery ticket a very good bet (much better than any casino game). Granted this is a little off, since you can only expect this return on a large number of bets, but speaking from a strictly mathematical view, it's a good play.
So, it would be more accurate to say that when the jackpot is small (precisely, less than $43M for 5+1 ball lottery) the lottery is a tax on fools (or those who can't do math, whichever you like).
-Matt
If you're just in it for the money, the lottery may be a better option. A detailed analysis is here.
Seriously, get a Ph.D only if you love it. I love being a graduate student, I'd do it for the rest of my life if I could (different fields of course). If you don't think you'd go to school just for the hell of it, I wouldn't pursue a Ph.D.
So I know that Slashdot is just a collection of links to other places, but really, does _every_ story from Wired have to be posted here? Granted this was a little better because it was posted in some proximity to the magazine being published, but don't most of us get Wired? At the very least, can we have a new category for "Wired Repost" so that those of us who do subscribe can filter it out??
So tell us, how long have you been involved with Amway?
This is a pyramid scheme. The problem is, it only works as long people are buying into the bottom. While I agree that there are lots of alternative ways to sell music, this isn't one of them.
If I'm Joe Indie, why would I want to let someone else take half the profit for "distributing" my music (which amounts to keeping it on their hard drive and running Kazaa or whatever), when I could do the same thing myself and get all of the profit?
Just for trivia's sake, here's a better example:
Auto-summarize. I don't know if it's still in there, but it was feature in like Word 97, where you could highlight some portion of text and it would use your own words to extract a summary. When I first saw it I was pretty impressed with how good it was.. but who ever actually used this?
Not true. You need to be "authorized" to play it using sharing too. We just tried it a few hours ago. As soon as you try to play a song on some one else's computer that they purchased using Apple's service it asks you to input that person's password to authorize this computer.
This may be what they say, but it's not entirely accurate. I'm friends with one of the professors on the Purdue CS admissions committee, and he told me that the number one most important factor, far outwieghing anything else is recommendations. So, even if you came from a no-name school, but worked with someone who's respected in the community, it goes a long way. You have to remember that all they're trying to do is measure the likely-hood that you will complete the Ph.D program and do good work. Whatever you can do to prove that to them is all that matters.
Just wondering if anyone else had the following pop into their heads while reading this headline:
(Must say in bad Japanese accent to be effective)
"Mothra coming.. Move away from windows!"
There's a key difference here though. Java requires a run-time stack to do all of it's safety checking. This project aims to all of it's checking at compile time, so it's static, rather than dynamic. This is _VERY_ hard problem, and is where virtually all of the programming languages research is centered today. However, you're instinct that this is not a new concept is correct. Microsoft is actually doing very similar research in the form of a project called Vault.