I hope this doesn't become another case of the government "revolving door". If he gets a high-paid lobbiest's job at the Open Source Technology Group I will be very dissapointed.
1. Open source geeks gather 141.5 billion dollars to buy 50.01% of Microsoft. 2. The remaining 49.99% owners realize that some open source geeks now control their company. Share price falls by half as they bail. 3. Open source geeks open source Microsoft's source code and announces that Microsoft will now be a services company. Share price falls by half again (at least). 4. Open source geeks sell their shares for 35 billion for a net loss of 106.5 billion dollars. 5. ??? 6. Profit!
Very cool intro to yEd. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it before.
I guess to each his or her own when it comes to the heavy-weight IDEs. However here's one last attempt to defend Eclipse. Since it is free I haven't really had a problem using it in jobs where the "official" IDE is JBuilder or something else. I end up not having to relearn keyboard combinations and each IDE's way of doing things since I can take Eclipse with me home and between contracts. Ctrl+Shift+O is so ingrained as an "optimize imports" command that I fear my brain is permanantly rewired. Nevertheless, I'll give IntelliJ a try when I have a chance (it can't be any worse than JBuilder).
How could someone who is so right about SWT (Swing, like democracy, isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives) be so wrong about IDEs:-) Eclipse is free, cross-platform, and much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (or JBuilder). I've heard good things about jEdit so I won't say that it is bad, but Eclipse is far more than a hobbyist's IDE. One particularly nice note is that once you're ready to make the transition to full J2EE support there are a bunch of really well done plug-ins and, even better, for a nominal fee MyEclipse packages all those plug-ins together for a J2EE environment that, IMHO, exceeds the functionality of JBuilder.
Plus, Ruby support if you want to experiment with that in a familiar evironment...
And, C/C++ support if you want to experiment with that in a familiar environment...
And, no doubt, plug-ins for Perl, Python, Brainf*ck, or whatever else you might want to try
You post some out-of-context quotes about "warentless searches for foreign intelligence puposes" from the Clinton and Carter administrations and expect us to forget about what is happening RIGHT NOW under a Republican congress and administration? This is bigger than your petty party loyalty. Grow up and be a citizen not one of Limbaugh's sheep.
I don't disagree. We must reformulate the original hypothesis from "evolution leads to short lifespans in birds because the magnetic poles shift over time..." so that it now reads "evolution would lead to short lifespans in species of migratory birds if those birds rely on the position of the Earth's magnetic poles to determine their migratory navigational routes because magnetic poles shift over time..."
Isn't it cool that we can refine our hypotheses when discussing evolution? Try having his conversation using Intelligent Design as the foundation; "Birds live as long as they live because a Higher Power designed them to live that long." I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, just that it doesn't lead to very interesting conversations.
The Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo can live for up to 100 years. And, according to this article, "The [Albatross] is a survivor. It flies 1,900 kilometers (1,100 miles) per day, with pinpoint navigation, and returns to its nest repeatedly over its 50-year lifespan."
I'm going to play devil's advocate here and make the case that Flash is -- or, at least, can be -- a good thing. In fact, there is no reason that a lot of what is currently being implemented as Ajax couldn't be done in a Flash in terms of making a "desktop-like" user interface.
Ignoring the bad flash advertisements -- it's not Flash's fault that it has been co-opted to create "smack the monkey, win an iPod" banners -- an application created by a decent UI engineer in Flash will appear the same (same fonts, same user experience, internationalization, etc..) on any modern browser with the Flash plug in. In particular, Flash can make excellent forms that support all of the bells and whistles that one would expect from a desktop application.
I could be saying the same things about Java Applets, but Sun lost the pissing contest with Microsoft at the same time Macromedia was slipping in under the radar.
There are downsides to Flash, of course. It can be bulky (especially compared to ASCII-based XHTML). You need a plug-in. It's a pain to work with for programmers that are more familiar with structured and pseudo-OO languages like C, Java, and C++ (how the hell do those timelines and stages work anyway?). And, from what I understand, it doesn't currently work with readers for the blind and other ADA requirements. However, Ajax needs JavaScript and a modern browser and applets need the proper JRE version and, finally, standard old HTML 4.01 forms basically suck.
One last plug for Flash, with Flash there is only one point-of-failure on the client. If something's not working go hang out at the Macromedia forums and someone will eventually have a solution or a work-around. If your JavaScript/XHTML/CSS doesn't work there are a lot of potential places where you could have made an error or, more likely, IE simply is not supporting your standards correctly and you'll just ahve to find a work-around.
This reminds me of an old Mad Magazine cartoon I saw in my misspent youth. I only remember vague details but it was somthing like this.
Panel One - the set up: Guy on moped and a guy on a huge, powerful, expensive Harley-Davidson style motorcycle.
Guy on HD says, "You wanna race!".
Guy on Moped says, "Sure, but I get to pick the track.".
Panel Two - the punch line: Guy on moped and guy on HD are lined up at the starting line. The race "track" is about 6" long and ends at a brick wall. The guy on the big motorcycle is looking concerned. The guy on the moped is smiling.
The moral. Define the parameters of your contest before making any assumptions about the winner.
On a server-side environment, the "massive overhead involved with installing the runtime everywhere" is pretty much a non-issue. It's like complaining that you can't write Ruby or Perl apps because Ruby and Perl aren't installed on every client machine. In the end, when you are doing these kind of applications, the only thing the client needs is a browsers and an internet connection.
If you're doing stand-along applications that need to be installed locally on a client then perhaps you have a point. On the other hand, it is easy enough to package the correct version of the JRE on your install CD and have you application use that.
The company I works for uses Java for basically one reason: J2EE. Fast enterprise applications that are developed very, very quickly and are delivered as HTML pages to the client's browser. JVM startup times are a non-issue since the application server is pretty much running all of the time. Memory is a non-issue since we know how much memory is available on the server and plan accordingly. It's not like someone is going to startup MS Office on the the back-up Sun server and start complaining about lack of resources. I'm guess we could do the same thing with C or Perl or some other CGI system, but Java has proven itself to be a stable development environment that is fairly safe (in terms of memory, security, and tolerance towards "newbie" programmers) so why change?
Personally, I want to experiment with Ruby on Rails to try and get a hands-on comparison since I've heard nothing but good things about both the language and the enterprise evironment. But, there is a bit of inertia with any development. Right now, at least, it is much easier to hire J2EE developers than Ruby on Rails developers.
If evolution is true, where is the human who walks out of the jungle saying, "My parents are apes, but I'm not, and I want to join the human race?"
You're just expecting too big of a jump in each generation. If you look for more subtle evolution you can find it even today. For example, I just met a man who said, "My parents are members of the Kansas School Board, but I'm not, and I want to join the human race." See! Evolution in action!;-)
I'm able to get my Windows boot to work with a GeForce 6600 AGP at full resolution for the 23" Apple Cinema Display (1940x1200) but as of yet I have been unable to tweak my SuSe 9.3 to display any higher than 1600x1200.
YMMV and I'm no expert at configuring the necessary config files, but as of yet it doesn't appear that this particular combination (6600 + SuSe 9.3 + 23" Cinema Display) works to its full potential "out of the box".
Still, for development work at home 1600x1200 is pretty nice and, under windows, it's beautiful IMHO.
Possibly true, but it any case it wasn't the lack of technical innovation required to query a database for the remaining minutes on your pre-paid plan.
I was under the impression that "pre-paid" service didn't exist primarily because it undercut the wireless companies desire to lock users into long term contracts. Pre-paid only came into being because all of the people who were willing or able to enter into a long term contract were already tied to one of the wireless companies so the company didn't lose anything from moving on to the less desireable pre-paid customers.
I have no evidence (other than my experience dealing with companies) but I'm guessing that this has always been a marketing "innovation" not a technical invention.
In your example, you came up with an idea to make IC's 10x faster but you sat on the idea for 3 or 4 years. Someone else independently comes up with the same idea, creates a product, and now you expect to gain some kind of financial gain? If your idea is that valuable but you lack the means to implement it yourself then invest in a lawyer, talk to a VC, and accept the fact that you are going to have to trade some of your "idea equity" for help in implementing your idea.
Remember, patents ONLY EVER EXISTED to enhance society through the promotion of new ideas. An idea that you sit on without telling anyone or that blocks legitimate development of new ideas is an affront to the idea behind patents.
In any case, and more to the point of this article, I personally think at any patent granted after about 1970 that consists of "given information X, query information Y from a database" should be tossed in the trash based on the (apparently no longer valid) obviousness restriction on patents.
Re:Not so sure about this - I stil "don't get it"
on
What is Ruby on Rails?
·
· Score: 1
You wrote:...wouldn't it just be better just to have the underlying language to be more imperitave and intuitive and standardized to begin with?
My answer: Yes!
My long answer: Yes, but...
My really, long answer: Yes, but the existing languages -- HTML, JavaScript, SQL, etc... -- are the languages that either define the data (i.e. SQL) or define the user interface (e.g. HTML and JavaScript). To enforce a better underlying and all-encompasing language you'd need to get all the data stores to start using your language and then get all of the user browsers to start using your language before there could be a critical mass to achieve this simplification.
The next best thing is to use a frameworks such as J2EE, RoR,.Net (I think, never used it...) that tries to abstract away as much of these problems as possible. These frameworks serve two strict masters: take data from these databases and deal with thier task specific languages and make them usable to any random user's web browser and deal with the idiosycracies there. At the same time, try to make that middle tier easy to understand and make it difficult to allow the users to do the wrong things (e.g. accidentally deleting data that shouldn't be deleted or failing to specifiy all the information they should). In other words, enforce the "business logic".
I think J2EE does a pretty good job of this, though some people hate it. I'm really looking forward to trying out RoR since I've always been a fan of Ruby as a language.
Each song has a natural audience that would be willing and financially able to purchase that song.
For a musician like Brittney Spears that "natural" audience numbers in the millions.
For a musician like Tom Waites that "natural" audience numbers in the thousands.
The financial success of that song therefor depends upon the number of individuals from that pool of consumers who: 1. hear the song and 2. are able to find the song in a place where it can be purchased.
Piracy of songs increases the percentage of the target population who hear the song while inspiring the RIAA to increase the places where songs can be purchased (does anyone think the iTunes wouldn't have been sued into oblivion if it weren't for piracy).
Okay, I'm done with the armchair economics for today. Where the hell is Steven Levitt when you need him?
Here's a hypothesis where piracy only affects sales on the up side.
Hypotheses: Piracy is a benefit to song sales (in the age of iTunes, talking about CDs seems a little dated) when sales are good and a non-issue when sales are bad because piracy acts as a multiplier to the "natural" sales of songs. A pirated popular/good song (ie. with a high piracy multiplier) acts as marketing for that song by expanding the audience that gets to hear the song. A bad/unpopular pirated track (with a multipler close to 1) can not be effective marketing so that the number of copies of that CD are unaffected.
Please refute, thanks.
Oh, and here's another hypothesis: There are at least 663429 people with Slashdot accounts. Some of those people think that there is a positive effect from piracy, some people think that there is no effect from piracy, some people think that there is a negative effect from piracy, and at least one person reads a few comments from each side and makes blanket generalizations about the alleged Slashdot group-think.
Inadequate teaching in fundamental courses like calculus is inexcusable, and any college that's failing its students like that needs a major wake-up call.
Absolutely agree. The initial classes can make or break a freshman's interest in engineering.
I went to a respected state school in the Pacific NW (located north of Tacoma and south of Bellingham) thinking I was going to go straight through the Comp. Sci. program. I wasn't too dumb; I did well on the AP classes and got a perfect 100 on the IQ test;-). Anyway, first day, first class, Calculus lecture. The ancient professor walks up to the overhead projector and begins writing. He's also mumbling something but no one can hear him. He's writing left handed and, while I don't have anything against lefties, he really should take off his tweed jacket because everything he writes is immediately blurred into oblivion by his sleeve. During the entire lecture he never looked up from the projector and when a student finally had the audacity to actually yell out a question (since the professor couldn't see or wouldn't acknowledge the raised hand) the answer, if there was one, was delivered grudgingly and inaudibly. In the end it was the poor TAs who saved most of us, despite bearing the brunt of the class's anger at our inability to understand the professor, by telling us the details of what we were unable to hear or read in the lecture.
Anyway, the next semester I wandered over to the liberal arts took English and Geology and Sociology and Art and Music and met beautiful and interesting women and worked with inspired and enthusiastic teachers and spent the next ten years being a happy and productive amateur computer programming. I've since gone back and received a Comp. Sci. MS which gives me the credibility I need to change jobs and the classes were much more focused than anything that was available as an undergraduate.
I've noticed that many of the comments have been in the vein, "Suck it up, maggot. Wining about how hard the classes are just isn't elite." That's fine. In a male dominated field there is going to be a lot of macho postering and, to be honest, I have nothing but respect for the kind of pure, directed intelligence that can power it's way through the roadblocks of an undergraduate engineering or math degree. But, for the rest of us, there is hope. In a couple of years, after you're finished getting your BA in English Lit and if you still have a passion for engineering, go get an MS.
Imagine if your google account held all your office-type documents, including photographs, and provided editing apps for them from the webpage. Imagine it tied into gmail. Imagine these office style apps were no less capable than regular desktop apps. Do you think people would pay money for such a service? Do you think it would attract users?
It sounds great. I was talking with a friend of mine who works at a firm where the email server has gone down and lost all the emails twice in the last year. GMail really starts sounding like a good option in a situation like that. This would be especially cool if Google would sell a service to customize gmail for the company by, for example, allowing the compant's domain name in the email address. If you add in calendars and conference room schedulers and project tracking apps (with Ajax based Gantt charts... wheeee!) a lot of expensive software just became redundant.
On the other hand, these Ajax based web sites still need to run on a browser (which for most of the world means IE) which runs on an operanting system (which for most of world means Windows). When every security patch for IE or Windows "accidentally" breaks some aspect of the Google service it's not going to be Microsoft who is blamed when people can't get their emails and calendars and gantt charts. In other words, don't write off Microsoft too soon. Almost everything that Google provides for the client sits on Microsoft software and they can pretty much shut it down any time they want...
This is the same logic that said, "Get in your SUVs and evacute New Orleans" and reflects a lack of understanding that a great number of Americans are not sitting in cushy office jobs with great drug benefits in their health insurance.
Today, the Census Bureau reported that 45 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2003, up by 1.4 million from 2002 and 5.2 million from 2000. The report states that this increase is "statistically significant." *
As an unrelated point, since I don't feel like posting a separate response elsewhere, does anyone think Fortune would bother writing this article if it were Merck or some other publicly traded drug company making these profits? I think their major issue is that you can't exactly buy stock in MIT (can you?).
There are plenty of links that describe the NFIP subsidy mostly based on money owed to the Treasury and debts that have been forgiven so that they never need to be paid back, but the reality can be summed up in a single quote:
"...if NFIP charges actuarial rates, the program is superfluous."
In other words, if the NFIP were able to recover it's liabilities plus adminitration costs from the premiums paid by the people who need the coverage then a private insurance company would be more than willing to provide that service. Private insurance companies are unwilling to provide a free market alternative.
That quote was from CATO but please don't write me off as a free market trumps common sense wing nut. I just think that welfare should go to people who need it not millionaires building McMansions on sand dunes (or 10 feet under the sea level).
Slashdot Mirror
I hope this doesn't become another case of the government "revolving door". If he gets a high-paid lobbiest's job at the Open Source Technology Group I will be very dissapointed.
Let's start with the Big Kahuna...
1. Open source geeks gather 141.5 billion dollars to buy 50.01% of Microsoft.
2. The remaining 49.99% owners realize that some open source geeks now control their company. Share price falls by half as they bail.
3. Open source geeks open source Microsoft's source code and announces that Microsoft will now be a services company. Share price falls by half again (at least).
4. Open source geeks sell their shares for 35 billion for a net loss of 106.5 billion dollars.
5. ???
6. Profit!
Very cool intro to yEd. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it before.
I guess to each his or her own when it comes to the heavy-weight IDEs. However here's one last attempt to defend Eclipse. Since it is free I haven't really had a problem using it in jobs where the "official" IDE is JBuilder or something else. I end up not having to relearn keyboard combinations and each IDE's way of doing things since I can take Eclipse with me home and between contracts. Ctrl+Shift+O is so ingrained as an "optimize imports" command that I fear my brain is permanantly rewired. Nevertheless, I'll give IntelliJ a try when I have a chance (it can't be any worse than JBuilder).
How could someone who is so right about SWT (Swing, like democracy, isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives) be so wrong about IDEs :-) Eclipse is free, cross-platform, and much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (or JBuilder). I've heard good things about jEdit so I won't say that it is bad, but Eclipse is far more than a hobbyist's IDE. One particularly nice note is that once you're ready to make the transition to full J2EE support there are a bunch of really well done plug-ins and, even better, for a nominal fee MyEclipse packages all those plug-ins together for a J2EE environment that, IMHO, exceeds the functionality of JBuilder.
Plus, Ruby support if you want to experiment with that in a familiar evironment...
And, C/C++ support if you want to experiment with that in a familiar environment...
And, no doubt, plug-ins for Perl, Python, Brainf*ck, or whatever else you might want to try
You post some out-of-context quotes about "warentless searches for foreign intelligence puposes" from the Clinton and Carter administrations and expect us to forget about what is happening RIGHT NOW under a Republican congress and administration? This is bigger than your petty party loyalty. Grow up and be a citizen not one of Limbaugh's sheep.
I don't disagree. We must reformulate the original hypothesis from "evolution leads to short lifespans in birds because the magnetic poles shift over time..." so that it now reads "evolution would lead to short lifespans in species of migratory birds if those birds rely on the position of the Earth's magnetic poles to determine their migratory navigational routes because magnetic poles shift over time..."
Isn't it cool that we can refine our hypotheses when discussing evolution? Try having his conversation using Intelligent Design as the foundation; "Birds live as long as they live because a Higher Power designed them to live that long." I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, just that it doesn't lead to very interesting conversations.
The Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo can live for up to 100 years. And, according to this article, "The [Albatross] is a survivor. It flies 1,900 kilometers (1,100 miles) per day, with pinpoint navigation, and returns to its nest repeatedly over its 50-year lifespan."
I'm going to play devil's advocate here and make the case that Flash is -- or, at least, can be -- a good thing. In fact, there is no reason that a lot of what is currently being implemented as Ajax couldn't be done in a Flash in terms of making a "desktop-like" user interface.
Ignoring the bad flash advertisements -- it's not Flash's fault that it has been co-opted to create "smack the monkey, win an iPod" banners -- an application created by a decent UI engineer in Flash will appear the same (same fonts, same user experience, internationalization, etc..) on any modern browser with the Flash plug in. In particular, Flash can make excellent forms that support all of the bells and whistles that one would expect from a desktop application.
I could be saying the same things about Java Applets, but Sun lost the pissing contest with Microsoft at the same time Macromedia was slipping in under the radar.
There are downsides to Flash, of course. It can be bulky (especially compared to ASCII-based XHTML). You need a plug-in. It's a pain to work with for programmers that are more familiar with structured and pseudo-OO languages like C, Java, and C++ (how the hell do those timelines and stages work anyway?). And, from what I understand, it doesn't currently work with readers for the blind and other ADA requirements. However, Ajax needs JavaScript and a modern browser and applets need the proper JRE version and, finally, standard old HTML 4.01 forms basically suck.
One last plug for Flash, with Flash there is only one point-of-failure on the client. If something's not working go hang out at the Macromedia forums and someone will eventually have a solution or a work-around. If your JavaScript/XHTML/CSS doesn't work there are a lot of potential places where you could have made an error or, more likely, IE simply is not supporting your standards correctly and you'll just ahve to find a work-around.
I don't know if Freeman Dyson ever made any money off of his invention. I don't think he ever got around to building one. ;-)
An example from about 2 centuries ago and another example from about 1 century ago. Anything in the last decade?
This reminds me of an old Mad Magazine cartoon I saw in my misspent youth. I only remember vague details but it was somthing like this.
Panel One - the set up:
Guy on moped and a guy on a huge, powerful, expensive Harley-Davidson style motorcycle.
Guy on HD says, "You wanna race!".
Guy on Moped says, "Sure, but I get to pick the track.".
Panel Two - the punch line:
Guy on moped and guy on HD are lined up at the starting line. The race "track" is about 6" long and ends at a brick wall. The guy on the big motorcycle is looking concerned. The guy on the moped is smiling.
The moral.
Define the parameters of your contest before making any assumptions about the winner.
On a server-side environment, the "massive overhead involved with installing the runtime everywhere" is pretty much a non-issue. It's like complaining that you can't write Ruby or Perl apps because Ruby and Perl aren't installed on every client machine. In the end, when you are doing these kind of applications, the only thing the client needs is a browsers and an internet connection.
If you're doing stand-along applications that need to be installed locally on a client then perhaps you have a point. On the other hand, it is easy enough to package the correct version of the JRE on your install CD and have you application use that.
The company I works for uses Java for basically one reason: J2EE. Fast enterprise applications that are developed very, very quickly and are delivered as HTML pages to the client's browser. JVM startup times are a non-issue since the application server is pretty much running all of the time. Memory is a non-issue since we know how much memory is available on the server and plan accordingly. It's not like someone is going to startup MS Office on the the back-up Sun server and start complaining about lack of resources. I'm guess we could do the same thing with C or Perl or some other CGI system, but Java has proven itself to be a stable development environment that is fairly safe (in terms of memory, security, and tolerance towards "newbie" programmers) so why change?
Personally, I want to experiment with Ruby on Rails to try and get a hands-on comparison since I've heard nothing but good things about both the language and the enterprise evironment. But, there is a bit of inertia with any development. Right now, at least, it is much easier to hire J2EE developers than Ruby on Rails developers.
You're just expecting too big of a jump in each generation. If you look for more subtle evolution you can find it even today. For example, I just met a man who said, "My parents are members of the Kansas School Board, but I'm not, and I want to join the human race." See! Evolution in action!
I'm able to get my Windows boot to work with a GeForce 6600 AGP at full resolution for the 23" Apple Cinema Display (1940x1200) but as of yet I have been unable to tweak my SuSe 9.3 to display any higher than 1600x1200.
YMMV and I'm no expert at configuring the necessary config files, but as of yet it doesn't appear that this particular combination (6600 + SuSe 9.3 + 23" Cinema Display) works to its full potential "out of the box".
Still, for development work at home 1600x1200 is pretty nice and, under windows, it's beautiful IMHO.
Possibly true, but it any case it wasn't the lack of technical innovation required to query a database for the remaining minutes on your pre-paid plan.
I was under the impression that "pre-paid" service didn't exist primarily because it undercut the wireless companies desire to lock users into long term contracts. Pre-paid only came into being because all of the people who were willing or able to enter into a long term contract were already tied to one of the wireless companies so the company didn't lose anything from moving on to the less desireable pre-paid customers.
I have no evidence (other than my experience dealing with companies) but I'm guessing that this has always been a marketing "innovation" not a technical invention.
In your example, you came up with an idea to make IC's 10x faster but you sat on the idea for 3 or 4 years. Someone else independently comes up with the same idea, creates a product, and now you expect to gain some kind of financial gain? If your idea is that valuable but you lack the means to implement it yourself then invest in a lawyer, talk to a VC, and accept the fact that you are going to have to trade some of your "idea equity" for help in implementing your idea.
Remember, patents ONLY EVER EXISTED to enhance society through the promotion of new ideas. An idea that you sit on without telling anyone or that blocks legitimate development of new ideas is an affront to the idea behind patents.
In any case, and more to the point of this article, I personally think at any patent granted after about 1970 that consists of "given information X, query information Y from a database" should be tossed in the trash based on the (apparently no longer valid) obviousness restriction on patents.
You wrote: ...wouldn't it just be better just to have the underlying language to be more imperitave and intuitive and standardized to begin with?
.Net (I think, never used it...) that tries to abstract away as much of these problems as possible. These frameworks serve two strict masters: take data from these databases and deal with thier task specific languages and make them usable to any random user's web browser and deal with the idiosycracies there. At the same time, try to make that middle tier easy to understand and make it difficult to allow the users to do the wrong things (e.g. accidentally deleting data that shouldn't be deleted or failing to specifiy all the information they should). In other words, enforce the "business logic".
My answer: Yes!
My long answer: Yes, but...
My really, long answer: Yes, but the existing languages -- HTML, JavaScript, SQL, etc... -- are the languages that either define the data (i.e. SQL) or define the user interface (e.g. HTML and JavaScript). To enforce a better underlying and all-encompasing language you'd need to get all the data stores to start using your language and then get all of the user browsers to start using your language before there could be a critical mass to achieve this simplification.
The next best thing is to use a frameworks such as J2EE, RoR,
I think J2EE does a pretty good job of this, though some people hate it. I'm really looking forward to trying out RoR since I've always been a fan of Ruby as a language.
Here's another hypotheses:
Each song has a natural audience that would be willing and financially able to purchase that song.
For a musician like Brittney Spears that "natural" audience numbers in the millions.
For a musician like Tom Waites that "natural" audience numbers in the thousands.
The financial success of that song therefor depends upon the number of individuals from that pool of consumers who: 1. hear the song and 2. are able to find the song in a place where it can be purchased.
Piracy of songs increases the percentage of the target population who hear the song while inspiring the RIAA to increase the places where songs can be purchased (does anyone think the iTunes wouldn't have been sued into oblivion if it weren't for piracy).
Okay, I'm done with the armchair economics for today. Where the hell is Steven Levitt when you need him?
Here's a hypothesis where piracy only affects sales on the up side.
Hypotheses: Piracy is a benefit to song sales (in the age of iTunes, talking about CDs seems a little dated) when sales are good and a non-issue when sales are bad because piracy acts as a multiplier to the "natural" sales of songs. A pirated popular/good song (ie. with a high piracy multiplier) acts as marketing for that song by expanding the audience that gets to hear the song. A bad/unpopular pirated track (with a multipler close to 1) can not be effective marketing so that the number of copies of that CD are unaffected.
Please refute, thanks.
Oh, and here's another hypothesis: There are at least 663429 people with Slashdot accounts. Some of those people think that there is a positive effect from piracy, some people think that there is no effect from piracy, some people think that there is a negative effect from piracy, and at least one person reads a few comments from each side and makes blanket generalizations about the alleged Slashdot group-think.
Absolutely agree. The initial classes can make or break a freshman's interest in engineering.
I went to a respected state school in the Pacific NW (located north of Tacoma and south of Bellingham) thinking I was going to go straight through the Comp. Sci. program. I wasn't too dumb; I did well on the AP classes and got a perfect 100 on the IQ test ;-). Anyway, first day, first class, Calculus lecture. The ancient professor walks up to the overhead projector and begins writing. He's also mumbling something but no one can hear him. He's writing left handed and, while I don't have anything against lefties, he really should take off his tweed jacket because everything he writes is immediately blurred into oblivion by his sleeve. During the entire lecture he never looked up from the projector and when a student finally had the audacity to actually yell out a question (since the professor couldn't see or wouldn't acknowledge the raised hand) the answer, if there was one, was delivered grudgingly and inaudibly. In the end it was the poor TAs who saved most of us, despite bearing the brunt of the class's anger at our inability to understand the professor, by telling us the details of what we were unable to hear or read in the lecture.
Anyway, the next semester I wandered over to the liberal arts took English and Geology and Sociology and Art and Music and met beautiful and interesting women and worked with inspired and enthusiastic teachers and spent the next ten years being a happy and productive amateur computer programming. I've since gone back and received a Comp. Sci. MS which gives me the credibility I need to change jobs and the classes were much more focused than anything that was available as an undergraduate.
I've noticed that many of the comments have been in the vein, "Suck it up, maggot. Wining about how hard the classes are just isn't elite." That's fine. In a male dominated field there is going to be a lot of macho postering and, to be honest, I have nothing but respect for the kind of pure, directed intelligence that can power it's way through the roadblocks of an undergraduate engineering or math degree. But, for the rest of us, there is hope. In a couple of years, after you're finished getting your BA in English Lit and if you still have a passion for engineering, go get an MS.
It sounds great. I was talking with a friend of mine who works at a firm where the email server has gone down and lost all the emails twice in the last year. GMail really starts sounding like a good option in a situation like that. This would be especially cool if Google would sell a service to customize gmail for the company by, for example, allowing the compant's domain name in the email address. If you add in calendars and conference room schedulers and project tracking apps (with Ajax based Gantt charts... wheeee!) a lot of expensive software just became redundant.
On the other hand, these Ajax based web sites still need to run on a browser (which for most of the world means IE) which runs on an operanting system (which for most of world means Windows). When every security patch for IE or Windows "accidentally" breaks some aspect of the Google service it's not going to be Microsoft who is blamed when people can't get their emails and calendars and gantt charts. In other words, don't write off Microsoft too soon. Almost everything that Google provides for the client sits on Microsoft software and they can pretty much shut it down any time they want...
But that's just my cynical side talking...
As an unrelated point, since I don't feel like posting a separate response elsewhere, does anyone think Fortune would bother writing this article if it were Merck or some other publicly traded drug company making these profits? I think their major issue is that you can't exactly buy stock in MIT (can you?).
That's a nice hypothesis, but I subscribe to the theory of Intelligent Bulging.
There are plenty of links that describe the NFIP subsidy mostly based on money owed to the Treasury and debts that have been forgiven so that they never need to be paid back, but the reality can be summed up in a single quote:
"...if NFIP charges actuarial rates, the program is superfluous."
In other words, if the NFIP were able to recover it's liabilities plus adminitration costs from the premiums paid by the people who need the coverage then a private insurance company would be more than willing to provide that service. Private insurance companies are unwilling to provide a free market alternative.
That quote was from CATO but please don't write me off as a free market trumps common sense wing nut. I just think that welfare should go to people who need it not millionaires building McMansions on sand dunes (or 10 feet under the sea level).