I have been reading about the advances in Python for the physical sciences. I think at some point it will be a major player, and it would probably be a good idea for the undergraduate to learn it.
OTOH, we tend to teach what we know and what has worked well. This has been Fortran. It is stable, which means it is easy to get and easy to teach. Most universities has extensive mathematical and scientific libraries, which means that unless one is teaching programming, all that is really neccesary is some glue code to put the functions together.
As an aside, it is also moderately difficult to debug. While this is annoying to the undergraduate, debugging a fortran program does teach important investigative skills and encourages a level of precision that is not so necessary in some more modern languages.
The patheticness of the post is the need for an iPhone to compensate for whatever inadequacies he or she is dealing with. I can tell you the original iPhone is plenty good. If one has the iPhone 3G it is plenty better. If somehow these two phones are inadequate, then maybe the solution it to pay the $175 to get out the contract and go to a Pre or a G1. No one is forcing anyone to buy a particular phone, or upgrade. That is a personal decision. It is like the kids how think they will die if the don't have the latest pair of Nikes.
In closing let me make a hint. In six month Apple is going to release a new phone that will make the 3GS look like the piece of shit it is. Save yourself some grief. Suffer with the lame phone you have now until the contract runs out, then buy something not Apple. If you can't afford to upgrade your Apple toys every six months, then get out of the game.
It seems to me that someone is trying to push their dogma through fear. I am not saying the computer did not cause the plane to crash, or that the pilot might have been able to do something to stop it if there was an option 'to have full control of the plane', whatever that means. What I am saying is that we really do not know all the circumstances, and it might be a bit early start pointing fingers.
First, I would say it naive to think that computers are somehow at fault, and that they do not have a net benefit. The main reason to use digital solid state computers is that they often reduce discrete component count, which usually increases reliability. In a system that is supposed to nearly 100% reliability, like an aircraft, component count must be kept to a minimum. That has traditionally mean fly by wire, and the more fly by wire, the better. My understanding is that Airbus reduces complexity significantly assuming a complete fly by wire profile. One could, for instance, install backup hydraulics, which I assume is not done, but this would reduce reliability.
There is not simple solution. Things do not increase security and reliability simply because we feel better. For instance, Many people feel safer in big trucks but many studies have shown that one is safer in a full size sedan. Likewise, one thing that makes a large truck, especially an SUV safe is the electronic stability control, which can countermand any driver instruction. Large planes are already computer controlled. Long haul flying of large planes is in no way a trivial task. I agree with the blog mentioned in the article that people who have no experience have no basis to make any useful comment.
It is a little tacky, but deserved. Here is my problem with MS. They want to the user to buy a new machine, not the just the OS, they complicate the market by not artificially fracturing the software, and instead of gaining market share by lowering prices, they bitch and moan and set up corporate policy to force customers to spend money.
I do believe that manufacturers should be able to sell their product in whatever form, at whatever price they wish. But if they choose a form and price that no one wants, and then they whine about is, I think that does make them look like little children that deserved to be called names. Vista is an example. It was a mistake, and the number of SKUs are insane, Do you know that MS maintains a website just to keep the consumer for being confused? Wouldn't it be simpler to have a home and business edition, and maybe have a separate deal for developers? Is there any reason why the home edition can't cost $100 and the business edition $200. I would have have paid $200 for vista. Instead I paid $150 for XP. I think a lot of rational agents are going to make the same decision. I bet a lot of ration agents are going to make the same decision unitl MS Windows 7 is $200 in full form.
I have no doubt that MS Vista is an excellent OS, and that 7 is going to be even better. I think 7 is exactly what MS needs to put out to keep customers in line. I also know that Mac OS X does everything I need, and more, with free development tools, and I can upgrade all my machines for $50 to snow leopard. I can't even begin to think about upgrading my windows machines to 7. So MS wil continue to bitch that no one will pay the price to upgrade to the new OS, and Apple will continue to treat it like the whiny boy it is.
My MS Windows machine has support for may different cards, ports, etc. It make the thing look very useful. Unfortunately my DSLR us compact flash, and not a single one of my MS Windows machines come with such a thing standard. Port bloat does not mean that a particular user will have a port that he or she needs. In any case, I transfer all my shots to a dedicated hard disk with an attached CF reader for security.
they're all too happy to charge $3000+ for the "luxury" of a machine that cost maybe 10% more in parts and labor.
Of course this is why we are left with crappy laptops. Sure a well designed with laptop, that has good usability and performance, can survive traaport might cost only 10% in parts and labor, but parts and labor are hardly the issue in such matters. The issue is getting the parts, and getting the parts that work. First, off the shelf parts will not work. When I was making wafer, I recall specifically that we charged a lot for the best wafers, and those that were not willing to pay were given the rejects of those that were. Sure they would work, but not as well as for those that were willing to pay.
Then there is system integration. While your average machine is simply a collection of off the shelf parts, minimally tested, selected primarily because they are cheap, a well built machine has carefully selected parts, that are purchased in large quantities to make sure that there is consistency over the model. Someone has to be paid to select, integrate, and acquire these parts.
Then there is the software. Even if we start with an OSS base, the nice façade has to be put on. Integration between different machines that are to be integrated.
I am not saying that a laptop should be 3K. I am saying that expecting to get a nice laptop, with long battery life, for under 1K is delusional. My Macbook pro is not a cheap machine, but neither is MS Windows laptop. Both are around 3K and both basically the same specs, except the MS machines has a smaller screen. I could get a macbook for 50% less than a pro, or a MS Windows laptop for 80% less, but then I would be buying the machines that is not well built.
Honestly, this is the answer. The reason to go to college is to get an education. There are some secondary issues, but you are talking about spending four years of your life studying. Four years that you could be using making money, not building debt and opportunity costs. To me, worrying about network policy is like worrying about the availability of beer and sex partners. Certainly an important issue, for not a critical issue, as the availability of all is reasonable at most colleges I have seen
To be more helpful, here is the way I see it. Most passwords are sent over HTTPS, so those are likely to be at least as secure as any other public connections you might have use, say at high school or networks you might sniff out and use without explicit permission. As far as passwords, assume all password used on campus assets are compromised. Do not reuse these passwords on other services. For instance, do not use a campus network password on faceboook. Some other students with access to campus records will find the nakes you have posted.
Assume that all you web browsing habits will be tracked. Most students studies are paid for by third parties, and as lame it might seem, third parties want to know if students are studying or playing. Given that your university network is likely funded by private funds, the tax payer is interested to know whether the money is used to helping student learn or just troll of dates and pr0n. Even though your personal habits are not likely of interest, as another poster suggested you are not as interesting as you think, such records might be exposed through an audit, and don't discount parental requests that very well might be paying for the education.
Emails should always be assumed to be public record when transmitted over a public network. Set up PGP is this is of concern, or set up some one time code with your friends. That is fun thing to do on those long college nights. This is practice for corporate where it is always good to assume that people are reading you emails. Running everything through google might help as the mail won't be stored on campus servers, as long as you don't mind having your college emails come back to haunt you in 10 years.
As far as the security agent, this might be genuine issue. Again, it is likely only an issue if you a normal college student who does not college stuff. OTOH, everyone on campus is a normal college student who does normal college stuff, so it would be imply you were an extraordinary person to be of interest. In any case, it looks like all this does is enforce best practices for Windows computers and make sure you are not creating a network yourself. The simple solution, as has been mentioned, it to buy a Mac or *nix machines, both of which will limit what this application can do. I have seen many of these apps, and they all work on Macintoshes. The best thing to do is behave during college. It is only four years, and they shouldn't be wasted playing with a computer when there are so many other fun things to play wit.
Here is the bottom line. If the campus system is not to your liking, and you absolutely cannot refrain from criminal activity on your computer, and you cannot get into another school, then buy a wire cellular broadband connection. Something like cricket will run a few hundred dollars for the year. As much as people like to say college is absolute freedom, this is a myth. There is freedom in some areas, but such freedoms are countered by additional responsibilities that the non college going public cannot manage. That is why a college graduate is such a special thing. They have proven they can handle the freedom, manage the responsibility, and succeed. In high school, the drop out rate is high because most people are forced in 9th grade and never have to make a personal commitment to wake up in the morning. They just quit as soon as they can. Most college students are at college voluntarily, but half of them don't have a degree 4 years later, often because they spend all their time parting, and never learn to balance play and work, a critical skill employers look form.
Until the CD, music pretty much did have a limited lifetime. All other mediums wore out. The CD, along with the disruptive effect of the personal computer, create what end of the music business as it then existed. This model was based upon first sales of original works as singles and albums, sales in multiple format for those who did not invest in equipment to format shift, sales of reissued greatest hits, sales of compilations, and sales of boxed sets. In effect, each track had the potential be resold multiple times.
Now with CD and digital downloads each track will likely be sold only once to each consumer, and has no effective limited lifetime. But this is a recent effect. The idea of a DRM provider going out of business is really no different than a vinyl album wearing out. Music with DRM is effectively rented, or licensed, and I am sure most TOS read that way. In the case of music it is not any different from what has mostly been the case. Format shift from DRM to CD, with some generational loss, and move on. Kids have been doing this for ny lifetime, at least.
For movies, it is more tricky, but then movies have not had the freedom to format shift and control the content. VHS tape wore out quickly, and had copy protections very early on. DVD is a closed, annoying format, and was developed to maximize control of the rights holder even at the expense of the customer. This is where the battle might be fought. Certainly the situation with music not that different. What we might be able to fight is the real deterioration of rights we see in the movie content business. The fact that DRM can control on which monitors one can play a movie, or that movies can't be easily format shifted, is issue.
Certainly all those thoughts are legitimately expressed in the United States, even though many of these shows occur at times when young children would be expected to listen. We assume that these are just words, and hearing that gay people should be punished, or that Lutheran doctors might deserve to be murdered are just words and will not effect them. This is the same logic we use to support the distribution of other content that reasonable people might find objectionable. Of course merely being objectionable does not make it subject to regulation. We may not agree that shooting police in a video games is acceptable, or verbally promoting the murder of large groups of people based on superficial characteristics, or limited opposition speech, but that does not mean we can regulate it
Of course Germany has a history of hate speech escalating to mass murder, so they have different tolerance to such entertainment
Traditionally retailers have gotten in trouble for doing anything based on the retail sales price. First, there can only be a suggested retail price, to prevent price fixing, Second, retailers have paid settlements due to the fact that the 'retail price' or 'comparison price' was an arbitrary number used solely to make it appear that the consumer was getting a discount. One retailer went out business based the fact that it could not longer claim to offer discount mechandise, the priced it sold for was basically the same as everyone else, and other have to put disclaimers such as 'no sales may have been made at the state retail price.'
Some might say this not retailers setting a base price, but the government, so it is ok. I think, though, this is still in effect price fixing, a it sets, at least within a state, a fixed priced for a given product. Though this may not result in a fixed price, which only lead to increase inflation as retailers are forced to overcompensate when price adjustments are allowed, it is certainly still an unwarranted obstruction of the free market.
If this is allowed, what is next? Minimum taxes on each transaction at the grocery store. If I want too offer buy two, get on free, do I have to pay taxes as if I bought three items? Do I have to pay tax on the total before the coupon?
I am absolutely in favor of taxes, after all the roads need to be fixed, the soldiers need a fair chance of getting a new leg when the original gets blown off, children need to be educated, but the tax must be based on real product or services. This will be the beginning of a serious problem. Just imagine getting advice for you computer from a professional. No charge, buddy, but the retail value fo my time is $200, so I have to charge you fifteen bucks in tax.
Now that MS, once primarily an OS developer, is seriously in hardware business, Creative needs to think about a graceful exit strategy from the MS Windows market. Just look at what happened when MS decided to sell software. Previous partners like Lotus and SSI saw what happens when MS want market share.
SAAB has a history of real safety. Many consumers have not been traditionally very concerned about the reliability problem. SAAB does not really down sell.
Hummer is simply an effecient way to kill families of four in smaller cars, as well as slowly killing the rest of us. Hummer does down sell, as with the H3. The H1 was a special vehicle in that it was large enough to not have follow pollution control standards that most cars do have to follow. Everyone complians about pollution control standards, but think about. You have toilet in your house, don't you? And pay plumbers. I mean, you don't have to have this expense. You could just crap in your neighbors yard, but you don't. And yet somehow we complain about catalytic converters and the cost of the emission control systems.
The H1 was special in another way. It was big enough to be taken off taxes in one big swoop, not over time. Need to reduce you tax liability. But an h1. Take it off your bogus lawnmower or antique bussinesss. The taxpayer has now bought you a car.
Again the problem with Hummer is that it was actively sold to people who could not really afford it. The economy allowed those people to buy it, and pay for gas, but now the magic house bank account is gone. Reports from everywhere say no one is buying these.
The good news is the chinese restrictions on cars to do apply to foreign made vehicles, so Hummer is likely not going to made in china. But the chinese do not have to pay the executive salaries that have been the main means of killin the car company, and can control costs in other ways, so they may be able to sell enough of these vehicles to turn a profit. No possible with American car companies who seem to think they are in the real estate business rather than the car business.
This was, I recall, the situation with DVD. IIRC, there was a time when the licensing fees were high, and combined with the fact it was new techology, these things were quite expensive. Then quite suddenly, they became cheap. Now everyone wants us to buy the expensive HDTV and Bluray. People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
I don't know if there is a real issue here. I don't know if the converter boxes have to pay the license fee, if they do it is certainly at the low end. I don't suspect you have to pay the fee to cable companies to use your old tv. This seems to be the case of early adopters paying to adopt early.
I leanred ed on a teletype. vi changed everything.
Shape table on the Apple were the next big change in my life.
Although I am sure 123 and all the clones are interesting, and Excel does deserve a place of it's own, visicalc changed the way I think.
Same thing for Mathematics.
I am not going to say anything about WYSIWG editing, because I truly think that combining content and presentation is a bad thing. It was a good idea, but it shouldn't be done on a regular basis. For any non trivial project, content and presentation has to be kept separate. I blame the fact that it isn't for all the bad code in the world.
Autodesk inventor was an excellent way to migrate from the drawing board to the computer. However Solidworks and later Inventor actually provided the means by onw which should draw on the computer. There is no reason to pretend that the computer is a drawing board.
It is kind of the same with C++. Lets us look at coding by modeling the world, but does not hide the code of the model behind arbitrary gibberish.
Anti virus software is very important because it allows us to used the cheap PC. Without it we have to buy the drones expensive computers.
To support there is only so much a change in politics or economic theory can do. At the base, both of these are essentially zero sum games. One may come up with an economic theory that is based on command or demand or currency based distribution of goods and services, but the actual amounts of goods and services are limited to existing stocks without technology innovations. We can take from those with 'too much' and give to those with 'too little' but without technology, we can't really increase the overall per capita supply. Therefore, saying that politics or economics can solve a problem is really he standard dogma of the business major.
The science we have is amazing. It has allowed a person to create multiple more food. It has allowed the food to be preserved, concentrated, and widely distributed. It has allowed some us to live in cleaner environments with much less risk of disease. It has allowed an efficient use of human effort by allowing the quick transport of personnel to areas in which they are needed. Some of us may not like the fact that persons smarter than ourselves can be shipping into to complete projects that we cannot efficiently do ourselves, but it is an amazing thing to do.
The political and economic theory comes in when distributing the benefits of these efficiencies. Who gets them. How much are we taxed to keep up the infrastructure, develop the technology, and train people to use the technology. How much will workers be paid by those that wish to apply the technology. All of this occurs in a world where the entitled live in fear that someone might use the money to enjoy things that the entitled do not approve by those who are not entitled.
First, why no phone test. Did they not have a SIM card? Do they not have a mobile account?
Second, the snipe a Palm at the end was not professional. Palm has produced serious hardware, the Palm V for instance. But to produce serious hardware someone needs to pay serious prices. One issue is that Palm is not longer a leader in innovation, and no longer goes after the market that will pay those prices. So, it is now down to commodity hardware, a tought fight to win.
Third, who knows what the application store is going to do. Android already has many Apps. iPhone has many apps. Pre will have many apps. The problem is we know have three different platforms, so we in a compatibility hell hole where manufacturers are tying us into platforms. If the phone is the next major platform, we are in trouble.
For 1,000 it will be more like a mac mini than an imac. Honestly, Dell has probelms shipping hardware that runs well for less than $800. When you get to a decent 24" IMac, there might only be a 10 or 15% saving on the Dell with Vista installed.
The biggest complaint I hear is not that you can't get a mac for $1000, as most people who will spend a $1000 will spend the $1300 for the imac, but that you can't get a mac for $500. This to me is that market segment that the cloners need to be in, not a 10% reduction from Apples. price. And don't try to say that these machines are going to complete with the high end iMac or low end Mac Pro and offer a 50% reduction in price. I don't see most other people shipping Xeon machines, much less with a terrebyte on board. I know that they can built for almost nothing, but really. Most people who want a $500 computer is not going to build it, they want plug and play.
I don't know that comic shops and the patrons and owners are stereotyped more than anyone else. I think like most so many other categories, they are used because they are mysterious. For example, most people do not read any significant number of books, and even fewer read significant number of comic books, so people who do are mysterious. Even fewer people write, so people who do, especially the amateurs that tend to occupy the genre fan fiction category, are triply mysterious. Whining about it just makes us look like losers.
The article makes us really look like losers. The one thing that is more stereotyped than the comic book guy is the cheerleader. Save the cheerleader is both a catchphrase and an irony, because why does a girl who cannot be killed need saving, a la Buffy. Yet we continue to want her to be the damsel in distress. Bringing these two archetypes together was brilliant. It is the thing that Heros does that no one understands. Why do shows use stereotypes. Because most people are simplistic, and have trouble with multiple levels of meaning.
Rocko is equally brilliant in that it is a good depiction of early young adult hood, when one is forced to learn to live. It is not a pretty sight. It is full of lots of scared people who deal with their fears in different ways. Some by hiding in books, some by finding a new playmate every night. Either one of these is stereotyped and seen as reasonable when on is young. Being offended by Filbert says more about one's own issue rather than the character. I find the show hard to take sometimes, but it is because it is so real.
The rest of the most of these are simply too pop culture and too obvious to even give credence. Suffice it to say that we need to be secure enough with ourselves to not freak out anytime we are ridiculed. We do the same with people we do not understand, like cheerleaders.
ah yes, the CPU fallacy. The computer is not the CPU. One can put a a fast CPU on a machine and if it is not matched with fast hardware, then one is just wasting the money. For example up to the late 90's IDE drivers were slow as molasses. Apple machines who used them were slow, but were cheaper. A slow bus can cause similar problems. 25 USB ports will not replace a firewire port for someone who needs it, which a little box can replace the card reader that some manufacturers include instead of a firewire 800.
As a mac user, it is easy to think that the hardware is the same as everyone else. It may be that Apple Computer transforms to Apple, Inc we will see that hardware becomes less of an issue. This certainly has been the case for the past tens years as the time lag from research to commodity has shrunk from month to years, but I never feel the price, at least on the pro hardware, is vastly different from the competition. Even the consumer hardware, like a 24" Imac seems quite reasonable. To apply the overused car analogy, it is not as cheap as an Aspire, but it certainly not as extravagant as an e-class either.
Are these rules applied uniformly in France? If so I wish we could do such things in the US. For instance, int he US we have many so-called faith based persons that produce what in effect infomercials in the form a religious services for the sole purpose of separating vulnerable people, often the elderly on fixed income, from their money. Then there are many churches that preach the gospel of prosperity, which is a magical incantation that they say will bring you 10x more money than you give to the church. I have no love for the church of scientology, but leaving these con artists on the street while harassing scientology just seems unfair. At least the church of scientology is upfront about the money requirements, and don't harass people with fairy tales of hell to extort the money.
Mac clone companies cannot make because macs are not overpriced. They are priced for what is necessary to deliver the hardware to run the OS. Although mac prices have fallen tremendously because the price of hardware has fallen tremendously, the OS itself stil requires some hefty hardware. Apple has no reason to change this because, unlike MS, it is not neccesary to run on cheap hardware to compensate for the fact that the software is overpriced. Apple cannot blackmail commodity hardware makers into making precious little profit because it integrates systems.
Anyone who is going to compete with Apple will have to do the same thing. They will have to keep up with Apple. This may mean, for example, that the machine can't have a slow bus or can't have a crap hard disk. Simply copying will not work.
What will work is innovation, and here is my idea. A fully virtualized machine. MS Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, whatever, fully installed and running in parallel on a multicore machine. A pipe dream? Probably. But this, not whining about the MS monopoly or that Apple wants so much money for what many call a POS is what will create a new world. Break the MS monopoly, break the Apple monopoly, run any application. Why that is as silly an idea as not having to go a special gas station dedicated to your brand of car.
To be fair, there is little modern about this, and really is not the drug hysteria that the majority of the population, at least in the US, complain about. When what is now bayer synthesized heroin, it pretty quickly became clear it was worse than the morphine it was meant to replace, and was essentially banned in the US almost 100 years ago. The same thing happens every ten years or so when something thinks they have come up with a safe speed, until it is shown that there is no such thing. I agree that amount of work done to keep vegetation that might be used to create a drug from crossing boarders is insane, but I think it is sort of good to stop the processed stuff. Just imagine, if laws against cocaine were fully prosecuted, we might not have had to deal with 12 years of recent inept governance in the US.
As far as the cost, that is not an issue. People steal stuff, they don't buy it. Have you noticed the number of over the counter drugs that are now behind locked doors? This is because kids were stealing it and making drugs. For them there was no money, just time, which druggies have in spades. It is true that it would take cases of this to make enough cocaine to matter, but one can imagine a couple kids spending the week gathering a bunch of the stuff, then spending the weekend evaporating the water to try to get a good dose. Many of us did dumber things a kid to try to get high.
Re:Modern Marvels: Secrets of Oil. Another junk st
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The Great Ethanol Scam
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· Score: 2, Informative
Here is the problem with the WSJ. It is going to go with whatever bit of misinformation that is currently in vogue. This is to force a switch of policy to help with whatever doll payments those in powers wish. This si different from innovation because innovation might not show a profit for 5-10 years, while such bit of misinformation are meant to show a profit, at least to some of the players, immediately.
Take ethanol from corn. This makes large conglomerates lots of money in terms of short term profits. It does not help the small farmer or the small processor as the good times do not last long enough to pay for the capital costs.
Such talk also helps solidify the corn culture of the United States, a culture that has cost the tax payer maybe 5 billion a year in doll payments to the conglomerates and farmers. This means that even though corn may not be the choice that a free market economy would make, it is the choice that the command driven economy is forced to make. Therefore alternatives like sugar cane, which the US used to grow, and maybe even switch grass is priced out of the command economy.
So what is next. Getting oil from shale, something that business would like to invest in, if only there was some stability and possibility of profit. So what does the business press do, publish stories about how the ethanol is a scam and we need to go back to oil, which we have plenty of if only the government would stop regulating the corporations so they will be able to innovate. We are told that it is cost effective to extract the oil at current prices, but we just need a push. Maybe move dole payments from corn to shale? Not likely. Probably ask for new dole payments for shale
The issue has to be risk assessment, not that a single accident occurred. There are always risks, and trying to cut the risk to zero is pointless. Thoughtfully balancing risk with research is the point.
When I was in the lab, it was a dangerous place. Not all of us knew what we were doing, we used chemicals that would never be used on a non-research basis, and very often we were distracted by the attractions of people around us. OTOH I learned a lot, much of which would never be learned in any other way. A couple of time my life and the life of others may have been at genuine risk. It is the nature of the beast. This is one reason why, in my experience, average work study students are not in the working part of a lab. Not only are these students not necessarily qualified to do the work, but it wouldn't make sense to put them at such risk given that they would receive little long term benefit. Such a student would be a lab rat. Most of my friends and I were not, we were students, trying to learn. It was a intoxicating time. Not like so many other students who were just trying to get a sheet of paper so they could spend the next 30 years drawing a pay check for doing nothing in particular.
In industrial labs, the situation is much different. The safety protocols are in place assuming that many people are simply workers, not researchers. These workers are unlikely to fully understand the risk, and are likely to be exposed over a number of decades, not a number of years. Combine this with the fact that most industrial processes are much better known, it is generally possible to tweak the process to make it very safe. Given that workers are need to work and are replaceable, it is generally possible to enforce the safety rules with threats of docking of pay and termination of employment. Such is not the case in a university research lab.
Research is cool, and like anything that is cool, it is dangerous. Unfortunately for us science geeks, what we do is so unintelligible that the outside worlds just shuts down. What is the quickest way to end a conversation? Tell the group you do science.
A simpler explanation is that this show was just another attempt to increase the profits of the terminator franchise. I suspect that given the number of people involved, and the number of people that had to be paid off to gain the rights to the characters, ideas, and franchise made the show too expensive.
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It seems to me that the same show could have been made with new characters at a lower cost. I am sure the network thought the fact that this was terminator meant that more people would watch it and they would recover the additional costs. Obviously they were wrong.
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OTOH, we tend to teach what we know and what has worked well. This has been Fortran. It is stable, which means it is easy to get and easy to teach. Most universities has extensive mathematical and scientific libraries, which means that unless one is teaching programming, all that is really neccesary is some glue code to put the functions together.
As an aside, it is also moderately difficult to debug. While this is annoying to the undergraduate, debugging a fortran program does teach important investigative skills and encourages a level of precision that is not so necessary in some more modern languages.
In closing let me make a hint. In six month Apple is going to release a new phone that will make the 3GS look like the piece of shit it is. Save yourself some grief. Suffer with the lame phone you have now until the contract runs out, then buy something not Apple. If you can't afford to upgrade your Apple toys every six months, then get out of the game.
First, I would say it naive to think that computers are somehow at fault, and that they do not have a net benefit. The main reason to use digital solid state computers is that they often reduce discrete component count, which usually increases reliability. In a system that is supposed to nearly 100% reliability, like an aircraft, component count must be kept to a minimum. That has traditionally mean fly by wire, and the more fly by wire, the better. My understanding is that Airbus reduces complexity significantly assuming a complete fly by wire profile. One could, for instance, install backup hydraulics, which I assume is not done, but this would reduce reliability.
There is not simple solution. Things do not increase security and reliability simply because we feel better. For instance, Many people feel safer in big trucks but many studies have shown that one is safer in a full size sedan. Likewise, one thing that makes a large truck, especially an SUV safe is the electronic stability control, which can countermand any driver instruction. Large planes are already computer controlled. Long haul flying of large planes is in no way a trivial task. I agree with the blog mentioned in the article that people who have no experience have no basis to make any useful comment.
I do believe that manufacturers should be able to sell their product in whatever form, at whatever price they wish. But if they choose a form and price that no one wants, and then they whine about is, I think that does make them look like little children that deserved to be called names. Vista is an example. It was a mistake, and the number of SKUs are insane, Do you know that MS maintains a website just to keep the consumer for being confused? Wouldn't it be simpler to have a home and business edition, and maybe have a separate deal for developers? Is there any reason why the home edition can't cost $100 and the business edition $200. I would have have paid $200 for vista. Instead I paid $150 for XP. I think a lot of rational agents are going to make the same decision. I bet a lot of ration agents are going to make the same decision unitl MS Windows 7 is $200 in full form.
I have no doubt that MS Vista is an excellent OS, and that 7 is going to be even better. I think 7 is exactly what MS needs to put out to keep customers in line. I also know that Mac OS X does everything I need, and more, with free development tools, and I can upgrade all my machines for $50 to snow leopard. I can't even begin to think about upgrading my windows machines to 7. So MS wil continue to bitch that no one will pay the price to upgrade to the new OS, and Apple will continue to treat it like the whiny boy it is.
My MS Windows machine has support for may different cards, ports, etc. It make the thing look very useful. Unfortunately my DSLR us compact flash, and not a single one of my MS Windows machines come with such a thing standard. Port bloat does not mean that a particular user will have a port that he or she needs. In any case, I transfer all my shots to a dedicated hard disk with an attached CF reader for security.
Of course this is why we are left with crappy laptops. Sure a well designed with laptop, that has good usability and performance, can survive traaport might cost only 10% in parts and labor, but parts and labor are hardly the issue in such matters. The issue is getting the parts, and getting the parts that work. First, off the shelf parts will not work. When I was making wafer, I recall specifically that we charged a lot for the best wafers, and those that were not willing to pay were given the rejects of those that were. Sure they would work, but not as well as for those that were willing to pay.
Then there is system integration. While your average machine is simply a collection of off the shelf parts, minimally tested, selected primarily because they are cheap, a well built machine has carefully selected parts, that are purchased in large quantities to make sure that there is consistency over the model. Someone has to be paid to select, integrate, and acquire these parts.
Then there is the software. Even if we start with an OSS base, the nice façade has to be put on. Integration between different machines that are to be integrated.
I am not saying that a laptop should be 3K. I am saying that expecting to get a nice laptop, with long battery life, for under 1K is delusional. My Macbook pro is not a cheap machine, but neither is MS Windows laptop. Both are around 3K and both basically the same specs, except the MS machines has a smaller screen. I could get a macbook for 50% less than a pro, or a MS Windows laptop for 80% less, but then I would be buying the machines that is not well built.
To be more helpful, here is the way I see it. Most passwords are sent over HTTPS, so those are likely to be at least as secure as any other public connections you might have use, say at high school or networks you might sniff out and use without explicit permission. As far as passwords, assume all password used on campus assets are compromised. Do not reuse these passwords on other services. For instance, do not use a campus network password on faceboook. Some other students with access to campus records will find the nakes you have posted.
Assume that all you web browsing habits will be tracked. Most students studies are paid for by third parties, and as lame it might seem, third parties want to know if students are studying or playing. Given that your university network is likely funded by private funds, the tax payer is interested to know whether the money is used to helping student learn or just troll of dates and pr0n. Even though your personal habits are not likely of interest, as another poster suggested you are not as interesting as you think, such records might be exposed through an audit, and don't discount parental requests that very well might be paying for the education.
Emails should always be assumed to be public record when transmitted over a public network. Set up PGP is this is of concern, or set up some one time code with your friends. That is fun thing to do on those long college nights. This is practice for corporate where it is always good to assume that people are reading you emails. Running everything through google might help as the mail won't be stored on campus servers, as long as you don't mind having your college emails come back to haunt you in 10 years.
As far as the security agent, this might be genuine issue. Again, it is likely only an issue if you a normal college student who does not college stuff. OTOH, everyone on campus is a normal college student who does normal college stuff, so it would be imply you were an extraordinary person to be of interest. In any case, it looks like all this does is enforce best practices for Windows computers and make sure you are not creating a network yourself. The simple solution, as has been mentioned, it to buy a Mac or *nix machines, both of which will limit what this application can do. I have seen many of these apps, and they all work on Macintoshes. The best thing to do is behave during college. It is only four years, and they shouldn't be wasted playing with a computer when there are so many other fun things to play wit.
Here is the bottom line. If the campus system is not to your liking, and you absolutely cannot refrain from criminal activity on your computer, and you cannot get into another school, then buy a wire cellular broadband connection. Something like cricket will run a few hundred dollars for the year. As much as people like to say college is absolute freedom, this is a myth. There is freedom in some areas, but such freedoms are countered by additional responsibilities that the non college going public cannot manage. That is why a college graduate is such a special thing. They have proven they can handle the freedom, manage the responsibility, and succeed. In high school, the drop out rate is high because most people are forced in 9th grade and never have to make a personal commitment to wake up in the morning. They just quit as soon as they can. Most college students are at college voluntarily, but half of them don't have a degree 4 years later, often because they spend all their time parting, and never learn to balance play and work, a critical skill employers look form.
Now with CD and digital downloads each track will likely be sold only once to each consumer, and has no effective limited lifetime. But this is a recent effect. The idea of a DRM provider going out of business is really no different than a vinyl album wearing out. Music with DRM is effectively rented, or licensed, and I am sure most TOS read that way. In the case of music it is not any different from what has mostly been the case. Format shift from DRM to CD, with some generational loss, and move on. Kids have been doing this for ny lifetime, at least.
For movies, it is more tricky, but then movies have not had the freedom to format shift and control the content. VHS tape wore out quickly, and had copy protections very early on. DVD is a closed, annoying format, and was developed to maximize control of the rights holder even at the expense of the customer. This is where the battle might be fought. Certainly the situation with music not that different. What we might be able to fight is the real deterioration of rights we see in the movie content business. The fact that DRM can control on which monitors one can play a movie, or that movies can't be easily format shifted, is issue.
Certainly all those thoughts are legitimately expressed in the United States, even though many of these shows occur at times when young children would be expected to listen. We assume that these are just words, and hearing that gay people should be punished, or that Lutheran doctors might deserve to be murdered are just words and will not effect them. This is the same logic we use to support the distribution of other content that reasonable people might find objectionable. Of course merely being objectionable does not make it subject to regulation. We may not agree that shooting police in a video games is acceptable, or verbally promoting the murder of large groups of people based on superficial characteristics, or limited opposition speech, but that does not mean we can regulate it
Of course Germany has a history of hate speech escalating to mass murder, so they have different tolerance to such entertainment
Some might say this not retailers setting a base price, but the government, so it is ok. I think, though, this is still in effect price fixing, a it sets, at least within a state, a fixed priced for a given product. Though this may not result in a fixed price, which only lead to increase inflation as retailers are forced to overcompensate when price adjustments are allowed, it is certainly still an unwarranted obstruction of the free market.
If this is allowed, what is next? Minimum taxes on each transaction at the grocery store. If I want too offer buy two, get on free, do I have to pay taxes as if I bought three items? Do I have to pay tax on the total before the coupon?
I am absolutely in favor of taxes, after all the roads need to be fixed, the soldiers need a fair chance of getting a new leg when the original gets blown off, children need to be educated, but the tax must be based on real product or services. This will be the beginning of a serious problem. Just imagine getting advice for you computer from a professional. No charge, buddy, but the retail value fo my time is $200, so I have to charge you fifteen bucks in tax.
Now that MS, once primarily an OS developer, is seriously in hardware business, Creative needs to think about a graceful exit strategy from the MS Windows market. Just look at what happened when MS decided to sell software. Previous partners like Lotus and SSI saw what happens when MS want market share.
Hummer is simply an effecient way to kill families of four in smaller cars, as well as slowly killing the rest of us. Hummer does down sell, as with the H3. The H1 was a special vehicle in that it was large enough to not have follow pollution control standards that most cars do have to follow. Everyone complians about pollution control standards, but think about. You have toilet in your house, don't you? And pay plumbers. I mean, you don't have to have this expense. You could just crap in your neighbors yard, but you don't. And yet somehow we complain about catalytic converters and the cost of the emission control systems.
The H1 was special in another way. It was big enough to be taken off taxes in one big swoop, not over time. Need to reduce you tax liability. But an h1. Take it off your bogus lawnmower or antique bussinesss. The taxpayer has now bought you a car.
Again the problem with Hummer is that it was actively sold to people who could not really afford it. The economy allowed those people to buy it, and pay for gas, but now the magic house bank account is gone. Reports from everywhere say no one is buying these.
The good news is the chinese restrictions on cars to do apply to foreign made vehicles, so Hummer is likely not going to made in china. But the chinese do not have to pay the executive salaries that have been the main means of killin the car company, and can control costs in other ways, so they may be able to sell enough of these vehicles to turn a profit. No possible with American car companies who seem to think they are in the real estate business rather than the car business.
I don't know if there is a real issue here. I don't know if the converter boxes have to pay the license fee, if they do it is certainly at the low end. I don't suspect you have to pay the fee to cable companies to use your old tv. This seems to be the case of early adopters paying to adopt early.
I leanred ed on a teletype. vi changed everything.
Shape table on the Apple were the next big change in my life.
Although I am sure 123 and all the clones are interesting, and Excel does deserve a place of it's own, visicalc changed the way I think.
Same thing for Mathematics.
I am not going to say anything about WYSIWG editing, because I truly think that combining content and presentation is a bad thing. It was a good idea, but it shouldn't be done on a regular basis. For any non trivial project, content and presentation has to be kept separate. I blame the fact that it isn't for all the bad code in the world.
Autodesk inventor was an excellent way to migrate from the drawing board to the computer. However Solidworks and later Inventor actually provided the means by onw which should draw on the computer. There is no reason to pretend that the computer is a drawing board.
It is kind of the same with C++. Lets us look at coding by modeling the world, but does not hide the code of the model behind arbitrary gibberish.
Anti virus software is very important because it allows us to used the cheap PC. Without it we have to buy the drones expensive computers.
The science we have is amazing. It has allowed a person to create multiple more food. It has allowed the food to be preserved, concentrated, and widely distributed. It has allowed some us to live in cleaner environments with much less risk of disease. It has allowed an efficient use of human effort by allowing the quick transport of personnel to areas in which they are needed. Some of us may not like the fact that persons smarter than ourselves can be shipping into to complete projects that we cannot efficiently do ourselves, but it is an amazing thing to do.
The political and economic theory comes in when distributing the benefits of these efficiencies. Who gets them. How much are we taxed to keep up the infrastructure, develop the technology, and train people to use the technology. How much will workers be paid by those that wish to apply the technology. All of this occurs in a world where the entitled live in fear that someone might use the money to enjoy things that the entitled do not approve by those who are not entitled.
Second, the snipe a Palm at the end was not professional. Palm has produced serious hardware, the Palm V for instance. But to produce serious hardware someone needs to pay serious prices. One issue is that Palm is not longer a leader in innovation, and no longer goes after the market that will pay those prices. So, it is now down to commodity hardware, a tought fight to win.
Third, who knows what the application store is going to do. Android already has many Apps. iPhone has many apps. Pre will have many apps. The problem is we know have three different platforms, so we in a compatibility hell hole where manufacturers are tying us into platforms. If the phone is the next major platform, we are in trouble.
The biggest complaint I hear is not that you can't get a mac for $1000, as most people who will spend a $1000 will spend the $1300 for the imac, but that you can't get a mac for $500. This to me is that market segment that the cloners need to be in, not a 10% reduction from Apples. price. And don't try to say that these machines are going to complete with the high end iMac or low end Mac Pro and offer a 50% reduction in price. I don't see most other people shipping Xeon machines, much less with a terrebyte on board. I know that they can built for almost nothing, but really. Most people who want a $500 computer is not going to build it, they want plug and play.
The article makes us really look like losers. The one thing that is more stereotyped than the comic book guy is the cheerleader. Save the cheerleader is both a catchphrase and an irony, because why does a girl who cannot be killed need saving, a la Buffy. Yet we continue to want her to be the damsel in distress. Bringing these two archetypes together was brilliant. It is the thing that Heros does that no one understands. Why do shows use stereotypes. Because most people are simplistic, and have trouble with multiple levels of meaning.
Rocko is equally brilliant in that it is a good depiction of early young adult hood, when one is forced to learn to live. It is not a pretty sight. It is full of lots of scared people who deal with their fears in different ways. Some by hiding in books, some by finding a new playmate every night. Either one of these is stereotyped and seen as reasonable when on is young. Being offended by Filbert says more about one's own issue rather than the character. I find the show hard to take sometimes, but it is because it is so real.
The rest of the most of these are simply too pop culture and too obvious to even give credence. Suffice it to say that we need to be secure enough with ourselves to not freak out anytime we are ridiculed. We do the same with people we do not understand, like cheerleaders.
As a mac user, it is easy to think that the hardware is the same as everyone else. It may be that Apple Computer transforms to Apple, Inc we will see that hardware becomes less of an issue. This certainly has been the case for the past tens years as the time lag from research to commodity has shrunk from month to years, but I never feel the price, at least on the pro hardware, is vastly different from the competition. Even the consumer hardware, like a 24" Imac seems quite reasonable. To apply the overused car analogy, it is not as cheap as an Aspire, but it certainly not as extravagant as an e-class either.
Are these rules applied uniformly in France? If so I wish we could do such things in the US. For instance, int he US we have many so-called faith based persons that produce what in effect infomercials in the form a religious services for the sole purpose of separating vulnerable people, often the elderly on fixed income, from their money. Then there are many churches that preach the gospel of prosperity, which is a magical incantation that they say will bring you 10x more money than you give to the church. I have no love for the church of scientology, but leaving these con artists on the street while harassing scientology just seems unfair. At least the church of scientology is upfront about the money requirements, and don't harass people with fairy tales of hell to extort the money.
Anyone who is going to compete with Apple will have to do the same thing. They will have to keep up with Apple. This may mean, for example, that the machine can't have a slow bus or can't have a crap hard disk. Simply copying will not work.
What will work is innovation, and here is my idea. A fully virtualized machine. MS Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, whatever, fully installed and running in parallel on a multicore machine. A pipe dream? Probably. But this, not whining about the MS monopoly or that Apple wants so much money for what many call a POS is what will create a new world. Break the MS monopoly, break the Apple monopoly, run any application. Why that is as silly an idea as not having to go a special gas station dedicated to your brand of car.
As far as the cost, that is not an issue. People steal stuff, they don't buy it. Have you noticed the number of over the counter drugs that are now behind locked doors? This is because kids were stealing it and making drugs. For them there was no money, just time, which druggies have in spades. It is true that it would take cases of this to make enough cocaine to matter, but one can imagine a couple kids spending the week gathering a bunch of the stuff, then spending the weekend evaporating the water to try to get a good dose. Many of us did dumber things a kid to try to get high.
Take ethanol from corn. This makes large conglomerates lots of money in terms of short term profits. It does not help the small farmer or the small processor as the good times do not last long enough to pay for the capital costs.
Such talk also helps solidify the corn culture of the United States, a culture that has cost the tax payer maybe 5 billion a year in doll payments to the conglomerates and farmers. This means that even though corn may not be the choice that a free market economy would make, it is the choice that the command driven economy is forced to make. Therefore alternatives like sugar cane, which the US used to grow, and maybe even switch grass is priced out of the command economy.
So what is next. Getting oil from shale, something that business would like to invest in, if only there was some stability and possibility of profit. So what does the business press do, publish stories about how the ethanol is a scam and we need to go back to oil, which we have plenty of if only the government would stop regulating the corporations so they will be able to innovate. We are told that it is cost effective to extract the oil at current prices, but we just need a push. Maybe move dole payments from corn to shale? Not likely. Probably ask for new dole payments for shale
When I was in the lab, it was a dangerous place. Not all of us knew what we were doing, we used chemicals that would never be used on a non-research basis, and very often we were distracted by the attractions of people around us. OTOH I learned a lot, much of which would never be learned in any other way. A couple of time my life and the life of others may have been at genuine risk. It is the nature of the beast. This is one reason why, in my experience, average work study students are not in the working part of a lab. Not only are these students not necessarily qualified to do the work, but it wouldn't make sense to put them at such risk given that they would receive little long term benefit. Such a student would be a lab rat. Most of my friends and I were not, we were students, trying to learn. It was a intoxicating time. Not like so many other students who were just trying to get a sheet of paper so they could spend the next 30 years drawing a pay check for doing nothing in particular.
In industrial labs, the situation is much different. The safety protocols are in place assuming that many people are simply workers, not researchers. These workers are unlikely to fully understand the risk, and are likely to be exposed over a number of decades, not a number of years. Combine this with the fact that most industrial processes are much better known, it is generally possible to tweak the process to make it very safe. Given that workers are need to work and are replaceable, it is generally possible to enforce the safety rules with threats of docking of pay and termination of employment. Such is not the case in a university research lab.
Research is cool, and like anything that is cool, it is dangerous. Unfortunately for us science geeks, what we do is so unintelligible that the outside worlds just shuts down. What is the quickest way to end a conversation? Tell the group you do science.
A simpler explanation is that this show was just another attempt to increase the profits of the terminator franchise. I suspect that given the number of people involved, and the number of people that had to be paid off to gain the rights to the characters, ideas, and franchise made the show too expensive. p It seems to me that the same show could have been made with new characters at a lower cost. I am sure the network thought the fact that this was terminator meant that more people would watch it and they would recover the additional costs. Obviously they were wrong.