And when one is writing software it is hard to keep everything in order. Apple has made some bonehead mistakes. MS has made really silly mistakes. On thing that should be good for Android is that many eyes can be looking at the code, except when some firm believes security is easy and makes a bonehead mistake. It seems like this will happen more in phones like Android unlike Ms and Apple as firms have an incentive to make risky changes to interface to differentiate the phone, not to mention the need to sell phones cheap while paying MS major chunks of money in settlement.
I did not have installed on my computer until the mid 2000s. The only place that it was widely used up until that point were some entertainment websites and advertising. 90% of the content flash I saw, IMHO, was advertising. Flash was slow, unstable, and resource hog on the computers that were affordable.
Flash blockers made flash tolerable and allowed me to install the Flash client. Technology also caught up with a the requirements of flash. A few non-entertainment sites also began to use Flash, like Google Stock.
When we talk about the decline of Flash using open source tools, we are not talking from the late 1990's Macromedia days,, we are talking about the six years that Adobe has had Flash and the rise of HTML 5. We are talking about Google releasing Docs not in Flash, but in HTML. We are talking about Youtube encoding videos so they can be packed in HTML and not flash. We are talking much content coded in Java and not Flash.
Adobe is the king of high price development tools. They bought flash so they could include this powerful tool in their catalog. The problem is they continued to target Flash to advertisers, not developers or consumers. Flash has one and only one advantage over OSS. The lack of an off switch.
According to what I have read this appears to be another case of the authorities possibly encourages a garden variety crazy person to engage in extreme activities. They took his IEDs and told him they had delivered them and succeeded in blowing up American troops. They delivered explosives and provided the means that this guy would try to blow up the pentagon. The only thing this guy seems to have done on his own is travel to the pentagon and take pictures of it.
So what they have done is capture a border line personality who came up with a movie plot threat that he would likely never actually be able to carry out. Maybe useful, but hardly the terrorist takedown of the decade.
I suspect there are hundreds of these border line personalities that would be venerable to an FBI agent encouraging them to commit some act of terrorism. These people want attention, and will do anything to get it.
When I first saw the specs, I though this would be a great tool for 8-12 education. It is obviously a good reading tool. The lack of camera means that a source of massive time suck is no longer an issue. Ditto for the mic. Depending on how rugged it is built, it could be the minimal machine that education needs. Of course the media consumption model might be an issue, but we can't have anything.
Upon further reading, I am became interested in whether the browser would render online apps like Google Docs. It runs flash so it should run the simulations for stuff like physics and electronics. I hope that the browser is good, as this is the only thing that kept me from buying a Kindle. My feeling is that, since Amazon pays 3g, they will sacrifice the web browser to minimize costs. I would be nice if Fire with WiFi could load a more standard browser.
I don't use a scientific calculator anymore, I use Wolfram Alpha. Pretty much anything you want to do a scientific calculator plus all the stuff that you can't do on many calculators simply because the College Board says that a useful calculator cannot be used on their tests.
So I pay for Wolfram Alpha on my iPhone and do everything that I used to do on my HP is about half the time.
It seems to me that this has been tested in the real world. I believe many of the products we buy have arbitration only agreements. These agreements require the injured party to travel to the home of the firm that supplied the defective product and state the case, often in front of a mediator that the injured party has no ability to insure is truly neutral, not to mention that arbitration has to equate the value of person to the value of what is often a corporation.
In principle I have no problem with mediation agreements. It is a free market solution to something that government should not be involved in, i.e. regulating and limiting the judicial process. I don't know why conservatives can't see that a constitution that sets up three coequal and separate branches would prevent the legislative branch from arbitrarily limiting what private citizens do on the judicial side.
The article seems to be changing terms. At first it talks about total compensation, which to some degree might be comparable. If the total compensation of a contractor is significantly greater than the total compensation of the fully funded employee, then that might be a problem. However later in the article it talks of pay of the contractor, pay of the federal employee, and salary of the private sector. This of course is silly. The cost of an employee is far greater than the salary. There is pension, health, workers comp, etc.
Even if the article is comparing total compensation to total compensation, which I doubt it is, there may be other cost involved. There have been times when I supplied my own equipment and I have charged beyond a normal hourly rate for the use of the equipment.
For contractors that are hired for short time, it is not uncommon in industry to pay them large amounts of money. For instance, I have seen many contractors come in for a few weeks a years being paid double what an equivalent worker would make. It is not cost effective to have such a person on payroll, but their specific skills are sometimes needed. Think of a plumber or electrician.
Which is not to say there is not waste. Just to say the article does not make a compelling case for waste, and certainly not a compelling case for 50% waste, which is what everyone wants to believe so that we have these historically low tax rates without negatively effecting economic growth.
I am the last person who disrespects the way past generation, but I do believe we have to take what they say with a grain of salt. Each generation has to define their own direction, and not be hobbled with the pat saying this is how it is because this is how it was. People going into space may not be the best use of funds right now. If we had been irrationally attached to people in space, we would not right be exploring the Heliosheath. We would not know what we know about Mars. I would like to see hundreds of probes sent in many directions to do some basic science on our solar system. I would also like to see people traveling so they can see and describe in a way that machines cannot. We can have both.
I watched The Bicycle Thieves the other day on the big screen. Beautiful movie. And not just becuase it is often cited as the best movie ever made. The story, the photography, the acting, it really good. The guy who plays Bruno is just excellent. Saw Lion King 3d as well. It was a gimmick, most shots were only gratuitous 3D, did not make it a better movie.
Both of these are movies reflecting a time. Thieves has an artistic quality for those who want and appreciate that in a movie. Lion Kind can only really be appreciated by those who were kids or had kids at the time of the release. It is not really the example of any particular genre, or the last of a genre.
Star Trek and Star Wars are both primary examples or two ways of doing sci fi in video. Star Trek is the Odyssey while Star Wars is more generic greek tragedy. One is about exploration of the world, something we do as geeks, the other exploration and justification of the self, something that is done by humanities people. They were both examples of classical forms suited for a particular time. I don't sit down and repeatedly watch either as I would Casablanca, or Go, or Blade Runner.
RIM let users do things that no one else could do. RIM gave corporate the control necessary for due diligence and CYA. There is always money to be made in providing products that no one else really makes.
When one thinks of RIM on thinks of efficient email and the best keyboard in the industry. This was the strengths. Yet Playbook was released without a direct email client and without a keyboard. In other words RIM left the playing field in which they had and began to compete using other peoples rules.
I know people who bought RIM phone just to look corporate. This was a good market. RIM could have expanded on this with a phone the was a hybrid consumer/corporate and then a tablet that expanded on this. No one though a phone with a keyboard would compete against apple, yet some Android has models with keyboards.
RIM had the market, but simply did not innovate, like so many other companies. Claiming that this is some unique problem, or that it is a Candadian thing is like saying Compaq failed becasue it was based in Texas, which also has almost no auto manufacturing.
It amazes me how quickly everyone takes this to be an attack on their personal ability to do however one wishes instead of a protection of a firms assets and ultimately the ability of individuals to maintain current positions. When I was younger I would see salespeople rack up huge 976 charges thinking they were cheating the owner. In fact this only forced him, eventually, to lay off a salesperson.
Obviously this is a matter of protecting the business. Bypassing it is easy, and only harmful if the employee is not getting work done.
MS Windows Vista was a long overdue and desperate attempt to rewrite the OS. Few upgraded because it was crap. MS WIndows 7 was an upgrade and gave many a reason to upgrade. I myself did only my fourth personal major upgrade in windows(3.11->95->NT->XP sp3->7), prior to which I was in MS DOS. Some vendors began to add functionality for Windows 7, something that was not widely done for vista.
The challenge with MS Windows 8 will be effect a large shift from XP. I just received a moderately large order of laptops, and they are all still running XP. MS has to put out an OS that will make a compelling argument for upgrade. XP was a compelling argument because it was the first adult Windows. The challenge is to create a truly mature OS that will bridge the WIMP and touch interfaces. As it is, MS Windows 7 looks more like a toy, but less so than Vista. MS seems to focusing on the consumer leaving enterprise to fend for themselves. If MS Windows 8 looked more like NT, they would have a great product.
If one write's one's own research paper, there is no need to check for plagiarism. It is an additional step that few serious students would have time to do. When I mean 'write on one's own' I mean take not in one's own words from valid source that are cited, and clearly label short quotes that support but do not form the bulk of the paper. The paper is then written from these notes. Plagiarism becomes quite a non issue. In most cases, if one has previously written a similar paper, using the work as the basis of the new paper is not considered totolly off limits.
Therefore the only reason to use such a service is to insure that work that is not fully one's own is not detectable as plagiarized. Therefore the only purpose of such a service is to promote plagiarism by making it less detectable. This may mean that the author copied other peoples work and wants to summarize just enough to avoid detection, or the paper was written by a third part and the students wants to see if third party is producing original work.
While I would expect students to copy work in high school, I am always surprised that it is so common in college. After all, anyone who is in college should be able to write well enough so that such complex routes around detection is less effecient than just writing an original paper. Anyone who cannot write at this level should not be in college, and any college that routinely accepts such student should not exist. It is a waste of time and money to even use services ike turnitin. Just deny inadequate students a higher education and have them go to a trade school or something.
With the heathkit stuff, one could build products equal or better to store-bought assembled stuff because so much of retail products were still assembled by humans and the components were manufactured with that assumption. So you would pay a little more for components, but you would save by doing the labor yourself. And it was fun.
Even when it came to PCB, etching yourself was not a huge problem. Try doing that now. For instance, by the late 80's with surface mount technology, who could do that without machines. Assembling now is pretty much swapping cards. There is no labor savings in that.
The value now is probably in having firmware that can be customized to specific tasks.
There are many ways to collect taxes. Unfortunately most people do not want to pay taxes, so those in power often insure they do not. For instance, after a certain point, the more money you make the less payroll tax you pay as a percentage of income. This is why we fight over little bits of residual taxes instead of pushing for real revenue.
This is why Texas has a whole wasted bureaucracy forcing small businesses to specialize in tax collection rather than entrepreneurship when we could just look at payroll and tax it at some small rate after a standard deduction. This, of course, would go against the Perry philosophy that maximizes government job and personal cronyism.
It is funny because according to texas records, over the past 10 years the percent of sales subject to state sales tax has fallen from about 21% to about 19%, which has resulted in a loss of about 2 billion in taxes. It could be argued, therefore, that the problem is not people buying out of state, but of law makers creating special exemption for their friends. Certainly the amount of sales tax collected is up quite a bit this year.
Furthermore, that is like saying that moving into enterprise zone is dodging taxes. This is not the case. By virtue of geographic location the state of california given them special tax breaks not available to others not in the geographic zone.
The current situation is that sales tax cost jobs by reducing the amount that can be purchased with a given sum. States like Tx and Ca that insist on using sales tax as the basis for revenue are killing the private job market just to maximize the number of government jobs that can be offered. If we are to have a sales tax, make it durable goods or high value products that people tend to buy in state. Right now we have a situation in Tx where Perry does not want to pay tax on his yacht but expects the rest of us to pay taxes on our prepared food.
Expanding state sales tax is simply going to expand government jobs, not actually provide more services to the citizens. We will need whole new offices of tax collectors to chase the companies. There will not be much left for services.
The actual difference between Marxism and Capitalism is how the powerful avoid responsibility for their actions and justify the power they hold. In broad terms, Marxism employs a committee to provide basic rights the masses, such as food and housing and meaningful work. Those on the committee enjoy certain privileges as they have given up their life to serve the masses that otherwise would just suffer in waller. The fact that some may be suffering is not an issue as the powerful are at lest trying to make their life better.
With capitalism, we invoke magic, the invisible hand, to avoid responsibility. I have a nice house, a nice car, enough money for everything I need, yet I need feel no guilt about the starving children with no roof over their had because they are that way because they are lazy or defective in some way. Of course as we are not willing to let the kids or useless old people simply die, we have introduced socialists means to prevent that eventuality that should be perfectly acceptable.
I do believe in limited capitalism as i have seen what the free flow of capital can do, and what the concentration of capital does to destroy a country. This means that things like periodic wealth redistribution is critical, as well as mechanisms that insure capital is accesible to everyone. For instance, the housing boom was regrettable, but the idea of easy credit to buy houses where one can build value is a good idea. Easy credit is central to a thriving capital economy. The problem with the US is that credit has never been easy for the masses.
The post office has no monopoly, this is one of the reasons why we are in trouble. There are other ways for people and businesses to send packages, and many use these other methods. USPS provides one simple and inexpensive means to send a package. The only monopoly that the USPS has in on the marked mail box, and the regulations involving a sealed envolope.
The 'only 1.7 billion' number is not insignificant. By comparison, the US congress is struggling to save a mere 50 billion dollars a year on the entire federal budget. Ending saturday delivery is part of a restructuring that can keep the postal service alive. It is also about moving government jobs to the private sector, something that some conservatives are very much against as it makes the economy look worse. For instance in Texas the govenor has maximized state jobs to make the local job picture look better, and has rallied against the rationalization of NASA to keep local jobs that Texas does not have the private infrastructure to absorb.
I think the issue is who is going to pay for mail. Previously the amount of 'junk mail' supported the USPS. Now it is mostly bills and firms and individuals paying bills. There is no competing service because no one else can do it for 40 cents. Really, if stamp prices just kept pace with inflation, we should be paying at least 50 cents per stamp.
This list is large on theory and short on trade craft, like the list presented in the article is short on theory and not so long on trade craft.
For instance, the Pragmatic Programmer has some interesting topic, and has been promoted to death, but I found The Practice of Programming to be much more instructive. It might be because of Brian Kernighan, or my belief that Addison-Wesley puts out the most rigorous computer books(O'Reilly is quick and dirty), but I found it a much more compelling read.
Code Complete is a very important book in terms of trade craft, and was written at a time when MS was writing credible code. I, However, consider it part of a trilogy that includes Writing Solid Code. I can't remember the third MS book, but do recall the three giving me a very good idea of current programming principles when I got back into programming several years ago.
The C book is a good example of how to document a language and how to write a simple and effective language. However, the C++ book provides much more theory and design using a modern language. If one's interest is deep language, The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition is a hard book to beat.
For theory, a book that I seldom see recommended, but is deeply important as at least some programming is procedural, is Composite/Structural programming. Most mistakes still seem to come from the lack of segration between data and rules.
Also, given how basic TCP/IP, I am often concerned that book like TCP/IP Illustrated is not more widely cited. While other books may provide an overview, this is one books that has allowed me to debug deep TCP/IP issues.
As an aside, efficient OO programming dictates the use of Design Patterns. While many would consider the Gamma book the standard, design patterns are based on the pattern language for architecture. A Pattern Language by Alexander is an interesting tome well worth the read.
An experienced technical person often has the ability to look a problem relate it something she or he has seen before, and diagnose the solution. We see this in something as simple as an introductory computer class. I wrote quite a bit of FORTRAN in high school, so when I went to college and did the same, I was able to diagnose strange behavior, as, in effect, the senior yet freshman programmer.
I see that when I am working on problem solving, I can often generate ideas and reduce them to solutions quickly. As an older technical person I am much less likely to play around and be social in the workplace. I did this as a younger person, and can see how younger people know might consider older people 'not a team player' when these older people do not join in the reindeer games.
So yes, there is absolutely age discrimination in the IT field. It is different from other fields as it is not always based on a pay rate or lack of basic job skills. Here is what drives me crazy. If one is a software developer the language should not make that much a difference. A software developer should be able to learn the basics of a language and an IDE in about a month, with help from colleagues. The past development experience can bring a mature view to projects which often are random in nature. What many shops want are code monkeys that will slap out product. Many firms protect themselves by hiring Comp Sci majors hoping they have picked up basic architecture experience along the way.
This myth has been propagated widely, but I don't think it holds water. One thing that Apple does well is ship a product that performs a limited number of tasks well, not a product that is buzzword compliant. Features are added later. Remember that Mac OS was originally flat file? It is widely known that an iPad can't play flash.
The web-app never made sense to me because how could Apple hope to differentiate the product? How could they keep people from buying the competition. Of course, as the lack of application really hurts the Mac, it does make sense that Apple would hedge it bets. If the iPhone were not a success, at least developer would be writing web apps that could be run on the iphone. The conventional wisdom was that developing for Apple products made little economic sense in the mass market context as the tools were not developer friendly and the market was small.
This changed when the iPhone and iPad became huge hits. Now developers wanted to write apps that would generate direct revenue, not just web based ad revenue. Given the speed that Apple got the updates out, one can only imagine that they had them ready but did not want to alienate consumers by delivering another incompatible product.
What is clear is that whatever success the iPad has right now with respect to the other tablets derives from the fact that the public wanted native apps, and Apple was able to deliver. There was nothing accidental about it.
Just on note on charity and philanthropy. Charity is when one gives money to someone in need on the street, or when on gives some money to an organization that will use it for to help others. Charity is when one gives simply because others need it, without strings. Yes the charity may push the world in a certain direction, where people have enough, or the oil companies have freedom to drill, children can go to school, but the primary purpose is that of a gift.
Philanthropy is using great wealth to live a legacy. It is not charity in the sense that it is a gift. Yes other do benefit but is like receiving socks and underwear for christmas. Someone has decided what the world needs, and they are going to make it happen. Philanthropy is about control, legacy, and fundamentally tax evasion.
For instance it is arguable that the Gates simply took a low hanging fruit, malaria control, and used as a means to set up a foundation to launder money. Sure they do some good, but does it do net good. If that money was taxed by the relevant government, if they simply gave their money as charity to existing NOG, might there be more good. Was it necessary to set up a whole new bureaucracy to fight what many were already doing, if they only had the cash the Gates had. The problem with simply giving to charity is that they Gates would not be able to insure that even though they money was legally theirs, it would still be available to enrich them.
Buffet is the same thing. I believe the foundations are headed by each of his three children. What a wonderful way to avoid inheritance tax while still insuring his kids have a guaranteed lifetime income and looking good in the process. He could have just given the money in trust to a charity, but he wanted to launder the money instead. Again, there is nothing wrong with philanthropy, it is just not charity.
Many people in the US claim that christianity is the basis of this country, yet they forget the story of the poor women giving her last penny to the church. How this gift was more valuable than all the others in the pot. How the people giving publicly to show how generous they are were simply hypocrites to be pitied. I am not that extreme. I think the world has greatly benefited from philanthropists. OTOH I think we benefit greater from the true spirit of giving. Those that will give a dollar simply because someone needs it. Those that will pay taxes even though much of it funds things, and people, we do not like. Those that will give even though they do not have control over where the money goes.
The SCO Group, AFAIK, is not Santa Cruz Operation(SCO). SCO did provide some products many years ago, but when I last looked at them 25 years ago they could not make a competitive case in the small bussiness arena competing against MS and Apple.The pricing was to compete against IBM, not against the new agile model based on redundant cheap hardware. Like MS now, they were a primary player, but not flexible enough to respond to new competition.
Never did anything with Caldera. It is clear that they SCO group, like the record labels, are trying to milk a relatively short term business model for as long as they can.
She bought a non-functional laptop
The story only says that she claimed the student claimed it was "messed up" and that she took it somewhere to have it fixed. If the computer was truly in bad shape, and required work, one would think that the hard disk would have been reformatted in which case the recovery software would presumably have been deleted. There would have been no reason not to reformat the HD since she had no information on it. The fact that the hard disk was not reformatted could mean that she had no idea it was stolen, or that there was nothing wrong with computer in the first place and she was not aware of the security software.
from one of her students
At an alternative high school, where the student might tend to be a bit less law abiding than normal. High schools are full of laptops to give student access to current technology and teach them needed skills, but many students merely see these as quick cash for walking around and date money. Any legitimate teacher knows this, even at a regular high school, and would never buy a computer from a student, especially anything that looked like a school computer, which according to the article this was one, which is why the recovery software was on it. She, as a substitute teacher, took advantage of the one degree of removal, and made the purchase. There is no way in hell that this was not receiving stolen merchandise. Even if it wasn't, there are strict guidelines on what students can legitimately sell on campus, so if she broke no laws, she likely broke her contract with the district.
Slashdot refer to others as "dumb" or "idiots" without bothering to get even a modicum of information The article gives plenty of information to judge this personal as at least a criminal, if not a stupid one. School laptops tend to be distinctive, often model not widely available to consumers. To get one out of the school, one has to be sneaky, as they are clearly identifiable. She either had to buy outside on the street or sneak it out of school herself. Any defense, that the computer was "messed up" and she paid to fix it, is not only irrelevant but complete here say. Even the story of buying it from a student is hearsay. I find it much more likely she stole the machine from the school and then tried to blame it on the student.
Even if the story is true, it is people like her that make it difficult to keep high end equipment for the majority of kids that want an education, not just a quick fix.
I also want to comment on the idea of the recovery software. This case proves it is needed. The taxpayer buys computers for the kids to use, not for employees to steal. It may be that schools should not buy computers for home use, but that is not the case here. Furthermore, the case for not taking sex pictures on the computer is that the computer does not provide the legal level of privacy equal to a sealed envelope sent through USPS. That the naked pictures were published were the result of multiple levels of bad decisions, not just one.
Google began to fail when the economics governing the value of a top link in Google became very large even if the value of the information was very small. At that point link farms began to propagate and Google graph theory could not keep up. It is not just spam, but the quality of the results. look up the lyrics to a song. Any community based site is going be relegated to sites that have potentially load viruses and other payload into your machine. Even the sites that are not malicious have ad payloads and other issues that make the content less useful than sites that had lyrics 10 years ago.
This goes for things like locksmiths, car engines, and other goods and services. All too often the top links are not the quality service, but those who have paid specialists to insure that they are the too links. How is the '+1' going to help this? How many people can you hire in third world countries to create proxy accounts that appear to originate from first world countries and '+1' your firm? Google just made the link farm easier to manipulate.
Slashdot Mirror
And when one is writing software it is hard to keep everything in order. Apple has made some bonehead mistakes. MS has made really silly mistakes. On thing that should be good for Android is that many eyes can be looking at the code, except when some firm believes security is easy and makes a bonehead mistake. It seems like this will happen more in phones like Android unlike Ms and Apple as firms have an incentive to make risky changes to interface to differentiate the phone, not to mention the need to sell phones cheap while paying MS major chunks of money in settlement.
Flash blockers made flash tolerable and allowed me to install the Flash client. Technology also caught up with a the requirements of flash. A few non-entertainment sites also began to use Flash, like Google Stock.
When we talk about the decline of Flash using open source tools, we are not talking from the late 1990's Macromedia days,, we are talking about the six years that Adobe has had Flash and the rise of HTML 5. We are talking about Google releasing Docs not in Flash, but in HTML. We are talking about Youtube encoding videos so they can be packed in HTML and not flash. We are talking much content coded in Java and not Flash.
Adobe is the king of high price development tools. They bought flash so they could include this powerful tool in their catalog. The problem is they continued to target Flash to advertisers, not developers or consumers. Flash has one and only one advantage over OSS. The lack of an off switch.
So what they have done is capture a border line personality who came up with a movie plot threat that he would likely never actually be able to carry out. Maybe useful, but hardly the terrorist takedown of the decade.
I suspect there are hundreds of these border line personalities that would be venerable to an FBI agent encouraging them to commit some act of terrorism. These people want attention, and will do anything to get it.
Upon further reading, I am became interested in whether the browser would render online apps like Google Docs. It runs flash so it should run the simulations for stuff like physics and electronics. I hope that the browser is good, as this is the only thing that kept me from buying a Kindle. My feeling is that, since Amazon pays 3g, they will sacrifice the web browser to minimize costs. I would be nice if Fire with WiFi could load a more standard browser.
So I pay for Wolfram Alpha on my iPhone and do everything that I used to do on my HP is about half the time.
In principle I have no problem with mediation agreements. It is a free market solution to something that government should not be involved in, i.e. regulating and limiting the judicial process. I don't know why conservatives can't see that a constitution that sets up three coequal and separate branches would prevent the legislative branch from arbitrarily limiting what private citizens do on the judicial side.
Even if the article is comparing total compensation to total compensation, which I doubt it is, there may be other cost involved. There have been times when I supplied my own equipment and I have charged beyond a normal hourly rate for the use of the equipment.
For contractors that are hired for short time, it is not uncommon in industry to pay them large amounts of money. For instance, I have seen many contractors come in for a few weeks a years being paid double what an equivalent worker would make. It is not cost effective to have such a person on payroll, but their specific skills are sometimes needed. Think of a plumber or electrician.
Which is not to say there is not waste. Just to say the article does not make a compelling case for waste, and certainly not a compelling case for 50% waste, which is what everyone wants to believe so that we have these historically low tax rates without negatively effecting economic growth.
I am the last person who disrespects the way past generation, but I do believe we have to take what they say with a grain of salt. Each generation has to define their own direction, and not be hobbled with the pat saying this is how it is because this is how it was. People going into space may not be the best use of funds right now. If we had been irrationally attached to people in space, we would not right be exploring the Heliosheath. We would not know what we know about Mars. I would like to see hundreds of probes sent in many directions to do some basic science on our solar system. I would also like to see people traveling so they can see and describe in a way that machines cannot. We can have both.
Both of these are movies reflecting a time. Thieves has an artistic quality for those who want and appreciate that in a movie. Lion Kind can only really be appreciated by those who were kids or had kids at the time of the release. It is not really the example of any particular genre, or the last of a genre.
Star Trek and Star Wars are both primary examples or two ways of doing sci fi in video. Star Trek is the Odyssey while Star Wars is more generic greek tragedy. One is about exploration of the world, something we do as geeks, the other exploration and justification of the self, something that is done by humanities people. They were both examples of classical forms suited for a particular time. I don't sit down and repeatedly watch either as I would Casablanca, or Go, or Blade Runner.
When one thinks of RIM on thinks of efficient email and the best keyboard in the industry. This was the strengths. Yet Playbook was released without a direct email client and without a keyboard. In other words RIM left the playing field in which they had and began to compete using other peoples rules.
I know people who bought RIM phone just to look corporate. This was a good market. RIM could have expanded on this with a phone the was a hybrid consumer/corporate and then a tablet that expanded on this. No one though a phone with a keyboard would compete against apple, yet some Android has models with keyboards.
RIM had the market, but simply did not innovate, like so many other companies. Claiming that this is some unique problem, or that it is a Candadian thing is like saying Compaq failed becasue it was based in Texas, which also has almost no auto manufacturing.
Obviously this is a matter of protecting the business. Bypassing it is easy, and only harmful if the employee is not getting work done.
The challenge with MS Windows 8 will be effect a large shift from XP. I just received a moderately large order of laptops, and they are all still running XP. MS has to put out an OS that will make a compelling argument for upgrade. XP was a compelling argument because it was the first adult Windows. The challenge is to create a truly mature OS that will bridge the WIMP and touch interfaces. As it is, MS Windows 7 looks more like a toy, but less so than Vista. MS seems to focusing on the consumer leaving enterprise to fend for themselves. If MS Windows 8 looked more like NT, they would have a great product.
Therefore the only reason to use such a service is to insure that work that is not fully one's own is not detectable as plagiarized. Therefore the only purpose of such a service is to promote plagiarism by making it less detectable. This may mean that the author copied other peoples work and wants to summarize just enough to avoid detection, or the paper was written by a third part and the students wants to see if third party is producing original work.
While I would expect students to copy work in high school, I am always surprised that it is so common in college. After all, anyone who is in college should be able to write well enough so that such complex routes around detection is less effecient than just writing an original paper. Anyone who cannot write at this level should not be in college, and any college that routinely accepts such student should not exist. It is a waste of time and money to even use services ike turnitin. Just deny inadequate students a higher education and have them go to a trade school or something.
Even when it came to PCB, etching yourself was not a huge problem. Try doing that now. For instance, by the late 80's with surface mount technology, who could do that without machines. Assembling now is pretty much swapping cards. There is no labor savings in that.
The value now is probably in having firmware that can be customized to specific tasks.
This is why Texas has a whole wasted bureaucracy forcing small businesses to specialize in tax collection rather than entrepreneurship when we could just look at payroll and tax it at some small rate after a standard deduction. This, of course, would go against the Perry philosophy that maximizes government job and personal cronyism.
It is funny because according to texas records, over the past 10 years the percent of sales subject to state sales tax has fallen from about 21% to about 19%, which has resulted in a loss of about 2 billion in taxes. It could be argued, therefore, that the problem is not people buying out of state, but of law makers creating special exemption for their friends. Certainly the amount of sales tax collected is up quite a bit this year.
The current situation is that sales tax cost jobs by reducing the amount that can be purchased with a given sum. States like Tx and Ca that insist on using sales tax as the basis for revenue are killing the private job market just to maximize the number of government jobs that can be offered. If we are to have a sales tax, make it durable goods or high value products that people tend to buy in state. Right now we have a situation in Tx where Perry does not want to pay tax on his yacht but expects the rest of us to pay taxes on our prepared food.
Expanding state sales tax is simply going to expand government jobs, not actually provide more services to the citizens. We will need whole new offices of tax collectors to chase the companies. There will not be much left for services.
With capitalism, we invoke magic, the invisible hand, to avoid responsibility. I have a nice house, a nice car, enough money for everything I need, yet I need feel no guilt about the starving children with no roof over their had because they are that way because they are lazy or defective in some way. Of course as we are not willing to let the kids or useless old people simply die, we have introduced socialists means to prevent that eventuality that should be perfectly acceptable.
I do believe in limited capitalism as i have seen what the free flow of capital can do, and what the concentration of capital does to destroy a country. This means that things like periodic wealth redistribution is critical, as well as mechanisms that insure capital is accesible to everyone. For instance, the housing boom was regrettable, but the idea of easy credit to buy houses where one can build value is a good idea. Easy credit is central to a thriving capital economy. The problem with the US is that credit has never been easy for the masses.
The 'only 1.7 billion' number is not insignificant. By comparison, the US congress is struggling to save a mere 50 billion dollars a year on the entire federal budget. Ending saturday delivery is part of a restructuring that can keep the postal service alive. It is also about moving government jobs to the private sector, something that some conservatives are very much against as it makes the economy look worse. For instance in Texas the govenor has maximized state jobs to make the local job picture look better, and has rallied against the rationalization of NASA to keep local jobs that Texas does not have the private infrastructure to absorb.
I think the issue is who is going to pay for mail. Previously the amount of 'junk mail' supported the USPS. Now it is mostly bills and firms and individuals paying bills. There is no competing service because no one else can do it for 40 cents. Really, if stamp prices just kept pace with inflation, we should be paying at least 50 cents per stamp.
For instance, the Pragmatic Programmer has some interesting topic, and has been promoted to death, but I found The Practice of Programming to be much more instructive. It might be because of Brian Kernighan, or my belief that Addison-Wesley puts out the most rigorous computer books(O'Reilly is quick and dirty), but I found it a much more compelling read.
Code Complete is a very important book in terms of trade craft, and was written at a time when MS was writing credible code. I, However, consider it part of a trilogy that includes Writing Solid Code. I can't remember the third MS book, but do recall the three giving me a very good idea of current programming principles when I got back into programming several years ago.
The C book is a good example of how to document a language and how to write a simple and effective language. However, the C++ book provides much more theory and design using a modern language. If one's interest is deep language, The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition is a hard book to beat.
For theory, a book that I seldom see recommended, but is deeply important as at least some programming is procedural, is Composite/Structural programming. Most mistakes still seem to come from the lack of segration between data and rules.
Also, given how basic TCP/IP, I am often concerned that book like TCP/IP Illustrated is not more widely cited. While other books may provide an overview, this is one books that has allowed me to debug deep TCP/IP issues.
As an aside, efficient OO programming dictates the use of Design Patterns. While many would consider the Gamma book the standard, design patterns are based on the pattern language for architecture. A Pattern Language by Alexander is an interesting tome well worth the read.
I see that when I am working on problem solving, I can often generate ideas and reduce them to solutions quickly. As an older technical person I am much less likely to play around and be social in the workplace. I did this as a younger person, and can see how younger people know might consider older people 'not a team player' when these older people do not join in the reindeer games.
So yes, there is absolutely age discrimination in the IT field. It is different from other fields as it is not always based on a pay rate or lack of basic job skills. Here is what drives me crazy. If one is a software developer the language should not make that much a difference. A software developer should be able to learn the basics of a language and an IDE in about a month, with help from colleagues. The past development experience can bring a mature view to projects which often are random in nature. What many shops want are code monkeys that will slap out product. Many firms protect themselves by hiring Comp Sci majors hoping they have picked up basic architecture experience along the way.
The web-app never made sense to me because how could Apple hope to differentiate the product? How could they keep people from buying the competition. Of course, as the lack of application really hurts the Mac, it does make sense that Apple would hedge it bets. If the iPhone were not a success, at least developer would be writing web apps that could be run on the iphone. The conventional wisdom was that developing for Apple products made little economic sense in the mass market context as the tools were not developer friendly and the market was small.
This changed when the iPhone and iPad became huge hits. Now developers wanted to write apps that would generate direct revenue, not just web based ad revenue. Given the speed that Apple got the updates out, one can only imagine that they had them ready but did not want to alienate consumers by delivering another incompatible product.
What is clear is that whatever success the iPad has right now with respect to the other tablets derives from the fact that the public wanted native apps, and Apple was able to deliver. There was nothing accidental about it.
Philanthropy is using great wealth to live a legacy. It is not charity in the sense that it is a gift. Yes other do benefit but is like receiving socks and underwear for christmas. Someone has decided what the world needs, and they are going to make it happen. Philanthropy is about control, legacy, and fundamentally tax evasion.
For instance it is arguable that the Gates simply took a low hanging fruit, malaria control, and used as a means to set up a foundation to launder money. Sure they do some good, but does it do net good. If that money was taxed by the relevant government, if they simply gave their money as charity to existing NOG, might there be more good. Was it necessary to set up a whole new bureaucracy to fight what many were already doing, if they only had the cash the Gates had. The problem with simply giving to charity is that they Gates would not be able to insure that even though they money was legally theirs, it would still be available to enrich them.
Buffet is the same thing. I believe the foundations are headed by each of his three children. What a wonderful way to avoid inheritance tax while still insuring his kids have a guaranteed lifetime income and looking good in the process. He could have just given the money in trust to a charity, but he wanted to launder the money instead. Again, there is nothing wrong with philanthropy, it is just not charity.
Many people in the US claim that christianity is the basis of this country, yet they forget the story of the poor women giving her last penny to the church. How this gift was more valuable than all the others in the pot. How the people giving publicly to show how generous they are were simply hypocrites to be pitied. I am not that extreme. I think the world has greatly benefited from philanthropists. OTOH I think we benefit greater from the true spirit of giving. Those that will give a dollar simply because someone needs it. Those that will pay taxes even though much of it funds things, and people, we do not like. Those that will give even though they do not have control over where the money goes.
Never did anything with Caldera. It is clear that they SCO group, like the record labels, are trying to milk a relatively short term business model for as long as they can.
The story only says that she claimed the student claimed it was "messed up" and that she took it somewhere to have it fixed. If the computer was truly in bad shape, and required work, one would think that the hard disk would have been reformatted in which case the recovery software would presumably have been deleted. There would have been no reason not to reformat the HD since she had no information on it. The fact that the hard disk was not reformatted could mean that she had no idea it was stolen, or that there was nothing wrong with computer in the first place and she was not aware of the security software.
from one of her students
At an alternative high school, where the student might tend to be a bit less law abiding than normal. High schools are full of laptops to give student access to current technology and teach them needed skills, but many students merely see these as quick cash for walking around and date money. Any legitimate teacher knows this, even at a regular high school, and would never buy a computer from a student, especially anything that looked like a school computer, which according to the article this was one, which is why the recovery software was on it. She, as a substitute teacher, took advantage of the one degree of removal, and made the purchase. There is no way in hell that this was not receiving stolen merchandise. Even if it wasn't, there are strict guidelines on what students can legitimately sell on campus, so if she broke no laws, she likely broke her contract with the district.
Slashdot refer to others as "dumb" or "idiots" without bothering to get even a modicum of information
The article gives plenty of information to judge this personal as at least a criminal, if not a stupid one. School laptops tend to be distinctive, often model not widely available to consumers. To get one out of the school, one has to be sneaky, as they are clearly identifiable. She either had to buy outside on the street or sneak it out of school herself. Any defense, that the computer was "messed up" and she paid to fix it, is not only irrelevant but complete here say. Even the story of buying it from a student is hearsay. I find it much more likely she stole the machine from the school and then tried to blame it on the student.
Even if the story is true, it is people like her that make it difficult to keep high end equipment for the majority of kids that want an education, not just a quick fix.
I also want to comment on the idea of the recovery software. This case proves it is needed. The taxpayer buys computers for the kids to use, not for employees to steal. It may be that schools should not buy computers for home use, but that is not the case here. Furthermore, the case for not taking sex pictures on the computer is that the computer does not provide the legal level of privacy equal to a sealed envelope sent through USPS. That the naked pictures were published were the result of multiple levels of bad decisions, not just one.
This goes for things like locksmiths, car engines, and other goods and services. All too often the top links are not the quality service, but those who have paid specialists to insure that they are the too links. How is the '+1' going to help this? How many people can you hire in third world countries to create proxy accounts that appear to originate from first world countries and '+1' your firm? Google just made the link farm easier to manipulate.