UW is more reputation than real education.. it's pretty terribly underfunded and the curriculum has been criticized by industry and students left, right and center.
That much is true.
Fortunately the tech bubble bursting deflated a lot of that ridiculous pomposity. I was unlucky enough to go to Waterloo right in that spot in the late nineties when the Globe and Mail Report on Business would have some fawning article praising UW and lamenting the "brain drain" to Silicon Valley every other day. This was not good for our humility.
The school can claim right to the infamous title of having the highest concentration of snobs per square meter of earth.
For Canadian computer science programs, definitely. For general snobbiness, I suspect some of the Ivy League have Waterloo beat.
Brilliant advice from a guy who links to a default Debian index as his home. Maybe instead of worrying about the "personally (sp) and the calibre" of schooling
Sigh, my friend's server goes down once after two years or uptime, and it has to be the day I flame Laurier on Slashdot. I was asking for it, I guess.
As for your picking on my spelling, please reread what I said. "What you're interested in personally", and "the calibre of the education you get" are noun phrases. I didn't mean to write something else like "personality".
I'm being a bit more of a prick for saying this too, but it's spelled "alligator".
you should worry about having that allegator mouth of yours not being backed up by a clue.
Well, I did apologize. I'll definitely admit my first comment made me come off as a massive jerk.
Maybe you could instead try going to better school.
Sorry, that did come off as being massively snobbish.
What I mean is that, really, hardware or software is not the question you should be asking.
What you're interested in personally and the calibre of the education you get and of your peers are going to be way more important than the degree to which you follow industry trends.
Can any expert confirm this or explain why this is relevant?
Yes, Fermat's Last Theorem was proven by Andrew Wiles in the early nineties.
This result would (apparently) supply another proof. Like the first, it would rely on quite complex and modern mathematics, but a slightly different sort than before.
The thing is that Fermat's Last Theorem is not especially important to mathematics; it's mostly a historical curiosity. However, it is a simple enough equation that anyone with a smattering of mathematics can understand: all you need to understand is exponentiation and addition operations, what an equation is, and what integers are. Plus, the story about Fermat's boast makes good press. These things make the equation famous.
So, the fact that this may prove Fermat's Last Theorem is icing on the cake, but for mathematicians the importance of the result is in its major implications for a vast field of research (algebraic geometry).
If it is actually proven, that is. I have seen enough popular accounts of some mathematician "on the verge of proving X" to not put much trust in such things. Wiles was wise to work in secret.
I suppose it is possible that there are more heterosexuals than gays overall: it didn't strike me as particularly likely at the time, but I'm not going to place any bets on my knowledge of the sexuals habits of most people. I guess it would have been safer to have just said "anal sex".
Damn, should have previewed. Here's what it should have looked like:
Marriage is either a social and evolutionary construct between each sex or it's just a club.
Why is a contract between sexes? Why not a contract between partners?
I support equal rights as far as survivor's beneifts, insurance, etc, but not changing the definition of a 4-thousand+ year institution simply because some of my fellow americans are stupid and hurt gay people.
So, you're one of the 'civil union' crowd: you're willing to give gay people all the trappings of marriage: benefits, coverage, etc. but you just don't want to call it "marriage".
For the life of me I don't understand this crowd: even the gay-bashing religious folk make more sense to me.
But clinging to a word -- it just makes no sense! What is so precious about the word 'marriage' that you can't bear the thought of having it applied to gay people?
This institution, whatever it is called, will be functionally identical to heterosexual marriage in every way (if it's not then we have another argument). Gay people will own property, have children, get messy divorces, and general acts like all other married couples.
For me, the whole "civil union" thing is comparable to a hypothetical situation at the beginning of the 20th century in which a guy would argue that, while women should be granted suffrage, that it really shouldn't be called 'voting'.
"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free," Santorum said.
Perhaps we can we expect Senator Santorum to next intervene on behalf of the unjustifiably repressed legions of private firefighters, police, water safety testers, and maintainers of roads?
After all, it's hard to compete in the market when the government does it for free!
This is also a good time to mention Spreading Santorum, a personal crusade by the advice columnist Dan Savage to popularize the use of the word 'santorum' to describe a (mostly) gay sex act, with the intention of embarrassing the anti-gay senator: spreadingsantorum.com
Marriage is either a social and evolutionary construct between each sex or it's just a club.
Why is a contract between sexes? Why not a contract between partners?
I support equal rights as far as survivor's beneifts, insurance, etc, but not changing the definition of a 4-thousand+ year institution simply because some of my fellow americans are stupid and hurt gay people.
So, you're one of the 'civil union' crowd: you're willing to give gay people all the trappings of marriage: benefits, coverage, etc. but you just don't want to call it "marriage".
For the life of me I don't understand this crowd: even the gay-bashing religious folk make more sense to me.
But clinging to a word -- it just makes no sense! What is so precious about the word 'marriage' that you can't bear the thought of having it applied to gay people?
This institution, whatever it is called, will be functionally identical to heterosexual marriage in every way (if it's not then we have another argument). Gay people will own property, have children, get messy divorces, and general acts like all other married couples.
For me, the whole "civil union" thing is comparable to a hypothetical situation at the beginning of the 20th century in which a guy would argue that, while women should be granted suffrage, that it really shouldn't be called 'voting'.
Some notion of what is needed to supplant proprietary software.
Probably, somewhere, there's some proprietary software package that is 1) necessary, but 2) incredibly boring to write and support.
So no open-source equivalent exists because no one's bothered to write it, because it isn't the private hobbyhorse of any volunteer developer.
This isn't criticism of open-source contributors per se. It's their damn free time, so why should they spend it any other way?
But clearly they donate their time for other reasons than the joy of coding: to popularize open-source software, and there is likely some low-hanging fruit in the 'boring software' category which could be written.
However, I think that before this happens, we'll need more institutions to organize the writing of such software.
Yeah, it's really surprising that people who develope software for free tend to not work on stuff that they're opposed to. Man, I wish I had been sharp enough to figure that out on my own.
My point wasn't as trite as that, but I didn't think I needed to make it because it's been made so often before.
The reason most open-source developers contribute their time, aside from the sheer love of making software, is to build a better computing world.
Part of building this world is attracting interest and money to support open-source projects. Doing this kind of work -- interfacing with proprietary formats, etc. -- isn't as much fun, but helps to spread the word.
Clearly we are motivated to spread the world; what surprises me is the degree to which our goals are still driven by our (possibly obscure) personal interests rather than some idea of what the world needs.
I'm not saying it should necessarily be otherwise, or that I do anything other than create software motivated by my personal interest. I just would have thought that by now there would be much larger communities of people developing general-interest 'software for the masses' to lure them off proprietary stuff.
Whatever. I seriously doubt this has been given serious consideration. Flipping off MS is fun, but you're also flipping off some people who can't switch.
I think there are enough people out there who have to use ActiveX that support will eventually be added as a special module or something.
It's just that its status as Microsoft's attempt at vendor lock-in has given it enough of a bad taste that it's pretty far down on the priority list of most volunteer developers.
It's surprising to what degree open-source development is still driven by the private whims of its contributors.
... Evolution needs Natural Selction. It is the meachnism it uses.
The OP is not correct. You do not need speciation (the emergence of new species) to have evolution.
You don't even need the emergence of new traits in a population. All you need is a change in the frequency of genes (technically, the frequency of alleles) over time. See the Wikipedia entry on evolution for more detail.
Natural Selection != Evolution. While a change appeared to take place, it was still the same basic species.
Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. 'Evolution' != 'Speciation'.
The variations between human populations are a result of evolution (whether that be evolution due to natural selection or simply genetic drift), but we're all still the same species.
Sad that in this case it comes from an actual quote from The Register, a reputable news source. They made it easy to take the quote out of context, and that's bad writing. I'd expect to see this from J. Random Blogger and repeated on Slashdot, and I'm disappointed to see it in The Register.
Whatever. They did it for effect, it's a question of style.
I don't think it's fair to require that writers do all kinds of things to avoid their writing being "easy to take out of context". Good writing usually isn't easy to take out of context, sure, but I think journalists ought to be allowed to pull the sort of things that the Register pulled here.
At some point you have to just force someone to accept responsibility for what's being resyndicated and RTFA in its entirety.
This is really unforgivable: to quote the 'Linus quote' from the Register verbatim, and then to not quote the bit immediately after:
Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up.
It doesn't matter how well the quote summarizes Linus' position. The Register makes it very clear that the quote is not really Linus' by denying it right afterward. Slashdot should too.
This is worst kind of out-of-context quoting I've seen in here quite a while, in a story at least. Both the submitter and CowboyNeal should apologise.
In the red corner, Old, with its established monopolies, its heavy labour-intensive structures, its lobbyists, and its wealth.
In the blue corner, New, with its sharp technological tools and paper-thin cost structures. No lobbyists, not much wealth.
Actually, up here in Canada, 'red' means Liberal and 'blue' Tory/Conservative, which is the opposite (as far as the political spectrum goes) of the American assignment of colours.
Not that these distinctions have much to do with the distinctions you're making: both the Liberals and the Conservatives would definitely be lumped in the "Old" category as you've described it.
Slashdot Mirror
UW is more reputation than real education.. it's pretty terribly underfunded and the curriculum has been criticized by industry and students left, right and center.
That much is true.
Fortunately the tech bubble bursting deflated a lot of that ridiculous pomposity. I was unlucky enough to go to Waterloo right in that spot in the late nineties when the Globe and Mail Report on Business would have some fawning article praising UW and lamenting the "brain drain" to Silicon Valley every other day. This was not good for our humility.
The school can claim right to the infamous title of having the highest concentration of snobs per square meter of earth.
For Canadian computer science programs, definitely. For general snobbiness, I suspect some of the Ivy League have Waterloo beat.
Brilliant advice from a guy who links to a default Debian index as his home. Maybe instead of worrying about the "personally (sp) and the calibre" of schooling
Sigh, my friend's server goes down once after two years or uptime, and it has to be the day I flame Laurier on Slashdot. I was asking for it, I guess.
As for your picking on my spelling, please reread what I said. "What you're interested in personally", and "the calibre of the education you get" are noun phrases. I didn't mean to write something else like "personality".
I'm being a bit more of a prick for saying this too, but it's spelled "alligator".
you should worry about having that allegator mouth of yours not being backed up by a clue.
Well, I did apologize. I'll definitely admit my first comment made me come off as a massive jerk.
Sorry to all the Laurier folks.
Maybe you could instead try going to better school.
Sorry, that did come off as being massively snobbish.
What I mean is that, really, hardware or software is not the question you should be asking.
What you're interested in personally and the calibre of the education you get and of your peers are going to be way more important than the degree to which you follow industry trends.
Not to be too much of a U of W snob about this, but:
You go to Laurier and you've worried about whether to study hardware or software?
Maybe you could instead try going to better school.
In the old days it was Ludwig Plutonium.
Archimedes Plutonium is so famous that he even has a wikipedia article about him.
Can any expert confirm this or explain why this is relevant?
Yes, Fermat's Last Theorem was proven by Andrew Wiles in the early nineties.
This result would (apparently) supply another proof. Like the first, it would rely on quite complex and modern mathematics, but a slightly different sort than before.
The thing is that Fermat's Last Theorem is not especially important to mathematics; it's mostly a historical curiosity. However, it is a simple enough equation that anyone with a smattering of mathematics can understand: all you need to understand is exponentiation and addition operations, what an equation is, and what integers are. Plus, the story about Fermat's boast makes good press. These things make the equation famous.
So, the fact that this may prove Fermat's Last Theorem is icing on the cake, but for mathematicians the importance of the result is in its major implications for a vast field of research (algebraic geometry).
If it is actually proven, that is. I have seen enough popular accounts of some mathematician "on the verge of proving X" to not put much trust in such things. Wiles was wise to work in secret.
Fermat II: The Serre Conjecture, starring Keanu Reeves as Chandra Khare (he looks Indian enough), a simple mathmetician from Utah.
Did you see the life of Buddha starring Keanu Reeves as good ol' Siddhartha himself?
It was somewhat less than convincing.
I tell you, those gay hippies shouldn't pick on conservatives so much.
They might stop if he stopped picking on them?
A lot of heterosexual people enjoy anal sex, too.
That was my motivation for saying "(mostly) gay".
I suppose it is possible that there are more heterosexuals than gays overall: it didn't strike me as particularly likely at the time, but I'm not going to place any bets on my knowledge of the sexuals habits of most people. I guess it would have been safer to have just said "anal sex".
Damn, should have previewed. Here's what it should have looked like:
Marriage is either a social and evolutionary construct between each sex or it's just a club.
Why is a contract between sexes? Why not a contract between partners?
I support equal rights as far as survivor's beneifts, insurance, etc, but not changing the definition of a 4-thousand+ year institution simply because some of my fellow americans are stupid and hurt gay people.
So, you're one of the 'civil union' crowd: you're willing to give gay people all the trappings of marriage: benefits, coverage, etc. but you just don't want to call it "marriage".
For the life of me I don't understand this crowd: even the gay-bashing religious folk make more sense to me.
But clinging to a word -- it just makes no sense! What is so precious about the word 'marriage' that you can't bear the thought of having it applied to gay people?
This institution, whatever it is called, will be functionally identical to heterosexual marriage in every way (if it's not then we have another argument). Gay people will own property, have children, get messy divorces, and general acts like all other married couples.
For me, the whole "civil union" thing is comparable to a hypothetical situation at the beginning of the 20th century in which a guy would argue that, while women should be granted suffrage, that it really shouldn't be called 'voting'.
"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free," Santorum said.
Perhaps we can we expect Senator Santorum to next intervene on behalf of the unjustifiably repressed legions of private firefighters, police, water safety testers, and maintainers of roads?
After all, it's hard to compete in the market when the government does it for free!
This is also a good time to mention Spreading Santorum, a personal crusade by the advice columnist Dan Savage to popularize the use of the word 'santorum' to describe a (mostly) gay sex act, with the intention of embarrassing the anti-gay senator: spreadingsantorum.com
Marriage is either a social and evolutionary construct between each sex or it's just a club.
Why is a contract between sexes? Why not a contract between partners?
I support equal rights as far as survivor's beneifts, insurance, etc, but not changing the definition of a 4-thousand+ year institution simply because some of my fellow americans are stupid and hurt gay people.
So, you're one of the 'civil union' crowd: you're willing to give gay people all the trappings of marriage: benefits, coverage, etc. but you just don't want to call it "marriage".
For the life of me I don't understand this crowd: even the gay-bashing religious folk make more sense to me.
But clinging to a word -- it just makes no sense! What is so precious about the word 'marriage' that you can't bear the thought of having it applied to gay people?
This institution, whatever it is called, will be functionally identical to heterosexual marriage in every way (if it's not then we have another argument). Gay people will own property, have children, get messy divorces, and general acts like all other married couples.
For me, the whole "civil union" thing is comparable to a hypothetical situation at the beginning of the 20th century in which a guy would argue that, while women should be granted suffrage, that it really shouldn't be called 'voting'.
Don't leap to conclusions. I don't think he was saying he is against affirmative action.
The basis of affirmative action is entrenching a temporary inequality to make up for a major pre-existing inequality which has a societal basis.
That is qualitatively different from a simple anti-discrimination policy.
What else would it be mostly driven by?
Some notion of what is needed to supplant proprietary software.
Probably, somewhere, there's some proprietary software package that is 1) necessary, but 2) incredibly boring to write and support.
So no open-source equivalent exists because no one's bothered to write it, because it isn't the private hobbyhorse of any volunteer developer.
This isn't criticism of open-source contributors per se. It's their damn free time, so why should they spend it any other way?
But clearly they donate their time for other reasons than the joy of coding: to popularize open-source software, and there is likely some low-hanging fruit in the 'boring software' category which could be written.
However, I think that before this happens, we'll need more institutions to organize the writing of such software.
Too bad you don't think like the Mozilla.org foundation does.
When I said 'special module', I was thinking 'third-party add-on', not necessarily anything from the Mozilla Foundation.
If the Mozilla Foundation doesn't want to support ActiveX, more power to 'em.
Yeah, it's really surprising that people who develope software for free tend to not work on stuff that they're opposed to. Man, I wish I had been sharp enough to figure that out on my own.
My point wasn't as trite as that, but I didn't think I needed to make it because it's been made so often before.
The reason most open-source developers contribute their time, aside from the sheer love of making software, is to build a better computing world.
Part of building this world is attracting interest and money to support open-source projects. Doing this kind of work -- interfacing with proprietary formats, etc. -- isn't as much fun, but helps to spread the word.
Clearly we are motivated to spread the world; what surprises me is the degree to which our goals are still driven by our (possibly obscure) personal interests rather than some idea of what the world needs.
I'm not saying it should necessarily be otherwise, or that I do anything other than create software motivated by my personal interest. I just would have thought that by now there would be much larger communities of people developing general-interest 'software for the masses' to lure them off proprietary stuff.
Since it's on-topic, I'll repost a link from a recent Slashdot story about the petition for User's Rights:
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/
Whatever. I seriously doubt this has been given serious consideration. Flipping off MS is fun, but you're also flipping off some people who can't switch.
I think there are enough people out there who have to use ActiveX that support will eventually be added as a special module or something.
It's just that its status as Microsoft's attempt at vendor lock-in has given it enough of a bad taste that it's pretty far down on the priority list of most volunteer developers.
It's surprising to what degree open-source development is still driven by the private whims of its contributors.
The OP is not correct. You do not need speciation (the emergence of new species) to have evolution.
You don't even need the emergence of new traits in a population. All you need is a change in the frequency of genes (technically, the frequency of alleles) over time. See the Wikipedia entry on evolution for more detail.
Natural Selection != Evolution. While a change appeared to take place, it was still the same basic species.
Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. 'Evolution' != 'Speciation'.
The variations between human populations are a result of evolution (whether that be evolution due to natural selection or simply genetic drift), but we're all still the same species.
Sad that in this case it comes from an actual quote from The Register, a reputable news source. They made it easy to take the quote out of context, and that's bad writing. I'd expect to see this from J. Random Blogger and repeated on Slashdot, and I'm disappointed to see it in The Register.
Whatever. They did it for effect, it's a question of style.
I don't think it's fair to require that writers do all kinds of things to avoid their writing being "easy to take out of context". Good writing usually isn't easy to take out of context, sure, but I think journalists ought to be allowed to pull the sort of things that the Register pulled here.
At some point you have to just force someone to accept responsibility for what's being resyndicated and RTFA in its entirety.
This is really unforgivable: to quote the 'Linus quote' from the Register verbatim, and then to not quote the bit immediately after:
Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up.
It doesn't matter how well the quote summarizes Linus' position. The Register makes it very clear that the quote is not really Linus' by denying it right afterward. Slashdot should too.
This is worst kind of out-of-context quoting I've seen in here quite a while, in a story at least. Both the submitter and CowboyNeal should apologise.
In the red corner, Old, with its established monopolies, its heavy labour-intensive structures, its lobbyists, and its wealth.
In the blue corner, New, with its sharp technological tools and paper-thin cost structures. No lobbyists, not much wealth.
Actually, up here in Canada, 'red' means Liberal and 'blue' Tory/Conservative, which is the opposite (as far as the political spectrum goes) of the American assignment of colours.
Not that these distinctions have much to do with the distinctions you're making: both the Liberals and the Conservatives would definitely be lumped in the "Old" category as you've described it.
So what icon would be the Canadian icon? Farley Mowat in a tub of maple syrup?
Argh! Thanks for the visual. Really.
It will be a long time before I'll be able to eat pancakes again, I can assure you.
Lots of French people in Canada.
For God's sake, they've been here for four hundred years!
At this point they're about as French as English-speaking North America is British, no matter what Triumph the Insult Comic Dog says.