IMO, that's arguably the BEST part of the whole bitcoin thing! It's a working experiment in creating a new, world-wide currency free of any central banking controls.
You mean like gold. Or silver. We have several centuries of experiments on a much larger scale with world wide currencies and no central banks.
Complaints about the environmental impact of CPU/GPIU time used to keep it going are very premature
It's more about how that compares to say a metal, where you are wasting real useful productive time to end up with a money that is inferior to paper money. Bitcoin is the same thing, just different numbers.
Perhaps as bitcoin demand rises, the whole mathematical model would even be adjusted to make mining new coins a little less processor intensive, to prevent massive deflation.
If you're going to deliberately reproduce all of the problems with gold you may as well stick to the plan and double down on stupid. If you're going to start tinkering with the model to allow adjustments based on economic need you should probably just jump headlong into the last 200 years of economics and use fiat money rather than trying to rediscover economics from the ground up.
Facebook is at a disadvantage because it does not have a mobile profile.
Facebook is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a foundry or any hardware fab facilities. For facebook to have a facebook branded phone they need to go to companies that make android phones and ask them to make one with a facebook logo on it.
One of the things that has happened is that western design firms who were outsourcing production to Asia suddenly got cut out of the process when those companies decided to make their own damn phone. Facebook would be trying to enter into that market in the absolutely worst possible place. At least nokia and RIM did some assembly in house, but that's of little value.
Window phone 8 isn't horrible. But they seem to be way too slow getting top end phones to market, the best WP8 phones are still dual core. When android is talking about 4+4 core GS4's or the like.
Ironically, Microsoft might actually be the lesser of the available evils when it comes to privacy, development environment, support and they could easily be more pro hacking than they are now. But well... they're 3 years late to the party.
It costs them nothing. Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.
He's suggesting that it costs nothing to do the publishing job, and goes on about how it doesn't cost 30 dollars to host a 3mb PDF file. Which is true, if no one ever reads the PDF file and you just have an IT guy uploading thousands of PDF's to a server.
But that isn't what publishing it.
Publishing journals costs money. Publishing physical journals as well as online ones costs more money, but those are real costs. And someone will have to pay them. Certainly it is governments paying for the publishers, since journal fees are coming out of government grants mostly, and that is an inefficient system, but an open access system doesn't mean publishing doesn't cost money.
Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.
Wait, the people who organize all of the reviews, keep the list of reviewers, store all of that information, arrange for the printing, manage the typesetting, chase after academics who don't format their work properly or who submit in a bad format are not doing 'actual work'?
Yes, the core content of the journal is paid for by someone else, but that doesn't mean all the people who exist in support of the journal itself are not doing real work. By your logic our department of 20 professors and 160 grad students are the only ones doing the real work, an the 4 administrative staff, 6 IT staff and university building staff should cost nothing since they aren't doing 'actual work'.
It's run a bit like a very far out pre-order launch, where you have to advertise all of the great things people will get in the box, assuming you can build it.
Being Chris Taylor of gas powered games and having a video out there where you're on the verge of tears saying if you don't get this money you have to shut the company down, and how you don't think you're going to make funding goals etc. etc. may all be perfectly honest. But that's not a good business strategy.
Which is, as I say, unfortunate. Now you're selling your companies time with a product pitch to the public rather than a bank. It does leave a lot of people with good projects and not enough start up money without the ability to get enough startup money to advertise to get kickstarter funding. Which seems wrong in a lot of ways.
---The UEF Interface seems to work just fine with Win OS and iOS. How is that a bios problem?
Samsungs implementation of UEFI is the problem, not the UEFI specification. No, it's not a 'bios' problem, UEFI replaced bios, but Samsung seems to have done something odd in their implementation of UEFI.
"---Gee wonder why the great mass migration to Linux hasn't happened?
Well sure, that has always been an issue. Linux apparently isn't important enough for companies to bother testing for it, which means it only works with contrived hacks, which means no one uses it, which means companies don't think it's important enough to bother testing for it.
I don't think you actually disagreed with anything I said, despite the tone.
the war in Afghanistan has been going on longer than the war in Vietnam did
Not quite, the US was involved in Vietnam from 1955 on, which is putting Afghanistan in the same range, but it's a much smaller war, in absolute terms, and in relative to the population of the US terms, deaths are a lot lower and the US hasn't really been all that committed to it. The US is constrained in how much trouble it can get itself into by needing to move supplies through third parties who are not willing to let the US put half a million troops into afghanistan even if it wanted to.
With Iraq, had there been WMD it would have been much harder to say 'the war should not happen'. You could I think reasonably agree or disagree either way, war is bad, but it's not acceptable to have a state arming itself with chemical weapons that has sworn to give them up, the legal precedent and the risk assessment in light of Sept 11/01. Now obviously there weren't WMD, and at the time we knew that western intelligence was talking out of its collective arse about what they supposedly knew. But that gap between 'made what sound like credible accusations' and 'no apparently you're full of shit' was relatively short, and there was always the possibility that the weapons inspectors were incompetent or that the intelligence agencies were simply not providing the good information for some reason.
With vietnam the same could more or less be said of the early 60's, lots of people were against the war and protesting, but at the same time, the protests didn't really ramp up until it was blatantly obvious that the military and the intelligence agencies were lying about the progress of the war, while at the same time demanding more and more conscripts (draftees) to fight this war they were lying about.
The various western intelligence agencies made a bunch of allegations about WMD, the UN weapons inspectors tried to follow up on that intel to have hard factual evidence. As it turend out the western intelligence was somewhere between completely wrong and fabricated, which end of the spectrum is secondary, since it was not a secret that the weapons inspectors didn't find anything. It was in the news. At the time. Everyone knew. That was why the french, the turks the germans the canadians etc. didn't go, and why there was no UNSC resolution following 1441 to authorize the war - there wasn't any actual evidence. There were strong accusations and all of them came up wrong with the weapons inspectors.
Beyond that it was a question of whom to believe, and Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones, instagram or reddit or a resurgent Apple were not about to expose a reality that was already exposed, nor were they going to make Bush Blair and Cheney realize their own intelligence was wrong (or if they had fabricated it it wouldn't matter anyway). They *might* have been able to persuade some elements of civilized armies to refuse to serve - that would have been a major victory. For some dude hanging out on a ship in the med or at a base in Kuwait getting facebook and twitter messages saying 'this is illegal don't do it' might have persuaded more of them to refuse. But in the end the invasion would have happened anyway. Bush and Blair ordered it, and it was up to the leadership of the respective armies to follow the law or their orders, and they chose to follow orders.
Probably longer than Windows phones will, but yes, given that the smartphone market is a ~2 year turnaround business that probably means they're freezing anything new for WP8 nowish, and by this time next year they'll be winding up anything WP8 specific and they'll have WP9 out the door (or 8.1 or whatever it ends up being).
If someone comes along and makes *more* money with a different business model people will flock to that.
It's not just 'don't buy it' it's 'buy something else in the same industry that is a better value'. If you want to sell me a DLC for 20 bucks (think Dragonborn expansion to Skyrim) that's a good value. It's basically an expansion pack without the box. But then you have to actually say how many copies you sold, so that everyone else knows this is a good idea.
If you make some horse armour for 5 dollars and sell a 1000 copies of it, the market has already spoken. If you make an expansion pack for 20 bucks and sell 5 million of them, the market has spoken too. But without some sales figures (and those two numbers were entirely made up), there's no easy way to know what does and what doesn't work.
If you look at Saints Row the Third on PC, on Steam. There are 3 options for the game (ignoring the strategy guide). The base game (40 dollars), the game with all DLC (50 dollars) or the all the DLC individually for 82. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they aren't selling a lot of the 'all the dlc' individually. All that DLC for 10 bucks that's not a bad deal. All that DLC for 80 is terrible. But well, I'm pretty sure it's only really rich or stupid people buying for 80 dollars what they can get for 50.
But the infrastructure is there now in the private sector. If you don't appreciate the challenges of moving that to the public sector you're going to have a rough time of it. Journals are big international products, which adds a layer of complexity onto this, as no one really trusts the US government to be the ones running the scientific community, but the US wouldn't let anyone else do it for their own scientists. US scientists would still be stuck paying for foreign journal publications, but is the US government going to get into the business of trying to charge every foreign scientist 100 bucks a year for access to US journals? They certainly *can*, but I doubt they want to.
I put stuff up on my webpage all the time. But it's not peer reviewed. If someone from Nature or SIGGRAPH called me tomorrow and asked me to review a paper I'd bloody well do it. But if someone from a journal or conference I never heard of asked me to peer review something I may simply say no. It's not just the prestige of the author that matters. The reviewer has to feel they are actually reviewing peers and not just random crazy people.
We could do all scientific publishing on our own websites for all it matters if the goal is just free. But the goal isn't free. The goal is make sure that the work that gets published stands at least some degree of scrutiny so you can expect that it actually is a new contribution to a particular field of knowledge. Maintaining those contacts, running those conferences, maintaining the staff that organize this hugely complex apparatus of knowledge and have the skillset to even know what the heck is going on isn't free.
You can cut journals out of the process, but that job needs to be done by someone, and they need to be paid. Now, obviously you could gut the profit making side of the business (and since it's the government paying for the subscriptions already they're already paying for it, so it could be a cost savings measure), but one shouldn't be under the illusion that the job of peer review isn't important or that it's free.
And people know how to install windows 7 on UEFI enabled devices. All of the manufacturers saw windows 8 as a potential train wreck for the industry, and saw Surface as direct competition to themselves, and they want to hedge their bets. If windows 8 had been a huge hit with consumers they would have sucked it up and sold devices competing with MS that they weren't happy with. But Windows 8 is doing relatively poorly it seems like, so all of these back up plans are coming out the door. Especially when you've got an order for 10 million touch screen panels, you need to put something on them, and customers don't want windows 8.
Disabling UEFI isn't magic. It's not even hard. Most users don't want to (and probably shouldn't) install their own OS anyway, they ask someone who knows how to do it, or they follow a guide on line that's good enough. UEFI is irrelevant in the marketplace. On the PS4 and Xbox 3 it might matter, as they'll both use something similar to outright block other operating systems than approved ones, but that's a different business anyway.
If you're heading east at 125 miles per hour, and there's a police station 75 miles east of you, can the police from that station ever catch you, even if they take a 15 minute donut break?
The apparent inability to otherwise change gears in the car or turn it off sounds a bit more concerning. That would be pretty standard advice from the guy on the other end of 999/911.
One first needs to keep in mind that the VAST majority of university professors are basically parents needing tech support people. They're in their 40's or later, they don't have time to be trained on the technology, assuming the training exists, and they aren't capable of taking advantage of it anyway. The ones who *are* capable already have solutions in place, and have for ages and don't need whatever the latest 'Blackboard or WebCt etc. product is. If you think it's a pain in the ass teaching someone to use their iPad (and that's bad enough) now imagine that all of their screwups effect a class of 1500 people.
Technology doesn't help a lot in the classroom itself. Well, it does, in that powerpoint slides are a vast improvement over a lot of other types of slides, and if you use a slate/tablet you can write on your own powerpoint at the front of the room. But writing on the whiteboard is helpful too. You *need* to pace yourself when at the front of the room, and if any of my students care to pipe in on this, I am terrible at pacing myself with powerpoint, but it can be done, and done very well by some people but not me. Of course my writing is basically illiterate scrawl so I have to use powerpoint.
The backend stuff. Getting assignments electronically is great. But it's actually really hard to mark things electronically, or at least efficiently. Yes you can write on PDFs and use all of the revision tools in Office or the like, but it's usually a lot faster for me to take a printed paper copy and put marks on it than it is to manage an electronic copy. I could write my own software to manage this a lot better than any of the tools out there because its very problem domain specific. If I have students writing an algorithms assignment I need a different type of submission than a iPhone project. I don't write my own because just doing it by hand for 20-30 students is good enough.
Marks on the web are hugely valuable. Both for me and for students. Students can look and see what the grades are at any time, and I can make a change and students know I've made the change. So that's fine. There are the usual security concerns (TA's including me when I'm TAing and not teaching) can make changes to grades on webct, and in a big class I have no idea if a change was made to something, or if that change was because the TA got a blowjob, or discovered and error in their marking, or just has a crush on redheads.
The multiple choice 'clicker' nonsense is worse than useless. First you make every damn kid buy some special device they only need for a handful of classes. Then you have to manage the bunch that are broken. Students that forget them, get them confused with someone else's. Ugh. Not worth it.
Online quizzes and that sort of thing... I could take or leave. I don't think they actually add much. Too easy to cheat, too easy to have IT problems make things go badly.
In classroom IT is also a problem because every damn classroom is different. I went to do a guest lecture at the place I did my MSc. They have a standard classroom setup for audio-PC-projector-screen, and I knew that going in. But I got to that specific class and... I couldn't set my computer anywhere I could access the screen or see my notes to myself while talking. And the 'screen' was actually touch sensitive. So rather than pointing at something on my slide to talk about I kept having it interpret my points as gestures. Bloody nuisance.
In classroom IT isn't 'owned' by any of the teachers, so none of them feel particularly responsible for it, and as I say most of them are computer illiterate at best (even in CS), where they might know their way around linux, but not Windows XP with whatever specific hardware configuration or the like. So you go into a class expecting to play audio, and... nothing. So now what is it? Is the audio muted, are the speakers unplugged, where was the audio muted etc. And this isn't my computer, so even if it takes me 15 or 20 seconds to figure it out, which isn't
Do tablets really count as a "PC"?... smart phone.
Probably some deserve to be called PCs and some don't, in all seriousness.
I would put it like this: can you accomplish all normal personal computing user tasks without significant effort.
So then what are a personal normal user tasks (so by this I don't mean can I update my drivers or move files around, those while relatively standardized are still a computing task within the scope of using a particular computer).
Some thoughts:
Can I read and create e-mails? (that pretty much excludes all of the pure e-reader devices). Can I browse the web without significant difficulty =? (so browsers that don't support java or embedded video or the like are out) Can I create normal user documents (resumes for example or other written work in tables)? That would exclude a lot of smart phones, while you might be able to edit parts of a document, a full document editor that you can actually use on a smartphone is hard to come by. The same software on a tablet however can be much more functional. I grant this is a big grey area. These days anything that can e-mail can send things to a printer so that's not a big deal.
But that's pretty much all the average user does with a PC. Trying to do much with spreadsheets on a phone is basically impossible, but you certainly could on tablet devices.
Too big to fail isn't some legal definition. It's a practical reality. If BP couldn't pay the 30-40 billion dollars they're looking at for deepwater horizon the UK stakeholders would have lost their savings in BP. They would then require they find new jobs, collect unemployment, collect more social benefits, the government would have to top up/take over etc. pensions etc. The cost of coping with the failure of the company would have been a lot more than just covering their arses on a 40 billion dollar fine.
So this is where stallmans proposal comes in, he thinks if you make the companies small enough then none of them will ever get too big too fail and need a bailout. That's dumb, but there are a couple of reasons. True, any individual company might not warrant bailing out, but an if an entire industry tanks (say aircraft manufacturing due to a terrorism event or the entire tourism industry shuts down because your main source of tourists dries up or whatever) then then the government is still ultimately on the hook for those unemployment/pension insurance/etc. benefits for the entire industry and its shareholders, and if the industry will recover it's a lot less painful to subsidize them until that happens. Greece and the various Caribbean islands give a good sense of this right now. Circumstances outside their control left them with a lot less customers and trying to make a new industry isn't sensible when tourism will come back as the world economy picks back up.
Secondly, I picked BP for a reason. BP isn't getting a government bailout because deepwater horizon was a one off event, not an industry wide crisis of production or distribution or the like (it may be symptomatic of lax safety, but not a massive drop in sales). And BP being the megabehemoth that it is, sold off some assets to other oil companies, agreed to pay the fines and... that was that. No bailout necessary. A smaller oil company would have collapsed and the government of the US would have been completely on the hook for cleaning up the damage. As it is they'll get quite a lot out of BP.
In the case of banks and car companies 'too big to fail' was very much about the huge spillover effects. If my bank goes under it's not just my bank, you look at your bank and think 'hmm what if my bank goes under?' and then you risk a run on the banks, there's all of the bank shareholders who would lose their savings etc. It's a nightmare. If you look at europe right now a lot of the problems are because french and german banks hold greek, spanish and italian government debt, if those countries default, exit the euro, both, or worse french and german taxpayers will have a lot less money to spend and pay taxes with. If any of the car companies goes under it's one thing, (Chrysler was going out of business for years before the crisis) but if all of them implode then there's millions of employees, both direct and indirect, pensioners, car owners etc.
As I say, too big to fail isn't some legal term. It depends on the circumstances of why a company is failing and what spillover effects that will have. "Don't bail them out" can cost a lot more than bailing them out. In the current case in the US, not letting them fail was bad enough, but it would have been significantly worse if they had failed. As it is the current US situation is the government not doing enough, not the government doing too much, what it did even back in 2009 was woefully inadequate, but better than the nothing.
All of those skills are helpful in actually being able to get yourself through university before you get to the corporate world.
But that's beside the point. I appreciate MS cynicism, but when GE says we need more engineers they're not asking public schools to teach them to make power generators or toasters. They really do want people to actually be knowledgable and capable in computing as a discipline. When you need to fill seats with foreign students by the dozens or hundreds in a CS course, and can't find seats for all the students in an english lit class you know education has failed somewhere.
Also, I don't know what world you're living in, but our CS and Software eng grads are all employed within a couple of months of graduation at decent salaries. The industry might be dynamic and require you move a lot and so on, but there are definitely jobs.
The Indian education system doesn't suffer from the issues you mentioned above
Not all of them, but most of them. I have 2 uncles who teach at Indian schools and 8 cousins in indian universities and we get about 30 indian grad students a year where I am and they all say the same thing: about 1/4 of degrees even from the best indian universities are basically fraudulent and bought with bribes, and there's no way to identify which ones those are on our end. We even occasionally get the odd student here who thinks they can bribe their way through, and it usually ends up being my job to tell them it's best to pack their bags and go home before they've paid tuition.
I grant you, that ratio for Harvard business school could be the same, but no one would know differently, harvard medical school on the other hand, no way.
India definitely has *far* more qualified people than it has resources to educate them. India has some combination of political connections and bribes pervading a lot of the system including the entrance exams an curriculum.
Universities in the US let them in more easily
Maybe the pay your way in schools, but we certainly don't. We take indian students (and chinese students) because they are on average significantly better than our domestic ones, and we get our pick of them. It's hard to realize just how much bigger india is than the US, but to find people at the quality of stop students from india and china in Canada or the US is very very hard, they exist, but in an absolute numbers problem, there aren't a lot of them, and indian and chinese students (and arabs and persians) are usually looking to go into fields like science and engineering which hard enough to fill with capable people at the best of times.
And that is spoken like a person who has no clue how difficult it is for many (most?) Americans who desire an education past high school.
basically the same thing to your entire post: Orders of magnitude problem.
Yes, if your parent is a professor you can get in when you otherwise maybe shouldn't quite be able to. But there's space to allow for those sorts of risk at US schools, and it's limited in scope. With lots of other places that's the majority.
That is also true in the United States if you are a not-wealthy U.S. citizen.
While there is a huge difference in connections, the difference in quality of education between a hugely expensive one and an inexpensive one is not anywhere near what is in some places.
Everyone needs to have basic computer literacy skills going forward. The sooner you start the better. But you need to get kids interested in how that box works early on. If you can read, write and do basic math you can write basic programs that can solve math problems for you.
Computer science is a lot of different things, but if you mean computer science in the sense of trying to efficiently solve problems (notably maths problems) through programming, then absolutely from grade 6 on you can do stuff, if not earlier. I certainly was programming at age 13 and 14 and that was 20 years ago when the options for computers were somewhat more expensive and limited. There were computers in classrooms before that but the teachers didn't know how to use them and neither did we. Now computers are sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap that you can have a Windows/Linux/whatever set of 3 or 4 computers along the wall in the classroom and expect there to be people in the room who know how to use them (obviously you'd need windows for that in general as most grade school teachers don't know linux, but times might change).
It's going to end up as computer science in the same way pouring two chemicals together is chemistry or trying to categorize animals is biology. They're not going to be trying to prove if something is NP hard, but if those of us in our 30's could learn BASIC programming in the 1980's and 1990's I think we can find something for the modern 10 or 12 year old.
When they get to me, at 17 or 18 years old in university there's a clear split. There are people for whom the computer may as well be some combination of alchemy and witchcraft and they know literally nothing about it and are terrified of it. And those who are varying levels of tech savvy, but are happy to sit down, start clicking buttons and can learn to do documents spreadsheets and or programming. In the modern world though, everyone who is going into science or engineering should now some basic programming skills and how to use spreadsheets etc. This doesn't have to be CS research, but even basic stuff like reading in files and doing basic maths on the contents and spitting it back out. We're not worried about stacks and heaps and doubly linked lists in grade school. But if their impression of java is only that it's a thing that pops up on their computer to annoy them they've missed out.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, that's arguably the BEST part of the whole bitcoin thing! It's a working experiment in creating a new, world-wide currency free of any central banking controls.
You mean like gold. Or silver. We have several centuries of experiments on a much larger scale with world wide currencies and no central banks.
Complaints about the environmental impact of CPU/GPIU time used to keep it going are very premature
It's more about how that compares to say a metal, where you are wasting real useful productive time to end up with a money that is inferior to paper money. Bitcoin is the same thing, just different numbers.
Perhaps as bitcoin demand rises, the whole mathematical model would even be adjusted to make mining new coins a little less processor intensive, to prevent massive deflation.
If you're going to deliberately reproduce all of the problems with gold you may as well stick to the plan and double down on stupid. If you're going to start tinkering with the model to allow adjustments based on economic need you should probably just jump headlong into the last 200 years of economics and use fiat money rather than trying to rediscover economics from the ground up.
Facebook is at a disadvantage because it does not have a mobile profile.
Facebook is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a foundry or any hardware fab facilities. For facebook to have a facebook branded phone they need to go to companies that make android phones and ask them to make one with a facebook logo on it.
One of the things that has happened is that western design firms who were outsourcing production to Asia suddenly got cut out of the process when those companies decided to make their own damn phone. Facebook would be trying to enter into that market in the absolutely worst possible place. At least nokia and RIM did some assembly in house, but that's of little value.
This is sadly true.
Window phone 8 isn't horrible. But they seem to be way too slow getting top end phones to market, the best WP8 phones are still dual core. When android is talking about 4+4 core GS4's or the like.
Ironically, Microsoft might actually be the lesser of the available evils when it comes to privacy, development environment, support and they could easily be more pro hacking than they are now. But well... they're 3 years late to the party.
It costs them nothing. Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.
He's suggesting that it costs nothing to do the publishing job, and goes on about how it doesn't cost 30 dollars to host a 3mb PDF file. Which is true, if no one ever reads the PDF file and you just have an IT guy uploading thousands of PDF's to a server.
But that isn't what publishing it.
Publishing journals costs money. Publishing physical journals as well as online ones costs more money, but those are real costs. And someone will have to pay them. Certainly it is governments paying for the publishers, since journal fees are coming out of government grants mostly, and that is an inefficient system, but an open access system doesn't mean publishing doesn't cost money.
Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.
Wait, the people who organize all of the reviews, keep the list of reviewers, store all of that information, arrange for the printing, manage the typesetting, chase after academics who don't format their work properly or who submit in a bad format are not doing 'actual work'?
Yes, the core content of the journal is paid for by someone else, but that doesn't mean all the people who exist in support of the journal itself are not doing real work. By your logic our department of 20 professors and 160 grad students are the only ones doing the real work, an the 4 administrative staff, 6 IT staff and university building staff should cost nothing since they aren't doing 'actual work'.
That seems to be the case unfortunately.
It's run a bit like a very far out pre-order launch, where you have to advertise all of the great things people will get in the box, assuming you can build it.
Being Chris Taylor of gas powered games and having a video out there where you're on the verge of tears saying if you don't get this money you have to shut the company down, and how you don't think you're going to make funding goals etc. etc. may all be perfectly honest. But that's not a good business strategy.
Which is, as I say, unfortunate. Now you're selling your companies time with a product pitch to the public rather than a bank. It does leave a lot of people with good projects and not enough start up money without the ability to get enough startup money to advertise to get kickstarter funding. Which seems wrong in a lot of ways.
---The UEF Interface seems to work just fine with Win OS and iOS. How is that a bios problem?
Samsungs implementation of UEFI is the problem, not the UEFI specification. No, it's not a 'bios' problem, UEFI replaced bios, but Samsung seems to have done something odd in their implementation of UEFI.
"---Gee wonder why the great mass migration to Linux hasn't happened?
Well sure, that has always been an issue. Linux apparently isn't important enough for companies to bother testing for it, which means it only works with contrived hacks, which means no one uses it, which means companies don't think it's important enough to bother testing for it.
I don't think you actually disagreed with anything I said, despite the tone.
the war in Afghanistan has been going on longer than the war in Vietnam did
Not quite, the US was involved in Vietnam from 1955 on, which is putting Afghanistan in the same range, but it's a much smaller war, in absolute terms, and in relative to the population of the US terms, deaths are a lot lower and the US hasn't really been all that committed to it. The US is constrained in how much trouble it can get itself into by needing to move supplies through third parties who are not willing to let the US put half a million troops into afghanistan even if it wanted to.
They also had longer to build up protests.
With Iraq, had there been WMD it would have been much harder to say 'the war should not happen'. You could I think reasonably agree or disagree either way, war is bad, but it's not acceptable to have a state arming itself with chemical weapons that has sworn to give them up, the legal precedent and the risk assessment in light of Sept 11/01. Now obviously there weren't WMD, and at the time we knew that western intelligence was talking out of its collective arse about what they supposedly knew. But that gap between 'made what sound like credible accusations' and 'no apparently you're full of shit' was relatively short, and there was always the possibility that the weapons inspectors were incompetent or that the intelligence agencies were simply not providing the good information for some reason.
With vietnam the same could more or less be said of the early 60's, lots of people were against the war and protesting, but at the same time, the protests didn't really ramp up until it was blatantly obvious that the military and the intelligence agencies were lying about the progress of the war, while at the same time demanding more and more conscripts (draftees) to fight this war they were lying about.
Indeed, no.
The various western intelligence agencies made a bunch of allegations about WMD, the UN weapons inspectors tried to follow up on that intel to have hard factual evidence. As it turend out the western intelligence was somewhere between completely wrong and fabricated, which end of the spectrum is secondary, since it was not a secret that the weapons inspectors didn't find anything. It was in the news. At the time. Everyone knew. That was why the french, the turks the germans the canadians etc. didn't go, and why there was no UNSC resolution following 1441 to authorize the war - there wasn't any actual evidence. There were strong accusations and all of them came up wrong with the weapons inspectors.
Beyond that it was a question of whom to believe, and Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones, instagram or reddit or a resurgent Apple were not about to expose a reality that was already exposed, nor were they going to make Bush Blair and Cheney realize their own intelligence was wrong (or if they had fabricated it it wouldn't matter anyway). They *might* have been able to persuade some elements of civilized armies to refuse to serve - that would have been a major victory. For some dude hanging out on a ship in the med or at a base in Kuwait getting facebook and twitter messages saying 'this is illegal don't do it' might have persuaded more of them to refuse. But in the end the invasion would have happened anyway. Bush and Blair ordered it, and it was up to the leadership of the respective armies to follow the law or their orders, and they chose to follow orders.
Probably longer than Windows phones will, but yes, given that the smartphone market is a ~2 year turnaround business that probably means they're freezing anything new for WP8 nowish, and by this time next year they'll be winding up anything WP8 specific and they'll have WP9 out the door (or 8.1 or whatever it ends up being).
DLC and so on exist because they make money.
If someone comes along and makes *more* money with a different business model people will flock to that.
It's not just 'don't buy it' it's 'buy something else in the same industry that is a better value'. If you want to sell me a DLC for 20 bucks (think Dragonborn expansion to Skyrim) that's a good value. It's basically an expansion pack without the box. But then you have to actually say how many copies you sold, so that everyone else knows this is a good idea.
If you make some horse armour for 5 dollars and sell a 1000 copies of it, the market has already spoken. If you make an expansion pack for 20 bucks and sell 5 million of them, the market has spoken too. But without some sales figures (and those two numbers were entirely made up), there's no easy way to know what does and what doesn't work.
If you look at Saints Row the Third on PC, on Steam. There are 3 options for the game (ignoring the strategy guide). The base game (40 dollars), the game with all DLC (50 dollars) or the all the DLC individually for 82. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they aren't selling a lot of the 'all the dlc' individually. All that DLC for 10 bucks that's not a bad deal. All that DLC for 80 is terrible. But well, I'm pretty sure it's only really rich or stupid people buying for 80 dollars what they can get for 50.
Certainly that's what would have to happen.
But the infrastructure is there now in the private sector. If you don't appreciate the challenges of moving that to the public sector you're going to have a rough time of it. Journals are big international products, which adds a layer of complexity onto this, as no one really trusts the US government to be the ones running the scientific community, but the US wouldn't let anyone else do it for their own scientists. US scientists would still be stuck paying for foreign journal publications, but is the US government going to get into the business of trying to charge every foreign scientist 100 bucks a year for access to US journals? They certainly *can*, but I doubt they want to.
The key is "review".
I put stuff up on my webpage all the time. But it's not peer reviewed. If someone from Nature or SIGGRAPH called me tomorrow and asked me to review a paper I'd bloody well do it. But if someone from a journal or conference I never heard of asked me to peer review something I may simply say no. It's not just the prestige of the author that matters. The reviewer has to feel they are actually reviewing peers and not just random crazy people.
We could do all scientific publishing on our own websites for all it matters if the goal is just free. But the goal isn't free. The goal is make sure that the work that gets published stands at least some degree of scrutiny so you can expect that it actually is a new contribution to a particular field of knowledge. Maintaining those contacts, running those conferences, maintaining the staff that organize this hugely complex apparatus of knowledge and have the skillset to even know what the heck is going on isn't free.
You can cut journals out of the process, but that job needs to be done by someone, and they need to be paid. Now, obviously you could gut the profit making side of the business (and since it's the government paying for the subscriptions already they're already paying for it, so it could be a cost savings measure), but one shouldn't be under the illusion that the job of peer review isn't important or that it's free.
If it's worth knowing people will know.
And people know how to install windows 7 on UEFI enabled devices. All of the manufacturers saw windows 8 as a potential train wreck for the industry, and saw Surface as direct competition to themselves, and they want to hedge their bets. If windows 8 had been a huge hit with consumers they would have sucked it up and sold devices competing with MS that they weren't happy with. But Windows 8 is doing relatively poorly it seems like, so all of these back up plans are coming out the door. Especially when you've got an order for 10 million touch screen panels, you need to put something on them, and customers don't want windows 8.
Disabling UEFI isn't magic. It's not even hard. Most users don't want to (and probably shouldn't) install their own OS anyway, they ask someone who knows how to do it, or they follow a guide on line that's good enough. UEFI is irrelevant in the marketplace. On the PS4 and Xbox 3 it might matter, as they'll both use something similar to outright block other operating systems than approved ones, but that's a different business anyway.
They might mean he had info on early development kits, a lot of that info has leaked out (there are after all lots of companies that have said kits).
Early development kits aren't final hardware though, so they don't mean much to consumers or people on the outside.
You realize there are firms that sell that sort of security right? And academic programs on how to do so etc.
There are legit was to enter the business he simply chose a different route.
If you're heading east at 125 miles per hour, and there's a police station 75 miles east of you, can the police from that station ever catch you, even if they take a 15 minute donut break?
The apparent inability to otherwise change gears in the car or turn it off sounds a bit more concerning. That would be pretty standard advice from the guy on the other end of 999/911.
One first needs to keep in mind that the VAST majority of university professors are basically parents needing tech support people. They're in their 40's or later, they don't have time to be trained on the technology, assuming the training exists, and they aren't capable of taking advantage of it anyway. The ones who *are* capable already have solutions in place, and have for ages and don't need whatever the latest 'Blackboard or WebCt etc. product is. If you think it's a pain in the ass teaching someone to use their iPad (and that's bad enough) now imagine that all of their screwups effect a class of 1500 people.
Technology doesn't help a lot in the classroom itself. Well, it does, in that powerpoint slides are a vast improvement over a lot of other types of slides, and if you use a slate/tablet you can write on your own powerpoint at the front of the room. But writing on the whiteboard is helpful too. You *need* to pace yourself when at the front of the room, and if any of my students care to pipe in on this, I am terrible at pacing myself with powerpoint, but it can be done, and done very well by some people but not me. Of course my writing is basically illiterate scrawl so I have to use powerpoint.
The backend stuff. Getting assignments electronically is great. But it's actually really hard to mark things electronically, or at least efficiently. Yes you can write on PDFs and use all of the revision tools in Office or the like, but it's usually a lot faster for me to take a printed paper copy and put marks on it than it is to manage an electronic copy. I could write my own software to manage this a lot better than any of the tools out there because its very problem domain specific. If I have students writing an algorithms assignment I need a different type of submission than a iPhone project. I don't write my own because just doing it by hand for 20-30 students is good enough.
Marks on the web are hugely valuable. Both for me and for students. Students can look and see what the grades are at any time, and I can make a change and students know I've made the change. So that's fine. There are the usual security concerns (TA's including me when I'm TAing and not teaching) can make changes to grades on webct, and in a big class I have no idea if a change was made to something, or if that change was because the TA got a blowjob, or discovered and error in their marking, or just has a crush on redheads.
The multiple choice 'clicker' nonsense is worse than useless. First you make every damn kid buy some special device they only need for a handful of classes. Then you have to manage the bunch that are broken. Students that forget them, get them confused with someone else's. Ugh. Not worth it.
Online quizzes and that sort of thing... I could take or leave. I don't think they actually add much. Too easy to cheat, too easy to have IT problems make things go badly.
In classroom IT is also a problem because every damn classroom is different. I went to do a guest lecture at the place I did my MSc. They have a standard classroom setup for audio-PC-projector-screen, and I knew that going in. But I got to that specific class and... I couldn't set my computer anywhere I could access the screen or see my notes to myself while talking. And the 'screen' was actually touch sensitive. So rather than pointing at something on my slide to talk about I kept having it interpret my points as gestures. Bloody nuisance.
In classroom IT isn't 'owned' by any of the teachers, so none of them feel particularly responsible for it, and as I say most of them are computer illiterate at best (even in CS), where they might know their way around linux, but not Windows XP with whatever specific hardware configuration or the like. So you go into a class expecting to play audio, and... nothing. So now what is it? Is the audio muted, are the speakers unplugged, where was the audio muted etc. And this isn't my computer, so even if it takes me 15 or 20 seconds to figure it out, which isn't
Do tablets really count as a "PC"?... smart phone.
Probably some deserve to be called PCs and some don't, in all seriousness.
I would put it like this: can you accomplish all normal personal computing user tasks without significant effort.
So then what are a personal normal user tasks (so by this I don't mean can I update my drivers or move files around, those while relatively standardized are still a computing task within the scope of using a particular computer).
Some thoughts:
Can I read and create e-mails? (that pretty much excludes all of the pure e-reader devices).
Can I browse the web without significant difficulty =? (so browsers that don't support java or embedded video or the like are out)
Can I create normal user documents (resumes for example or other written work in tables)? That would exclude a lot of smart phones, while you might be able to edit parts of a document, a full document editor that you can actually use on a smartphone is hard to come by. The same software on a tablet however can be much more functional. I grant this is a big grey area.
These days anything that can e-mail can send things to a printer so that's not a big deal.
But that's pretty much all the average user does with a PC. Trying to do much with spreadsheets on a phone is basically impossible, but you certainly could on tablet devices.
Too big to fail isn't some legal definition. It's a practical reality. If BP couldn't pay the 30-40 billion dollars they're looking at for deepwater horizon the UK stakeholders would have lost their savings in BP. They would then require they find new jobs, collect unemployment, collect more social benefits, the government would have to top up/take over etc. pensions etc. The cost of coping with the failure of the company would have been a lot more than just covering their arses on a 40 billion dollar fine.
So this is where stallmans proposal comes in, he thinks if you make the companies small enough then none of them will ever get too big too fail and need a bailout. That's dumb, but there are a couple of reasons. True, any individual company might not warrant bailing out, but an if an entire industry tanks (say aircraft manufacturing due to a terrorism event or the entire tourism industry shuts down because your main source of tourists dries up or whatever) then then the government is still ultimately on the hook for those unemployment/pension insurance/etc. benefits for the entire industry and its shareholders, and if the industry will recover it's a lot less painful to subsidize them until that happens. Greece and the various Caribbean islands give a good sense of this right now. Circumstances outside their control left them with a lot less customers and trying to make a new industry isn't sensible when tourism will come back as the world economy picks back up.
Secondly, I picked BP for a reason. BP isn't getting a government bailout because deepwater horizon was a one off event, not an industry wide crisis of production or distribution or the like (it may be symptomatic of lax safety, but not a massive drop in sales). And BP being the megabehemoth that it is, sold off some assets to other oil companies, agreed to pay the fines and... that was that. No bailout necessary. A smaller oil company would have collapsed and the government of the US would have been completely on the hook for cleaning up the damage. As it is they'll get quite a lot out of BP.
In the case of banks and car companies 'too big to fail' was very much about the huge spillover effects. If my bank goes under it's not just my bank, you look at your bank and think 'hmm what if my bank goes under?' and then you risk a run on the banks, there's all of the bank shareholders who would lose their savings etc. It's a nightmare. If you look at europe right now a lot of the problems are because french and german banks hold greek, spanish and italian government debt, if those countries default, exit the euro, both, or worse french and german taxpayers will have a lot less money to spend and pay taxes with. If any of the car companies goes under it's one thing, (Chrysler was going out of business for years before the crisis) but if all of them implode then there's millions of employees, both direct and indirect, pensioners, car owners etc.
As I say, too big to fail isn't some legal term. It depends on the circumstances of why a company is failing and what spillover effects that will have. "Don't bail them out" can cost a lot more than bailing them out. In the current case in the US, not letting them fail was bad enough, but it would have been significantly worse if they had failed. As it is the current US situation is the government not doing enough, not the government doing too much, what it did even back in 2009 was woefully inadequate, but better than the nothing.
All of those skills are helpful in actually being able to get yourself through university before you get to the corporate world.
But that's beside the point. I appreciate MS cynicism, but when GE says we need more engineers they're not asking public schools to teach them to make power generators or toasters. They really do want people to actually be knowledgable and capable in computing as a discipline. When you need to fill seats with foreign students by the dozens or hundreds in a CS course, and can't find seats for all the students in an english lit class you know education has failed somewhere.
Also, I don't know what world you're living in, but our CS and Software eng grads are all employed within a couple of months of graduation at decent salaries. The industry might be dynamic and require you move a lot and so on, but there are definitely jobs.
The Indian education system doesn't suffer from the issues you mentioned above
Not all of them, but most of them. I have 2 uncles who teach at Indian schools and 8 cousins in indian universities and we get about 30 indian grad students a year where I am and they all say the same thing: about 1/4 of degrees even from the best indian universities are basically fraudulent and bought with bribes, and there's no way to identify which ones those are on our end. We even occasionally get the odd student here who thinks they can bribe their way through, and it usually ends up being my job to tell them it's best to pack their bags and go home before they've paid tuition.
I grant you, that ratio for Harvard business school could be the same, but no one would know differently, harvard medical school on the other hand, no way.
India definitely has *far* more qualified people than it has resources to educate them. India has some combination of political connections and bribes pervading a lot of the system including the entrance exams an curriculum.
Universities in the US let them in more easily
Maybe the pay your way in schools, but we certainly don't. We take indian students (and chinese students) because they are on average significantly better than our domestic ones, and we get our pick of them. It's hard to realize just how much bigger india is than the US, but to find people at the quality of stop students from india and china in Canada or the US is very very hard, they exist, but in an absolute numbers problem, there aren't a lot of them, and indian and chinese students (and arabs and persians) are usually looking to go into fields like science and engineering which hard enough to fill with capable people at the best of times.
And that is spoken like a person who has no clue how difficult it is for many (most?) Americans who desire an education past high school.
basically the same thing to your entire post: Orders of magnitude problem.
Yes, if your parent is a professor you can get in when you otherwise maybe shouldn't quite be able to. But there's space to allow for those sorts of risk at US schools, and it's limited in scope. With lots of other places that's the majority.
That is also true in the United States if you are a not-wealthy U.S. citizen.
While there is a huge difference in connections, the difference in quality of education between a hugely expensive one and an inexpensive one is not anywhere near what is in some places.
Both likely.
Everyone needs to have basic computer literacy skills going forward. The sooner you start the better. But you need to get kids interested in how that box works early on. If you can read, write and do basic math you can write basic programs that can solve math problems for you.
Computer science is a lot of different things, but if you mean computer science in the sense of trying to efficiently solve problems (notably maths problems) through programming, then absolutely from grade 6 on you can do stuff, if not earlier. I certainly was programming at age 13 and 14 and that was 20 years ago when the options for computers were somewhat more expensive and limited. There were computers in classrooms before that but the teachers didn't know how to use them and neither did we. Now computers are sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap that you can have a Windows/Linux/whatever set of 3 or 4 computers along the wall in the classroom and expect there to be people in the room who know how to use them (obviously you'd need windows for that in general as most grade school teachers don't know linux, but times might change).
It's going to end up as computer science in the same way pouring two chemicals together is chemistry or trying to categorize animals is biology. They're not going to be trying to prove if something is NP hard, but if those of us in our 30's could learn BASIC programming in the 1980's and 1990's I think we can find something for the modern 10 or 12 year old.
When they get to me, at 17 or 18 years old in university there's a clear split. There are people for whom the computer may as well be some combination of alchemy and witchcraft and they know literally nothing about it and are terrified of it. And those who are varying levels of tech savvy, but are happy to sit down, start clicking buttons and can learn to do documents spreadsheets and or programming. In the modern world though, everyone who is going into science or engineering should now some basic programming skills and how to use spreadsheets etc. This doesn't have to be CS research, but even basic stuff like reading in files and doing basic maths on the contents and spitting it back out. We're not worried about stacks and heaps and doubly linked lists in grade school. But if their impression of java is only that it's a thing that pops up on their computer to annoy them they've missed out.