They all work very well... for people who know what address bars and tabs are.
Seriously, you're setting the bar way higher than the average user.
Plugins? What's a plugin? Why is this asking me to download something? How do I install something? Ever tried to install flash in firefox? You have to download and run an executable, it terrifies people, they don't know if the site they're getting it from might be hacked, the usually don't know how to find the file they've downloaded to run it. If it doesn't just run on it's own it's too hard for the average user.
Firefox and opera certainly function better on sites *I* visit than say my 70 year old father and his wife. The websites I visit are built for people with the assumption they might not use IE. But my dad's wife manages to find these odd flash game sites that never work right in anything other than IE. And they run their computer on a 20 inch monitor in 800x600 mode because well, it makes everything look bigger, so they can read it better. Good luck getting webpages designed for the young tech savy firefox user to behave nicely in 800x600 (except google).
To anyone capable of reading, the menu screen shouldn't be hard, but it is. It causes regular users to panic and look for a 'get me the fuck away from here' button. It's how all the phishing/internet security 2010 type attacks succeed unfortunately. People want appliances. They're scared of choices they aren't capable of making in an informed fashion.
Like I say, it's the sort of thing that makes sense on a new computer. People *expect* and accept that on a new computer they will have to learn a new of way of doing things and learn new stuff. On average even my first year university students panic when something shows up with different settings than they're used to. If they expect it to be the same they don't want new. And even then, when presented with the choice, they aren't going to want to rock the boat.
Lovely, so now a bunch of tech savvy people are going to be getting calls asking how to make these screens go away and never come back.
Users don't want choice, they don't want complexity, menus are complexity. Even that stupid setup menu on IE when you first install it scares the hell out of people and they just have to keep clicking 'not right now' or whatever it is EVERY time they start the application because they don't know how to make it go away. They want shit that does its thing that they don't have to think about and for whatever they're doing IE already does that. If you have enough know how to not use IE already, you don't. If you don't have the know how sticking some other choice for you there is just going to break stuff and confuse people. I feel bad for people who will accidentally choose google chrome or safari and then not have a clue how to use it, and not have a clue how to immediately revert the system to what they did have that let them do whatever they were doing.
Not a bad concept in the 'when it's installed' sense, and on purely legal basis it makes sense, but it's not the sort of thing you want to be pushing out to live OS's that people are actually using right now. Even then putting anything other than IE8 on tends to be risky, everything is designed to work in IE, less so with firefox and way less so with any other choice, that's going to hobble people who suddenly have a new browser and no idea how to make it work.
it isn't supposed to benefit the consumer. It's supposed to benefit their bottom line. Which in the long run, benefits the people who want a better, more diverse range of games to play.
It's the same thinking as paywalls on news websites - we aren't making enough money now, even though we have x customers. If we add a paywall, we'll only have 0.y *x customers, but at least we'll have enough money to stay in business and provide them content. The users who pay may even get a better experience this way if they make more money doing it.
Why would customers be happy about it? Well if I'm paying for a game, and getting the same experience as someone who pirated it, and they represent 19/20 players, and then they start to add DRM which gimps the game to keep those 19/20 people out (and still doesn't work) I'm not exactly feeling like their strategy is pro customer. Now though, they're saying things like 'free DLC when you preorder' well really that means you're paying $60 for the DLC and the the game is free because you could have pirated it and just had to buy the DLC, but at least I feel like I'm not stealing their stuff, and I'm getting something out of paying money. UBIsofts system is bad because it punishes you for having bought their product. The EA system of DLC is good because it rewards you for paying for the game, but if you won't pay for the game or DLC elements of it, you're not getting the same experience as someone who does. The Sony thing is half and half, they're just advertising it badly, not that I can think of a better way. Buy our product, get free multiplayer, don't buy our product, pay for multiplayer! But then I suppose they have the problems as EA and their DLC - you can still get the rest of the game for free, or a lot less used/pirated.
As much as I loved the Civ games, once I played stuff like EU2 and others based on the same engine I just couldn't go back. Civ has an exploding degree of management, which I found woefully unnecessary. If I'm the guy in charge, when there is one city, ok I care about building the library, but if there are 50 cities, I care less about your library, and more about the focus of your city. Spore had the right concept, if appaling implementation, what defines a civilization changes through time, and the 'level' you want to envision the problem changes.
The scope of an EU/vicky/HOI game is about on par with a late stage civ game, where the world is filled up and you're managing your empire within that. But in the paradox products I can actually manage the empire, my stacks of 12 units that I move at once makes sense - I'm not managing every single bloody division in the army, I now manage army groups and someone else. I felt HOI3 when kinda the wrong direction with tripling the number of provinces because that's like the same problem with Civ. The economic system in civ now feels oversimplified, that might be good, but something like Vicky you start to see an actual population growth mechanic and something that seems kinda like a real economy. Not that it was necessarily perfectly balanced, but the system was a lot better than Civ.
Oh and other games can do real time and have it work well. I know turn based is a civ thing, and I wouldn't change it if I were them, but turned based and hexagonal squares is like an old school wargame, other products don't bind you to a particular shape of terrain and run in real time, either fast or slow. I find that much more compelling. I'll still buy it, but I feel like the Civ series is a throwback to and old way of doing things, it has it's moments and its charm, but the rest of the grand strategy world has progressed along (except spore, which kinda has the right idea for a while, and then dies completely). No more than I would expect to see a turn based stand there and one guy at a time swing in final fantasy (like say FF6) - it's been done, but they have progressed from that. I'll still put up with outdated mechanics to see the world they've created but I'm unlikely to invest heavily in it repeatedly when it's like that.
They're only not ready now because the normal age is older. We had this problem in ontario when they got rid of grade 13, oh the tragedy that 17/18 year olds would be too young for university (compared to the previous years 18/19 year olds, they aren't mature enough blah blah blah. Well you know what, when everyone else is 17, it's not really a problem. The problem was more on our end as the institutions because we now had to (for example) shift how much alcohol we could serve, and to whom and had to start policy alcohol policies in residences (since when students were entering at 18 ish some of them could drink right away others had to wait until december ish, but now the presumption is that no one is 19 and able to drink). Granted that is a problem with alcohol age, not with students particularly. If you set the entrance bar for university as based on academic achievement, everyone who shows up will be there because of academic achievement, and you'll have a new social norm. The transition from one system to another is messy, really messy, I hate to say it. There are going to be a lot of angry bitter 18 year olds that just wasted two years of their lives in highschool when some 16 year old upstart didn't have to go through that. But at the end of the transition you have a much better collection of students, who aren't wasting years of their lives pretending like high school matters, and actually getting on with life and towards earning money.
Honestly, high school makes you lazy and stupid, especially if you started out smart. It's boring, and it teaches you that you can do well enough with no effort. Then they get to university when half our students are from india, the middle east and china, and those guys, I hate to say, didn't move 10 time zones because they were lazy dunces. They're smart, they work hard, they're focused, and they make our domestic students (myself included) look like dull speedbumps. Granted it's reading week so even as a PhD student I can't be expected to be doing work right now rather than posting on/. but I went in to fetch a book yesterday and all the chinese grad students were there, and working.
I have some WoW friends who happen to live near me that are just out of highschool. They're smart guys, one is in comp sci, the other going into engineering. But my god highschool taught them to be lazy. No late penalties, no motivation to get work done quickly because you can breeze through doing it the night before. These guys have developed the same terrible habits I had coming out of highschool, and it has taken me years to break out of those bad habits. Once you discover it's easy to be lazy and still do well, it's hard to train yourself differently. Another guy wants to be an artist. Well he could have been an artist last year maybe (as in enroll in a university fine arts programme), but you know, he kinda felt like he wanted to spend another year in highschool, become a bit more mature. Waste of bloody time and money, he doesn't have any meaningful courses to take and 'working on his profile' isn't going to help him when someone else, who's got an equally good profile did it in less time. When you build a system around assuming people will probably stupid, they probably will be.
To me the biggest risks of young people in university is money, and driving. You need to learn to drive, ideally from someone with experience... like say a parent, and you usually can't afford to pay enough for the experience you should have. If you don't live at home when you're 16 it's hard to find someone to teach you that will work for free. Money is a big problem. How do you pay rent, how do you pay for your health, how do you do your taxes, how do you recognize reasonable and unreasonable spending (for someone to live on their own). Those are things you have time to learn in the last 2 years of high school because you have time. It's probably manageable but still troubling. It might lead to more people going to university closer to home, which is a double edged sword, you're not exploiting talent as optimally, but then the talent you do have has a lot less debt, and that's probably for the better.
agreed. I'm not in charge of anything so my opinion on what should or should not be computer science isn't considered. Strictly speaking the courses are supposed to be about design or something, but in practice they tend to be a lot of handholding on how to do basic things in excel, photoshop or the like. When you have to teach students how to unzip files from the course webpage, you know you're not starting with the most informed lot.
And ya, those courses attract the computer illiterate, who spend half the class talking to friends on facebook and not learning basic skills. In other words: precisely the sort of person who has a computer, but doesn't know anything about using it safely.
As to the reason we offer those courses. They can attract 2000 students between all the various 'service' courses we offer. Core comp sci, maybe 300 or 400 combined. Enrollment depending on whether other departments make their students take the courses, that's at a first year level.
no they aren't. Which is the problem. The average user probably doesn't know what a security certificate is, let alone when you should, or should not trust one. That's why we have experts debating which ones to actually trust on their behalf.
Half the first year students we have in computer science courses can't navigate to a directory (note that these are generally not core comp sci students, but taking a course on say how to use photoshop), let alone figure out what a security certificate is. That's why we need experts to design systems which are inherently as secure as is legally possible in the first place.
Well the catch is that linux developers are mostly being paid. That's IMO what's taken say pre ubuntu linux from being an amusing nerd gimmick to something a normal human being might actually use for something. Firefox developers are being paid too.
If you pay people to do the wrong things the product will suck. Linux benefits from several eyes on the problem of deciding where development money should go. But that's the same weakness. What happens to firefox when the product they sell: A google startpage, is usurped by google launching its own competing browser (or if their privacy ideals conflict with what google does to that search info)?
The quality of software is judged by it doing what you want it to do, whether you want it to do the right or sensible thing or not is another matter. IE was cheap (i.e. free), and preinstalled, netscape wasn't. Since then they worked hard to maintain backwards compatibility with a product who's main selling feature was that I didn't have to download it. Which is why they have more marketshare than firefox still. Vista was competing with XP, not Linux. And it offered no real compelling reason to upgrade, on the other hand most of the core software stuff in Vista carried over to 7, which is apparently wonderful, even though it's main difference from vista seems to be they changed the priorities on some processes, changed the look of the skin and put a big 7 on the box.
Where are the results of those paid developers you ask? http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142978/Windows_market_share_slide_resumes down to 92% of the OS market. Office went from what, 10, 15% of the market in 90/91 to probably 80% today, and I bet 90% of the revenue. The market of people who pay for the product they use seems to have spoken. MS fulfills their requirements. Just because their requirements may make no rational sense, they paid people to do what the customer wanted - and the customer got a product he/she will pay for.
Linux developers obviously haven't put enough effort into making the product people want. It may, in the formal proof sense of computer science be 'better', but it obviously doesn't meet as many user requirements on the desktop.
As for who produces the best quality, the passionate volunteer or the guy in it for the money? Well how long is the project? If my developers aren't getting paid, what are they eating, where are they living? If they're getting paid, but not by me, how much work can I expect them to actually do? The guy guaranteed a job no matter how terrible a job he does (Yugo), in the socialist/communist system doesn't really count.
You realize software isn't free right? Duplication costs being nothing isn't he same as the product costing nothing to make. A fighter jet costs 40 billion dollars to develop, and 100 million dollars to actually manufacture. If you only sell 100 of them (say the french Rafale) 80% of your total costs (50 billion) are in 'development' and 20% in actual production. Or maybe it will be 40/60 if they make a full 200 of them, whatever. The passionate volunteer who really really wants to do it still needs to eat, so if you want him to stay on time and a budget you kinda need to pay him. Or else he's going to work for the person who offers him food, and not work on your project.
I think a better point for him to make might be that good software development in practice requires you pay people to do it. Who does the paying probably matters to some degree, but unpaid people are probably more inclined to solve problems interesting to them than problems which are boring but ought to be fixed.
He's arguing, probably correctly, that open source software is not necessarily secure because you can put and infinite number of eyes on it. There are not, in practice infinite number of developers available, and of the people who could be classed as developers that are available only a small percentage have meaningful skills to apply to the problem. Fair enough. I'm getting a PhD in comp sci, so on paper I'm a potential developer for linux. In practice I've never contributed anything to the linux codebase, nor have I attempted to invest the time in doing so, and I suspect I'm not alone.
I think the most important point is that lots of businesses contribute developer time to various open source projects, as do governments. But they're mostly in the business of monetizing services, on an individual basis they, like me, have no obligation to keep paying people to develop the software they service. That's a problem, since if enough of them fall on hard times the projects themselves are going to suffer, and it risks being a nasty downward spiral. For all of the things wrong with MS, if you get an operating system from them you're paying for an operating system, or a word processor or whatever, and the market for those products determines their viability, and how much developer time can be applied to them. Newspapers sell advertising space, to pay for journalism. If the market for journalism remains unchanged but the market for advertising space tanks your journalists are looking for work. If the market for whatever products the main contributors to linux sell erode away (ironically, like the car business, by making an easier to use more reliable product) there's no one actually paying for the thing which costs money to make. A sufficiently secure, stable etc. piece of software requires the minimum of support, but doesn't stay current without investment. Windows may not be the most 'current' OS in the world, but when you buy a new version M$ isn't out anything by making it more secure, more stable etc.
And what exactly do you think NASA does then? 17 billion dollars is hardly enough to do much on your own - they're contracting out to the private sector. Heck most new fighter jets are costing 40+ billion just to develop - usually governments paying private companies to do work.
Being a government agency lets you be on the leading edge, and to pay people to develop technologies that wouldn't be profitable (yet) without you, but you don't usually want to do it all yourself. Even if you 'do it yourself' most of what you buy is farmed out some private entity, it's not like the government is in the steel or titanium business after all.
A breakdown of where nasa spends it's money is available at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420990main_FY_201_%20Budget_Overview_1_Feb_2010.pdf. How much of that can really be farmed out to private investment is certainly up for debate, but you don't want science to be done in such a risk averse fashion that nothing useful gets done. Governments fund long term, high risk science, companies fund mid and short term lower risk science. Kinda makes sense. A negative or null result is still useful, but costly, and most businesses don't want to be footing the bill for it. So the first question perhaps, is what on that list isn't worth paying for?
You rather naively suggest LEO may not be as grand as the moon or mars that they should get some infrastructure up there so you can go wherever you want. How is that going to work? Someone going to build an orbital shipyard under the hope someone will come along and want to build something there? NASA creates a market for future technologies, that's it's role. They're saying Moon, Mars or whatever the governments priorities are precisely to get companies to invest in all the required pieces so they know the investment will pay off. You can't seriously expect a company to just cough up billions of dollars without any reasonable assurance there will be a buyer for all this LEO infrastructure you expect them to build. The biggest challenge for NASA and its suppliers is that every government and congress that comes along has a different idea about what to do, but the major, interesting projects (can) take a lot longer than one congressional cycle. You can easily, in the parlance of a CPU, waste all your time context switching and never actually get any processing done. If the goal under Bush was Mars, but the goal under obama is just satellites (for example) then you have a huge context switch cost to abandon one set of development and start something afresh. In practice it's probably smaller scale than that, but no less troublesome for the building guys. A company on the other hand would have to have the money to sustain huge upfront investment costs to do anything useful, without much guarantee of a payoff. Rocket development is easy to justify, lots of people have lots of stuff they want up in space. It's the stuff that you actually put up there that's usually one off development and manufacturing and that's where you have these apparently expensive things with relatively little immediate payoff having a market.
Um even the nature of sending an e-mail may represent private information. Your services for students with disabilities for example, by nature of saying 'you have a meeting with so and so in our office every thursday this term' is letting the cat out of the bag so to speak. Or a 'You have a meeting with prof A at 3 pm. Signature: Prof A, lead researcher diabetes lab' or similar.
If you think people, on average, outside the engineering and comp sci departments have the technical skill to transmit drafts of papers, meeting with potential subject schedules etc. over something other than e-mail, you're grossly misinformed. The problem we have had at the last two universities I've been at is that people just used gmail because IT worked hard to keep our internal mail so secure you couldn't send.pdf and.zip attachments.
That said, I'm not sure any inherent problem with Google (or Sun or whomever) doing your e-mail. Someone is running your e-mail, your internal guys have a lot of trouble keeping e-mail sufficiently up to date for people to actually use it (especially in the era of shrinking budgets). These big outfits can aggregate the costs of backups, UI design etc over dozens of institutions. Admittedly they're marginally more likely than your internal guys to have a market to sell any of the private data too, but I don't see that as a huge gain in risk. Your contract with them should specify the service they provide limits what they can do with your e-mail data, and if they violate that it's a breech of contract issue. You're probably better with them running it in a decent fashion with half decent contract than your students using gmail for everything, with no contract about what they can, or cannot do with private data.
And it's not like the people writing this code are, or were trained in computer science, assuming computer science even existed when they were doing the work.
Having done an undergrad in theoretical physics, but being in a PhD in comp sci now I will say this: The assumption in physics when I graduated in 2002 was that by second year you knew how to write code, whether they've taught you or not. Even more recently it has still been an assumption that you'll know how to write code, but they try and give you a bare minimum of training. And of course it's usually other physical scientists who do the teaching, not computer scientists, so bad information (or out of date information or the like) is propagated along. That completely misses the advanced topics in computer science which cover a lot more of the software engineering sort of problems. Try explaining to a physicist how a 32 or 64 bit float can't exactly replicate all of the numbers they think it can and watch half of them have their eyes gloss over for half an hour. And then the problem is what do you do about it?
Then you get into a lab (uni lab). Half the software used will have been written in F77 when it was still pretty new, and someone may have hacked some modifications in here and there over the years. Some of these programs last for years, span multiple careers and so on. They aren't small investments but have had grubby little grad student paws on them for a long time, in addition to incompetent professor hands.
None of scientific computing is done particularly well, they expect people with no training in software development to do the work, assuming it was done when software development existed, and there isn't the funding to pay people who might do it properly.
On top of all that it's not like you want to release your code to the public right away anyway. As a scientist you're in competition with groups around the world to publish first. You describe in your paper the science you think you implemented, someone else who wants to verify your results gets to write a new chunk of code which they think is the same science and you compare. Giving out a scientists code for inspection means someone else will have a working software platform to publish papers based on your work, and that's not so good for you. For all the talk of research for the public good, ultimately your own good, of continuing to publish (to get paid) trumps a public need. That's a systematic problem, and when you're competing with a research group in brazil, and you're in canada their rules are different than yours, and so you keep things close to the chest.
The best bet for notetaking is a smartpen, and pay the money for a handwriting recognition program so you can index them properly. A good one will let you record the lecture and keep in sync with what you were writing. Your mileage may vary on the legal issues around recording a lecture.
This way you get a paper book, an electronic version of the notes as backup, but then the paper is also the backup if your computer gets blown up or stolen etc.
Only really rich enthusiasts replace every year, there is relatively little value in it. Jumping between generations, ATI 4K series to 5K series, (or nvidia 200 to 300 series), arguably core 2's to core i7's aren't terrible ideas. Expensive, but at least you're getting a significant jumps in capabilities, whether you care about those capabilities is another matter. But if you run what would be a new top of the line machine today, with up to date software, and then compare that to a 5 year old equivalent and the difference, even to the average end user is pretty stark.
The business cycle is driven by a combination of technical and basic user requirements. After 5 years your employees start to complain that the crappy machine you bought 5 years ago is extremely crappy compared even to the garbage they bought. And most computer components in my experience in a big business environment have a failure rate of around 50% at 6 years (which is usually capacitor failures but is rarely worth fixing on an IT guys end). On a home use basis where the machine is in a well cleaned area and off a lot you can do better than that... usually. You naturally want to start replacing before the 50% failure rate hits you. When one important guys computer doesn't work it's a mild nuisance, when 3 or 4 important guys are having computer trouble you better hope your resume is up to date.
Or maybe too many people are involved in the process to be clear who exactly is at fault. If there's a bug in code I've written alone that's probably my fault, but if that bug shows up in a shipped version of a playstation game there are lots of layers of people who might have made a mistake.
Intelligence on a global scale is a huge operation, the guy who takes the phone call in nigeria is not the same guy who sends it to a law enforcement agency or who tries to do anything about it. Computers are really good at searching and sorting, that's what we as computer scientists spend most of our time doing. But the data gathered needs to be unique, entered properly, and then the person doing the search needs to search for the right thing. But that requires an initial step to centralize all the information from decentralized sources, and the distribute the information out, to the right people, and then have it not be buried in noise. That's not easy, at all. There's no one person who can read everything. I think of the relatively simple problem of catching cheaters on written work at school. If you have 1000 students and 10 markers your odds of finding two identical papers go way down compared to 1 person marking 20 or 30. You can put it in a computer and it will search for 'similarities' but without enough useful parameters everything is going to be similar to everything else. Finding a paper that is very similar to one on the same topic submitted 10 years ago is even harder. If you've got 20 or 30 000 people you're watching for general terrorist activities at any given time that requires an immense undertaking of people and technology, the system really can be at fault. People can be at fault too, but then if your system will fail when a small number of people make mistakes it's not a very fault tolerant system. On top of all that, it's not like anyone really knows how to do this sort of thing. We may have been fighting roughly the same people in various stages for hundreds of years but now in a single 9-5 shift a guy who was being watched in nigeria can cross into europe, and a shift later be in the US. The Israelis sort of by definition don't let in a lot people who come from countries that might be hostile to them (and the reverse). The problem the US faces isn't unique in the world, but the pace and scope of the problem are unique in time. No one has faced a threat so relatively small yet deadly, distributed so widely, and so rapidly. Finding the right people, training them properly aren't exactly known quantities, calling out an individual who has messed up is dumb, because no one wants to be the scapegoat when there are dozens of people above and below them in the chain who could have done something about their errors.
For all the talk of this underwear bombers father calling in and saying he thinks his son is up to something, what we don't know is how often they get calls like that, and how many of them are just plain wrong, how long it takes to track this down and how many people in the intelligence community are basically running around on wild goose chases.
People were willing to tolerate the US in saudi when the threat from iraq was immediate. People, on the whole, aren't stupid enough to miss the big picture here. The problem is 3, 4, 5 years later why is the wealthiest muslim country reliant on a foreign power to protect itself? (Given that they can buy US weapons) The *continued* presence of the US there shamed every saudi who believed their country should be able to defend itself from a poorer, weaker (and slightly smaller populationwise) potential adversary. If we all woke up tomorrow and realized mexico had an army of 10 million with a huge inventory of tanks aircraft etc, and was sufficiently well armed NATO rushed into help guard the US border that's one thing. But 5 years later if the potential adversary, with less money, technology, trade, access and overall weaker it's a problem. The *continued* US presence, and no fly zones over the oppressed, gassed people of Iraq was a shame on the honour of the people of Saudi, the protectors of the muslim holy places, that they are relying on a bunch of Christians from across the ocean to guard them from another muslim state. Either they lack legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the muslim world, at which point we should wonder why we're supporting them, or they figure we're dumb enough to run in and help them for free, why should they bother, and we should wonder why we're the only ones who think this needs to be done 'our' way.
The US troops in Saudi pushed bin laden over the edge, but he wasn't exactly pro US or Saudi Royal family before that. The house of Saud for all practical purposes may as well all carry US or EU passports, as they syphon off all the money they can, and then store in the US and EU. As a western country that's basically what we want them to do, if they took that money and reinvested in their economy or that of their neighbours we wouldn't have it back (think trade deficits) As it is economically Saudi arabia may as well be part of the US. But long prior to the invasion of Kuwait and the US moving into Saudi he was against what the US puppet in Israel was doing to the Palestinians, the wealth disparity in Saudi between the princes and everyone else, US involvement in southeast asia, Russian control over chechnya, the perceived relations between egypt and the US (hence he was able to merge AQ with the Egyptian IJ)
This is something the lunatic left understands perfectly. The House of Saud are the protrusion of Western imperialism into Saudi, created by Britain (like several middle eastern states) and propped up by their successors in the US. That's the problem. They aren't a government of the people, for the people or anything else, nor, in the best of both worlds old school british system are the people represented. You cannot beat someone into submission, at least not states. Every single rebellion in history has played this out. Either you give them a fair shake or eventually they will come back for it, and the house of Saud is definitely not fair to the people of Saudi arabia or their supposed brothers in the rest of the muslim world who they leave in poverty. France and Germany were at each others throats over the overlapping populations along the rhine, the solution, was first move all of the germans out (since we won WW2), and then push them towards being a single state rendering the issue moot. Indians fought, and lost, a rebellion in 1857, it took them 90 years, but eventually they got independence.
There were lots of mistakes that led to Al qaeda hating the US as much as it does. Some of that was simply not inviting them to be part of the coalition to liberate kuwait, a mistake no one even conceived that we could have been making. Al qaeda offered to do it all, we not only turned them down but insulted them by suggesting they couldn't even participate - something 20 years in hindsight we can see, by definitely had no idea of at the time. Some of it is fundamental and deeply ideological. There are still KKK members in the US, there are still people
well that's why they're developers, not users. Your developers need to see stuff in the OS on a more regular basis than the average user. Finding connected hardware ID strings, even as a guy getting a PhD in computer science isn't exactly top of my priority list. If you look at the godmode everyone was playing with it's not exactly insightful. It's just a list, sorted alphabetically by type of task, of menus. Useful if you're changing stuff for the sake of changing stuff (say the first time you set up your computer or if you're testing), but there's no obvious logical connection between my folder display settings, my windows defender settings and my 'location and other sensors' options. It's handy to have if you want to see a list of a lot of stuff you can do, but not really very functional.
If anything they don't really belong together unless you're doing stuff with the operating system that is very different than your average user, like say, trying to test the functionality of all this stuff, in order.
Admittedly control panel isn't a great implementation, I think MS is still grappling with which direction to take your system settings, either the sort of godmode exhaustive list, which IMO is far too confusing for the average user (albeit alphabetical at least), and the task dependent options where you only see your folders settings options if you're messing with folders, mouse settings with mouse software etc. In the end they've settled on an ugly hybrid of the two, but I think that covers all bases better than the alternatives.
Politics is far more realistic and practical than that. At some point it doesn't matter why people are dumb enough to riot, if they will, and it gets people killed (notably innocent people) then you have to be seen taking steps to stop it. And with 1.1 billion people, no matter what happens, someone is bound to get killed. Scared sacred elephant in Allahabad, there's a dozen people trampled to death. Train ride from Mumbai to Dehli there's a few people who fall of and get killed or seriously wounded- assuming the train ever actually goes.
There are probably 700 or 800 million hindu's in India. The vast majority of whom are poorly, if at all educated. The only 'education' they have could be from a local priest who has told them whatever he bloody well feels like. Changing that to a culture that values fully free speech simply isn't going to happen in a short period of time. Heck look at ireland and blasphemy laws which just came essentially back into force. We in the 'west' (insofar as Ireland ever deserved to be counted as the west) aren't exactly immune from this either. Indians who are pro censorship are playing to a much more practical than ideological view of their country and the consequences of the world they live in. When you have a literacy rate of 60% your options aren't good, and more ideological solutions take time. A lot of time. Especially when it's in someone else's political interest to stir up a fuss every time someone says something unpopular.
Truly free speech is an ideological myth, and as matter of practice not worth fighting for anyway - would you really want someone free to stir up a riot that kills dozens if not hundreds of people for the fun of it? For all the fuss over the cartoons of mohammed the real story is that one guy was able to cause serious personal risk to thousands of people, millions of dollars in productivity and possible property damage. He was making a statement, but one could as easily have done it solely for the purpose of stirring up a fuss, and that's not really a power you want just waved around recklessly. Whether it should cause such problems is really a different problem, in the world we live in it does cause problems and you have to cope with that. No more than in the US the president cannot declare war - power tends to require balance. The power to declare war must be balanced with the guarantee that the people either (in the british system) can choose to not pay for it, and therefore not go a long with it, or in the US system not allow it at all, the power to cause riots which can kill people and cause millions in damage, trigger diplomatic spats and risk frankly war, perhaps also needs balance.
You are under the misguided impression Iran's biggest enemy in the region is israel. It is not. It has yankee troops on two borders, and has the Saudi's to contend with for leadership as the per-eminent Muslim state. The rhetoric against israel is just that, rhetoric with some token proxies causing a fuss to make it look like they're doing something. The real prize is to destabilize saudi, who regularly publicly toy with the idea of being nuclear armed.
Who do you think the saudi's are buying all the F15's to protect themselves against exactly? Not Israel. And until the yanks are out of Iraq it's an arms race between Saudi and Iran to see who gets to seize control of the place the moment the last yankee boot is out of there. The iranians and saudi's have been and will perpetually be at each others throats. Iran is too relatively powerful (compared to Saudi) to be ignored, but too small compared to the Sunni world to risk ticking them off too much - and they need a strong defence to prevent the Sunni's from trying to wipe the idol worshipers out to deal with this problem once and for all.
Complaining about israel is the middle east equivalent of westerners complaining taxes are too high, every now and then someone comes along and makes some token changes to policy to win political support, but basically everyone knows the game and is not out to rock the boat too much. Admittedly there is a real danger than you'll get some idiot in charge who actually believes all of the rhetoric, but that is not presently the case with Iran.
But in the west we regularly see 15-25% of our engineering students as arabs and easily 50-70% can be foreigners (india, china, middle east, south america, very rarely sub saharan africa). If 0.001% of them go on to become terrorists I'm not sure it means much about what we can do education wise. But I don't think anyone, myself included, in the business of training engineers would think it odd to have 10 or 15 students complain about an exam on Eid or go to prayers right before or after class (or during a lab if they're long labs and not deeply involved).
Besides, when these guys come here it serves to further radicalize some of them. They've been told all of the evils of the west and they get here and for some of them it's squarely in front of them. We do nothing while gaza is turned into a giant concentration camp and Saudi is used as the puppet of the US it is to invade Yemen, all while we get fat and lazy stealing their oil. It's not like we can somehow be alarmed some small percent of them want to kill us. Some people in the US hate black people, therefore one should not be stunned that that group will want to kill Obama. That doesn't make it right, sensible, a significant number of people or anything remotely moral, but it certainly shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
or at least code they don't want shown to the public/* This chunk written by Sir_Sri ext 1111 e-mail... *///coudn't get this sh*t to work right, used a hack but if you swirl the mouse around counter clockwise 7 times the program always crashes// Sir_Sri is an idiot, incompetent and has been moved away from coding into marketing, he won't touch this again, I fixed this crap up for him Bill ext 1, office 1 e-mail 1@microsoft.com.
You build your model (nowdays on computer but not necessarily) compare to past data and see if it fits. Hope for new data and see if it still fits.
An experimentalist tries to figure out how to collect new data, and to try and see if it fits with known theory or not. In the case of relativity as discussed above really small things going really really fast or really big things don't jive with newtonian theory. Of course Newton had no way of realizing that at the time.
The challenge with all climate science is that there are a lot of interconnected parts, CO2 being naturally occurring has a feedback loop with plant matter for example, and modelling that correctly is only one piece of a very large puzzle. Rarely is it obviously a 1-1 mapping between A and B. The coldest, longest winter on record in one place can occur in the hottest year on record in the world for example. They aren't mutually exclusive, and if anything 'global' warming is mostly a polar phenomena at the moment, well outside most peoples day to day lives. And then herein lies the problem. Do they have enough of the right data to correctly build the computer models? You could err in either direction. I would not, for example, have intuitively guessed that melting icecaps would release methane, which exacerbates the problem. But then warmer temperatures increase the plant growth in some parts of the world (I'm in canada so we see a sliver of this), which in turn reduces CO2, and reduces warming... kinda, the trick is properly determining the change.
And yes, you can, and do experiment on the climate, regularly. Rarely wisely, but you certainly can do it.
The distinction with 'studies' is that they tend to not have a reproducible or verifiable model, if they have a formalized model at all. As time goes on they are creeping into more and more actual science, notably psychology, especially now that the tools are both available and relatively easy to use.
also due diligence isn't instant. These guys did get caught, eventually. If they were smart the first batch they sold was legit, then they just have until some regular or spot check review to sell the fake stuff.
You cannot possibly inspect every piece of every thing you buy from everyone, and adequately test it, even as a big entity. You test some, and, as with any (pseudo random) sampling method it won't catch everything right away, and might never catch some things.
Not really a different issue. How much does an 8 year old game sell for at retail (unopened). A 'collector' item, it's a lot. Daikraptana and it's probably 2 bucks. The linked price in the article simply doesn't apply anymore, it's from 2006. 3 years on windows XP is worth basically nothing. Whatever they had to pay 3 years ago, before Vista and 7 were out doesn't matter.
Your concept of value is missing the notion of liquidation - at this point the company is liquidating it's stock of windows XP keys, and their value is virtually nothing. Digital goods do depreciate just like physical goods, because price is supply and demand, and demand is almost none for XP now.
point 1. Covered to some degree in 3rd and 4th year everywhere I've been. Point 2. Covered in small part in the first databases course and regularly in 2nd (3rd and 4th year). Point 3- done from 2nd year on, with special emphasis in 3rd year. point 4. While talked about it doesn't really come up or mean anything until 3rd year or 4th year projects.
In short, I dispute your assertion that none of that is taught in universities. In my experience that is all covered to varying degrees in different places. Whether students paid any attention or not is another matter.
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They all work very well... for people who know what address bars and tabs are.
Seriously, you're setting the bar way higher than the average user.
Plugins? What's a plugin? Why is this asking me to download something? How do I install something? Ever tried to install flash in firefox? You have to download and run an executable, it terrifies people, they don't know if the site they're getting it from might be hacked, the usually don't know how to find the file they've downloaded to run it. If it doesn't just run on it's own it's too hard for the average user.
Firefox and opera certainly function better on sites *I* visit than say my 70 year old father and his wife. The websites I visit are built for people with the assumption they might not use IE. But my dad's wife manages to find these odd flash game sites that never work right in anything other than IE. And they run their computer on a 20 inch monitor in 800x600 mode because well, it makes everything look bigger, so they can read it better. Good luck getting webpages designed for the young tech savy firefox user to behave nicely in 800x600 (except google).
To anyone capable of reading, the menu screen shouldn't be hard, but it is. It causes regular users to panic and look for a 'get me the fuck away from here' button. It's how all the phishing/internet security 2010 type attacks succeed unfortunately. People want appliances. They're scared of choices they aren't capable of making in an informed fashion.
Like I say, it's the sort of thing that makes sense on a new computer. People *expect* and accept that on a new computer they will have to learn a new of way of doing things and learn new stuff. On average even my first year university students panic when something shows up with different settings than they're used to. If they expect it to be the same they don't want new. And even then, when presented with the choice, they aren't going to want to rock the boat.
Lovely, so now a bunch of tech savvy people are going to be getting calls asking how to make these screens go away and never come back.
Users don't want choice, they don't want complexity, menus are complexity. Even that stupid setup menu on IE when you first install it scares the hell out of people and they just have to keep clicking 'not right now' or whatever it is EVERY time they start the application because they don't know how to make it go away. They want shit that does its thing that they don't have to think about and for whatever they're doing IE already does that. If you have enough know how to not use IE already, you don't. If you don't have the know how sticking some other choice for you there is just going to break stuff and confuse people. I feel bad for people who will accidentally choose google chrome or safari and then not have a clue how to use it, and not have a clue how to immediately revert the system to what they did have that let them do whatever they were doing.
Not a bad concept in the 'when it's installed' sense, and on purely legal basis it makes sense, but it's not the sort of thing you want to be pushing out to live OS's that people are actually using right now. Even then putting anything other than IE8 on tends to be risky, everything is designed to work in IE, less so with firefox and way less so with any other choice, that's going to hobble people who suddenly have a new browser and no idea how to make it work.
it isn't supposed to benefit the consumer. It's supposed to benefit their bottom line. Which in the long run, benefits the people who want a better, more diverse range of games to play.
It's the same thinking as paywalls on news websites - we aren't making enough money now, even though we have x customers. If we add a paywall, we'll only have 0.y *x customers, but at least we'll have enough money to stay in business and provide them content. The users who pay may even get a better experience this way if they make more money doing it.
Why would customers be happy about it? Well if I'm paying for a game, and getting the same experience as someone who pirated it, and they represent 19/20 players, and then they start to add DRM which gimps the game to keep those 19/20 people out (and still doesn't work) I'm not exactly feeling like their strategy is pro customer. Now though, they're saying things like 'free DLC when you preorder' well really that means you're paying $60 for the DLC and the the game is free because you could have pirated it and just had to buy the DLC, but at least I feel like I'm not stealing their stuff, and I'm getting something out of paying money. UBIsofts system is bad because it punishes you for having bought their product. The EA system of DLC is good because it rewards you for paying for the game, but if you won't pay for the game or DLC elements of it, you're not getting the same experience as someone who does. The Sony thing is half and half, they're just advertising it badly, not that I can think of a better way. Buy our product, get free multiplayer, don't buy our product, pay for multiplayer! But then I suppose they have the problems as EA and their DLC - you can still get the rest of the game for free, or a lot less used/pirated.
As much as I loved the Civ games, once I played stuff like EU2 and others based on the same engine I just couldn't go back. Civ has an exploding degree of management, which I found woefully unnecessary. If I'm the guy in charge, when there is one city, ok I care about building the library, but if there are 50 cities, I care less about your library, and more about the focus of your city. Spore had the right concept, if appaling implementation, what defines a civilization changes through time, and the 'level' you want to envision the problem changes.
The scope of an EU/vicky/HOI game is about on par with a late stage civ game, where the world is filled up and you're managing your empire within that. But in the paradox products I can actually manage the empire, my stacks of 12 units that I move at once makes sense - I'm not managing every single bloody division in the army, I now manage army groups and someone else. I felt HOI3 when kinda the wrong direction with tripling the number of provinces because that's like the same problem with Civ. The economic system in civ now feels oversimplified, that might be good, but something like Vicky you start to see an actual population growth mechanic and something that seems kinda like a real economy. Not that it was necessarily perfectly balanced, but the system was a lot better than Civ.
Oh and other games can do real time and have it work well. I know turn based is a civ thing, and I wouldn't change it if I were them, but turned based and hexagonal squares is like an old school wargame, other products don't bind you to a particular shape of terrain and run in real time, either fast or slow. I find that much more compelling. I'll still buy it, but I feel like the Civ series is a throwback to and old way of doing things, it has it's moments and its charm, but the rest of the grand strategy world has progressed along (except spore, which kinda has the right idea for a while, and then dies completely). No more than I would expect to see a turn based stand there and one guy at a time swing in final fantasy (like say FF6) - it's been done, but they have progressed from that. I'll still put up with outdated mechanics to see the world they've created but I'm unlikely to invest heavily in it repeatedly when it's like that.
They're only not ready now because the normal age is older. We had this problem in ontario when they got rid of grade 13, oh the tragedy that 17/18 year olds would be too young for university (compared to the previous years 18/19 year olds, they aren't mature enough blah blah blah. Well you know what, when everyone else is 17, it's not really a problem. The problem was more on our end as the institutions because we now had to (for example) shift how much alcohol we could serve, and to whom and had to start policy alcohol policies in residences (since when students were entering at 18 ish some of them could drink right away others had to wait until december ish, but now the presumption is that no one is 19 and able to drink). Granted that is a problem with alcohol age, not with students particularly. If you set the entrance bar for university as based on academic achievement, everyone who shows up will be there because of academic achievement, and you'll have a new social norm. The transition from one system to another is messy, really messy, I hate to say it. There are going to be a lot of angry bitter 18 year olds that just wasted two years of their lives in highschool when some 16 year old upstart didn't have to go through that. But at the end of the transition you have a much better collection of students, who aren't wasting years of their lives pretending like high school matters, and actually getting on with life and towards earning money.
Honestly, high school makes you lazy and stupid, especially if you started out smart. It's boring, and it teaches you that you can do well enough with no effort. Then they get to university when half our students are from india, the middle east and china, and those guys, I hate to say, didn't move 10 time zones because they were lazy dunces. They're smart, they work hard, they're focused, and they make our domestic students (myself included) look like dull speedbumps. Granted it's reading week so even as a PhD student I can't be expected to be doing work right now rather than posting on /. but I went in to fetch a book yesterday and all the chinese grad students were there, and working.
I have some WoW friends who happen to live near me that are just out of highschool. They're smart guys, one is in comp sci, the other going into engineering. But my god highschool taught them to be lazy. No late penalties, no motivation to get work done quickly because you can breeze through doing it the night before. These guys have developed the same terrible habits I had coming out of highschool, and it has taken me years to break out of those bad habits. Once you discover it's easy to be lazy and still do well, it's hard to train yourself differently. Another guy wants to be an artist. Well he could have been an artist last year maybe (as in enroll in a university fine arts programme), but you know, he kinda felt like he wanted to spend another year in highschool, become a bit more mature. Waste of bloody time and money, he doesn't have any meaningful courses to take and 'working on his profile' isn't going to help him when someone else, who's got an equally good profile did it in less time. When you build a system around assuming people will probably stupid, they probably will be.
To me the biggest risks of young people in university is money, and driving. You need to learn to drive, ideally from someone with experience... like say a parent, and you usually can't afford to pay enough for the experience you should have. If you don't live at home when you're 16 it's hard to find someone to teach you that will work for free. Money is a big problem. How do you pay rent, how do you pay for your health, how do you do your taxes, how do you recognize reasonable and unreasonable spending (for someone to live on their own). Those are things you have time to learn in the last 2 years of high school because you have time. It's probably manageable but still troubling. It might lead to more people going to university closer to home, which is a double edged sword, you're not exploiting talent as optimally, but then the talent you do have has a lot less debt, and that's probably for the better.
agreed. I'm not in charge of anything so my opinion on what should or should not be computer science isn't considered. Strictly speaking the courses are supposed to be about design or something, but in practice they tend to be a lot of handholding on how to do basic things in excel, photoshop or the like. When you have to teach students how to unzip files from the course webpage, you know you're not starting with the most informed lot.
And ya, those courses attract the computer illiterate, who spend half the class talking to friends on facebook and not learning basic skills. In other words: precisely the sort of person who has a computer, but doesn't know anything about using it safely.
As to the reason we offer those courses. They can attract 2000 students between all the various 'service' courses we offer. Core comp sci, maybe 300 or 400 combined. Enrollment depending on whether other departments make their students take the courses, that's at a first year level.
no they aren't. Which is the problem. The average user probably doesn't know what a security certificate is, let alone when you should, or should not trust one. That's why we have experts debating which ones to actually trust on their behalf.
Half the first year students we have in computer science courses can't navigate to a directory (note that these are generally not core comp sci students, but taking a course on say how to use photoshop), let alone figure out what a security certificate is. That's why we need experts to design systems which are inherently as secure as is legally possible in the first place.
Well the catch is that linux developers are mostly being paid. That's IMO what's taken say pre ubuntu linux from being an amusing nerd gimmick to something a normal human being might actually use for something. Firefox developers are being paid too.
If you pay people to do the wrong things the product will suck. Linux benefits from several eyes on the problem of deciding where development money should go. But that's the same weakness. What happens to firefox when the product they sell: A google startpage, is usurped by google launching its own competing browser (or if their privacy ideals conflict with what google does to that search info)?
The quality of software is judged by it doing what you want it to do, whether you want it to do the right or sensible thing or not is another matter. IE was cheap (i.e. free), and preinstalled, netscape wasn't. Since then they worked hard to maintain backwards compatibility with a product who's main selling feature was that I didn't have to download it. Which is why they have more marketshare than firefox still. Vista was competing with XP, not Linux. And it offered no real compelling reason to upgrade, on the other hand most of the core software stuff in Vista carried over to 7, which is apparently wonderful, even though it's main difference from vista seems to be they changed the priorities on some processes, changed the look of the skin and put a big 7 on the box.
Where are the results of those paid developers you ask? http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142978/Windows_market_share_slide_resumes down to 92% of the OS market. Office went from what, 10, 15% of the market in 90/91 to probably 80% today, and I bet 90% of the revenue. The market of people who pay for the product they use seems to have spoken. MS fulfills their requirements. Just because their requirements may make no rational sense, they paid people to do what the customer wanted - and the customer got a product he/she will pay for.
Linux developers obviously haven't put enough effort into making the product people want. It may, in the formal proof sense of computer science be 'better', but it obviously doesn't meet as many user requirements on the desktop.
As for who produces the best quality, the passionate volunteer or the guy in it for the money? Well how long is the project? If my developers aren't getting paid, what are they eating, where are they living? If they're getting paid, but not by me, how much work can I expect them to actually do? The guy guaranteed a job no matter how terrible a job he does (Yugo), in the socialist/communist system doesn't really count.
You realize software isn't free right? Duplication costs being nothing isn't he same as the product costing nothing to make. A fighter jet costs 40 billion dollars to develop, and 100 million dollars to actually manufacture. If you only sell 100 of them (say the french Rafale) 80% of your total costs (50 billion) are in 'development' and 20% in actual production. Or maybe it will be 40/60 if they make a full 200 of them, whatever. The passionate volunteer who really really wants to do it still needs to eat, so if you want him to stay on time and a budget you kinda need to pay him. Or else he's going to work for the person who offers him food, and not work on your project.
I think a better point for him to make might be that good software development in practice requires you pay people to do it. Who does the paying probably matters to some degree, but unpaid people are probably more inclined to solve problems interesting to them than problems which are boring but ought to be fixed.
He's arguing, probably correctly, that open source software is not necessarily secure because you can put and infinite number of eyes on it. There are not, in practice infinite number of developers available, and of the people who could be classed as developers that are available only a small percentage have meaningful skills to apply to the problem. Fair enough. I'm getting a PhD in comp sci, so on paper I'm a potential developer for linux. In practice I've never contributed anything to the linux codebase, nor have I attempted to invest the time in doing so, and I suspect I'm not alone.
I think the most important point is that lots of businesses contribute developer time to various open source projects, as do governments. But they're mostly in the business of monetizing services, on an individual basis they, like me, have no obligation to keep paying people to develop the software they service. That's a problem, since if enough of them fall on hard times the projects themselves are going to suffer, and it risks being a nasty downward spiral. For all of the things wrong with MS, if you get an operating system from them you're paying for an operating system, or a word processor or whatever, and the market for those products determines their viability, and how much developer time can be applied to them. Newspapers sell advertising space, to pay for journalism. If the market for journalism remains unchanged but the market for advertising space tanks your journalists are looking for work. If the market for whatever products the main contributors to linux sell erode away (ironically, like the car business, by making an easier to use more reliable product) there's no one actually paying for the thing which costs money to make. A sufficiently secure, stable etc. piece of software requires the minimum of support, but doesn't stay current without investment. Windows may not be the most 'current' OS in the world, but when you buy a new version M$ isn't out anything by making it more secure, more stable etc.
And what exactly do you think NASA does then? 17 billion dollars is hardly enough to do much on your own - they're contracting out to the private sector. Heck most new fighter jets are costing 40+ billion just to develop - usually governments paying private companies to do work.
Being a government agency lets you be on the leading edge, and to pay people to develop technologies that wouldn't be profitable (yet) without you, but you don't usually want to do it all yourself. Even if you 'do it yourself' most of what you buy is farmed out some private entity, it's not like the government is in the steel or titanium business after all.
A breakdown of where nasa spends it's money is available at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420990main_FY_201_%20Budget_Overview_1_Feb_2010.pdf. How much of that can really be farmed out to private investment is certainly up for debate, but you don't want science to be done in such a risk averse fashion that nothing useful gets done. Governments fund long term, high risk science, companies fund mid and short term lower risk science. Kinda makes sense. A negative or null result is still useful, but costly, and most businesses don't want to be footing the bill for it. So the first question perhaps, is what on that list isn't worth paying for?
You rather naively suggest LEO may not be as grand as the moon or mars that they should get some infrastructure up there so you can go wherever you want. How is that going to work? Someone going to build an orbital shipyard under the hope someone will come along and want to build something there? NASA creates a market for future technologies, that's it's role. They're saying Moon, Mars or whatever the governments priorities are precisely to get companies to invest in all the required pieces so they know the investment will pay off. You can't seriously expect a company to just cough up billions of dollars without any reasonable assurance there will be a buyer for all this LEO infrastructure you expect them to build. The biggest challenge for NASA and its suppliers is that every government and congress that comes along has a different idea about what to do, but the major, interesting projects (can) take a lot longer than one congressional cycle. You can easily, in the parlance of a CPU, waste all your time context switching and never actually get any processing done. If the goal under Bush was Mars, but the goal under obama is just satellites (for example) then you have a huge context switch cost to abandon one set of development and start something afresh. In practice it's probably smaller scale than that, but no less troublesome for the building guys. A company on the other hand would have to have the money to sustain huge upfront investment costs to do anything useful, without much guarantee of a payoff. Rocket development is easy to justify, lots of people have lots of stuff they want up in space. It's the stuff that you actually put up there that's usually one off development and manufacturing and that's where you have these apparently expensive things with relatively little immediate payoff having a market.
Um even the nature of sending an e-mail may represent private information. Your services for students with disabilities for example, by nature of saying 'you have a meeting with so and so in our office every thursday this term' is letting the cat out of the bag so to speak. Or a 'You have a meeting with prof A at 3 pm. Signature: Prof A, lead researcher diabetes lab' or similar.
If you think people, on average, outside the engineering and comp sci departments have the technical skill to transmit drafts of papers, meeting with potential subject schedules etc. over something other than e-mail, you're grossly misinformed. The problem we have had at the last two universities I've been at is that people just used gmail because IT worked hard to keep our internal mail so secure you couldn't send .pdf and .zip attachments.
That said, I'm not sure any inherent problem with Google (or Sun or whomever) doing your e-mail. Someone is running your e-mail, your internal guys have a lot of trouble keeping e-mail sufficiently up to date for people to actually use it (especially in the era of shrinking budgets). These big outfits can aggregate the costs of backups, UI design etc over dozens of institutions. Admittedly they're marginally more likely than your internal guys to have a market to sell any of the private data too, but I don't see that as a huge gain in risk. Your contract with them should specify the service they provide limits what they can do with your e-mail data, and if they violate that it's a breech of contract issue. You're probably better with them running it in a decent fashion with half decent contract than your students using gmail for everything, with no contract about what they can, or cannot do with private data.
And it's not like the people writing this code are, or were trained in computer science, assuming computer science even existed when they were doing the work.
Having done an undergrad in theoretical physics, but being in a PhD in comp sci now I will say this: The assumption in physics when I graduated in 2002 was that by second year you knew how to write code, whether they've taught you or not. Even more recently it has still been an assumption that you'll know how to write code, but they try and give you a bare minimum of training. And of course it's usually other physical scientists who do the teaching, not computer scientists, so bad information (or out of date information or the like) is propagated along. That completely misses the advanced topics in computer science which cover a lot more of the software engineering sort of problems. Try explaining to a physicist how a 32 or 64 bit float can't exactly replicate all of the numbers they think it can and watch half of them have their eyes gloss over for half an hour. And then the problem is what do you do about it?
Then you get into a lab (uni lab). Half the software used will have been written in F77 when it was still pretty new, and someone may have hacked some modifications in here and there over the years. Some of these programs last for years, span multiple careers and so on. They aren't small investments but have had grubby little grad student paws on them for a long time, in addition to incompetent professor hands.
None of scientific computing is done particularly well, they expect people with no training in software development to do the work, assuming it was done when software development existed, and there isn't the funding to pay people who might do it properly.
On top of all that it's not like you want to release your code to the public right away anyway. As a scientist you're in competition with groups around the world to publish first. You describe in your paper the science you think you implemented, someone else who wants to verify your results gets to write a new chunk of code which they think is the same science and you compare. Giving out a scientists code for inspection means someone else will have a working software platform to publish papers based on your work, and that's not so good for you. For all the talk of research for the public good, ultimately your own good, of continuing to publish (to get paid) trumps a public need. That's a systematic problem, and when you're competing with a research group in brazil, and you're in canada their rules are different than yours, and so you keep things close to the chest.
The best bet for notetaking is a smartpen, and pay the money for a handwriting recognition program so you can index them properly. A good one will let you record the lecture and keep in sync with what you were writing. Your mileage may vary on the legal issues around recording a lecture.
This way you get a paper book, an electronic version of the notes as backup, but then the paper is also the backup if your computer gets blown up or stolen etc.
Only really rich enthusiasts replace every year, there is relatively little value in it. Jumping between generations, ATI 4K series to 5K series, (or nvidia 200 to 300 series), arguably core 2's to core i7's aren't terrible ideas. Expensive, but at least you're getting a significant jumps in capabilities, whether you care about those capabilities is another matter. But if you run what would be a new top of the line machine today, with up to date software, and then compare that to a 5 year old equivalent and the difference, even to the average end user is pretty stark.
The business cycle is driven by a combination of technical and basic user requirements. After 5 years your employees start to complain that the crappy machine you bought 5 years ago is extremely crappy compared even to the garbage they bought. And most computer components in my experience in a big business environment have a failure rate of around 50% at 6 years (which is usually capacitor failures but is rarely worth fixing on an IT guys end). On a home use basis where the machine is in a well cleaned area and off a lot you can do better than that... usually. You naturally want to start replacing before the 50% failure rate hits you. When one important guys computer doesn't work it's a mild nuisance, when 3 or 4 important guys are having computer trouble you better hope your resume is up to date.
Or maybe too many people are involved in the process to be clear who exactly is at fault. If there's a bug in code I've written alone that's probably my fault, but if that bug shows up in a shipped version of a playstation game there are lots of layers of people who might have made a mistake.
Intelligence on a global scale is a huge operation, the guy who takes the phone call in nigeria is not the same guy who sends it to a law enforcement agency or who tries to do anything about it. Computers are really good at searching and sorting, that's what we as computer scientists spend most of our time doing. But the data gathered needs to be unique, entered properly, and then the person doing the search needs to search for the right thing. But that requires an initial step to centralize all the information from decentralized sources, and the distribute the information out, to the right people, and then have it not be buried in noise. That's not easy, at all. There's no one person who can read everything. I think of the relatively simple problem of catching cheaters on written work at school. If you have 1000 students and 10 markers your odds of finding two identical papers go way down compared to 1 person marking 20 or 30. You can put it in a computer and it will search for 'similarities' but without enough useful parameters everything is going to be similar to everything else. Finding a paper that is very similar to one on the same topic submitted 10 years ago is even harder. If you've got 20 or 30 000 people you're watching for general terrorist activities at any given time that requires an immense undertaking of people and technology, the system really can be at fault. People can be at fault too, but then if your system will fail when a small number of people make mistakes it's not a very fault tolerant system. On top of all that, it's not like anyone really knows how to do this sort of thing. We may have been fighting roughly the same people in various stages for hundreds of years but now in a single 9-5 shift a guy who was being watched in nigeria can cross into europe, and a shift later be in the US. The Israelis sort of by definition don't let in a lot people who come from countries that might be hostile to them (and the reverse). The problem the US faces isn't unique in the world, but the pace and scope of the problem are unique in time. No one has faced a threat so relatively small yet deadly, distributed so widely, and so rapidly. Finding the right people, training them properly aren't exactly known quantities, calling out an individual who has messed up is dumb, because no one wants to be the scapegoat when there are dozens of people above and below them in the chain who could have done something about their errors.
For all the talk of this underwear bombers father calling in and saying he thinks his son is up to something, what we don't know is how often they get calls like that, and how many of them are just plain wrong, how long it takes to track this down and how many people in the intelligence community are basically running around on wild goose chases.
People were willing to tolerate the US in saudi when the threat from iraq was immediate. People, on the whole, aren't stupid enough to miss the big picture here. The problem is 3, 4, 5 years later why is the wealthiest muslim country reliant on a foreign power to protect itself? (Given that they can buy US weapons) The *continued* presence of the US there shamed every saudi who believed their country should be able to defend itself from a poorer, weaker (and slightly smaller populationwise) potential adversary. If we all woke up tomorrow and realized mexico had an army of 10 million with a huge inventory of tanks aircraft etc, and was sufficiently well armed NATO rushed into help guard the US border that's one thing. But 5 years later if the potential adversary, with less money, technology, trade, access and overall weaker it's a problem. The *continued* US presence, and no fly zones over the oppressed, gassed people of Iraq was a shame on the honour of the people of Saudi, the protectors of the muslim holy places, that they are relying on a bunch of Christians from across the ocean to guard them from another muslim state. Either they lack legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the muslim world, at which point we should wonder why we're supporting them, or they figure we're dumb enough to run in and help them for free, why should they bother, and we should wonder why we're the only ones who think this needs to be done 'our' way.
The US troops in Saudi pushed bin laden over the edge, but he wasn't exactly pro US or Saudi Royal family before that. The house of Saud for all practical purposes may as well all carry US or EU passports, as they syphon off all the money they can, and then store in the US and EU. As a western country that's basically what we want them to do, if they took that money and reinvested in their economy or that of their neighbours we wouldn't have it back (think trade deficits) As it is economically Saudi arabia may as well be part of the US. But long prior to the invasion of Kuwait and the US moving into Saudi he was against what the US puppet in Israel was doing to the Palestinians, the wealth disparity in Saudi between the princes and everyone else, US involvement in southeast asia, Russian control over chechnya, the perceived relations between egypt and the US (hence he was able to merge AQ with the Egyptian IJ)
This is something the lunatic left understands perfectly. The House of Saud are the protrusion of Western imperialism into Saudi, created by Britain (like several middle eastern states) and propped up by their successors in the US. That's the problem. They aren't a government of the people, for the people or anything else, nor, in the best of both worlds old school british system are the people represented. You cannot beat someone into submission, at least not states. Every single rebellion in history has played this out. Either you give them a fair shake or eventually they will come back for it, and the house of Saud is definitely not fair to the people of Saudi arabia or their supposed brothers in the rest of the muslim world who they leave in poverty. France and Germany were at each others throats over the overlapping populations along the rhine, the solution, was first move all of the germans out (since we won WW2), and then push them towards being a single state rendering the issue moot. Indians fought, and lost, a rebellion in 1857, it took them 90 years, but eventually they got independence.
There were lots of mistakes that led to Al qaeda hating the US as much as it does. Some of that was simply not inviting them to be part of the coalition to liberate kuwait, a mistake no one even conceived that we could have been making. Al qaeda offered to do it all, we not only turned them down but insulted them by suggesting they couldn't even participate - something 20 years in hindsight we can see, by definitely had no idea of at the time. Some of it is fundamental and deeply ideological. There are still KKK members in the US, there are still people
well that's why they're developers, not users. Your developers need to see stuff in the OS on a more regular basis than the average user. Finding connected hardware ID strings, even as a guy getting a PhD in computer science isn't exactly top of my priority list. If you look at the godmode everyone was playing with it's not exactly insightful. It's just a list, sorted alphabetically by type of task, of menus. Useful if you're changing stuff for the sake of changing stuff (say the first time you set up your computer or if you're testing), but there's no obvious logical connection between my folder display settings, my windows defender settings and my 'location and other sensors' options. It's handy to have if you want to see a list of a lot of stuff you can do, but not really very functional.
If anything they don't really belong together unless you're doing stuff with the operating system that is very different than your average user, like say, trying to test the functionality of all this stuff, in order.
Admittedly control panel isn't a great implementation, I think MS is still grappling with which direction to take your system settings, either the sort of godmode exhaustive list, which IMO is far too confusing for the average user (albeit alphabetical at least), and the task dependent options where you only see your folders settings options if you're messing with folders, mouse settings with mouse software etc. In the end they've settled on an ugly hybrid of the two, but I think that covers all bases better than the alternatives.
Politics is far more realistic and practical than that. At some point it doesn't matter why people are dumb enough to riot, if they will, and it gets people killed (notably innocent people) then you have to be seen taking steps to stop it. And with 1.1 billion people, no matter what happens, someone is bound to get killed. Scared sacred elephant in Allahabad, there's a dozen people trampled to death. Train ride from Mumbai to Dehli there's a few people who fall of and get killed or seriously wounded- assuming the train ever actually goes.
There are probably 700 or 800 million hindu's in India. The vast majority of whom are poorly, if at all educated. The only 'education' they have could be from a local priest who has told them whatever he bloody well feels like. Changing that to a culture that values fully free speech simply isn't going to happen in a short period of time. Heck look at ireland and blasphemy laws which just came essentially back into force. We in the 'west' (insofar as Ireland ever deserved to be counted as the west) aren't exactly immune from this either. Indians who are pro censorship are playing to a much more practical than ideological view of their country and the consequences of the world they live in. When you have a literacy rate of 60% your options aren't good, and more ideological solutions take time. A lot of time. Especially when it's in someone else's political interest to stir up a fuss every time someone says something unpopular.
Truly free speech is an ideological myth, and as matter of practice not worth fighting for anyway - would you really want someone free to stir up a riot that kills dozens if not hundreds of people for the fun of it? For all the fuss over the cartoons of mohammed the real story is that one guy was able to cause serious personal risk to thousands of people, millions of dollars in productivity and possible property damage. He was making a statement, but one could as easily have done it solely for the purpose of stirring up a fuss, and that's not really a power you want just waved around recklessly. Whether it should cause such problems is really a different problem, in the world we live in it does cause problems and you have to cope with that. No more than in the US the president cannot declare war - power tends to require balance. The power to declare war must be balanced with the guarantee that the people either (in the british system) can choose to not pay for it, and therefore not go a long with it, or in the US system not allow it at all, the power to cause riots which can kill people and cause millions in damage, trigger diplomatic spats and risk frankly war, perhaps also needs balance.
You are under the misguided impression Iran's biggest enemy in the region is israel. It is not. It has yankee troops on two borders, and has the Saudi's to contend with for leadership as the per-eminent Muslim state. The rhetoric against israel is just that, rhetoric with some token proxies causing a fuss to make it look like they're doing something. The real prize is to destabilize saudi, who regularly publicly toy with the idea of being nuclear armed.
Who do you think the saudi's are buying all the F15's to protect themselves against exactly? Not Israel. And until the yanks are out of Iraq it's an arms race between Saudi and Iran to see who gets to seize control of the place the moment the last yankee boot is out of there. The iranians and saudi's have been and will perpetually be at each others throats. Iran is too relatively powerful (compared to Saudi) to be ignored, but too small compared to the Sunni world to risk ticking them off too much - and they need a strong defence to prevent the Sunni's from trying to wipe the idol worshipers out to deal with this problem once and for all.
Complaining about israel is the middle east equivalent of westerners complaining taxes are too high, every now and then someone comes along and makes some token changes to policy to win political support, but basically everyone knows the game and is not out to rock the boat too much. Admittedly there is a real danger than you'll get some idiot in charge who actually believes all of the rhetoric, but that is not presently the case with Iran.
But in the west we regularly see 15-25% of our engineering students as arabs and easily 50-70% can be foreigners (india, china, middle east, south america, very rarely sub saharan africa). If 0.001% of them go on to become terrorists I'm not sure it means much about what we can do education wise. But I don't think anyone, myself included, in the business of training engineers would think it odd to have 10 or 15 students complain about an exam on Eid or go to prayers right before or after class (or during a lab if they're long labs and not deeply involved).
Besides, when these guys come here it serves to further radicalize some of them. They've been told all of the evils of the west and they get here and for some of them it's squarely in front of them. We do nothing while gaza is turned into a giant concentration camp and Saudi is used as the puppet of the US it is to invade Yemen, all while we get fat and lazy stealing their oil. It's not like we can somehow be alarmed some small percent of them want to kill us. Some people in the US hate black people, therefore one should not be stunned that that group will want to kill Obama. That doesn't make it right, sensible, a significant number of people or anything remotely moral, but it certainly shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
or at least code they don't want shown to the public /* This chunk written by Sir_Sri ext 1111 e-mail ... */ //coudn't get this sh*t to work right, used a hack but if you swirl the mouse around counter clockwise 7 times the program always crashes // Sir_Sri is an idiot, incompetent and has been moved away from coding into marketing, he won't touch this again, I fixed this crap up for him Bill ext 1, office 1 e-mail 1@microsoft.com.
um... that's how all theoretical science works.
You build your model (nowdays on computer but not necessarily) compare to past data and see if it fits. Hope for new data and see if it still fits.
An experimentalist tries to figure out how to collect new data, and to try and see if it fits with known theory or not. In the case of relativity as discussed above really small things going really really fast or really big things don't jive with newtonian theory. Of course Newton had no way of realizing that at the time.
The challenge with all climate science is that there are a lot of interconnected parts, CO2 being naturally occurring has a feedback loop with plant matter for example, and modelling that correctly is only one piece of a very large puzzle. Rarely is it obviously a 1-1 mapping between A and B. The coldest, longest winter on record in one place can occur in the hottest year on record in the world for example. They aren't mutually exclusive, and if anything 'global' warming is mostly a polar phenomena at the moment, well outside most peoples day to day lives. And then herein lies the problem. Do they have enough of the right data to correctly build the computer models? You could err in either direction. I would not, for example, have intuitively guessed that melting icecaps would release methane, which exacerbates the problem. But then warmer temperatures increase the plant growth in some parts of the world (I'm in canada so we see a sliver of this), which in turn reduces CO2, and reduces warming... kinda, the trick is properly determining the change.
And yes, you can, and do experiment on the climate, regularly. Rarely wisely, but you certainly can do it.
The distinction with 'studies' is that they tend to not have a reproducible or verifiable model, if they have a formalized model at all. As time goes on they are creeping into more and more actual science, notably psychology, especially now that the tools are both available and relatively easy to use.
also due diligence isn't instant. These guys did get caught, eventually. If they were smart the first batch they sold was legit, then they just have until some regular or spot check review to sell the fake stuff.
You cannot possibly inspect every piece of every thing you buy from everyone, and adequately test it, even as a big entity. You test some, and, as with any (pseudo random) sampling method it won't catch everything right away, and might never catch some things.
Not really a different issue. How much does an 8 year old game sell for at retail (unopened). A 'collector' item, it's a lot. Daikraptana and it's probably 2 bucks. The linked price in the article simply doesn't apply anymore, it's from 2006. 3 years on windows XP is worth basically nothing. Whatever they had to pay 3 years ago, before Vista and 7 were out doesn't matter.
Your concept of value is missing the notion of liquidation - at this point the company is liquidating it's stock of windows XP keys, and their value is virtually nothing. Digital goods do depreciate just like physical goods, because price is supply and demand, and demand is almost none for XP now.
point 1. Covered to some degree in 3rd and 4th year everywhere I've been.
Point 2. Covered in small part in the first databases course and regularly in 2nd (3rd and 4th year).
Point 3- done from 2nd year on, with special emphasis in 3rd year.
point 4. While talked about it doesn't really come up or mean anything until 3rd year or 4th year projects.
In short, I dispute your assertion that none of that is taught in universities. In my experience that is all covered to varying degrees in different places. Whether students paid any attention or not is another matter.