The fact is that the average American student lags behind the average student in most developed countries through secondary school.
However the top 10% of US students are equal to the top 10% of the highest ranking secondary educational systems in the world.
Moreover, the percentage of American students who go on to post-secondary education is far greater than any other country. And American universities are as good or better than any in the world. Most of the Noble Prizes since WWII were awarded to people working at American universities.
The result is that top students graduating from top US universities are fully equal or better equipped to compete on an international playing field compared to any other country.
And also despite having a higher percentage of it's workforce employed than other western nations, and a more diverse workforce, US worker productivity per hour is as good as any nation. If the educational system as a whole were failing, this just would not be so.
No, the issue is not the education system, but rather the way the US economy works. In particular we do not reward real innovation enough. The stock market is interested in what is going to happen 6 months from now, when in fact most innovations take 5-7 years to get to market.
I am on Cablevision's Optimum Online, and the speed is obscene. 10Mbs download, 1Mbs upload. Equivalent DSL is not obtainable; the fastest DSL is about 3/4 the speed of OOL and costs 5x more.
The only downside to cable is that it is far from symmetrical, leading to a lot of bandwidth inefficiency. But that should change as cable companies roll out DOCSIS 2.0 which should take the pressure off upload bandwidth.
And here I'm seeing whining that you didn't get x% of your salary as a Christmas bonus for doing the work you were hired to do at a salary you agreed to prior to accepting the job.
Many of us accepted a job based in part on bonuses as part of the compensation. When you go into a salary review and your boss includes a bonus as part of the compensation calculation, and then you don't get that bonus, that to me is a failure to honor an a verbal contract.
Clearly that was already done. Your arguments that they were not are totally without merit.
For example, "we live in a world where everybody competes tooth and nail to take more money fom everyone they can. people take and lose money all the time. I hardly think it "harm" to have someone else taking money"
No nation on Earth would agree that it is within lawful behaviour to defraud, steal, rob, embezzle or otherwise obtain money by such means. Clearly this is occurring in this case, and as such is a crime whose victims are deprived of this money. By your specious argument it would be perfectly ok for me to hold up banks, run penny stock fraud operations, and engage any other such crime because all it involves is 'taking money'.
what evidence do you have that money gained from this copying was or will be used for crime?
Like, uh, where do you think these guys were getting the money to buy the blank CD's and burners they were using??? Obviously from the proceeds of a previous crime.
Give me the name of one victim of these "criminals" who were copying CDs and selling them.
Any artist who would have recieved a cut from the sale of the legitmate product was a victim.
Any consumer who thought he was buying legitimate product and got counterfeit product was a victim.
Any merchant selling legitimate product who lost sales to these counterfeiters is a victim of this crime.
All taxpayers were victims of the criminals because they have to pay for the law enforcement, court system and jails used to catch prosecute and punish these criminals.
Any citizen wha was affected by a crime that wasn't pursued by these law enforcement agents while they were after these criminals was a victim.
Any citizen who was a victim of a crime financed by the sales of these materials is also a victim of this crime.
I have been a great fan of LOTR since the first American release of the books in the 60's; my wife actually has the first edition - she had it imported from England when she was a teenager after reading WH Auden's original review.
We had both thought that doing justice to this on film was impossible and were viewing the Peter Jackson effort as likely to be a great flop.
How glad we are that we were wrong. These films are magnificent and capture the greatest story of the 20th century. We have watched FOTR several times now, and are amazed how well it has held up.
I cannot wait until we can put all 3 films on a dvd changer and let them run consecutively.
Re:solution for one of the problems..
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 2
Microsoft SMS will get that done for you with a couple of clicks..
If you have 23 NT 4 servers, 6.Net RC2 servers, 19 W2K servers, 2 HP-UX servers, 42 RedHat 7.2 servers, and 8 Solaris machines that is not going to work.
Omigod, I guess there still are some.com managers on the loose. Who in their right mind would spend 2.1 billion on a money losing company that has $154 million in SALES???
IBM must be planning to integrate the Rational process into a LOT of their products to justify this.
I have yet to find any group that has tried to repeat the hydrino experiments.
The reason is that the this is poppycock.
How is anyone going to repeaat his results when he makes statements like "only the catalyst I make will work"??
Scientists don't go around trying to reproduce every wild claim of perpetual motion, etc. for the simple reason it's a waste of time. Basic, well understood theories like the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen atom have withstood the test of time and have been validated many, many times. Claimants that these well accepted results are wrong have a very heavy burden of proof before they will be taken seriously.
the chances of one of them being right are minimal
I'll take my chance on the lottery. The money ought to go to SETI; I think we are far more likely to get a space drive from a message from the stars than these crackpots.
This guy is a con-artist taking you for a ride. Why are you feeding his ego. Utter nonsense!
If you actually read the NASA study, you will immediately see that there the amount of experimental evidence in NO WAY justifies any of the claims made. Excess power generation based on microwave heating of two different gas mixtures invalidates millions of REPEATABLE experiments conducted over the past 80 years? I DON'T THINK SO. Much more likely is that the adsorbtivity of the gases wasn't the same.
The NASA study didn't even get to the point where they measured exhaust gas velocity.
I wish *nix, especially Linux, could do all this, but from my trials and experiences,
I don't think you have any serious idea of what is possible with Linux and UNIX. You don't think Google or Akamai are managing their 10,000+ Linux servers piecemeal, do you?
Retrain uses, maybe, althourh Open Office is pretty close to a complete clone of MS Office.
All the rest can be handled with Linux just as well as it can be with Windows. With a kickstart CD, you can do the whole thing over the network and end up with a standardized install. As far as actually having to visit the machine, that is really riduculous. UNIX and Linux are esecially strong in their remote admin capabilities.
If I were to switch 100% to Linux I would have to administer each machine individually at the moment
That is silly. I've worked in large UNIX environments, and I can assure you that there are plenty of tools capable of flowing out software, managing large groups of users, and so on. UNIX boxen were running on networks 15 years before Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack in any of their products. The fact is that Kerberos implementations with key servers were in use for managing user bases in the 10s of thousands at places like MIT long before Microsoft had a single server product.
You don't think hosting providers like Verio or UUNet who manage many thousands of servers manage their installations one box at a time, do you?
Trust the French to get the unit magnitude wrong. However they did manage to copy the idea of decimal scaling from Thomas Jefferson, presumably on one of his visits to France (which he rightly felt was inferior to Virginia).
"Jefferson continued, "where he had only tens to carry forward, it was easy and free from error." Jefferson began advocating decimal reckoning as an orderly alternative to the currency chaos in 1776. In 1784, after his "Notes on the establishment of a Money Unit," he recommended a system with the advantages of convenience, simplicity, and familiarity. The Spanish dollar was convenient in size, its decimal division would make computation simple, and its multiples and subdivisions would accord with already well-known coins. "Even mathematical heads," he admitted, "feel the relief of an easier substituted for a more difficult process." Jefferson's lucid arguments overwhelmed rival plans and the United States soon became the first nation in history to adopt a decimal coinage system."
I think that 'self-taught' guys are better than graduates because they have the burning passion
I think that some of the very best coders I've seen are field switchers - they have a strong educational background/knowledge of some other field, plus the passion/self-taught characteristics of the non-graduate. That is a powerful combination.
One thing I watch for when hiring is what the programmer has at home - if he doesn't have at least three machines all running differeent OS's he doesn't have the calling.
Mathematics at least grew out of that particular my-me-mine stage hundreds of years ago
You don't really believe that, do you? If this were really true, mathematics journals would publish their articles without author's names attached to them, and their would be no Fields Medal. The fact is that the method of keeping score is different, that's all.
# A tendency to rename extent concepts and play up difference in closely related concepts, rather than seeking underlying patterns hidden connections. # A warping of priorities away from deeper, long term questions towards faddish, buzzword driven crud. # The erection of lots of fences intended to limit the scope of enquiring minds.
This sounds to me like the traditional lament of the academic when he finds his pursuit has a practical use.
The engineer who takes joy from building something people can use has a different view.
We need both.
As I believe I mentioned earlier in the thread, I suspect I am out of step with my times.
The British have a long tradition of toleration of eccentricity that is sadly lacking in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
While AOL was a leader in this space the patent was only filed in September 2002.
The article clearly states that the filing was done in 1997, and the patent was granted in Sept 200.
The fact is that the average American student lags behind the average student in most developed countries through secondary school.
However the top 10% of US students are equal to the top 10% of the highest ranking secondary educational systems in the world.
Moreover, the percentage of American students who go on to post-secondary education is far greater than any other country. And American universities are as good or better than any in the world. Most of the Noble Prizes since WWII were awarded to people working at American universities.
The result is that top students graduating from top US universities are fully equal or better equipped to compete on an international playing field compared to any other country.
And also despite having a higher percentage of it's workforce employed than other western nations, and a more diverse workforce, US worker productivity per hour is as good as any nation. If the educational system as a whole were failing, this just would not be so.
No, the issue is not the education system, but rather the way the US economy works. In particular we do not reward real innovation enough. The stock market is interested in what is going to happen 6 months from now, when in fact most innovations take 5-7 years to get to market.
I am on Cablevision's Optimum Online, and the speed is obscene. 10Mbs download, 1Mbs upload. Equivalent DSL is not obtainable; the fastest DSL is about 3/4 the speed of OOL and costs 5x more.
The only downside to cable is that it is far from symmetrical, leading to a lot of bandwidth inefficiency. But that should change as cable companies roll out DOCSIS 2.0 which should take the pressure off upload bandwidth.
And here I'm seeing whining that you didn't get x% of your salary as a Christmas bonus for doing the work you were hired to do at a salary you agreed to prior to accepting the job.
Many of us accepted a job based in part on bonuses as part of the compensation. When you go into a salary review and your boss includes a bonus as part of the compensation calculation, and then you don't get that bonus, that to me is a failure to honor an a verbal contract.
In contrast I look at Japanese companies and the way they operate.
You are talking about an economic structure that has been in a recession for the past 10 years.
"the name" and HOW THEY WERE HARMED
Clearly that was already done. Your arguments that they were not are totally without merit.
For example, "we live in a world where everybody competes tooth and nail to take more money fom everyone they can. people take and lose money all the time. I hardly think it "harm" to have someone else taking money"
No nation on Earth would agree that it is within lawful behaviour to defraud, steal, rob, embezzle or otherwise obtain money by such means. Clearly this is occurring in this case, and as such is a crime whose victims are deprived of this money. By your specious argument it would be perfectly ok for me to hold up banks, run penny stock fraud operations, and engage any other such crime because all it involves is 'taking money'.
what evidence do you have that money gained from this copying was or will be used for crime?
Like, uh, where do you think these guys were getting the money to buy the blank CD's and burners they were using??? Obviously from the proceeds of a previous crime.
Give me the name of one victim of these "criminals" who were copying CDs and selling them.
Any artist who would have recieved a cut from the sale of the legitmate product was a victim.
Any consumer who thought he was buying legitimate product and got counterfeit product was a victim.
Any merchant selling legitimate product who lost sales to these counterfeiters is a victim of this crime.
All taxpayers were victims of the criminals because they have to pay for the law enforcement, court system and jails used to catch prosecute and punish these criminals.
Any citizen wha was affected by a crime that wasn't pursued by these law enforcement agents while they were after these criminals was a victim.
Any citizen who was a victim of a crime financed by the sales of these materials is also a victim of this crime.
I have been a great fan of LOTR since the first American release of the books in the 60's; my wife actually has the first edition - she had it imported from England when she was a teenager after reading WH Auden's original review.
We had both thought that doing justice to this on film was impossible and were viewing the Peter Jackson effort as likely to be a great flop.
How glad we are that we were wrong. These films are magnificent and capture the greatest story of the 20th century. We have watched FOTR several times now, and are amazed how well it has held up.
I cannot wait until we can put all 3 films on a dvd changer and let them run consecutively.
unless you shelled out $1500 for a car DVD player
d /I n-dash.htm
Car DVD players are $150, not $1500.
http://www.mp3playerstore.com/stuff_you_need/dv
Microsoft SMS will get that done for you with a couple of clicks..
.Net RC2 servers, 19 W2K servers, 2 HP-UX servers, 42 RedHat 7.2 servers, and 8 Solaris machines that is not going to work.
If you have 23 NT 4 servers, 6
Well then how do ying ou get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime?
In a good company people have quantitative (measurable) performance goals tied to compensation.
Servers achieved 99.9999% uptime this year? 10% bonus. 99%? No bonus.
it has been perfected.
DVD burners are really looking good these days. At 4x DVD you can burn the equivalent of 8 CD's on 1 DVD in 15 minutes.
Faster, more convenient and occupies less space on that already crowded CD rack.
The $154 million in sales is for ONE QUARTER.
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/r/ratl.html [yahoo.com]
Dumbass yourself. Rational also has $800 Million in debts and liabilities.
General rule of thumb is a company is worth about what it's next year revenues are expected to be. Or if it is losing money, it's book value.
The market valuation is pretty much in line with that.
IBM paid $2.1 billion for a money losing company with $600M market value, or $500 Million book value. They overpaid, period.
Yeah, and Hugo Gernsback invented TV, Radar, yadda yadda in 1911.
Omigod, I guess there still are some .com managers on the loose. Who in their right mind would spend 2.1 billion on a money losing company that has $154 million in SALES???
IBM must be planning to integrate the Rational process into a LOT of their products to justify this.
I have yet to find any group that has tried to repeat the hydrino experiments.
The reason is that the this is poppycock.
How is anyone going to repeaat his results when he makes statements like "only the catalyst I make will work"??
Scientists don't go around trying to reproduce every wild claim of perpetual motion, etc. for the simple reason it's a waste of time. Basic, well understood theories like the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen atom have withstood the test of time and have been validated many, many times. Claimants that these well accepted results are wrong have a very heavy burden of proof before they will be taken seriously.
the chances of one of them being right are minimal
I'll take my chance on the lottery. The money ought to go to SETI; I think we are far more likely to get a space drive from a message from the stars than these crackpots.
they'd have to explain to their bosses why they've just spent a good deal of taxpayers' money on snake oil,
One good reason for this expenditure would be to get stories like "NASA proves xyz is a crackpot" onto slashdot and into the Village Voice.
WHAT IS IT WITH YOU GUYS!!!
This guy is a con-artist taking you for a ride. Why are you feeding his ego. Utter nonsense!
If you actually read the NASA study, you will immediately see that there the amount of experimental evidence in NO WAY justifies any of the claims made. Excess power generation based on microwave heating of two different gas mixtures invalidates millions of REPEATABLE experiments conducted over the past 80 years? I DON'T THINK SO. Much more likely is that the adsorbtivity of the gases wasn't the same.
The NASA study didn't even get to the point where they measured exhaust gas velocity.
GIVE ME A BREAK.
I wish *nix, especially Linux, could do all this, but from my trials and experiences,
I don't think you have any serious idea of what is possible with Linux and UNIX. You don't think Google or Akamai are managing their 10,000+ Linux servers piecemeal, do you?
Retrain uses, maybe, althourh Open Office is pretty close to a complete clone of MS Office.
All the rest can be handled with Linux just as well as it can be with Windows. With a kickstart CD, you can do the whole thing over the network and end up with a standardized install. As far as actually having to visit the machine, that is really riduculous. UNIX and Linux are esecially strong in their remote admin capabilities.
If I were to switch 100% to Linux I would have to administer each machine individually at the moment
That is silly. I've worked in large UNIX environments, and I can assure you that there are plenty of tools capable of flowing out software, managing large groups of users, and so on. UNIX boxen were running on networks 15 years before Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack in any of their products. The fact is that Kerberos implementations with key servers were in use for managing user bases in the 10s of thousands at places like MIT long before Microsoft had a single server product.
You don't think hosting providers like Verio or UUNet who manage many thousands of servers manage their installations one box at a time, do you?
I think you have to remember how 'rough' linux was 5 years ago. Isn't it easier to set up (and maintain) a server running linux these days?
Five years ago Windows 2000 was a pretty tough road to hoe also.
Trust the French to get the unit magnitude wrong. However they did manage to copy the idea of decimal scaling from Thomas Jefferson, presumably on one of his visits to France (which he rightly felt was inferior to Virginia).
"Jefferson continued, "where he had only tens to carry forward, it was easy and free from error." Jefferson began advocating decimal reckoning as an orderly alternative to the currency chaos in 1776. In 1784, after his "Notes on the establishment of a Money Unit," he recommended a system with the advantages of convenience, simplicity, and familiarity. The Spanish dollar was convenient in size, its decimal division would make computation simple, and its multiples and subdivisions would accord with already well-known coins. "Even mathematical heads," he admitted, "feel the relief of an easier substituted for a more difficult process." Jefferson's lucid arguments overwhelmed rival plans and the United States soon became the first nation in history to adopt a decimal coinage system."
I think that 'self-taught' guys are better than graduates because they have the burning passion
I think that some of the very best coders I've seen are field switchers - they have a strong educational background/knowledge of some other field, plus the passion/self-taught characteristics of the non-graduate. That is a powerful combination.
One thing I watch for when hiring is what the programmer has at home - if he doesn't have at least three machines all running differeent OS's he doesn't have the calling.
Mathematics at least grew out of that particular my-me-mine stage hundreds of years ago
You don't really believe that, do you? If this were really true, mathematics journals would publish their articles without author's names attached to them, and their would be no Fields Medal. The fact is that the method of keeping score is different, that's all.
# A tendency to rename extent concepts and play up difference in closely related concepts, rather than seeking underlying patterns hidden connections.
# A warping of priorities away from deeper, long term questions towards faddish, buzzword driven crud.
# The erection of lots of fences intended to limit the scope of enquiring minds.
This sounds to me like the traditional lament of the academic when he finds his pursuit has a practical use.
The engineer who takes joy from building something people can use has a different view.
We need both.
As I believe I mentioned earlier in the thread, I suspect I am out of step with my times.
The British have a long tradition of toleration of eccentricity that is sadly lacking in the US.