Compare with Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, in a district with a zero-tolerance policy for violence, which has had success telling kids and their parents that returning physical violence is wrong.
Have you tried Natural Selection? The theme is Marines vs. Aliens with two gameplay styles. Classic is a real-time strategy/first person shooter hybrid, where there are real differences between the teams. Combat is an action-oriented RPG-style game with shorter rounds. It's based on the Half-Life 1 engine, with a Source version to be released (hopefully this year). Still, if you have fond memories of Quake, then you probably don't mind 5 year-old technology. The company formed by the mod authors (Unknown Worlds) is trying to make money now, and I wish them luck.
Sure, not everyone is playing the same game anymore, but the market is much bigger as well. The important thing is the community, and if you have 3 friends willing to play with you, that may be all the community you need.
I agree. The problem is not the language but the process. The offshore company probably has a better designed and documented process (it is a huge selling point for many offshore industries), but your team has the experience. What you need is to implement a constant improvement process, either by transfering all your work to an offshore company (your bosses' solution), or create and refine that process in house.
I find the best source for answering these kinds of criticisms is www.talkorigins.org , specifically the index to creationist claims. It is humbling to me to see the extent of the arguements, how the attacks and criticisms come from all sides, and yet there is a reasonable answer for almost all of them.
CF101 addresses the problem of First Law and the creation of the universe: "Formation of the universe from nothing need not violate conservation of energy. The gravitational potential energy of a gravitational field is a negative energy. When all the gravitational potential energy is added to all the other energy in the universe, it might sum to zero".
CF001 and subsections address the problems of the Second Law and evolution:
The second law of thermodynamics says no such thing. It says that heat will not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one or, equivalently, that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease. This does not prevent increasing order because
the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the change in entropy that accompanies it, can and will power local decreases in entropy on earth.
entropy is not the same as disorder. Sometimes the two correspond, but sometimes order increases as entropy increases. (Aranda-Espinoza et al. 1999; Kestenbaum 1998) Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size (Han and Craighead 2000).
even in a closed system, pockets of lower entropy can form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system.
In short, order from disorder happens on earth all the time.
The only processes necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection. All of these are seen to happen all the time, so, obviously, no physical laws are preventing them. In fact, connections between evolution and entropy have been studied in depth, and never to the detriment of evolution (Demetrius 2000).
Several scientists have proposed that evolution and the origin of life is driven by entropy (McShea 1998). Some see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according to the second law (Brooks and Wiley 1988), so organisms diversify to fill empty niches much as a gas expands to fill an empty container. Others propose that highly ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase overall entropy) more efficiently (Schneider and Kay 1994).
An afternoon of browsing the lists should answer some of your questions, and help you form better arguments for and against evolution. For instance:
CB200 - Irreducible complexity can come from evolution
I think evolution best describes the world around us. However, I haven't studied all sides of the issue. This index pointed out several claims that might have been convincing for me if I hadn't heard them before. It is a good reference for those who claim to believe in evolution, but don't know all the facts. In fact, it is a good idea to just poke around that site - there is more than a week's worth of arguments.
Here is the Economist's editors take on the issue:
Yet because the system runs under American auspices, other countries are unhappy with this arrangement. Many of those who want to relieve America of its control think ICANN's job should be taken over by a United Nations agency.
To anybody who has spent much time observing the UN at work, this sounds like a poor idea. It is no accident that the world's telephone systems remained so expensive and static for so long. They have been heavily regulated nationally and their international links have been controlled by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body which once rejected the idea of the internet in favour of a more controllable and less efficient system. That standard never amounted to much. The ITU's approach reflected the interests of state-run telecom monopolies, which themselves are now being shaken to their foundations by the internet.
It is also no accident that many of the countries loudest in their demands for the internet to be taken out of American hands are those, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that are keenest on restricting its use by their own citizens.
There is more, but that's about the limit of what I consider fair use, and there is a fairly painless ad-supported way to read the whole article.
Maybe it's just my Anglo mindset, but I've found the Economist to be roughly right on just about every issue I care about, and well worth the subscription price. I just wish I had time to read something else besides...
As my wife loves to say, it can't be ahead of it's time, as it's time is when it existed (ok, she says it better). This 'Ahead of its time' stuff is bullcrap... it's not as if, were this released a couple of years later it would do well... it wouldn't.
The Phaistos Disc was ahead of its time. It is a clay disc printed on both sides, using pre-made seals. The technology is similar to the Gutenberg Bible, and was probably created in 1700 B.C., about 3000 years earlier. However, it did not create the same explosion of printed content of the Gutenberg press, and it is a mystery what the disk actually says.
There are several reasons. At the time and place that the disk was manufactured, there were probably only a handful of people that could read and write, so there was no market of readers looking for cheaper printed materials. Paper wasn't available as a cheap, lightweight printing medium. Metal wasn't available to make high quality letter molds, and the circular pattern required pre-planning on the part of the scribe, where movable type and block text is much more flexible.
The Phaistos scribe had a really good idea, using preformed molds and a static alphabet for creating written material. However, it required another few thousand years of cultural and technological progress for the idea to actually catch on and take hold. History is full of technology (automobile, steam engine, etc.) that required the right environment for it to catch on and become part of the culture. Read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies for further examples and analysis.
I liked Episode III, and I like it more the more I look back on it. Yes, the dialog was awful, but the myth makes me keep playing back the plot in my mind. Ep. I and II left little effect on me, but I won't be able to see Darth Vader, Obi Wan, or Yoda in 4,5,6 the same way again.
But still - the worst parts of Episode III for me:
Younglings?
All this awesome technology, but no birth control?
Younglings!?!
Are ultra-sounds are part of the dark side? Did she get any pre-natal care at all? Why were twins such a freaking surprise?
Four Jedi walk into the Palpatine's chambers, light sabers drawn, and three die with almost no fight at all? Whose uncle got these guys on the Jedi Council?
Microsoft is one of the best at PR, and their "Get the Facts" campaign may be one of their most impressive successes (oh that Microsoft would be so successful developing and creating safe and secure software)
As any hacker knows, social engineering is an order of magnitude easier and more effective than any technical effort.
Natural diamonds can be blood diamonds. Cultured diamonds aren't. How does this make natural diamonds "better" than cultured diamonds?
For a cultured diamond, men just gave their time. For a blood diamond, men gave their lives. What can be more romantic than men dying for your jewelry?
The first pair of pictures demonstrate the purity of (some of) the diamonds. Nitrogen trapped in the crystal structure causes the diamond to have a yellow tint. All natural diamonds have some impurities like this. Manufactured diamonds can now approach the perfection of an all carbon diamond with no impurities, for a perfectly clear diamond.
One effect is that a "pure" diamond glows in certain wavelengths of light (blacklights, I think). This is used by jewelers to quickly demonstrate to a customer the difference between a "good" natural diamond, which won't glow, and a "bad" manufactured diamond, which is "too perfect".
Remember, it isn't romantic unless it was formed underground millions of years ago and dug out by low wage third world workers.
I laughed out loud, even though I'm alone in the room. No joke.
I'm sorry, I'm a scientist. I can't just believe your assertion - can you give me some evidence? Or maybe a passage from the Bible?
Re:A.G. says Bezos misinterpreted them...
on
Book 'Em, Dano
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I find it interesting that the A.G. promotes such a system, described as "...a small government-funded royalty paid to authors of books borrowed from libraries." I mean, how could you determine who gets royalties without keeping track of how many times each item gets checked out? Wouldn't that raise serious privacy concerns, not to mention issues of fraud and checkout-padding for certain books?
Libraries care about customer service. Maybe not as much as Borders and Barnes and Noble, but their mission is to serve a community, and every few years they need to get that community to vote on bond issues to pay for new and updated facilities, not to mention employee salaries. You bet your life that libraries keep track of what books are being checked out, what books seem to always be on hold, etc. It helps determine what books they need more copies of, and to anticipate demand for new releases.
That being said, it would be silly, for many of the reasons you mention, to attach royalties to books checked out of the library. Like music, only the most recent books and the best selling series are in enough demand to make the extra bookkeeping worth it. In fact, its only the music where I see this extra accounting being worthwhile, since it is trivial to check out a CD, rip it to MP3, and return it the next day.
Libraries also know that their customers are worried about the PATRIOT act and have other privacy concerns. Our local library now has a policy that customers are linked to books in the database for as short a period as possible - namely, for as long as I have the book checked out or a fine due on a late book. So, now you have a little extra incentive to pay those $.05 late fees.
We're getting there, but we're not there yet. And we won't be until storage is truly ubiquitous. I've actually spent some of my weekend re-organizing my music collection, ripping CDs that hadn't listened in a while, etc. But even with the 600G of storage in my PC, I still can't have everything I want unless it's compressed. And I'm thinking about how to listen to my collection in my car. Bringing hundreds of CDs around with me isn't practical. MP3 CDs hold maybe 10-20 albums. HDD based devices (ipods and the like) still can't hold everything I own... not even close. And I want to have a DVD server so rather than pulling out the DVD, I can just call up one of the hundreds of DVDs I own on a menu.
How inefficient. One million people buy one million DVDs, and then copy them to their local disk farm. One million uncompressed copies, mostly just sitting there, plus any backups. Sure, storage may be cheap at some point in the future, but if your copy is bit for bit identical to everyone else's archive, why not just put them all on centralized, redundant servers, with a fat pipe to your door? Cut out the middleman as well - when you buy the new DVD, there's just a bit that flips on for your account, and you have access to the global copy. Only make a local copy when you want to edit it, or compress it for some local portable storage.
Of course, we'd have to hit the content owners over the head with a clue stick, to get them to allow all content to cheaply reside on these servers (too much trouble to have an account on the Warner Brothers server, the Sony server, the BMG server, etc.). And they would have to agree on a content management standard. And, it would have to be priced to be competative with those who have their local data farms and access to pirated stuff.
So, yeah, massive hard drives will probably come first, with lots of local uncompressed copies, despite any inefficencies.
In other news, google for "mp3 car project" for building a computer to put in your car, running off the battery. Stick a big hard drive in there, a wireless card, and a rsync script to mirrow your music collection. I'd suggest an extension cord and weekend updates, rather than idling your car for a half-hour.
Wow - spoken like someone who has gotten a full night's sleep for the last year.
I thought I was pretty smart, good with kids, etc. Now I have an eight-month old sitting on my lap, and I'm typing with one hand, trying to keep her away from the keys. I had seven hours of sleep, only interrupted for a half-hour, and I feel like Rip Van Winkle.
I used to spout out inane child care theories at parties, which sounded logical and reasonable to me, but other parents who had somehow managed to get the night off just shook their heads. Now I know how little I knew (and still don't know), and I admire those parent's restraint for not punching me in the face.
Well, all things considered, I have managed to teach most of them some things their parents never managed (but wanted to), and most of the time the parents were completely surprised with how much calmer their child had become in a matter of days or sometimes even hours (well, it never lasts long when the parents get back to doing all the wrong things anyway). Until now, I never had to cause any physical pain to any child. And yes, I'm a guy. And I graduated in comp. sciences, not child care or anything like that.
Here's what happened. You and your significant other have been in a relationship for a long time. You love each other, but you can't really say you are "in love". Your hearts don't flutter when you see each other, when you talk on the phone it is mostly business, etc. Maybe you are even having a bad week, as you head out to that party.
At the party, there is a friend of a friend, who you start talking to, and you find out you have a lot in common. You play a musical instrument too! Someone who has never been in the band just doesn't understand. Yeah, I love that album too - you have to try this one out next! Wow, tell me more about your theories about micro-loans to the working poor in Sub-Saharan Africa!
Suddenly, you are not the boring, predictable person that brings home their share of the household income. You are a interesting person again, with interesting things to say, and a world of experience to share.
Nothing changed. You aren't boring and predictable one hour, and lively and interesting the next. It just took the flirty stranger to highlight that side of you.
You, sir, are that flirty stranger for that kid. Who knows what kind of day they had. Maybe their parents were ignoring them all day, possibly cooking and cleaning for your visit. Maybe they just got over an ilness, and everyone is still making up for lost sleep. Maybe it's a good kid, who just learned how to say "no" or bang two pots together, and it begins to annoy after the first 100 times. And now you come along, giving quality attention, not anticipating bad behaviour but expecting good things, and treating the little person like a lively and interesting human being.
Now, if you've ever been chatted up by the flirty stranger, your reaction depends on your relationship. You might start thinking "yeah, I could do better", and start adding to your relationship escape plan. You might think "I love my partner, but we need to get that spark back". You might even think "How amusing - this person thinks they can wrestle me away from the love of my life". The kid (who, as he or she will eventually remind you, didn't choose his parents) will probably go for the more shallow reaction, of "you are the best person ever", but when it comes time to go, they probably won't make the switch. And you have little intention of being there at two in the morning to change a diaper.
The parents probably appreciate it - they don't have the emotional energy to fully respond to their children every minute of every day. But if you ever mention things like "why are you going back to those bad habits when I taught you some good techniques?", then don't be suprised if you aren't invited back around.
Personally, I'd rather work at home and take care of my own children (when they appear soon, I think) than
I can't write code myself, so obviously there is a lot that i dont know. But is it really that hard to write code that is portable?
I'm not a polygamist, so obviously there is a lot that I don't know, but I imagine it's about as hard as dating two people at once. Once it goes into production, it's more like being married to two people. Not impossible, but surely you can imagine some of the difficulties. Unless you haven't dated, in which case you should have plenty of time to pick up programming.
Yeah, it just happened to me today. I was Coding my unit test first for a bit of code that returned a C++ string. Since the function wasn't written yet, I wrote a skeleton function to make the test fail. It could have returned a null string, or "This function is not implemented". However, I had just read too much JerkCity , so, of course, the skeleton function returned "Diagnosis: Gay."
It made me chuckle every time the test failed. I stopped chuckling when my boss's boss came in to ask what progress I was making. As soon as his back was turned, I changed the failure string to something more... neutral.
Maybe it's a good reason for the Extreme Programming practice of pair programming - to prevent you from doing something "funny" that will get you in trouble.
Awhile back on Slashdot (I'm too lazy to find the link) there was an article on Captcha's being attacked by Spammers who would set up a porno site requiring user registration using, the Captcha in mind to crack, then forwarding the results to the anti-captcha bot.
This is a valid point, but still won't break the system completely. The CAPTCHA is being used to win the right to send an email to someone's address - a single email to a single address - and is randomly generated each time. So, it is a linear cost for the spammer - one duped male for each peice of spam to send.
In additon, the CAPTCHA is emailed back to the spammer, putting the burden on his machine to hold the email address and the additional information. Any spammer that messes with the reply address won't even see the "please validate" email.
This is a fairly good solution to the problem, except for making it accessible to the blind. It creates a non-trivial linear cost to the spammer, taking away one of the economic incentives to spam.
I don't want a storm of "my TiVo is OK messages", but it seemed bizzare that my friend has one hard drive failure after a year of use, and then the hard drive of the next one was bad out of the box. As I said, unlucky, or maybe TiVo's QA is slipping.
I checked air flow, no problem, and I'd expect hiccups from the other AV devices if the power was bad.
I'm in the same situation - my Series 1 is rock solid, and just works. If the hard drive did fail, I might even be able to replace it myself.
The parent might be talking about the Series 2 boxes, which use customized hardware and must be sent back to the factory. My friend had a hard drive failure after the warranty ran out, and had to pay for a reconditioned unit, that wasn't working out of the box. I'm helping her to hook up the third unit tonight. She may have paid over $100 for shipping and replacement units.
I have no idea if she is just unlucky, or if there are real problems with Series 2 boxes or TiVo customer support. It does make me reconsider replacing my Series 1 any time soon.
"Their success to this point"???!!! For a private company, success means profits. If not actual profits, then hopes of profits in the forseeable future. As the story mentions, they've lost half a billion dollars, and show no sign of going into the black.
That "half-a-billion" dollar figure is misleading. That's the IPO money, spent in the dotcom days when a good business plan was to spend millions just to get market share. And spend they did. Very little of that IPO money is left.
They are currently scraping by quarter to quarter, and losing a few million in cash each quarter. But they have millions in the bank, so they can afford to burn some. Almost all their costs are business costs - they have no remaining debt to finance.
Yes, I wouldn't call TiVo a success either. They wouldn't make make a good case study for business school, at least not at this point. But it is not as bleak as the half a billion figure looks.
Consider the MIT graduate, whose parents paid the whole $100,000+ tuition, after grants and scholarships. You might find that he is a net loss for his investors, of perhaps a half a million dollars. But, he has a degree from MIT, a job with a great starting salary, and no student loans. He's not a success yet, but he has a good start. And, just like the folks that bought TIVO at the IPO prices and held on to them, the kid's parents shouldn't expect to see that money back any time soon.
I wish you would have included these details - you would have gotten a better response, from people experienced in your environment.
The important thing is that your language might look like C or Java, but it sounds like it is very different in practice. So, on this one, you can't really lean on your C and Java experience to help. You have to either trust the vendor, or run some experiments yourself.
In the case of C, it is an interesting excercise to just run the preprocessor, and see the result. In gcc, the option is "-E". This will expand macros, add in header files, etc. etc. In this way, there is no difference between cutting and pasting and #including a file. Your compiler doesn't really care.
Of course, it matters a great deal to people. We need clear interfaces, well documented and self-documented code, hiding of details behind a useful abstraction, debugging tools, and all the things that make us humans rather than compilers. In our world, programs cleanly divided into headers makes more sense.
I imagine in your case, the "compiler" is different than traditional C/C++ compilers. If you have a header file Code.h that declares "extern int my_global_var", and a source file Code.c that defines "int my_global_var", it is perfectly obvious to you where the definition of my_global_var is. To you compiler, it is not clear - there is no reason why Code.h and Code.c have to be related at all. So, it may have to search ALL the source files in a directory, to find where that global variable, or a function, class, etc., is actually defined.
To prevent this search, the vendor is suggesting that you #include all the source, and thus use the preprocessor to gather up all the code at once. Now, all the declarations and definitions are in a single unit, and the "compiler" doesn't have to search files - maybe.
This would be horrible and wrong if it was a C compiler. But it sounds like it isn't - it just uses a syntax that looks like C (again, I wish you'd just say what the product is, so we'd stop guessing). So, forget that it looks like C and sometimes acts like C, and start experimenting.
I might also throw in the possibility that, since the end of the Cold War, there has been very little incentive for governments, etc, to back fundamental research that might (a decade later) lead to radically new technologies. Governments like the status quo, they like the future to be predictable. Fundamental research (except perhaps in really esoteric areas like cosmology or areas with practical benefits for them like medicine) scares the willies out of the people in power -- it might upset their apple cart.
The government pumped over a half billion a year into the Human Genome project, and spent $1.6 billion on nanotechnology last year. The government is still willing to spend money on basic research, but I doubt they are willing to create a whole new agency, such as NASA. They would rather have private companies do the work (even if federally funded), then create a new class of federal employees.
I also think you are assuming malice on the part of the government, when instead you should be assuming stupidity. And, since it is a democracy, you don't have to look far to find the root of that stupidity.
There's nothing intrinsic about GPA that makes it a meaningful indicator of how somebody will perform at a job. Come to think of it, there probably isn't *any* metric you can use to evaluate potential employees, that works out to much more than a crap-shoot.
Read Joel's reasoning again.
When you get good grades, it is because you master the material, work well with others, and give the professor what he wanted. These are all things that an employer would expect. I don't want some brilliant kid who only does what is interesting, can't be bothered to determine what is required, and ignores what is boring. In other words, yes, I want to pass up the brilliant guy with the 2.9 GPA.
I was at a confernce in orlando last week, and there was a parallel conference which seemed to be mostly military simulation stuff, they seemed to be pretty strong there. Guess they moved to the more lucrative stuff.
I wouldn't look to military simultion for an example of a growth area. Some of the simulators are as old as the planes themselves, 30 years and older, with upgrades every three to five years to keep them up to date. FORTRAN is still the universal language, or at least the F77 dialect. C is starting to take over, but slowly, and Ada still has a sizable presence. In general, technologies and practices lag five to ten years behind the rest of the commerical world.
On the other hand, it is fairly secure work if you can get it. Lots of people can start in simulation and retire in it, which isn't true of a lot of industries. If you can get a security clearance, you are in even better shape.
So, don't worry about international outsourcing - just become a military contractor!
Slashdot Mirror
Compare with Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, in a district with a zero-tolerance policy for violence, which has had success telling kids and their parents that returning physical violence is wrong.
Sure, not everyone is playing the same game anymore, but the market is much bigger as well. The important thing is the community, and if you have 3 friends willing to play with you, that may be all the community you need.
I would recommend buying six copies of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", by Michael Feathers. Perhaps with Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Fowler et al. Or, you can just buy one copy now, and the other five later.
CF101 addresses the problem of First Law and the creation of the universe: "Formation of the universe from nothing need not violate conservation of energy. The gravitational potential energy of a gravitational field is a negative energy. When all the gravitational potential energy is added to all the other energy in the universe, it might sum to zero".
CF001 and subsections address the problems of the Second Law and evolution:
- the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the change in entropy that accompanies it, can and will power local decreases in entropy on earth.
- entropy is not the same as disorder. Sometimes the two correspond, but sometimes order increases as entropy increases. (Aranda-Espinoza et al. 1999; Kestenbaum 1998) Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size (Han and Craighead 2000).
- even in a closed system, pockets of lower entropy can form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system.
In short, order from disorder happens on earth all the time.Several scientists have proposed that evolution and the origin of life is driven by entropy (McShea 1998). Some see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according to the second law (Brooks and Wiley 1988), so organisms diversify to fill empty niches much as a gas expands to fill an empty container. Others propose that highly ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase overall entropy) more efficiently (Schneider and Kay 1994).
An afternoon of browsing the lists should answer some of your questions, and help you form better arguments for and against evolution. For instance:
I think evolution best describes the world around us. However, I haven't studied all sides of the issue. This index pointed out several claims that might have been convincing for me if I hadn't heard them before. It is a good reference for those who claim to believe in evolution, but don't know all the facts. In fact, it is a good idea to just poke around that site - there is more than a week's worth of arguments.
Maybe it's just my Anglo mindset, but I've found the Economist to be roughly right on just about every issue I care about, and well worth the subscription price. I just wish I had time to read something else besides...
The Phaistos Disc was ahead of its time. It is a clay disc printed on both sides, using pre-made seals. The technology is similar to the Gutenberg Bible, and was probably created in 1700 B.C., about 3000 years earlier. However, it did not create the same explosion of printed content of the Gutenberg press, and it is a mystery what the disk actually says.
There are several reasons. At the time and place that the disk was manufactured, there were probably only a handful of people that could read and write, so there was no market of readers looking for cheaper printed materials. Paper wasn't available as a cheap, lightweight printing medium. Metal wasn't available to make high quality letter molds, and the circular pattern required pre-planning on the part of the scribe, where movable type and block text is much more flexible.
The Phaistos scribe had a really good idea, using preformed molds and a static alphabet for creating written material. However, it required another few thousand years of cultural and technological progress for the idea to actually catch on and take hold. History is full of technology (automobile, steam engine, etc.) that required the right environment for it to catch on and become part of the culture. Read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies for further examples and analysis.
But still - the worst parts of Episode III for me:
As any hacker knows, social engineering is an order of magnitude easier and more effective than any technical effort.
For a cultured diamond, men just gave their time. For a blood diamond, men gave their lives. What can be more romantic than men dying for your jewelry?
One effect is that a "pure" diamond glows in certain wavelengths of light (blacklights, I think). This is used by jewelers to quickly demonstrate to a customer the difference between a "good" natural diamond, which won't glow, and a "bad" manufactured diamond, which is "too perfect".
Remember, it isn't romantic unless it was formed underground millions of years ago and dug out by low wage third world workers.
Hmmm. I always get 3.243F6...
I'm sorry, I'm a scientist. I can't just believe your assertion - can you give me some evidence? Or maybe a passage from the Bible?
Libraries care about customer service. Maybe not as much as Borders and Barnes and Noble, but their mission is to serve a community, and every few years they need to get that community to vote on bond issues to pay for new and updated facilities, not to mention employee salaries. You bet your life that libraries keep track of what books are being checked out, what books seem to always be on hold, etc. It helps determine what books they need more copies of, and to anticipate demand for new releases.
That being said, it would be silly, for many of the reasons you mention, to attach royalties to books checked out of the library. Like music, only the most recent books and the best selling series are in enough demand to make the extra bookkeeping worth it. In fact, its only the music where I see this extra accounting being worthwhile, since it is trivial to check out a CD, rip it to MP3, and return it the next day.
Libraries also know that their customers are worried about the PATRIOT act and have other privacy concerns. Our local library now has a policy that customers are linked to books in the database for as short a period as possible - namely, for as long as I have the book checked out or a fine due on a late book. So, now you have a little extra incentive to pay those $.05 late fees.
How inefficient. One million people buy one million DVDs, and then copy them to their local disk farm. One million uncompressed copies, mostly just sitting there, plus any backups. Sure, storage may be cheap at some point in the future, but if your copy is bit for bit identical to everyone else's archive, why not just put them all on centralized, redundant servers, with a fat pipe to your door? Cut out the middleman as well - when you buy the new DVD, there's just a bit that flips on for your account, and you have access to the global copy. Only make a local copy when you want to edit it, or compress it for some local portable storage.
Of course, we'd have to hit the content owners over the head with a clue stick, to get them to allow all content to cheaply reside on these servers (too much trouble to have an account on the Warner Brothers server, the Sony server, the BMG server, etc.). And they would have to agree on a content management standard. And, it would have to be priced to be competative with those who have their local data farms and access to pirated stuff.
So, yeah, massive hard drives will probably come first, with lots of local uncompressed copies, despite any inefficencies.
In other news, google for "mp3 car project" for building a computer to put in your car, running off the battery. Stick a big hard drive in there, a wireless card, and a rsync script to mirrow your music collection. I'd suggest an extension cord and weekend updates, rather than idling your car for a half-hour.
I thought I was pretty smart, good with kids, etc. Now I have an eight-month old sitting on my lap, and I'm typing with one hand, trying to keep her away from the keys. I had seven hours of sleep, only interrupted for a half-hour, and I feel like Rip Van Winkle.
I used to spout out inane child care theories at parties, which sounded logical and reasonable to me, but other parents who had somehow managed to get the night off just shook their heads. Now I know how little I knew (and still don't know), and I admire those parent's restraint for not punching me in the face.
Well, all things considered, I have managed to teach most of them some things their parents never managed (but wanted to), and most of the time the parents were completely surprised with how much calmer their child had become in a matter of days or sometimes even hours (well, it never lasts long when the parents get back to doing all the wrong things anyway). Until now, I never had to cause any physical pain to any child. And yes, I'm a guy. And I graduated in comp. sciences, not child care or anything like that.
Here's what happened. You and your significant other have been in a relationship for a long time. You love each other, but you can't really say you are "in love". Your hearts don't flutter when you see each other, when you talk on the phone it is mostly business, etc. Maybe you are even having a bad week, as you head out to that party.
At the party, there is a friend of a friend, who you start talking to, and you find out you have a lot in common. You play a musical instrument too! Someone who has never been in the band just doesn't understand. Yeah, I love that album too - you have to try this one out next! Wow, tell me more about your theories about micro-loans to the working poor in Sub-Saharan Africa!
Suddenly, you are not the boring, predictable person that brings home their share of the household income. You are a interesting person again, with interesting things to say, and a world of experience to share.
Nothing changed. You aren't boring and predictable one hour, and lively and interesting the next. It just took the flirty stranger to highlight that side of you.
You, sir, are that flirty stranger for that kid. Who knows what kind of day they had. Maybe their parents were ignoring them all day, possibly cooking and cleaning for your visit. Maybe they just got over an ilness, and everyone is still making up for lost sleep. Maybe it's a good kid, who just learned how to say "no" or bang two pots together, and it begins to annoy after the first 100 times. And now you come along, giving quality attention, not anticipating bad behaviour but expecting good things, and treating the little person like a lively and interesting human being.
Now, if you've ever been chatted up by the flirty stranger, your reaction depends on your relationship. You might start thinking "yeah, I could do better", and start adding to your relationship escape plan. You might think "I love my partner, but we need to get that spark back". You might even think "How amusing - this person thinks they can wrestle me away from the love of my life". The kid (who, as he or she will eventually remind you, didn't choose his parents) will probably go for the more shallow reaction, of "you are the best person ever", but when it comes time to go, they probably won't make the switch. And you have little intention of being there at two in the morning to change a diaper.
The parents probably appreciate it - they don't have the emotional energy to fully respond to their children every minute of every day. But if you ever mention things like "why are you going back to those bad habits when I taught you some good techniques?", then don't be suprised if you aren't invited back around.
Personally, I'd rather work at home and take care of my own children (when they appear soon, I think) than
I'm not a polygamist, so obviously there is a lot that I don't know, but I imagine it's about as hard as dating two people at once. Once it goes into production, it's more like being married to two people. Not impossible, but surely you can imagine some of the difficulties. Unless you haven't dated, in which case you should have plenty of time to pick up programming.
It made me chuckle every time the test failed. I stopped chuckling when my boss's boss came in to ask what progress I was making. As soon as his back was turned, I changed the failure string to something more... neutral.
Maybe it's a good reason for the Extreme Programming practice of pair programming - to prevent you from doing something "funny" that will get you in trouble.
This is a valid point, but still won't break the system completely. The CAPTCHA is being used to win the right to send an email to someone's address - a single email to a single address - and is randomly generated each time. So, it is a linear cost for the spammer - one duped male for each peice of spam to send.
In additon, the CAPTCHA is emailed back to the spammer, putting the burden on his machine to hold the email address and the additional information. Any spammer that messes with the reply address won't even see the "please validate" email.
This is a fairly good solution to the problem, except for making it accessible to the blind. It creates a non-trivial linear cost to the spammer, taking away one of the economic incentives to spam.
I checked air flow, no problem, and I'd expect hiccups from the other AV devices if the power was bad.
The parent might be talking about the Series 2 boxes, which use customized hardware and must be sent back to the factory. My friend had a hard drive failure after the warranty ran out, and had to pay for a reconditioned unit, that wasn't working out of the box. I'm helping her to hook up the third unit tonight. She may have paid over $100 for shipping and replacement units.
I have no idea if she is just unlucky, or if there are real problems with Series 2 boxes or TiVo customer support. It does make me reconsider replacing my Series 1 any time soon.
That "half-a-billion" dollar figure is misleading. That's the IPO money, spent in the dotcom days when a good business plan was to spend millions just to get market share. And spend they did. Very little of that IPO money is left.
They are currently scraping by quarter to quarter, and losing a few million in cash each quarter. But they have millions in the bank, so they can afford to burn some. Almost all their costs are business costs - they have no remaining debt to finance.
Yes, I wouldn't call TiVo a success either. They wouldn't make make a good case study for business school, at least not at this point. But it is not as bleak as the half a billion figure looks.
Consider the MIT graduate, whose parents paid the whole $100,000+ tuition, after grants and scholarships. You might find that he is a net loss for his investors, of perhaps a half a million dollars. But, he has a degree from MIT, a job with a great starting salary, and no student loans. He's not a success yet, but he has a good start. And, just like the folks that bought TIVO at the IPO prices and held on to them, the kid's parents shouldn't expect to see that money back any time soon.
The important thing is that your language might look like C or Java, but it sounds like it is very different in practice. So, on this one, you can't really lean on your C and Java experience to help. You have to either trust the vendor, or run some experiments yourself.
In the case of C, it is an interesting excercise to just run the preprocessor, and see the result. In gcc, the option is "-E". This will expand macros, add in header files, etc. etc. In this way, there is no difference between cutting and pasting and #including a file. Your compiler doesn't really care.
Of course, it matters a great deal to people. We need clear interfaces, well documented and self-documented code, hiding of details behind a useful abstraction, debugging tools, and all the things that make us humans rather than compilers. In our world, programs cleanly divided into headers makes more sense.
I imagine in your case, the "compiler" is different than traditional C/C++ compilers. If you have a header file Code.h that declares "extern int my_global_var", and a source file Code.c that defines "int my_global_var", it is perfectly obvious to you where the definition of my_global_var is. To you compiler, it is not clear - there is no reason why Code.h and Code.c have to be related at all. So, it may have to search ALL the source files in a directory, to find where that global variable, or a function, class, etc., is actually defined.
To prevent this search, the vendor is suggesting that you #include all the source, and thus use the preprocessor to gather up all the code at once. Now, all the declarations and definitions are in a single unit, and the "compiler" doesn't have to search files - maybe.
This would be horrible and wrong if it was a C compiler. But it sounds like it isn't - it just uses a syntax that looks like C (again, I wish you'd just say what the product is, so we'd stop guessing). So, forget that it looks like C and sometimes acts like C, and start experimenting.
The government pumped over a half billion a year into the Human Genome project, and spent $1.6 billion on nanotechnology last year. The government is still willing to spend money on basic research, but I doubt they are willing to create a whole new agency, such as NASA. They would rather have private companies do the work (even if federally funded), then create a new class of federal employees.
I also think you are assuming malice on the part of the government, when instead you should be assuming stupidity. And, since it is a democracy, you don't have to look far to find the root of that stupidity.
Read Joel's reasoning again.
When you get good grades, it is because you master the material, work well with others, and give the professor what he wanted. These are all things that an employer would expect. I don't want some brilliant kid who only does what is interesting, can't be bothered to determine what is required, and ignores what is boring. In other words, yes, I want to pass up the brilliant guy with the 2.9 GPA.
That was probably the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference.
I wouldn't look to military simultion for an example of a growth area. Some of the simulators are as old as the planes themselves, 30 years and older, with upgrades every three to five years to keep them up to date. FORTRAN is still the universal language, or at least the F77 dialect. C is starting to take over, but slowly, and Ada still has a sizable presence. In general, technologies and practices lag five to ten years behind the rest of the commerical world.
On the other hand, it is fairly secure work if you can get it. Lots of people can start in simulation and retire in it, which isn't true of a lot of industries. If you can get a security clearance, you are in even better shape.
So, don't worry about international outsourcing - just become a military contractor!