I am a computer scientist working for a major industrial research lab.
English is still the primary language for technology research publications, and will continue to be so for the near future. So don't worry about needing to read foreign journals. Yes some French or German or Japanese might help you find a few more obscure things, but generally if the work is worthwhile it eventually gets published in English.
However, personally I think you should learn Mandarin Chinese. Why?
1) There's a gigantic pool of IT research talent in China that we're only beginning to tap. They publish primarily in English, but their spoken English is generally poor with some exceptions. It's a tremendous benefit to know at least some Chinese in order to be able to socialize with your Chinese colleagues at a conference or when visiting. And I'm fairly certain that if you make a career in research in the next 50 years, you will be visiting and possibly living in the PRC at some point.
2) Research isn't for everyone. If you discover this at an awkward time in your career, it helps to have other skills to fall back on. Being able to speak Chinese is already a significant career asset, and this is likely to continue.
3) Spoken Chinese is a great language to learn, because it challenges a native-English-speaker's conceptions of grammar and meaning. It forced me to think about language in a whole new way, similar to how Prolog completely broke my brain as a sophomore CS undergrad.
All that said, Chinese fluency requires 8+ years of intensive education and immersion to develop; you will most likely never become as proficient in it as you might in a Western language.
A few years ago I dumped Verizon DSL when they switched to a policy of blocking all outgoing SMTP traffic, except that which went to Verizon's servers. And Verizon's servers didn't accept a FROM that wasn't a verizon.net email address. Goodbye personal domain! I went to Speakeasy and never looked back.
Does FiOS have similar ridiculous restrictions? If not, you can bet that they will soon. All that speed is useless if your ISP has a proven track record of screwing over their technically savvy customers.
Dammit, why do my mod points always expire right before I see something that should be modded up?
Hell yes. LMCTF is an often-overlooked multiplayer classic. It was FAST, as in the original Quake, and very well-balanced between newbies and veterans. It took about 5 minutes to learn how to use the grapple properly, but only after hours and hours of play could you fly across the map like Tarzan running from a dozen Blues with their flag hanging from your back:). Meanwhile, even a newbie could shoot you out of the air with a well-timed rocket, so shutouts were extremely rare. And a coordinated team of inexperienced players could almost always beat a rabble with a couple of good gunmen in it.
Eventually some of us picked up CounterStrike and moved on, but it was never, ever the same.
Intranets and The Internet are two different beasts when it comes to search. Intranet pages are much more tightly controlled, the set of all pages is quite sparse, and the "importance" of a page doesn't necessarily correspond to its value as a search result. PageRank (even tuned for these conditions) just isn't as effective as it is on the public Internet; you want to tune search results for each organization based on how people actually use their intranet. I think the Google Search Appliance actually does this (refining the order of its results based on clickthroughs) but I'm unsure.
In my company (a very big and globe-spanning one), our intranet search is more-or-less useless. However, many people use an internal social bookmarking application. Searching this set of links is leaps and bounds more useful, and tends to return the result I'm looking for in the first half of the first page. A lot of these links are on obscure little pages hidden away on our massive intranet, which describe, say, how to fill out a massive form the right way, or how to hack around a particular quirk in our IT infrastructure. In other words, things that employees think are important, rather than things that management thinks are important.
Which is not to say that I think ChaCha at IU is a good thing. By all accounts this situation sounds like a terrible conflict of interest. However, I don't think that simply pointing Google at your organization's intranet is going to solve all your problems; instead, you want a smart blend of automated page ranking and social filtering to get around the problems caused by the (relatively) smaller sample set.
Another interesting data point: people here in China are so aggressive about shopping for the best deal on mobile service that you can now buy a single phone handset that takes TWO SIM cards. There are separate "call" buttons, one for each line. All of the phone's functions can be routed over either network, and you can change that on the fly if necessary. So you can have one provider for international calls and another for local, or buy a cheap text messaging package from one provider and use the other for voice.
The only way to change what US providers offer is to use your dollars. I've started to do that recently, and it's a great feeling.
First, buy your own, GSM, unlocked phone. I bought my most-recent quad-band dream phone from Amazon for $200. Admittedly, my dream phone is a lot simpler than what most/.'ers want, but I still think it was a great deal for something I'll use for 2-3 years.
Second, reject the contract. For GSM providers, you can get a new plan without a contract if you don't buy a phone and if you badger the salespeople enough.
Third, keep track of your monthly usage, and change your plan at least 2-3 times a year to fit the services you actually use. You can do that without a contract, and it will save you a lot of money.
As an American, I can't tell you how liberating cell phone freedom feels. The Europeans may laugh, but being able to just walk into any store, buy a SIM card and thereby change my provider is incredible to me. Or being able to just switch my plan to prepaid when I go overseas, then switch it back when I return. On my most recent trip to Beijing, I walked into a China Mobile store, bought a SIM card and prepaid plan for about $30, and was using my own phone in China in less than 5 minutes.
That's a powerful thing for a consumer to do. And it's why I reluctantly refuse to buy an iPhone until I can get one that's unlocked.
Check out the screenshots. A GUI? A fricking email application with drafts, multiple mailboxes and priorities? A fully editable map?
This is a classic example of badly conceived and designed IT implemented by indifferent lifer government contractors working off of ridiculous 2000-page requirement docs instead of, you know, what troopers actually need. They spend all their time on jamming in 800 features that will never be used, and let the fundamentals (battery life and system responsiveness) go to pot because they don't show up in the demos.
Map with location icons. Gun camera. Simple broadcast texting. That's all you need. Instead some clueless program manager decided it was critically important for a tactical rig to have all the features of his darling Outlook.
I've owned two gadget-laden phones in my life, and I'm still pining for my original StarTac. I never use any of the fancy features on my colorful phones, aside from (every once in a blue moon) text messaging. That, plus the size, plus the E-ink display, plus the green implications of being able to charge my phone during my bicycle commute to work, makes me eager to see this on the market. Although I'll probably have to order it from overseas.:(
The problem, though, is that you're still creating the expectation that Freenet will work like the Web. Which it doesn't. People want to click on links and have those links open immediately or at least in a minute or two. When it doesn't, they become frustrated and give up.
The "technical workaround" you mentioned doesn't really work. You're limited by the reasonable number of tabs / windows you can open, and (at least in my experience) about %75 of those tend to time out and you need to go in and manually hit refresh every hour or so to see if they've loaded yet.
I don't think it's so much Freenet's speed (although it is bad), as it is the way they've chosen for people to browse and interact with Freenet.
By making the web browser / HTML the means by which one navigates Freenet and retrieves content, they've forced people into an inappropriate model. Web browsers require you to sit there and monitor their activity, then click links and wait some more. No good when your latency is O(1 hour).
A better UI solution would have a two-tiered model, say one that spiders large amounts of metadata in a single pass (say overnight), lets you browse through all of that in a few minutes and pick the things you want to download, then queue them up and wait a couple of days for them to arrive. Sort of like the model used for BitTorrent: WWW for finding and selecting torrents, then the actual BT client for queuing files and managing downloads.
I long for the day when slashdotters stop whining and set up the glorious utopia that they all seem to envision so well.
My point was that, in the US, WE CAN'T. We're locked out by a government-endorsed oligopoly. Companies in Europe are springing up all the time within a fertile and competitive mobile market, taking advantage of an atmosphere of technical and business openness that's enforced by smart regulation.
Anytime you have an infrastructure-heavy business like a mobile carrier, you NEED regulation in order to have even a semblance of that free market that libertarians cherish so much. The problem is that you need to have the kind of regulation that encourages business and innovation, not the kind of government-corporate collusion that stifles it.
I'm a researcher working with a mobile technologies group at a top-5 US tech university. It is nearly impossible to develop an interesting or innovative application for mobiles in the US without a "partnership" (read: signing over all the rights) with a major carrier. And unless you're Nokia or Motorola, you can pretty much forget about that.
Case in point: MMS / picture messaging. Hardly anybody in the US uses it, because it's expensive and you can never be certain it will be received on the other end. Every US mobile provider charges both the sender and the recepient for an MMS, whereas in Europe most providers just charge the sender. The result of this is that the US providers lock down their networks so that only a "trusted" MMSC server (e.g. one run by them or [maybe] another major US provider) can route picture messages, while in Europe anyone can run an MMSC. So, in Europe, if I want to perhaps build a social networking service that uses camphones as a platform, I can do so easily. In the US, I'm pretty much screwed -- I either have to go over an email gateway (which not all phones or carrier plans support) or I have to proxy everything through a phone (which is completely non-scalable and violates all sorts of provider agreements). Because of this, an entire standard (MMS) is more or less dead in the US, because no small company can produce a killer app.
The mobile oligopoly in the US has completely killed our ability to innovate on mobile platforms. We're lagging far, far behind European and Asian companies on this critical technology, and it's due to corporate sloth and short-sighted greed coupled with badly regulated markets.
The jobs cited in the article are temporary ones that occur due to the Christmas rush. Amazon's order volume more than quadruples over the holidays. It's just not practical to employ those people year round; furthermore, if every man, woman and child in that small town signed up at the FC, they still wouldn't have enough workers.
A FC doesn't employ as many people as a traditional factory, I'll grant you that. But it's still a shot in the arm for many of the small towns in which they're located, and provides the kind of foundation industry that supports a richer local economy. Hey, look at all the money those motels are bringing in from temporary workers.:)
While the idea of a flatpack mouse is interesting, battery-life concerns (why does anyone need a bluetooth mouse for their NOTEBOOK?) and the ergonomic horror apparent from the photos lead me to give this one a pass. I'll stick with my compact, ergonomic, lightweight, batteryless, cord-storing, and inexpensive Logitech notebook mouse, thanks.
Re:The Google Brain-Drain
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Guido Goes Google
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's a bit of a difference between giving money and collaboration.
Money is great. I have nothing against money. But treating a university like a farm team is not quite the same as working with a group of researchers and then publicizing the results. The former benefits just Google and the students who are around when the money hasn't been used up yet. The latter benefits Google, the researchers, the students, and (ideally) everyone who comes after them in that particular field.
I'm thinking about the difference between Google's OSS approach (finance development, reap the benefits, hire the best that come out of that process) vs. id Software's approach (when something is no longer generating revenue, release it as OSS). How much of all the amazing stuff that I'm sure goes on behind Google's walls is going to vanish into the NDA void, never to be seen again? How much of that would've been shared with the public if its author had been working at a company that would allow it (vs. one that owns personal projects done on 20% time)?
I'm not trying to bash Google here; I just have some honest concerns about their overall philosophy of absorbing the best and the brightest into a single monoculture. Perfectly happy to be shown that I'm wrong.
The Google Brain-Drain
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Guido Goes Google
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Hmm. I'm glad Google is providing opportunities for so many worthy people. But, from what I've heard, it's an intensely secretive atmosphere with little publicizing of work outside your own group. For that matter, my impression has been that unlike most large tech companies, Google doesn't like to work with universities -- they prefer to just hire the best faculty outright rather than collaborate.
I'm reminded of the Microsoft Research brain-drain from a few years ago, when everyone was paranoid about what MSR was doing to universities. They gobbled up dozens upon dozens of top academics, and then . . . well, we haven't heard much from them since. Google is now doing the same thing to the open source community, to who knows what effect.
Don't you mean "It doesn't act like, SH, ZSH, Bash, etc... AND IT WAS MADE BY MICROSOFT, BUUUURN!"
I really don't understand people like you. You whine, moan and complain because Microsoft's command prompt sucks, and when they fix it, you go out of your way to find new things to bitch about. What is very interesting, is that if they HAD copied Bash, or one of the other unix command lines, you would have immediatly jumped on them for that too.
Uh, nice straw man you've got there. Doesn't quite look like me though.
I'm complaining about MSH, and the general MS tendency to emphasize specific use cases (which represent, at best, merely the majority of usage) at the expense of simple, flexible, extensible architectures, both in their systems and their user models.
I could care less if MS simply copied bash. They've introduced a more powerful shell paradigm (which is great, I like to see innovation in CLIs), but IMO they've done made some mistakes designing the syntax.
. . . which means that his "investment" is tied to the whims of the company that owns the game. If they suddenly decide that, for reasons of "game balance", they need to devalue the currency, then he's screwed.
I vastly prefer the model used by Second Life. It has a floating currency, with competing markets for exchange (although there have been some worrying developments lately in that regard). There are hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of players with a very real financial stake in the game and control over the game's market; the owning company has a very real interest in keeping them happy.
Seriously though, the design of MSH is odd. Their hybrid of paradigms from functional programming and OOP is just weird and inconsistent. Having completely different syntaxes for invoking "Commands" and "Methods" is obviously a byproduct of trying to have both a traditional shell syntax and OOPy goodness, without thinking much about internal consistency.
Typical Microsoft: very use-case focused, at the expense of helping their users build a consistent mental model of how their system works. I bet it's pretty hard to do anything in MSH that its designers didn't specifically anticipate.
The reason the iPod has been doing so poorly in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere in Southeast Asia is size. People there like their mp3 players TINY -- they don't give a guff for capacity as long as it's super-small and shockproof. The Shuffle was a step in the right direction, but without a display its capabilities were limited. The Nano is perfectly poised to make serious inroads into the Asian mp3 player arena, if they market it well enough.
Now if they added recording capabilities (which Asian students often use to record lectures, for some reason), the Japanese manufacturers would really start to sweat.
- C# gives you access to a wider variety of tools. You can import most.dlls with far less fuss than JNI. Plus the DirectX / Direct3D bindings give you better media processing capability than Java's sound and media extensions. Finally, if you're doing ubicomp / sensing / small devices and need to do some low-level stuff, C# lets you access USB and parallel devices.
- Java has much better IDEs available. The refactoring support in Eclipse is a critical tool for research / prototyping projects, letting you clean up and rearrange code quickly and easily. Visual Studio is a nightmare.
- If you have PocketPC / MS SmartPhones as a target platform, go with C#. If you have to support anything else, go with J2ME. Java support under PocketPC is available but excruciating to use. Most mobile devices support some kind of J2ME profile, but you'll still wind up writing a custom version for each brand and model of device.
I'm not sure about speed. If you're doing non-widget stuff that requires a lot of low-level drawing, you'll probably be using 2D extensively. My instinct tells me that GDI+ is probably faster than Java2D, but I haven't done much low-level GDI+. The APIs are identical, anyway.
I would have absolutely no problem with H1Bs coming to the United States, if they were actually immigrants. Like the author said, that's how most Americans got to be here in the first place. I proudly welcome any and all Indian programmers as US citizens -- more talent and initiative benefits us in the long run, even if I have to compete harder for a job.
However, the flood of overseas workers are on sponsored visas, which means it's uncertain they'll actually get permanent residency status in the long run. Much of the money they receive tends to go to nest eggs or remittances, to be spent on making a life for themselves or their families back in the home country. Fifteen years later, they're running an outsourcing business and the US economy is left with squat.
Call me an imperialist, but I believe that if you want to benefit from the American economy, you should become an American (with all of the rights and responsibilities that entails). We should get rid of the H1B program and replace it with a more streamlined immigration process, a la Canada.
For Economist.com readers, there was a great article last July with some stats about the rising tide of remittances, and the degree to which many developing countries' economies are becoming dependant upon them.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein had basic infrastructure.
. . . in Baghdad.
Saddam's government struggled to keep their utilities running, both before and after 1991. The typical solution to a generator failure at the height of summer was to make sure power was running to Baghdad and Tikrit, and let everyone else sweat it out.
Iraq's utility problems are due to two things: first, because the Americans try to distribute utilities fairly among the Iraqi population, Baghdadis perceive that those services are much worse than under Saddam. Second, because the Americans are having so much trouble providing adequate security for workers and equipment, it is nearly impossible to improve the current situation.
I'm not going to cite these because anyone can find them on google in 2 minutes. That's how long it took to disprove your lies.
And all it took was a 2-minute post by somebody who's actually been there and worked with Civil Affairs, to prove that anyone with an axe to grind can selectively quote without attribution from Google.
... do people focus so much fear on highly unlikely events.
I liked Bowling for Columbine too.
That doesn't change the fact that for the past few years crime has been steadily ticking upward on my campus. Not to mention that skyrocketing real estate prices are pushing students into more marginal neighborhoods if they want to live affordably.
I'm physically pretty large, so I've seldom had problems or been harassed. But I've had friends, colleagues, and professors who've stared down the barrel of a gun, held by somebody who simply did not give a shit anymore about anything or anyone.
Face it: if you want to live in an American city, and you don't want to be a victim, you have to be prepared to defend yourself. Of course, there's a certain amount of sanity testing that should be applied (if you're marooned in a small liberal arts college in the countryside, for example, I doubt you'd need the pepper spray). But I'm perfectly happy to err on the side of paranoia.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a computer scientist working for a major industrial research lab.
English is still the primary language for technology research publications, and will continue to be so for the near future. So don't worry about needing to read foreign journals. Yes some French or German or Japanese might help you find a few more obscure things, but generally if the work is worthwhile it eventually gets published in English.
However, personally I think you should learn Mandarin Chinese. Why?
1) There's a gigantic pool of IT research talent in China that we're only beginning to tap. They publish primarily in English, but their spoken English is generally poor with some exceptions. It's a tremendous benefit to know at least some Chinese in order to be able to socialize with your Chinese colleagues at a conference or when visiting. And I'm fairly certain that if you make a career in research in the next 50 years, you will be visiting and possibly living in the PRC at some point.
2) Research isn't for everyone. If you discover this at an awkward time in your career, it helps to have other skills to fall back on. Being able to speak Chinese is already a significant career asset, and this is likely to continue.
3) Spoken Chinese is a great language to learn, because it challenges a native-English-speaker's conceptions of grammar and meaning. It forced me to think about language in a whole new way, similar to how Prolog completely broke my brain as a sophomore CS undergrad.
All that said, Chinese fluency requires 8+ years of intensive education and immersion to develop; you will most likely never become as proficient in it as you might in a Western language.
A few years ago I dumped Verizon DSL when they switched to a policy of blocking all outgoing SMTP traffic, except that which went to Verizon's servers. And Verizon's servers didn't accept a FROM that wasn't a verizon.net email address. Goodbye personal domain! I went to Speakeasy and never looked back.
Does FiOS have similar ridiculous restrictions? If not, you can bet that they will soon. All that speed is useless if your ISP has a proven track record of screwing over their technically savvy customers.
Dammit, why do my mod points always expire right before I see something that should be modded up?
:). Meanwhile, even a newbie could shoot you out of the air with a well-timed rocket, so shutouts were extremely rare. And a coordinated team of inexperienced players could almost always beat a rabble with a couple of good gunmen in it.
Hell yes. LMCTF is an often-overlooked multiplayer classic. It was FAST, as in the original Quake, and very well-balanced between newbies and veterans. It took about 5 minutes to learn how to use the grapple properly, but only after hours and hours of play could you fly across the map like Tarzan running from a dozen Blues with their flag hanging from your back
Eventually some of us picked up CounterStrike and moved on, but it was never, ever the same.
I think if Valve is smart they'll release a Portal 2
:)
If you listen to the developers' commentary, at one point one of them slips up and refers to it as "...the first of the Portal games."
Intranets and The Internet are two different beasts when it comes to search. Intranet pages are much more tightly controlled, the set of all pages is quite sparse, and the "importance" of a page doesn't necessarily correspond to its value as a search result. PageRank (even tuned for these conditions) just isn't as effective as it is on the public Internet; you want to tune search results for each organization based on how people actually use their intranet. I think the Google Search Appliance actually does this (refining the order of its results based on clickthroughs) but I'm unsure.
In my company (a very big and globe-spanning one), our intranet search is more-or-less useless. However, many people use an internal social bookmarking application. Searching this set of links is leaps and bounds more useful, and tends to return the result I'm looking for in the first half of the first page. A lot of these links are on obscure little pages hidden away on our massive intranet, which describe, say, how to fill out a massive form the right way, or how to hack around a particular quirk in our IT infrastructure. In other words, things that employees think are important, rather than things that management thinks are important.
Which is not to say that I think ChaCha at IU is a good thing. By all accounts this situation sounds like a terrible conflict of interest. However, I don't think that simply pointing Google at your organization's intranet is going to solve all your problems; instead, you want a smart blend of automated page ranking and social filtering to get around the problems caused by the (relatively) smaller sample set.
Another interesting data point: people here in China are so aggressive about shopping for the best deal on mobile service that you can now buy a single phone handset that takes TWO SIM cards. There are separate "call" buttons, one for each line. All of the phone's functions can be routed over either network, and you can change that on the fly if necessary. So you can have one provider for international calls and another for local, or buy a cheap text messaging package from one provider and use the other for voice.
The only way to change what US providers offer is to use your dollars. I've started to do that recently, and it's a great feeling.
/.'ers want, but I still think it was a great deal for something I'll use for 2-3 years.
First, buy your own, GSM, unlocked phone. I bought my most-recent quad-band dream phone from Amazon for $200. Admittedly, my dream phone is a lot simpler than what most
Second, reject the contract. For GSM providers, you can get a new plan without a contract if you don't buy a phone and if you badger the salespeople enough.
Third, keep track of your monthly usage, and change your plan at least 2-3 times a year to fit the services you actually use. You can do that without a contract, and it will save you a lot of money.
As an American, I can't tell you how liberating cell phone freedom feels. The Europeans may laugh, but being able to just walk into any store, buy a SIM card and thereby change my provider is incredible to me. Or being able to just switch my plan to prepaid when I go overseas, then switch it back when I return. On my most recent trip to Beijing, I walked into a China Mobile store, bought a SIM card and prepaid plan for about $30, and was using my own phone in China in less than 5 minutes.
That's a powerful thing for a consumer to do. And it's why I reluctantly refuse to buy an iPhone until I can get one that's unlocked.
Check out the screenshots. A GUI? A fricking email application with drafts, multiple mailboxes and priorities? A fully editable map?
This is a classic example of badly conceived and designed IT implemented by indifferent lifer government contractors working off of ridiculous 2000-page requirement docs instead of, you know, what troopers actually need. They spend all their time on jamming in 800 features that will never be used, and let the fundamentals (battery life and system responsiveness) go to pot because they don't show up in the demos.
Map with location icons. Gun camera. Simple broadcast texting. That's all you need. Instead some clueless program manager decided it was critically important for a tactical rig to have all the features of his darling Outlook.
I've owned two gadget-laden phones in my life, and I'm still pining for my original StarTac. I never use any of the fancy features on my colorful phones, aside from (every once in a blue moon) text messaging. That, plus the size, plus the E-ink display, plus the green implications of being able to charge my phone during my bicycle commute to work, makes me eager to see this on the market. Although I'll probably have to order it from overseas. :(
The problem, though, is that you're still creating the expectation that Freenet will work like the Web. Which it doesn't. People want to click on links and have those links open immediately or at least in a minute or two. When it doesn't, they become frustrated and give up.
The "technical workaround" you mentioned doesn't really work. You're limited by the reasonable number of tabs / windows you can open, and (at least in my experience) about %75 of those tend to time out and you need to go in and manually hit refresh every hour or so to see if they've loaded yet.
I don't think it's so much Freenet's speed (although it is bad), as it is the way they've chosen for people to browse and interact with Freenet.
By making the web browser / HTML the means by which one navigates Freenet and retrieves content, they've forced people into an inappropriate model. Web browsers require you to sit there and monitor their activity, then click links and wait some more. No good when your latency is O(1 hour).
A better UI solution would have a two-tiered model, say one that spiders large amounts of metadata in a single pass (say overnight), lets you browse through all of that in a few minutes and pick the things you want to download, then queue them up and wait a couple of days for them to arrive. Sort of like the model used for BitTorrent: WWW for finding and selecting torrents, then the actual BT client for queuing files and managing downloads.
I long for the day when slashdotters stop whining and set up the glorious utopia that they all seem to envision so well.
My point was that, in the US, WE CAN'T. We're locked out by a government-endorsed oligopoly. Companies in Europe are springing up all the time within a fertile and competitive mobile market, taking advantage of an atmosphere of technical and business openness that's enforced by smart regulation.
Anytime you have an infrastructure-heavy business like a mobile carrier, you NEED regulation in order to have even a semblance of that free market that libertarians cherish so much. The problem is that you need to have the kind of regulation that encourages business and innovation, not the kind of government-corporate collusion that stifles it.
I'm a researcher working with a mobile technologies group at a top-5 US tech university. It is nearly impossible to develop an interesting or innovative application for mobiles in the US without a "partnership" (read: signing over all the rights) with a major carrier. And unless you're Nokia or Motorola, you can pretty much forget about that.
Case in point: MMS / picture messaging. Hardly anybody in the US uses it, because it's expensive and you can never be certain it will be received on the other end. Every US mobile provider charges both the sender and the recepient for an MMS, whereas in Europe most providers just charge the sender. The result of this is that the US providers lock down their networks so that only a "trusted" MMSC server (e.g. one run by them or [maybe] another major US provider) can route picture messages, while in Europe anyone can run an MMSC. So, in Europe, if I want to perhaps build a social networking service that uses camphones as a platform, I can do so easily. In the US, I'm pretty much screwed -- I either have to go over an email gateway (which not all phones or carrier plans support) or I have to proxy everything through a phone (which is completely non-scalable and violates all sorts of provider agreements). Because of this, an entire standard (MMS) is more or less dead in the US, because no small company can produce a killer app.
The mobile oligopoly in the US has completely killed our ability to innovate on mobile platforms. We're lagging far, far behind European and Asian companies on this critical technology, and it's due to corporate sloth and short-sighted greed coupled with badly regulated markets.
The jobs cited in the article are temporary ones that occur due to the Christmas rush. Amazon's order volume more than quadruples over the holidays. It's just not practical to employ those people year round; furthermore, if every man, woman and child in that small town signed up at the FC, they still wouldn't have enough workers.
:)
A FC doesn't employ as many people as a traditional factory, I'll grant you that. But it's still a shot in the arm for many of the small towns in which they're located, and provides the kind of foundation industry that supports a richer local economy. Hey, look at all the money those motels are bringing in from temporary workers.
While the idea of a flatpack mouse is interesting, battery-life concerns (why does anyone need a bluetooth mouse for their NOTEBOOK?) and the ergonomic horror apparent from the photos lead me to give this one a pass. I'll stick with my compact, ergonomic, lightweight, batteryless, cord-storing, and inexpensive Logitech notebook mouse, thanks.
There's a bit of a difference between giving money and collaboration.
Money is great. I have nothing against money. But treating a university like a farm team is not quite the same as working with a group of researchers and then publicizing the results. The former benefits just Google and the students who are around when the money hasn't been used up yet. The latter benefits Google, the researchers, the students, and (ideally) everyone who comes after them in that particular field.
I'm thinking about the difference between Google's OSS approach (finance development, reap the benefits, hire the best that come out of that process) vs. id Software's approach (when something is no longer generating revenue, release it as OSS). How much of all the amazing stuff that I'm sure goes on behind Google's walls is going to vanish into the NDA void, never to be seen again? How much of that would've been shared with the public if its author had been working at a company that would allow it (vs. one that owns personal projects done on 20% time)?
I'm not trying to bash Google here; I just have some honest concerns about their overall philosophy of absorbing the best and the brightest into a single monoculture. Perfectly happy to be shown that I'm wrong.
Hmm. I'm glad Google is providing opportunities for so many worthy people. But, from what I've heard, it's an intensely secretive atmosphere with little publicizing of work outside your own group. For that matter, my impression has been that unlike most large tech companies, Google doesn't like to work with universities -- they prefer to just hire the best faculty outright rather than collaborate.
I'm reminded of the Microsoft Research brain-drain from a few years ago, when everyone was paranoid about what MSR was doing to universities. They gobbled up dozens upon dozens of top academics, and then . . . well, we haven't heard much from them since. Google is now doing the same thing to the open source community, to who knows what effect.
Don't you mean "It doesn't act like, SH, ZSH, Bash, etc... AND IT WAS MADE BY MICROSOFT, BUUUURN!"
I really don't understand people like you. You whine, moan and complain because Microsoft's command prompt sucks, and when they fix it, you go out of your way to find new things to bitch about. What is very interesting, is that if they HAD copied Bash, or one of the other unix command lines, you would have immediatly jumped on them for that too.
Uh, nice straw man you've got there. Doesn't quite look like me though.
I'm complaining about MSH, and the general MS tendency to emphasize specific use cases (which represent, at best, merely the majority of usage) at the expense of simple, flexible, extensible architectures, both in their systems and their user models.
I could care less if MS simply copied bash. They've introduced a more powerful shell paradigm (which is great, I like to see innovation in CLIs), but IMO they've done made some mistakes designing the syntax.
. . . which means that his "investment" is tied to the whims of the company that owns the game. If they suddenly decide that, for reasons of "game balance", they need to devalue the currency, then he's screwed.
I vastly prefer the model used by Second Life. It has a floating currency, with competing markets for exchange (although there have been some worrying developments lately in that regard). There are hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of players with a very real financial stake in the game and control over the game's market; the owning company has a very real interest in keeping them happy.
I kill me.
Seriously though, the design of MSH is odd. Their hybrid of paradigms from functional programming and OOP is just weird and inconsistent. Having completely different syntaxes for invoking "Commands" and "Methods" is obviously a byproduct of trying to have both a traditional shell syntax and OOPy goodness, without thinking much about internal consistency.
Typical Microsoft: very use-case focused, at the expense of helping their users build a consistent mental model of how their system works. I bet it's pretty hard to do anything in MSH that its designers didn't specifically anticipate.
The reason the iPod has been doing so poorly in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere in Southeast Asia is size. People there like their mp3 players TINY -- they don't give a guff for capacity as long as it's super-small and shockproof. The Shuffle was a step in the right direction, but without a display its capabilities were limited. The Nano is perfectly poised to make serious inroads into the Asian mp3 player arena, if they market it well enough.
Now if they added recording capabilities (which Asian students often use to record lectures, for some reason), the Japanese manufacturers would really start to sweat.
- C# gives you access to a wider variety of tools. You can import most .dlls with far less fuss than JNI. Plus the DirectX / Direct3D bindings give you better media processing capability than Java's sound and media extensions. Finally, if you're doing ubicomp / sensing / small devices and need to do some low-level stuff, C# lets you access USB and parallel devices.
- Java has much better IDEs available. The refactoring support in Eclipse is a critical tool for research / prototyping projects, letting you clean up and rearrange code quickly and easily. Visual Studio is a nightmare.
- If you have PocketPC / MS SmartPhones as a target platform, go with C#. If you have to support anything else, go with J2ME. Java support under PocketPC is available but excruciating to use. Most mobile devices support some kind of J2ME profile, but you'll still wind up writing a custom version for each brand and model of device.
I'm not sure about speed. If you're doing non-widget stuff that requires a lot of low-level drawing, you'll probably be using 2D extensively. My instinct tells me that GDI+ is probably faster than Java2D, but I haven't done much low-level GDI+. The APIs are identical, anyway.
I would have absolutely no problem with H1Bs coming to the United States, if they were actually immigrants. Like the author said, that's how most Americans got to be here in the first place. I proudly welcome any and all Indian programmers as US citizens -- more talent and initiative benefits us in the long run, even if I have to compete harder for a job.
However, the flood of overseas workers are on sponsored visas, which means it's uncertain they'll actually get permanent residency status in the long run. Much of the money they receive tends to go to nest eggs or remittances, to be spent on making a life for themselves or their families back in the home country. Fifteen years later, they're running an outsourcing business and the US economy is left with squat.
Call me an imperialist, but I believe that if you want to benefit from the American economy, you should become an American (with all of the rights and responsibilities that entails). We should get rid of the H1B program and replace it with a more streamlined immigration process, a la Canada.
For Economist.com readers, there was a great article last July with some stats about the rising tide of remittances, and the degree to which many developing countries' economies are becoming dependant upon them.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein had basic infrastructure.
. . . in Baghdad.
Saddam's government struggled to keep their utilities running, both before and after 1991. The typical solution to a generator failure at the height of summer was to make sure power was running to Baghdad and Tikrit, and let everyone else sweat it out.
Iraq's utility problems are due to two things: first, because the Americans try to distribute utilities fairly among the Iraqi population, Baghdadis perceive that those services are much worse than under Saddam. Second, because the Americans are having so much trouble providing adequate security for workers and equipment, it is nearly impossible to improve the current situation.
I'm not going to cite these because anyone can find them on google in 2 minutes. That's how long it took to disprove your lies.
And all it took was a 2-minute post by somebody who's actually been there and worked with Civil Affairs, to prove that anyone with an axe to grind can selectively quote without attribution from Google.
... do people focus so much fear on highly unlikely events.
I liked Bowling for Columbine too.
That doesn't change the fact that for the past few years crime has been steadily ticking upward on my campus. Not to mention that skyrocketing real estate prices are pushing students into more marginal neighborhoods if they want to live affordably.
I'm physically pretty large, so I've seldom had problems or been harassed. But I've had friends, colleagues, and professors who've stared down the barrel of a gun, held by somebody who simply did not give a shit anymore about anything or anyone.
Face it: if you want to live in an American city, and you don't want to be a victim, you have to be prepared to defend yourself. Of course, there's a certain amount of sanity testing that should be applied (if you're marooned in a small liberal arts college in the countryside, for example, I doubt you'd need the pepper spray). But I'm perfectly happy to err on the side of paranoia.