If your average coder has a college diploma and your average manager has a Master's degree then I'd sure as hell hope that coding is a low-level skill and managing is a high-level skill -- otherwise all these people are not being educated properly! Anyone getting a college diploma should know that its usefulness will eventually expire; it is a shorter-term investment than a university degree.
People with an undergrad degree are somewhat caught between the two worlds: if they have people skills and work hard then they can be a small fish in a big pond; otherwise they can be a big fish in a small pond. The bubble burst caused the water level of all ponds to lower: the small ones evaporate (read: get outsourced) while the larger ones don't have as much room for the less competitive fish. These fish forced to become amphibious between worlds are the underemployed, angry ones who we hear from a lot on Slashdot. The small fish in the small ponds are dead.
Does it modify the BIOS, then? It has to be stored somewhere and the only places that persist without power are partitions, the master boot record*, and firmware.
* Does `fdisk/mbr` wipe the entire MBR? Like what would happen if you installed LILO or GRUB on a Deep Frozen system?
Japan's retirement problem is certainly worse than the rest of the First World's, however the problem of increased retirement is epidemic. Different countries have different solutions:
Japan: build robots. United States: outsource to the Third World. Canada: bring the Third World to us (via immigration).
Although many First World countries would benefit from Canada's approach, very few are so non-xenophobic and have a culture capable of integrating so many immigrants. The US perhaps comes close, but since manufacturing jobs can be exported (unlike Canada's resource jobs), and the US is run by corporations only interested in short-term gain, they're fucked.
Japan's racism is the real reason they must turn to robots, not their demographics.
So Honda is now interested in robots because they didn't outsource the manufacture of their production line robots, right? As a requirement of their core business, the companies has been forced to become experts at what they now see as their future business. If that's not a brilliant argument against outsourcing, I don't know what is.
Athens produced so much philosophy and science because slaves gave the citizens lots of time to sit around and think. If we have robot slaves, we'll also have lots of time to sit around. A high-technology communism would cause an explosion in philosophy, art, science, and open source code.:)
Since we now know that centrally planned economies are unable to adequately allocate resources (this is why the USSR fell -- it had nothing to do with socialism), guaranteed income to citizens to be spent on the free market is the best implementation of a future communism.
Didn't Marx specify that communism would not work until technology was to a point that people's basic needs could be cheaply met? Didn't he warn Lenin that Russia could not sustain a communism unless Western Europe were also involved?
Robotic labour is exactly what we need if we want communism. The only way we can save mankind from the tyrrany of greed is if labour is optional.
A lot of posters are pointing out that robots won't replace all labour but leave just a few highly qualified positions, how will we get those people to work in a communism? Well tell me this: how many/. readers would be willing to tinker with robots for free if they didn't have to worry about a job? At least as many who'd tinker with pure software, I think. Science fiction will be the propaganda of the revolution.
If by "schools" you mean colleges, then they're doing exactly what they should be doing: if you sign up for a diploma in "software development", you should not be taught "system administration" -- that's a separate diploma.
If by "schools" you mean universities, which are expected to give better rounded educations, then the problem is deeper: they should not be pumping out either coders or administrators, they should be pumping out computer scienticians who are capable of understanding formal languages and complex systems. Unfortunately most graduates seem to understand neither.
Domains, print servers, and clusters are the topics of college courses or certificates -- a well-educated student should pick them up very quickly on the job or in their own time.
I've never used Deep Freeze, but from everything that's been said about it so far it appears that subverting it is directly reducable to the problem of gaining raw write access to the hard drive. Once you have raw access, you could either alter the Deep Freeze partition or, if the administrator was clever enough to put the image on a CD, alter the master boot record to ensure that Deep Freeze is never activated.
I have no idea how difficult it is to get raw access using various versions of Windows, but in Linux its usually a case of getting root. How many local exploits do you think Windows XP has?
First, coalition governments are not as resiliant to extremists (eg: Isreal) and, if consensus is needed, tend to be less efficient at actually getting stuff done (althought this is not necessarily bad). Second, the problem with proportional representation is that the representatives are only representing proportions which do not necessarily have a fixed set of voters; as a result, representatives can get away with more without having to worry about being accountable to their home district. Some proportional allocation systems also reward backroom politicians who are better at controlling their party than actually getting votes.
However, every time I look at a ballot I feel like I'm choosing the lesser of n evils. And some issues (like the kind debated on/.) are under the radar screens of all my potential representatives. So I agree that there is room for change.
A much fairer (although more far-fetched) system than proportional representation is Liquid Democracy.
For the things that most of us do all day, adding a second slow processor makes a bigger difference than doubling the speed. There's no way I'm going to upgrade from my dual Celeron 933s (in BogoMIPS, that's 400+something) until I can get SMP with budget CPUs. (And I'm not talking about maybe-it'll-work-with-some-solder-SMP, I want at least some assurance of success that I'll work before I buy it.)
I vowed I'd never buy Intel again after they intentionally crippled the Celeron IIs. Who knew I wouldn't be able to buy AMD, either?
The "unforeseen consequences" are not inherintly bad or good, they're simply greater fitness. Anti-GMO groups tend to confuse inherint evil with bad for humans. Yes, genetic modification could alter (no, not "screw up") nature enough to make life more difficult for humans, but making life more difficult for all species is a totally different issue.
Yes, GMOs will almost certainly escape ("life will find a way"), but they will only take over from the original species if they are more fit. Natual selection still applies to GMOs. By modifying organisms, we are not controlling evolution, but simply being tools of it.
Chemical pollution actually does have the ability to make life more difficult for all species and industrial agricultural methods promote monoculture thereby subverting natural selection. These are the true enemies of nature, as opposed to GMOs: nature by other means. Luckily, GMOs are also the most likely solution to pesticides and monoculture. GMOs are our saviour.
There's no technological barrier to mods on consoles, at least in some form:
For the time being, console games are signed and distributed on physical media, so mods will have to be as well. The costs of publishing result in only the very best mods being available. (eg: CounterStrike on XBox)
The next step is to provide amature developers with the ability to produce signed media, so that mods can be published on a small-press basis.
Finally, once console games are distributed online (as is certainly Microsoft's goal if not Sony's), there's no difference between small-press and large-press games.
Until the final stage, mods will be a bit more than free (at the very least you'll need to download the ISO and burn to a DVD) but considering that they're often more entertaining than the original game, that's not a significant problem. Also, as long as the games are stored on physical media there's no way for a mod on one media to access the original game on another. This will be solved in the short term by allowing mod developers (like CounterStrike) to redistribute the game engine and in the long term by doing away with physical media (could a mod fit on a memory chip?).
Personally, I can't wait to do away with the shackle of trying to use a general-purpose workstation as a game machine.
What I don't get is: how does this constitute a strike? Like yes, they're doing something weird, and that's getting the media to pay attention to their plight. But when only one of the faculty and the students goes on strike, the idea is that the delivery of the education-as-product is being disrupted.
If the students and the faculty protest by holding lectures in a public place instead of university property, then all they're doing is lowering the university's maintenance costs. And if the government is paying attention, then they'll just lower the university's budget an appropriate amount to maintain the public space where lectures are being held. In the end, education becomes more free without the government spending anything.
How I wish that buying TV on DVD were a valid business model! Unfortunately, many of my favourite series have still not been released on DVD and those that have are as many as 5 seasons behind currently aired episodes.
I can only hope that Tivo decreases ad-revenue to the point where television producers stop forcing fans to pirate.
I've for the most part given up games like you did, but now I can't just go out and pick up one of the latest games on a whim: there's no way I could run it. When you're not playing games, although your desire for better performance doesn't stop, it certainly goes in another direction -- towards dual CPUs, RAID arrays, and copious amounts of RAM.
This has lead me to consider buying myself, on not much more than a whim, a console for Christmas.:)
Back when I was in residence the students who had TVs in their room tended to be both asocial and pampered. Those with microwaves were finnicky eaters. And those with printers required copious tech support (from geeks down the hall like myself).
Maybe these students should grow up and learn to live without every little electronic device? Leaving your room and talking to someone instead of one more vibrator session in front of your Star Trek DVDs will probably make you a more interesting person. You might meet someone cool while standing in the lab printing out your F-quality essay. And learning how to brush your teeth with a manual brush will be indispensible after the revolution.
Beginners Need Good Syntax
on
Javascrypt
·
· Score: 1
I think a beginner language should have C-like syntax (I realise Ruby's is vaguely C-like, but not enough in my opinion) if you expect your beginners to eventually be programming in the real world (full of C, Java, Perl, and PHP). (If the syntax isn't important, then why not just start them on Scheme!:)
One of the nice things about JavaScript is that every computer already has an interpreter. (Although not all have a debugger.:( Also, Ruby doesn't have a large enough user base to have ubiquitous documentation. (I haven't checked, but I doubt you can get a Ruby book at any neighbourhood bookstore.)
That's like saying Java and SWING go hand-in-hand. Oh wait, or do I meant Java and AWT? Or SWT? (See my point? Just because your ECMAscript interpreter only has one GUI library doesn't say jack about mine.)
JavaScript RULEZ!!1!
on
Javascrypt
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not yucky! JavaScript is one of the most elegant of scripting languages.
You have features like higher-order functions (well kinda), basic OO, and built-in regular expressions. C-like syntax with simplicitly totally unlike Python and Perl. And talk about platform independence! If JavaScript had just a few more libraries I think I'd advocate it as a great beginner language...
Now I've used Jabber in the past but I must say that jabber.org feels like an amature server.
After a while I migrated to another system and forgot to bring my password with me. What are you supposed to do? I dunno, email someone or something...
Now I've got that sorted out, but the Jabber server knocks me off every few hours. I guess that's alright as long as I'm not using IM for work, but...
As much as I want to, I just can't recommend Jabber to my non-Linux friends. If there was a professionally run server I could, but how could it ever be as cheap as ICQ without the ad revenue or MSN without the loss-leader?
Seriously: if Apple wants their candy-coated machines to be taken seriously, they need to take their customers seriously, and serious customers aren't going to sit there with a hole open until the Apple engineers release patches on tradition. If you can't patch as fast as open source, you have no business selling software.
Unless your clients can specify the requirements formally (and if they can do that, why don't they just write the program themselves in a functional language?), there's always room for a lawsuit. Thankfully, society has developed a mechanism for extremely low-cost, high-speed lawsuits: binding arbitration.
So what happens is the Client submits their signed spec (possibly after refining it with the Developer) and payment to a knowledgable (capable of understanding the spec) and trustworth neutral party: the Arbitrator. The Arbitrator signs the spec and then passes it on to the Developer. When the Developer thinks the project is done, they demonstrate it (possibly using signed code) to the Arbitrator, who then decides whether it satisfies the spec or not. If so, the Arbitrator pays the Developer and passes the code onto the Client, otherwise the Arbitrator corresponds with the Developer to work towards completion. If the Developer gets hit by a bus before the project is complete, the Arbitrator gives the payment back to the Client.
(Obviously the Arbitrator can get a percentage of the payment, a fixed fee from either party, or do the work pro bono.)
Slashdot Mirror
If your average coder has a college diploma and your average manager has a Master's degree then I'd sure as hell hope that coding is a low-level skill and managing is a high-level skill -- otherwise all these people are not being educated properly! Anyone getting a college diploma should know that its usefulness will eventually expire; it is a shorter-term investment than a university degree.
People with an undergrad degree are somewhat caught between the two worlds: if they have people skills and work hard then they can be a small fish in a big pond; otherwise they can be a big fish in a small pond. The bubble burst caused the water level of all ponds to lower: the small ones evaporate (read: get outsourced) while the larger ones don't have as much room for the less competitive fish. These fish forced to become amphibious between worlds are the underemployed, angry ones who we hear from a lot on Slashdot. The small fish in the small ponds are dead.
Does it modify the BIOS, then? It has to be stored somewhere and the only places that persist without power are partitions, the master boot record*, and firmware.
* Does `fdisk /mbr` wipe the entire MBR? Like what would happen if you installed LILO or GRUB on a Deep Frozen system?
Japan's retirement problem is certainly worse than the rest of the First World's, however the problem of increased retirement is epidemic. Different countries have different solutions:
Japan: build robots.
United States: outsource to the Third World.
Canada: bring the Third World to us (via immigration).
Although many First World countries would benefit from Canada's approach, very few are so non-xenophobic and have a culture capable of integrating so many immigrants. The US perhaps comes close, but since manufacturing jobs can be exported (unlike Canada's resource jobs), and the US is run by corporations only interested in short-term gain, they're fucked.
Japan's racism is the real reason they must turn to robots, not their demographics.
So Honda is now interested in robots because they didn't outsource the manufacture of their production line robots, right? As a requirement of their core business, the companies has been forced to become experts at what they now see as their future business. If that's not a brilliant argument against outsourcing, I don't know what is.
Athens produced so much philosophy and science because slaves gave the citizens lots of time to sit around and think. If we have robot slaves, we'll also have lots of time to sit around. A high-technology communism would cause an explosion in philosophy, art, science, and open source code. :)
Since we now know that centrally planned economies are unable to adequately allocate resources (this is why the USSR fell -- it had nothing to do with socialism), guaranteed income to citizens to be spent on the free market is the best implementation of a future communism.
I, for one, welcome our robot slaves.
Didn't Marx specify that communism would not work until technology was to a point that people's basic needs could be cheaply met? Didn't he warn Lenin that Russia could not sustain a communism unless Western Europe were also involved?
Robotic labour is exactly what we need if we want communism. The only way we can save mankind from the tyrrany of greed is if labour is optional.
A lot of posters are pointing out that robots won't replace all labour but leave just a few highly qualified positions, how will we get those people to work in a communism? Well tell me this: how many /. readers would be willing to tinker with robots for free if they didn't have to worry about a job? At least as many who'd tinker with pure software, I think. Science fiction will be the propaganda of the revolution.
If by "schools" you mean colleges, then they're doing exactly what they should be doing: if you sign up for a diploma in "software development", you should not be taught "system administration" -- that's a separate diploma.
If by "schools" you mean universities, which are expected to give better rounded educations, then the problem is deeper: they should not be pumping out either coders or administrators, they should be pumping out computer scienticians who are capable of understanding formal languages and complex systems. Unfortunately most graduates seem to understand neither.
Domains, print servers, and clusters are the topics of college courses or certificates -- a well-educated student should pick them up very quickly on the job or in their own time.
I've never used Deep Freeze, but from everything that's been said about it so far it appears that subverting it is directly reducable to the problem of gaining raw write access to the hard drive. Once you have raw access, you could either alter the Deep Freeze partition or, if the administrator was clever enough to put the image on a CD, alter the master boot record to ensure that Deep Freeze is never activated.
I have no idea how difficult it is to get raw access using various versions of Windows, but in Linux its usually a case of getting root. How many local exploits do you think Windows XP has?
First, coalition governments are not as resiliant to extremists (eg: Isreal) and, if consensus is needed, tend to be less efficient at actually getting stuff done (althought this is not necessarily bad). Second, the problem with proportional representation is that the representatives are only representing proportions which do not necessarily have a fixed set of voters; as a result, representatives can get away with more without having to worry about being accountable to their home district. Some proportional allocation systems also reward backroom politicians who are better at controlling their party than actually getting votes.
However, every time I look at a ballot I feel like I'm choosing the lesser of n evils. And some issues (like the kind debated on /.) are under the radar screens of all my potential representatives. So I agree that there is room for change.
A much fairer (although more far-fetched) system than proportional representation is Liquid Democracy .
Come on, give us the meanest joke already!
The gay one was pretty damn good.
For the things that most of us do all day, adding a second slow processor makes a bigger difference than doubling the speed. There's no way I'm going to upgrade from my dual Celeron 933s (in BogoMIPS, that's 400+something) until I can get SMP with budget CPUs. (And I'm not talking about maybe-it'll-work-with-some-solder-SMP, I want at least some assurance of success that I'll work before I buy it.)
I vowed I'd never buy Intel again after they intentionally crippled the Celeron IIs. Who knew I wouldn't be able to buy AMD, either?
The "unforeseen consequences" are not inherintly bad or good, they're simply greater fitness. Anti-GMO groups tend to confuse inherint evil with bad for humans. Yes, genetic modification could alter (no, not "screw up") nature enough to make life more difficult for humans, but making life more difficult for all species is a totally different issue.
Yes, GMOs will almost certainly escape ("life will find a way"), but they will only take over from the original species if they are more fit. Natual selection still applies to GMOs. By modifying organisms, we are not controlling evolution, but simply being tools of it.
Chemical pollution actually does have the ability to make life more difficult for all species and industrial agricultural methods promote monoculture thereby subverting natural selection. These are the true enemies of nature, as opposed to GMOs: nature by other means. Luckily, GMOs are also the most likely solution to pesticides and monoculture. GMOs are our saviour.
There's no technological barrier to mods on consoles, at least in some form:
Until the final stage, mods will be a bit more than free (at the very least you'll need to download the ISO and burn to a DVD) but considering that they're often more entertaining than the original game, that's not a significant problem. Also, as long as the games are stored on physical media there's no way for a mod on one media to access the original game on another. This will be solved in the short term by allowing mod developers (like CounterStrike) to redistribute the game engine and in the long term by doing away with physical media (could a mod fit on a memory chip?).
Personally, I can't wait to do away with the shackle of trying to use a general-purpose workstation as a game machine.
What I don't get is: how does this constitute a strike? Like yes, they're doing something weird, and that's getting the media to pay attention to their plight. But when only one of the faculty and the students goes on strike, the idea is that the delivery of the education-as-product is being disrupted.
If the students and the faculty protest by holding lectures in a public place instead of university property, then all they're doing is lowering the university's maintenance costs. And if the government is paying attention, then they'll just lower the university's budget an appropriate amount to maintain the public space where lectures are being held. In the end, education becomes more free without the government spending anything.
How I wish that buying TV on DVD were a valid business model! Unfortunately, many of my favourite series have still not been released on DVD and those that have are as many as 5 seasons behind currently aired episodes.
I can only hope that Tivo decreases ad-revenue to the point where television producers stop forcing fans to pirate.
I've for the most part given up games like you did, but now I can't just go out and pick up one of the latest games on a whim: there's no way I could run it. When you're not playing games, although your desire for better performance doesn't stop, it certainly goes in another direction -- towards dual CPUs, RAID arrays, and copious amounts of RAM.
:)
This has lead me to consider buying myself, on not much more than a whim, a console for Christmas.
Your radical ideas about legal routes to egalitarianism have already occured to others.
Back when I was in residence the students who had TVs in their room tended to be both asocial and pampered. Those with microwaves were finnicky eaters. And those with printers required copious tech support (from geeks down the hall like myself).
Maybe these students should grow up and learn to live without every little electronic device? Leaving your room and talking to someone instead of one more vibrator session in front of your Star Trek DVDs will probably make you a more interesting person. You might meet someone cool while standing in the lab printing out your F-quality essay. And learning how to brush your teeth with a manual brush will be indispensible after the revolution.
One of the nice things about JavaScript is that every computer already has an interpreter. (Although not all have a debugger. :( Also, Ruby doesn't have a large enough user base to have ubiquitous documentation. (I haven't checked, but I doubt you can get a Ruby book at any neighbourhood bookstore.)
That's like saying Java and SWING go hand-in-hand. Oh wait, or do I meant Java and AWT? Or SWT? (See my point? Just because your ECMAscript interpreter only has one GUI library doesn't say jack about mine.)
It's not yucky! JavaScript is one of the most elegant of scripting languages. You have features like higher-order functions (well kinda), basic OO, and built-in regular expressions. C-like syntax with simplicitly totally unlike Python and Perl. And talk about platform independence! If JavaScript had just a few more libraries I think I'd advocate it as a great beginner language...
Yeah, but how much does MSN or ICQ cost? That's why I can't recommend Jabber.
After a while I migrated to another system and forgot to bring my password with me. What are you supposed to do? I dunno, email someone or something...
Now I've got that sorted out, but the Jabber server knocks me off every few hours. I guess that's alright as long as I'm not using IM for work, but...
As much as I want to, I just can't recommend Jabber to my non-Linux friends. If there was a professionally run server I could, but how could it ever be as cheap as ICQ without the ad revenue or MSN without the loss-leader?
Thank god crackers are on a monthly crack cycle!
Seriously: if Apple wants their candy-coated machines to be taken seriously, they need to take their customers seriously, and serious customers aren't going to sit there with a hole open until the Apple engineers release patches on tradition. If you can't patch as fast as open source, you have no business selling software.
Unless your clients can specify the requirements formally (and if they can do that, why don't they just write the program themselves in a functional language?), there's always room for a lawsuit. Thankfully, society has developed a mechanism for extremely low-cost, high-speed lawsuits: binding arbitration.
So what happens is the Client submits their signed spec (possibly after refining it with the Developer) and payment to a knowledgable (capable of understanding the spec) and trustworth neutral party: the Arbitrator. The Arbitrator signs the spec and then passes it on to the Developer. When the Developer thinks the project is done, they demonstrate it (possibly using signed code) to the Arbitrator, who then decides whether it satisfies the spec or not. If so, the Arbitrator pays the Developer and passes the code onto the Client, otherwise the Arbitrator corresponds with the Developer to work towards completion. If the Developer gets hit by a bus before the project is complete, the Arbitrator gives the payment back to the Client.
(Obviously the Arbitrator can get a percentage of the payment, a fixed fee from either party, or do the work pro bono.)