Many of the basic history questions in the test should have been easy (US allies/enemies in WWII).
But it's much harder to blame people for failing questions like this one where " just 16 percent, tested respondents' basic understanding of economic principles, asking why "free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning?"
I'm not sure that question has a right answer, particularly in light of recent turmoil in the global economy. Depending upon your political bias, this question can be answered ostensibly correctly by disagreeing with the question.
If this were a quiz based upon known facts it would have more value as an objective measurement.
actually, the telcos would never refer to you as a customer. You're a consumer. Customers purchase and maintain an ongoing relationship with the seller. Consumers (the preferred term) are passive recipients of services and products which, once received, cannot be resold to others.
I've seen a number of articles like this pop up on/. recently. Generally, the topic is something like "XX tawdry action occurs... lawyers threaten to sue".
While legal threats do carry weight of their own in our society, there's a BIG difference between threatening to sue and filing a legal document. The main difference is the consequences to the petitioner.
If I threaten to sue someone and don't have sufficient grounds to do so, there's no consequence to me for making that argument. (other than PR and reputation).
But once a lawyer files a document with the court, the lawyer or the plaintiff has signed a document that bears a signature alleging the facts within it are true. Not that it happens often, but the court could discipline you for a knowing falsehood.
Take legal threats for what they're worth... the value of the words alone.
IANAL, etc, etc. If someone with a law degree wants to clean up or correct this post, have at it =D.
The difference between the 'cool' companies that lead the way and the 'uncool' large company followers is a question of intent. The youtubes of the world (although certainly not without profit motive) are seeking to solve an existing problem or improve upon an existing method.
Frequently, these companies also have a counter-culture aspect in that they provide a way to do something (distribute video) that the existing infrastructure frowns upon. These 'disruptive' uses appear to place the user above profit as the central concern. Everything from tivo to napster to youtube has been about allowing users to do something that their existing provider initially resisted.
When the old guard caves and decides to follow, their implementation is driven not from a user perspective but with the motivation of defending or protecting their old model. Invariably, this leads to a clumsier implementation, fewer features, and a perception that if the userper is eventually defeated (ms-netscape anyone?) that the service will return to abusing its user base when there is no longer an external motive to play nice.
If NBC really wanted to provide users a better way of accessing its content then their initiative would probably succeed. But the question then becomes what new value are you providing beyond youtube and why build a whole new service instead of cooperating with the upstart provider?
The answer is almost always a less than altruisitic motive. And that turns people off.
sorry if this has been covered, but im posting from a treo... MPEG4 is highly dependent on keyframe rate. I recently tried encoding some racetrack video and wondered why mpeg looked so much worse than sorenson or MJPEG. I thought keeping keyframes spaced out would save on filesize. as it turned out I needed at least 2 keyframes per second, with one every 10 frames working best. and, file size was not dramatically affected. YMMV
Nope. There's a port in the works, see this page.
But, it's not in a useable form yet. We've been looking for a solution for our small-med size company ( LitigationDynamicsInc.com ) but have yet to find a single solution that be used to track our customer base and let the sales guys on windows see the same calendaring and customer data that the production (mac/pc) folks need to see. Everything seems close but no one project has everything yet. Ideally there'd be something that worked with ical, outlook, web, and palm and ran on macosx. Opengroupware is that product, but it's not quite there yet from the standpoint of running on X. I was able to play with it on a linux box, but it kept losing a connection to the database:P
PHPprojekt is close also and does run on 10.2+ but the developers are staunch in their refusal to support US-format date and time entry which is a deal-breaker for us.
Has anyone tried complaining to the advertisers using the service? I'm sure that if BMG, Frost, etc were made aware that their ads through this service were damaging their reputation with existing customers, they might reconsider sponsoring toptext. No sponsors, no toptext.
Now probably isnt the best time to go for an MBA. Lets see:
.COM or Consulting firm fails --> Lots of unemployed BS degrees get laid off --> some get severence, some have money already --> cant find another job --> I know! Lets all go get an MBA!
In the next 2-3 years we are going to see a HUGE increase in the numbers of students graduating from B-School. Even this year many of the top schools are reporting huge increases in the number of applications received.
We are at a transition stage. Copyright power used to favor individuals and the public. Corporate interest has now become paramount. However, content creators dont HAVE to buy into this. Very few of the copyrights owned by corporations were actually created by them. Its the artists who choose to give the corporations this power by selling their future royalties in exchange for payment today. As long as there are content creators and artists willing to release their works under alternative licenses there will be an alternative to corporte IP. The best case scenario would actually be for the corporations to impose excessively restrictive pricing and licensing which would make open-sourced content even more attractive.
One of the new features that Netscape is boasting about is their more robust cookie management in NS 6.
Well, its a good thing because you will need it. When I went to the Netscape site to download 6, I had to turn away 4 cookies from the main page, another 1 from a popup window, and 2 more during or immediately after the download process. Do they really need that many to track my visit?
Regarding your comment of not wanting to solve other people's problems:
I felt that way once as well. The tech culture is known for being *a bit* self-centered. I think thats part of having a highly desirable skill set and the potential to make tons of money at an early age. However, last year at the age of 23 I was diagnosed with lymphoma. It was the last thing I was expecting. What seemed like an '"old people's" problem became a very visceral nightmare.
As a cancer survivor myself, I found the announcement to be a great step forward. As you might know current cancer treatments range from unpleasant to barbaric and it is my hope that some day we will look back on today's treatments and marvel at how primitive they were.
That said, I do think that as distributed computing becomes more widespread you will have to be careful which projects you support. But, its the same situation with charities today. Some are better than others. Do your research and find a project that speaks to you. Or, if you dont like the current options, start your own...
Metallica's attorney, Howard King had this to say: "Ultimately, I think people will do what's right. It's hard in the face of free brownies to do the right thing, but if you have to find the recipe and cook them, you might just do what's right, which is pay for them. " I think this just goes to show how clueless the industry really is. Since when did paying for brownies become the 'right thing' to do? In my household we always baked our own. Especially in college;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the basic history questions in the test should have been easy (US allies/enemies in WWII).
But it's much harder to blame people for failing questions like this one where " just 16 percent, tested respondents' basic understanding of economic principles, asking why "free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning?"
I'm not sure that question has a right answer, particularly in light of recent turmoil in the global economy. Depending upon your political bias, this question can be answered ostensibly correctly by disagreeing with the question.
If this were a quiz based upon known facts it would have more value as an objective measurement.
The story doesn't appear at the linked URL anymore.
And, it's been scrubbed from Google's cache. A search shows a matching page, but clicking the link for the cache brings up no document found.
I hope somebody kept a copy ... assuming that person hasn't been disappeared.
actually, the telcos would never refer to you as a customer. You're a consumer. Customers purchase and maintain an ongoing relationship with the seller. Consumers (the preferred term) are passive recipients of services and products which, once received, cannot be resold to others.
I've seen a number of articles like this pop up on /. recently. Generally, the topic is something like "XX tawdry action occurs... lawyers threaten to sue".
... the value of the words alone.
While legal threats do carry weight of their own in our society, there's a BIG difference between threatening to sue and filing a legal document. The main difference is the consequences to the petitioner.
If I threaten to sue someone and don't have sufficient grounds to do so, there's no consequence to me for making that argument. (other than PR and reputation).
But once a lawyer files a document with the court, the lawyer or the plaintiff has signed a document that bears a signature alleging the facts within it are true. Not that it happens often, but the court could discipline you for a knowing falsehood.
Take legal threats for what they're worth
IANAL, etc, etc. If someone with a law degree wants to clean up or correct this post, have at it =D.
The difference between the 'cool' companies that lead the way and the 'uncool' large company followers is a question of intent. The youtubes of the world (although certainly not without profit motive) are seeking to solve an existing problem or improve upon an existing method.
Frequently, these companies also have a counter-culture aspect in that they provide a way to do something (distribute video) that the existing infrastructure frowns upon. These 'disruptive' uses appear to place the user above profit as the central concern. Everything from tivo to napster to youtube has been about allowing users to do something that their existing provider initially resisted.
When the old guard caves and decides to follow, their implementation is driven not from a user perspective but with the motivation of defending or protecting their old model. Invariably, this leads to a clumsier implementation, fewer features, and a perception that if the userper is eventually defeated (ms-netscape anyone?) that the service will return to abusing its user base when there is no longer an external motive to play nice.
If NBC really wanted to provide users a better way of accessing its content then their initiative would probably succeed. But the question then becomes what new value are you providing beyond youtube and why build a whole new service instead of cooperating with the upstart provider?
The answer is almost always a less than altruisitic motive. And that turns people off.
sorry if this has been covered, but im posting from a treo ...
MPEG4 is highly dependent on keyframe rate. I recently tried encoding some racetrack video and wondered why mpeg looked so much worse than sorenson or MJPEG. I thought keeping keyframes spaced out would save on filesize. as it turned out I needed at least 2 keyframes per second, with one every 10 frames working best. and, file size was not dramatically affected. YMMV
Nope. There's a port in the works, see this page. But, it's not in a useable form yet. We've been looking for a solution for our small-med size company ( LitigationDynamicsInc.com ) but have yet to find a single solution that be used to track our customer base and let the sales guys on windows see the same calendaring and customer data that the production (mac/pc) folks need to see. Everything seems close but no one project has everything yet. Ideally there'd be something that worked with ical, outlook, web, and palm and ran on macosx. Opengroupware is that product, but it's not quite there yet from the standpoint of running on X. I was able to play with it on a linux box, but it kept losing a connection to the database :P
PHPprojekt is close also and does run on 10.2+ but the developers are staunch in their refusal to support US-format date and time entry which is a deal-breaker for us.
I tried it with my 10.1 system. The .hqx file is decoded into an application, but doesnt get executed unless you double click on it. Seems Ok to me.
Has anyone tried complaining to the advertisers using the service? I'm sure that if BMG, Frost, etc were made aware that their ads through this service were damaging their reputation with existing customers, they might reconsider sponsoring toptext. No sponsors, no toptext.
Now probably isnt the best time to go for an MBA. Lets see:
.COM or Consulting firm fails --> Lots of unemployed BS degrees get laid off --> some get severence, some have money already --> cant find another job --> I know! Lets all go get an MBA!
In the next 2-3 years we are going to see a HUGE increase in the numbers of students graduating from B-School. Even this year many of the top schools are reporting huge increases in the number of applications received.
We are at a transition stage. Copyright power used to favor individuals and the public. Corporate interest has now become paramount. However, content creators dont HAVE to buy into this. Very few of the copyrights owned by corporations were actually created by them. Its the artists who choose to give the corporations this power by selling their future royalties in exchange for payment today. As long as there are content creators and artists willing to release their works under alternative licenses there will be an alternative to corporte IP. The best case scenario would actually be for the corporations to impose excessively restrictive pricing and licensing which would make open-sourced content even more attractive.
One of the new features that Netscape is boasting about is their more robust cookie management in NS 6. Well, its a good thing because you will need it. When I went to the Netscape site to download 6, I had to turn away 4 cookies from the main page, another 1 from a popup window, and 2 more during or immediately after the download process. Do they really need that many to track my visit?
Regarding your comment of not wanting to solve other people's problems: I felt that way once as well. The tech culture is known for being *a bit* self-centered. I think thats part of having a highly desirable skill set and the potential to make tons of money at an early age. However, last year at the age of 23 I was diagnosed with lymphoma. It was the last thing I was expecting. What seemed like an '"old people's" problem became a very visceral nightmare. As a cancer survivor myself, I found the announcement to be a great step forward. As you might know current cancer treatments range from unpleasant to barbaric and it is my hope that some day we will look back on today's treatments and marvel at how primitive they were. That said, I do think that as distributed computing becomes more widespread you will have to be careful which projects you support. But, its the same situation with charities today. Some are better than others. Do your research and find a project that speaks to you. Or, if you dont like the current options, start your own...
Metallica's attorney, Howard King had this to say: "Ultimately, I think people will do what's right. It's hard in the face of free brownies to do the right thing, but if you have to find the recipe and cook them, you might just do what's right, which is pay for them. " I think this just goes to show how clueless the industry really is. Since when did paying for brownies become the 'right thing' to do? In my household we always baked our own. Especially in college ;-)