Average literacy rate in Thailand is 92.6. Which means 7.3% of people can't read. That's one out of every thirteen people, completely shut off from education. If you're telling me that giving underpowered, incompatible laptops to 5% of the kids is better than teaching 7.3% of the population to read/write - I guess we'll have to disagree.
Gotta agree with Mr. Gates here. The primary vehicle for computerization in these countries will be the cell phone. It has sufficient processing power and connectivity is built in. The infrastructure is already available in a lot of places. Two things are missing from most cell phones right now - QWERTY keyboard and TV out. They can be added easily and cheaply.
The guy sounds quite rational there. I mean, there's bad education and then there's complete and utter lack of education. If you're in a country where 10% of people can't read and write (1% in USA, Canada and European countries, 0.5% in Russia) - you'll be better off if you spend the money on teaching them how to read and write. No fancy hardware is necessary - just a pen, a book and some paper. If you're in a country where 95+ percent of people are literate but computing is not easily accessible to high schoolers - that one can benefit from OLPC type program a lot more. Things are incomparably worse in India (which is why I guess it declined to participate early on). 30% of male and 52% of female population can't read or write. In Nigeria, percentages are 25 and 40% correspondingly. In Brazil - 14 and 13% correspondingly. In Argentina - 3 and 3%. Based on this, out of four countries in OLPC project (Brazil, Argentina, Thailand and Nigeria), only one country - Argentina - can potentially benefit from spending on OLPC more than from spending on basic education. In order to run, you first need to learn how to walk.
High levels of government corruption in participating countries is not a coincidence either. Someone will make a lot of money on this, and you can bet it won't be teachers.
>> I have to go over there and interrupt you just to find out whether you're busy
No you don't. I have a post it note on my door.
>> because they're not stalled all day trying to figure something out that you knew all along.
In 90% of cases, their question could be handled by Google perfectly well without breaking me out of the flow. For the remaining 10% there's email which I check every couple of hours.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. There's team work and then there's coding. When I'm coding, I like to keep my door closed with a post-it note on it saying "Email Only". If someone interrupts me every 20 minutes I get nothing done in a day because it takes me about 15 minutes to regain context and re-concentrate. When I want to talk to a person down the hall, I have no problem walking down the hall and talking to the person.
This has nothing to do with being sociable or being a hermit. This has to do with inability to concentrate when frequently interrupted. I don't go to work to socialize after all, I go there to design and write quality code.
Remember, folks it's less than a good mobile phone IN RUSSIA. Even subsidized phones aren't subsidized as heavily there, and most phone plans are pre-paid. And it's probably the owner of Russia's leading design studio who wrote that post. For him "a good mobile phone" could easily be $1000.
His only hope is that no IBM patent lawyer was around. Microsoft started patenting shit like crazy not so long ago, 5-6 years maybe. The trigger was a huge, detailed infringement notice from IBM. Microsoft's portfolio was relatively small at the time, so they had to scramble and find some patents that IBM infringes on to bring down the price of licensing the patents from IBM. That's how big companies operate these days. They look at each other's portfolios and decide who pays who and how much. The bigger your portfolio - the more likely you are to not pay anything and maybe even get the money. Quality of the patents is secondary, no one has the time to study a few thousand patents each year.
For as long as Linux is at the core of what IBM does, Linux can sleep tight at night. Any patent claims will just not fly since IBM can steamroll anyone with their huge patent portfolio.
Hire a decent musician, spend 18 months and millions of dollars futzing with stuff he recorded and RELEASE A TURD anyway. That's the unique Microsoft development process (tm).
Not to argue that nothing on the web should take more than 4 seconds to load (on _second_ load), but notice who sponsored the study - Akamai. It's like if Microsoft sponsored a study "proving" that Linux sucks.
Caching is your friend. If you cache, don't forget to version your stuff as well:
All lenses that Nikon bundles with its DSLRs are pretty darn good, especially 18-70mm, 18-135mm and 18-200mm VR. Canon wants you to buy a lens right off the bat, even if you've bought a "bundled" one already. Granted, both N and C make some good lenses, but for a beginner who doesn't want to spend a fortune Nikon is a better choice.
Well, he's been sentenced to death for 148 deaths of Shiite villagers that were caused by his orders. Nothing else is proven. Before you start throwing random numbers around again, consider the source.
And don't get me wrong, I do think the guy deserved what he got. But I also think he's not the worst offender here.
Kinda makes you wonder if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will one day be tried and sentenced to death, too. After all, they've killed 100x the people Saddam did.
2.33GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD. It's scary fast, even in Aperture. After reading horror stories on the web I thought it'd run ridiculously hot. Not so, my friends. The bottom does get hot when you do something hardcore (LiveType realtime rendering or a hardcore Aperture session), but not as hot as to be unbearable. Overall, I'm very pleased with my purchase, and this is hands down the best laptop I've ever used.
My son is very pleased, too - he can't get enough of Photo Booth.:0)
Looks like good ol' US of A is slowly turning into something like USSR, except capitalist. Or maybe into China. Pretty soon the laws will be passed to freakin' execute dissenters on the spot for just disagreeing.
America needs a few crushing military defeats in the wars it unnecessarily initiates. That's the only way to stop Pentagon from engaging in wars for all sorts of ridiculous, made up reasons and Joe Sixpack from approving whatever BS he hears on TV. Think about it, the US has been in war with someone practically for half a century already if not more. The only two of these wars that were justified were WWII and Afghanistan. In all the others the US wasn't even remotely threatened so the wars were designed to line the pockets of the sitting president's buddies, make him look tough and create political capital for the ruling party come the next election.
Nowhere in my post did I say "automation is bad". I did say that it must always be supplemented with a healthy dose of manual testing for scenarios not covered by automation. Saying otherwise would indicate that not only you didn't work in QA, but you also don't have (or don't communicate with) any decent QA engineers around.
Then, you're also forgetting that any decent rigorous test has maintenance costs associated with it. The higher the source tree churn, the higher the maintenance cost. You will basically have to change the test case every time developer changes the logic inside an API. This happens A LOT.
So automated tests aren't really a "fire and forget" thing that dreamers like you describe when they sell them to management. In a lot of cases automated tests make a heck of a lot of sense. I, for one, would want a heavy dose of atomation applied to every well specified API or web service, primarily because it's much easier to automate these tests than run test cases over and over manually. In a lot of other cases automation doesn't make any sense whatsoever and manual poking around by a qualified QA engineer (this is not limited to UI BTW, one can write tools that will allow to invoke APIs also) will uncover tons and tons more bugs and the bugs will be of much higher quality.
That, my friends, is what you get if you rely too much on automation and don't do enough manual poking around. For those who lack context, there's a strong push in Windows to do as much testing through automation as possible. As often happens when a $1M exec bonus depends on something, the underlings got a little overzealous and either fired software test engineers or "up-converted" them to "software development engineers in test" who were then told to write automation. The effect of this is that you have bits and pieces of Vista that are tested really well and other bits and pieces that aren't tested _at all_. One needs to remember that when your automated test case finds a bug and that bug gets fixed, it's not likely to find more bugs in the same code path. This doesn't mean there are no bugs in the code. This means there aren't more bugs _in this exact code path_ that test case exercises.
I cringe when someone uses words "leader" or "leadership" for these folks. Let us make an important distinction here. They are _managers_. Being a _leader_ is a totally orthogonal thing to being a _manager_. Leadership is earned through the respect of subordinates. Management position is obtained through brown nosing with higher ups.
Could you guys maybe license the tech and legally package media playback, font hinting, etc. on a $35 "Ubuntu Addons" CD or something like that. I know there's Automatix, but I don't like the fact that when I run it I break a shitload of laws, no matter how retarded they are. Personally, I'd rather pay a license fee and enjoy computing the way it should be in year 2006.
Somehow, I'm having a hard time believing this number. Here are the stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access_in_th e_United_States. The total number of people who could potentially play online is 204M, including 3 year olds and 80 year olds. So they want to tell me that the majority of users with internet connection play games online? I call bullshit on this one. Online gaming in toddlers and old farts is at negligible levels, and most of the folks I know (age group 25-40) don't play online even though some of them have gaming consoles. And these aren't just some random folks - they're geeks who live and breathe the Internet. They're just too busy to waste massive amounts of time on playing online and I bet so are most of the rest of adult US population. That leaves us with kids 10 to roughly 23 years old.
In this country, you need to multiply the salary rougly by 2.5 to get the overall yearly spending on a single "individual contributor" employee. You need to rent a building, you need to buy hardware, bandwidth, electricity, you need to pay health insurance, heating, janitorial, "morale" events, etc, etc. And $83K a year won't get you anyone "deeply qualified". It's a mid-level salary of a decent programmer in, say, WA.
Slashdot Mirror
Average literacy rate in Thailand is 92.6. Which means 7.3% of people can't read. That's one out of every thirteen people, completely shut off from education. If you're telling me that giving underpowered, incompatible laptops to 5% of the kids is better than teaching 7.3% of the population to read/write - I guess we'll have to disagree.
Gotta agree with Mr. Gates here. The primary vehicle for computerization in these countries will be the cell phone. It has sufficient processing power and connectivity is built in. The infrastructure is already available in a lot of places. Two things are missing from most cell phones right now - QWERTY keyboard and TV out. They can be added easily and cheaply.
The guy sounds quite rational there. I mean, there's bad education and then there's complete and utter lack of education. If you're in a country where 10% of people can't read and write (1% in USA, Canada and European countries, 0.5% in Russia) - you'll be better off if you spend the money on teaching them how to read and write. No fancy hardware is necessary - just a pen, a book and some paper. If you're in a country where 95+ percent of people are literate but computing is not easily accessible to high schoolers - that one can benefit from OLPC type program a lot more. Things are incomparably worse in India (which is why I guess it declined to participate early on). 30% of male and 52% of female population can't read or write. In Nigeria, percentages are 25 and 40% correspondingly. In Brazil - 14 and 13% correspondingly. In Argentina - 3 and 3%. Based on this, out of four countries in OLPC project (Brazil, Argentina, Thailand and Nigeria), only one country - Argentina - can potentially benefit from spending on OLPC more than from spending on basic education. In order to run, you first need to learn how to walk.
High levels of government corruption in participating countries is not a coincidence either. Someone will make a lot of money on this, and you can bet it won't be teachers.
>> I have to go over there and interrupt you just to find out whether you're busy
No you don't. I have a post it note on my door.
>> because they're not stalled all day trying to figure something out that you knew all along.
In 90% of cases, their question could be handled by Google perfectly well without breaking me out of the flow. For the remaining 10% there's email which I check every couple of hours.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. There's team work and then there's coding. When I'm coding, I like to keep my door closed with a post-it note on it saying "Email Only". If someone interrupts me every 20 minutes I get nothing done in a day because it takes me about 15 minutes to regain context and re-concentrate. When I want to talk to a person down the hall, I have no problem walking down the hall and talking to the person.
This has nothing to do with being sociable or being a hermit. This has to do with inability to concentrate when frequently interrupted. I don't go to work to socialize after all, I go there to design and write quality code.
Remember, folks it's less than a good mobile phone IN RUSSIA. Even subsidized phones aren't subsidized as heavily there, and most phone plans are pre-paid. And it's probably the owner of Russia's leading design studio who wrote that post. For him "a good mobile phone" could easily be $1000.
His only hope is that no IBM patent lawyer was around. Microsoft started patenting shit like crazy not so long ago, 5-6 years maybe. The trigger was a huge, detailed infringement notice from IBM. Microsoft's portfolio was relatively small at the time, so they had to scramble and find some patents that IBM infringes on to bring down the price of licensing the patents from IBM. That's how big companies operate these days. They look at each other's portfolios and decide who pays who and how much. The bigger your portfolio - the more likely you are to not pay anything and maybe even get the money. Quality of the patents is secondary, no one has the time to study a few thousand patents each year.
For as long as Linux is at the core of what IBM does, Linux can sleep tight at night. Any patent claims will just not fly since IBM can steamroll anyone with their huge patent portfolio.
Star Wars virgin takes a plunger
Hire a decent musician, spend 18 months and millions of dollars futzing with stuff he recorded and RELEASE A TURD anyway. That's the unique Microsoft development process (tm).
Not to argue that nothing on the web should take more than 4 seconds to load (on _second_ load), but notice who sponsored the study - Akamai. It's like if Microsoft sponsored a study "proving" that Linux sucks.
Caching is your friend. If you cache, don't forget to version your stuff as well:
<script src="foo.js?d=md5sum-of-the-script"></script>
And do this with everything you cache - css, xml, xsl, whatever.
All lenses that Nikon bundles with its DSLRs are pretty darn good, especially 18-70mm, 18-135mm and 18-200mm VR. Canon wants you to buy a lens right off the bat, even if you've bought a "bundled" one already. Granted, both N and C make some good lenses, but for a beginner who doesn't want to spend a fortune Nikon is a better choice.
Girls don't browse porn.
Well, he's been sentenced to death for 148 deaths of Shiite villagers that were caused by his orders. Nothing else is proven. Before you start throwing random numbers around again, consider the source.
And don't get me wrong, I do think the guy deserved what he got. But I also think he's not the worst offender here.
Kinda makes you wonder if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will one day be tried and sentenced to death, too. After all, they've killed 100x the people Saddam did.
2.33GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD. It's scary fast, even in Aperture. After reading horror stories on the web I thought it'd run ridiculously hot. Not so, my friends. The bottom does get hot when you do something hardcore (LiveType realtime rendering or a hardcore Aperture session), but not as hot as to be unbearable. Overall, I'm very pleased with my purchase, and this is hands down the best laptop I've ever used.
:0)
My son is very pleased, too - he can't get enough of Photo Booth.
Looks like good ol' US of A is slowly turning into something like USSR, except capitalist. Or maybe into China. Pretty soon the laws will be passed to freakin' execute dissenters on the spot for just disagreeing.
America needs a few crushing military defeats in the wars it unnecessarily initiates. That's the only way to stop Pentagon from engaging in wars for all sorts of ridiculous, made up reasons and Joe Sixpack from approving whatever BS he hears on TV. Think about it, the US has been in war with someone practically for half a century already if not more. The only two of these wars that were justified were WWII and Afghanistan. In all the others the US wasn't even remotely threatened so the wars were designed to line the pockets of the sitting president's buddies, make him look tough and create political capital for the ruling party come the next election.
Nowhere in my post did I say "automation is bad". I did say that it must always be supplemented with a healthy dose of manual testing for scenarios not covered by automation. Saying otherwise would indicate that not only you didn't work in QA, but you also don't have (or don't communicate with) any decent QA engineers around.
Then, you're also forgetting that any decent rigorous test has maintenance costs associated with it. The higher the source tree churn, the higher the maintenance cost. You will basically have to change the test case every time developer changes the logic inside an API. This happens A LOT.
So automated tests aren't really a "fire and forget" thing that dreamers like you describe when they sell them to management. In a lot of cases automated tests make a heck of a lot of sense. I, for one, would want a heavy dose of atomation applied to every well specified API or web service, primarily because it's much easier to automate these tests than run test cases over and over manually. In a lot of other cases automation doesn't make any sense whatsoever and manual poking around by a qualified QA engineer (this is not limited to UI BTW, one can write tools that will allow to invoke APIs also) will uncover tons and tons more bugs and the bugs will be of much higher quality.
Too many people need to give up their egos, use GUI toolkits they don't like, and admit they don't know jack about what looks good and what doesn't.
That, my friends, is what you get if you rely too much on automation and don't do enough manual poking around. For those who lack context, there's a strong push in Windows to do as much testing through automation as possible. As often happens when a $1M exec bonus depends on something, the underlings got a little overzealous and either fired software test engineers or "up-converted" them to "software development engineers in test" who were then told to write automation. The effect of this is that you have bits and pieces of Vista that are tested really well and other bits and pieces that aren't tested _at all_. One needs to remember that when your automated test case finds a bug and that bug gets fixed, it's not likely to find more bugs in the same code path. This doesn't mean there are no bugs in the code. This means there aren't more bugs _in this exact code path_ that test case exercises.
That's lpszCharles lpszSimonyi, thank you very much.
I cringe when someone uses words "leader" or "leadership" for these folks. Let us make an important distinction here. They are _managers_. Being a _leader_ is a totally orthogonal thing to being a _manager_. Leadership is earned through the respect of subordinates. Management position is obtained through brown nosing with higher ups.
It leaves all this law-breaking mess to you. Read the fine print.
Could you guys maybe license the tech and legally package media playback, font hinting, etc. on a $35 "Ubuntu Addons" CD or something like that. I know there's Automatix, but I don't like the fact that when I run it I break a shitload of laws, no matter how retarded they are. Personally, I'd rather pay a license fee and enjoy computing the way it should be in year 2006.
Somehow, I'm having a hard time believing this number. Here are the stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access_in_th e_United_States. The total number of people who could potentially play online is 204M, including 3 year olds and 80 year olds. So they want to tell me that the majority of users with internet connection play games online? I call bullshit on this one. Online gaming in toddlers and old farts is at negligible levels, and most of the folks I know (age group 25-40) don't play online even though some of them have gaming consoles. And these aren't just some random folks - they're geeks who live and breathe the Internet. They're just too busy to waste massive amounts of time on playing online and I bet so are most of the rest of adult US population. That leaves us with kids 10 to roughly 23 years old.
In this country, you need to multiply the salary rougly by 2.5 to get the overall yearly spending on a single "individual contributor" employee. You need to rent a building, you need to buy hardware, bandwidth, electricity, you need to pay health insurance, heating, janitorial, "morale" events, etc, etc. And $83K a year won't get you anyone "deeply qualified". It's a mid-level salary of a decent programmer in, say, WA.