If they have internet access, for something different, but which I think is exactly along the lines of what you describe, check out a SaaS product called TrackVia (http://www.trackvia.com). It's relatively cheap (you might try to get them to give you pro bono access as a charity) and has all the abilities you describe designed specifically for non-technical people, but is also quite versatile.
Code does not have to be fully reviewed for the open source development process to discipline attempts at compromise. There is a nonzero probability that any given piece of code will be reviewed for reasons other than looking for a back door, and if the probability is higher than trivial, it would dissuade parties from attempting to surreptitiously put in a back door. If a back door were found, the contributor would be known and repercussions would follow.
Moreover, I would not be at all surprised if foreign governments who have a national security interest in running uncompromised operating systems have devoted time and resources specifically to code review of the kernel for potential compromises.
I'm not sure that I hear a success story there. Has it actually contributed to your career significantly, or are you just enjoying being able to speak/read the language? In the U.S., there are so many Chinese-Americans who can speak much more fluently than someone who learned it as a second language and/or Chinese immigrants who would basically be willing to sacrifice a limb for a green card that it's not a particular competitive advantage in the workplace. In China, there is such discrimination against foreigners in hiring and promotion that trying to get a real job is an exercise in futility. It doesn't sound like you've been able to actually do more than gain some social value from your experience with Chinese.
As someone who has learned Chinese as an adult, I would recommend against it unless you have the opportunity to do so without sacrificing considerable opportunity costs or have the luxury of not having to worry about opportunity costs. The learning process is considerably more time-consuming and challenging than a European language, and you cannot learn it to a functional level from taking classes. (There are many foreigners I've met in China who took four years of Chinese as an undergraduate and were astonished to discover when they set foot in the country that they were totally non-functional.) You have to actually live in a Chinese-speaking country, and it's very hard to get a decent job in China unless you're moved there by a multinational and retain your salary and benefits from the home country. Even then, if you're working a regular job, you simply won't have time to learn the language in a reaonable tme frame. I know plenty of expats in China who have been working here for 7-10 years and still can barely ask for directions in Chinese.
Finally, if you think you can simply show up in China and people will be beating down your door to give you a great job, think again. The idea that China is full of potential is a total myth for Westerners. There are almost no opportunities for Westerners outside of teaching English or other jobs unrelated to professional technical positions, and no Chinese-owned firm I've heard of has ever given a Westerner a management position with any authority. Whereas in the United States, being a non-U.S. citizen does not impose a glass ceiling, in China quite the opposite is true. You simply won't make money here unless you are working for a multinational and are moved here from your home country rather than someone who moves here and is then hired in-country, in which case your living here is taken as a clear signal you're willing to work for local wages.
In short, people who talk about Chinese as a way to open doors and create opportunities are simply out of touch with the realities on the ground in China.
If the firm uses CentOS today because they find that optimal, they may find paying for Red Hat support tomorrow optimal. If they use some other operating system, they will be less likely to ever send Red Hat money. So take this opportunity to educate the CIO so that if your firm is ever in the position of needing their services, he or she will know where to go.
The goal should not be to eliminate free riders. In fact, free riding is an inherent component of the open source model and many who are free riders today will become paying customers tomorrow. The economic model works when the number of free riders is not so high that it chokes off resources necessary to develop the platform.
Whether or not that is the case for Red Hat is going to have little to do with your firm's decision or people's sentiments about whether paying for open source software is the right or wrong thing to do, and much to do with the general incentives that their economic model produces. Red Hat knows there are firms like yours wrestling with the same decision, and that many of them will chose options such as CentOS, but hopes that there are a sufficient number for whom it is a good business decision to avail themselves of Red Hat's (and other open source contributors') services that the product will command sufficient resources to continue to improve.
The problem is not their hardware. The hardware is great. It's their inability to deliver on a stable, usable operating system. Whoever has been in charge of the OS division of their company should not only be fired, but charged with criminal negligence.
They haven't yet delivered on their Linux OS, and their use of Microsoft Mobile is a total disaster.
In my own experience, I've owned several Treos, and recently upgraded to a 750. It came with Microsoft Windows Mobile, which, though I generally haven't had good experiences with Microsoft software, I thought I'd give a quick whirl. Little did I know what I was in for.
Among the many, many instabilities, the worst is the SMS application. It freezes about 25% of the time when a message is received, dropping the message. This means that SMS is basically unusable. Perhaps an upgrade would fix it, but I hesitate to upgrade because the online message boards are filled with posts of people who've attempted the process and bricked their phones.
I was also shocked to discover that there's no way of syncing your calendar, contacts, etc. on Windows Mobile without using Outlook. No way at all, unless you want to rely on a really buggy pre-alpha open source package, which I don't.
I don't like Outlook, I don't want to use Outlook, and I certainly don't want to pay for more Microsoft software after I've already (implicitly) paid for their OS, which replaces what Palm previously did for free.
I've given up on waiting for Palm to get their act together. I still love their hardware, but their total incompetence in delivering a stable and modern OS will mean I, for one, will never be a customer again.
While this might not seem so serious to consumers in the U.S., in fact the banana family (including plantains) is the 4th largest food staple crop in the world (or at least it was several years ago when I was researching the banana industry for a litigation matter) behind wheat, rice, and corn.
To those who suggest the actor is a whiner, reread the post. He appropriately blames the union for not including these kinds of positions appropriately in their collective bargaining efforts.
Basically, many companies in the video game industry, a young(ish) business currently more or less an oligopoly, are making well above what would be considered normal profits. Barriers to entry are high, so I would anticipate they will continue to make above-normal profits for some time.
The music industry, movie industry, and sports industry, among others, have gone through the same dynamic and the video game industry will doubtless see many of the same growing pains they have and be subject to the same kinds of bargaining dynamics. And in situations like this, with well-above-normal profits being generated, those who add significant economic value and don't use collective bargaining to claim a share of the pie are simply giving money away.
Sure, with the exception of some rock stars, the coders in the trenches aren't being paid millions, but that's not a reason the actors shouldn't be paid more. If anything, it simply indicates the coders in such industries should strive to self-organize as well as actors and athletes.
I am an American who currently lives in China and can assure you, while there are success stories, and certainly fortunes are being made here, the idea that Americans can pop on over to China and be masters of the universe is a red herring at best.
Some reasons that it is not all you might think it is: 1) The salaries are often lower. Much lower. It used to be that multinationals paid Western wages for work in China, but that is not always true today. You'll be told that the standard of living is lower, so that makes up for it, but even though you can live like a king in many areas for $10,000 / year, you aren't going to be saving much for retirement at that level. 2) The salaries are not necessarily going up for Westerners. A lot of foreigners are drawn by the oft-repeated story of the boom economy in China. As a result, there is downward pressure on salaries for Westerners in many sectors with companies offering less to people who they perceive as having a desire to live in China. When I was talking to a friend who has been here for some time about working in China, he said if you express a desire to work in China, they'll offer you Chinese wages. 3) There is a very real glass ceiling. - Few foreigners really learn the language. It takes about 3-4 times as long to learn Chinese as another European language, and that's if you're really trying. Most foreigners come to China thinking they'll learn the language by osmosis and ultimately return home several years later knowing how to give directions to a cab driver and not much else. - Moreover, the cultures are vastly different, and it's difficult to establish the kinds of quality relationships that you need to progress in business. And certain concepts such as honesty and integrity are very different here, resulting in many foreigners under the impression that they are establishing sound business relationships and friendships getting screwed in the end. - There is still a very nationalistic "us versus them" kind of attitude among Chinese nationals, and this bias makes it difficult for a foreigner to be treated as an equal, even if they speak Chinese, in terms of promotion and opportunities for advancement.
While there are certainly opportunities here in China, I would recommend anyone thinking of making a career move to China doing extra due diligence before they dive in.
This guy again. Clearly someone who is vying for the "Saddest Loser on the Planet" award.
Whoever has such a sad, lonely life that they gain some kind of emotional satisfaction out of posting this kind of thing *over and over* again needs some counseling. Seriously.
Is there someone out there in the Slashdot universe who could delete these things?
If your software is being adopted by a university, perhaps you could get some interest from CS students. In general, students are more likely to have both the interest and the time to work on F/OSS projects.
You may also consider adjusting the amount of time you have to devote to various tasks to increase the amount of time you spend cultivating the ecosystem. For example, if you spend 70% of your time coding, 20% managing documentation / the web site / etc., and 10% of your time with PR, answering user e-mails, reaching out to users, etc., try upping the 10% to 20% or more. Linus' coding chops were only one part of why we've all heard of Linux.
This guy has taken to trying to post this same bit of drivel on a number of Slashdot topics.
I don't know which is sadder, that this poor loser needs whatever juvenile emotional gratification comes with anonymously posting this kind of thing, or that his life is so empty that he feels the need to do it over and over again.
Just plain sad. Here is someone clearly in need of counseling, but he's not going to get it on Slashdot.
Would someone who has the ability to do so be so kind as to remove this comment. It is entirely off-topic and puerile in the most unflattering sense of the word.
Whoever posted this needs to get out of their darkened basement, acquire an additional 10 years or so of maturity, and look into what is commonly known as a life. It's just so sad.
Of course, that means the open source vendors are providing over $60 billion of additional value to customers, who are able to divert whatever would be spent on proprietary software to more productive use.
In other words, it is making the overall market more efficient. That's just Economics 101.
For those who try to spin this as some sort of problem, can you imagine if a single company owned a patent granting them exclusive rights to produce what Apache provides for free? The gains to said company would pale in comparison to the astronomical loss to the overall marketplace.
Like you, I was of humble means. I went to graduate school at a respectable state university rather than in the Ivy League. When I graduated with my degree (in economics), however, I secured a position at an elite consulting group populated almost exclusively with University of Chicago graduates, the 2nd ranked economics department in the world, an unprecedented opportunity.
So although I can only offer my own experience, I worked in an office full of graduates from a top-ranked university and my perspective on the relative merits of a public vs. Ivy League education comes from firsthand experience.
From a practical perspective, my impression is that although the average level of capability of a University of Chicago graduate student would certainly be above that of someone from a lower-ranked school, the capabilities of the top students are relatively comparable. When I first started with the firm, I was somewhat intimidated by the fact that I did not come with a pedigree, but by the time I left, I was a top-billing consultant. So I don't think your education or ability level will suffer if you don't go to MIT or some other prestigious school.
However, the opportunities available to those who attend a school with a pedigree far exceed the opportunities available to the commoners. The networking opportunities are tremendous, and when you come from a top institution, people just assume you must be brilliant. When you come from a public school, you have to prove that you're brilliant. Moreover, there is a self-perpetuating cycle. More prestigious positions are filled by people from top-ranked universities, and when it is time for them to do the hiring, they likewise restrict their attention only to the top-ranked universities. The difference in terms of starting salaries due to factors that are wholly independent of your actual ability level make a huge difference to your marketability just after you graduate, and will probably have a large impact on your lifetime earnings.
So my advice to you, having seen what it's like on both sides of the tracks, would be to spend the extra money, incur debt, etc., and attend the more prestigious institution. You probably won't come away with better skills, but purely from the perspective of a lifetime earnings guesstimate, I would guesstimate the extra spending would be well worth it.
I use a Windows Mobile device. Involuntarily. Aside from my other beefs (the biggest of which is that they do not support anything other than Outlook to sync... I am indescribably perturbed by that "feature"), the voice recognition software is completely useless.
Sitting alone in a room with no background noise whatsoever, speaking as clearly as an evening news anchor, I get about a 5-10% success rate.
If that's the best voice recognition out there for mobile devices at the moment, it's got a very long way to go before it could be useful for Joe Average.
IT Ethics is Different from Business Ethics
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Ethics In IT
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The fundamental focus of ethics is different between general business and IT issues.
In many business programs, students are exhorted to compete from day one. Many students take away the message that they should maximize profits (or market share or whatever they use as a metric of success) by any means necessary.
(I have worked on a number of antitrust regulatory issues, and you would be astonished at the number of e-mails that have been unearthed in which executives send each other messages to the effect, "Let's use unfair competitive practices to squash the little guy!" I'm paraphrasing, of course, but not by much.)
In IT, on the other hand, the issues pertain more to privacy and intellectual property rights. If a system administrator reads someone's e-mail, it may be for personal gain or just out of curiosity, but it's not due to any sort of overriding business objective. Competition in IT is to build the best product, not to "get" the other guy. And the ethics reflect that.
By the way, I've also worked at a company where an admin, who reported to a manager I worked beside, was reading e-mails. The manager let him know that he knew, and that if anything came of it, it would come back to bite him, but also let it slide because (1) someone has to have access, and whoever it is will probably take a peek from time to time, and (2) he was relatively discrete about it, and others may not be. Was he unethical in letting the behavior persist?
The "unable to forward" message one gets when trying to click on the link to Pheedo says "you'll also need to select Internet Explorer as your default web browser." Aren't the market share stats for Mozilla high enough yet that web sites like Pheedo would be best served by either testing on Mozilla or simply just coding to published standards? Or is their engineering team simply lazy and/or incompetent?
Barring further information, I'll put my money on the latter. What a bunch of nobs.
The other posts seem to lack the cultural context to understand what the Mandriva CEO was intimating and what may very well have happened.
Bribery and corruption is just a fact of life in most of the world. I have been living in a developing nation for over a year now, and I can say from experience that most Slashdotters who are writing from the U.S. or Europe have no idea how endemic, and even accepted, corruption is outside the West. If the allegation were true, it would not be the least bit surprising to the average Nigerian.
Microsoft would not bribe the Nigerian government. They would bribe a few well-placed officials, then charge the Nigerian government enough to cover both their costs and their bribes and earn a tidy profit.
Supposing the alleged allegation is true, the winners would Microsoft and a few Nigerian decision-makers. The losers would be the Nigerian taxpayers and/or, if costs were passed on to the schools that use the computers, the children.
However, if a bribe were given, under the FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act), someone at Microsoft would be criminally liable. U.S. citizens who bribe overseas government officials are subject to prosecution at home.
I have heard time and time again on Slashdot that Wolfram just took other people's work, that he had people working underneath him & that he didn't actually know what he was talking about in his book. This is some corroborating evidence, in my opinion.
Hardly. Wolfram disappeared for a decade to produce A New Kind of Science. Was he picking his toes while his team of crack Mathematica techies were developing the ideas for the book? I find that hard to believe. In fact, the way I heard it, he did all of his own editing on the book, much to the dismay of some who found it in need of editing.
He probably did have staffers assisting in running simulations (and with his bankroll, I would certainly entertain that notion myself), but name me one prominent professor who hasn't stood on the shoulders of graduate students.
Whether you consider him a genius or a crackpot (and he certainly gives reason to entertain both opinions), Wolfram is undoubtedly brilliant and seems to be dedicated to the advancement of mathematical ideas that he considers to be important. It hardly seems that a lack of academic integrity would be consistent with his actions to date.
Whether history will ultimately judge him a genius or a crackpot, I would guess that he has done more to advance mathematics than all the posters to this article combined, myself included. So give the man some credit.
I'm terribly curious what Turbolinux thinks that Microsoft thinks it is getting out of the deal.
They call it a "cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios." What kind of patent portfolio can Turbolinux possibly have, and how could it possibly be a threat to Microsoft? A related question would be whether you can call it a patent portfolio if you have less than two patents.
Assuming (and I think this would be a reasonable assumption) that Microsoft would feel exactly zero threat from Turbolinux's patent portfolio, and assuming they're going to be paying Turbolinux a healthy sum to enter into the agreement as they have with Novell, executives at Turbolinux and GNU/Linux users in general have to be asking themselves what Microsoft is actually buying for the bundle they'll (presumably) be handing over to Turbolinux.
This is not a rhetorical question. Perhaps I'm daft, but the fact that, on the surface, a "cross-licensing" arrangement doesn't seem to make economic sense for one of the parties for the reasons ostensibly given by the parties entering into the agreement piques my curiosity.
There have been lots of helpful posts thus far, though they have missed step 1, which is critical.
Step 1: Figure out what you want to know and why you want to know it.
You are probably living a rich, full life without knowing advanced group theory. So you are probably thinking about learning math for a specific reason, either for professional advancement or curiosity. If you are going to be successful, figure out what it is you really want to know or what it is that piques your curiosity. Are you frustrated because you want to save for retirement but don't know how to handle investment returns? Do you just want to not be embarrassed when you have to do simple addition and subtraction in front of your peers? Are there specific problems that crop up at work?
Once you've identified these issues, then refer to the advice from the other posts and put together a game plan.
The key is to pursue the things you're interested in. The approach is the same as, for example, you want to know more about cars. Finding out about auto mechanics is much easier and more interesting when your car is broken and you've got a specific problem to solve. Or if you have friends who are grease monkeys and you want to be able to talk to them on their own level.
Pick some problems in the books or classwork, but also just pick little problems that crop up in your life and try to work them out while you're on the bus, waiting in line, at the gym, whatever. And be sure to talk to other people who know more. Don't be embarrassed. If you don't meet someone in your class, join in online forums. Trust me, people who enjoy math really enjoy talking to other people about math. Like learning a foreign language, you can't learn it by reading a book. You have to do it and you are most efficient when you engage other people in your learning process.
I base this advice on experience: I stopped taking mathematics courses in my sophomore year in high school because I found it boring. (Unfortunately, the way high school math is typically taught, it usually is boring). Later, because there were things I was interested in, I took it up again in college and went on to earn a BA in mathematics, probably one of the best choices (both for my intellectual enrichment and my professional life) I've ever made in my life. I kept my focus by finding things that made me curious and following up on them and have never looked back.
Slashdot Mirror
If they have internet access, for something different, but which I think is exactly along the lines of what you describe, check out a SaaS product called TrackVia (http://www.trackvia.com). It's relatively cheap (you might try to get them to give you pro bono access as a charity) and has all the abilities you describe designed specifically for non-technical people, but is also quite versatile.
Hope that helps!
Code does not have to be fully reviewed for the open source development process to discipline attempts at compromise. There is a nonzero probability that any given piece of code will be reviewed for reasons other than looking for a back door, and if the probability is higher than trivial, it would dissuade parties from attempting to surreptitiously put in a back door. If a back door were found, the contributor would be known and repercussions would follow.
Moreover, I would not be at all surprised if foreign governments who have a national security interest in running uncompromised operating systems have devoted time and resources specifically to code review of the kernel for potential compromises.
I couldn't agree more. Because of the dread Nobel prize, radical left-wingers like Einstein, Fermi, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg have ruined physics.
I'm not sure that I hear a success story there. Has it actually contributed to your career significantly, or are you just enjoying being able to speak/read the language? In the U.S., there are so many Chinese-Americans who can speak much more fluently than someone who learned it as a second language and/or Chinese immigrants who would basically be willing to sacrifice a limb for a green card that it's not a particular competitive advantage in the workplace. In China, there is such discrimination against foreigners in hiring and promotion that trying to get a real job is an exercise in futility. It doesn't sound like you've been able to actually do more than gain some social value from your experience with Chinese.
As someone who has learned Chinese as an adult, I would recommend against it unless you have the opportunity to do so without sacrificing considerable opportunity costs or have the luxury of not having to worry about opportunity costs. The learning process is considerably more time-consuming and challenging than a European language, and you cannot learn it to a functional level from taking classes. (There are many foreigners I've met in China who took four years of Chinese as an undergraduate and were astonished to discover when they set foot in the country that they were totally non-functional.) You have to actually live in a Chinese-speaking country, and it's very hard to get a decent job in China unless you're moved there by a multinational and retain your salary and benefits from the home country. Even then, if you're working a regular job, you simply won't have time to learn the language in a reaonable tme frame. I know plenty of expats in China who have been working here for 7-10 years and still can barely ask for directions in Chinese.
Finally, if you think you can simply show up in China and people will be beating down your door to give you a great job, think again. The idea that China is full of potential is a total myth for Westerners. There are almost no opportunities for Westerners outside of teaching English or other jobs unrelated to professional technical positions, and no Chinese-owned firm I've heard of has ever given a Westerner a management position with any authority. Whereas in the United States, being a non-U.S. citizen does not impose a glass ceiling, in China quite the opposite is true. You simply won't make money here unless you are working for a multinational and are moved here from your home country rather than someone who moves here and is then hired in-country, in which case your living here is taken as a clear signal you're willing to work for local wages.
In short, people who talk about Chinese as a way to open doors and create opportunities are simply out of touch with the realities on the ground in China.
If the firm uses CentOS today because they find that optimal, they may find paying for Red Hat support tomorrow optimal. If they use some other operating system, they will be less likely to ever send Red Hat money. So take this opportunity to educate the CIO so that if your firm is ever in the position of needing their services, he or she will know where to go.
The goal should not be to eliminate free riders. In fact, free riding is an inherent component of the open source model and many who are free riders today will become paying customers tomorrow. The economic model works when the number of free riders is not so high that it chokes off resources necessary to develop the platform.
Whether or not that is the case for Red Hat is going to have little to do with your firm's decision or people's sentiments about whether paying for open source software is the right or wrong thing to do, and much to do with the general incentives that their economic model produces. Red Hat knows there are firms like yours wrestling with the same decision, and that many of them will chose options such as CentOS, but hopes that there are a sufficient number for whom it is a good business decision to avail themselves of Red Hat's (and other open source contributors') services that the product will command sufficient resources to continue to improve.
The problem is not their hardware. The hardware is great. It's their inability to deliver on a stable, usable operating system. Whoever has been in charge of the OS division of their company should not only be fired, but charged with criminal negligence.
They haven't yet delivered on their Linux OS, and their use of Microsoft Mobile is a total disaster.
In my own experience, I've owned several Treos, and recently upgraded to a 750. It came with Microsoft Windows Mobile, which, though I generally haven't had good experiences with Microsoft software, I thought I'd give a quick whirl. Little did I know what I was in for.
Among the many, many instabilities, the worst is the SMS application. It freezes about 25% of the time when a message is received, dropping the message. This means that SMS is basically unusable. Perhaps an upgrade would fix it, but I hesitate to upgrade because the online message boards are filled with posts of people who've attempted the process and bricked their phones.
I was also shocked to discover that there's no way of syncing your calendar, contacts, etc. on Windows Mobile without using Outlook. No way at all, unless you want to rely on a really buggy pre-alpha open source package, which I don't.
I don't like Outlook, I don't want to use Outlook, and I certainly don't want to pay for more Microsoft software after I've already (implicitly) paid for their OS, which replaces what Palm previously did for free.
I've given up on waiting for Palm to get their act together. I still love their hardware, but their total incompetence in delivering a stable and modern OS will mean I, for one, will never be a customer again.
While this might not seem so serious to consumers in the U.S., in fact the banana family (including plantains) is the 4th largest food staple crop in the world (or at least it was several years ago when I was researching the banana industry for a litigation matter) behind wheat, rice, and corn.
Food for thought.
To those who suggest the actor is a whiner, reread the post. He appropriately blames the union for not including these kinds of positions appropriately in their collective bargaining efforts.
Basically, many companies in the video game industry, a young(ish) business currently more or less an oligopoly, are making well above what would be considered normal profits. Barriers to entry are high, so I would anticipate they will continue to make above-normal profits for some time.
The music industry, movie industry, and sports industry, among others, have gone through the same dynamic and the video game industry will doubtless see many of the same growing pains they have and be subject to the same kinds of bargaining dynamics. And in situations like this, with well-above-normal profits being generated, those who add significant economic value and don't use collective bargaining to claim a share of the pie are simply giving money away.
Sure, with the exception of some rock stars, the coders in the trenches aren't being paid millions, but that's not a reason the actors shouldn't be paid more. If anything, it simply indicates the coders in such industries should strive to self-organize as well as actors and athletes.
I am an American who currently lives in China and can assure you, while there are success stories, and certainly fortunes are being made here, the idea that Americans can pop on over to China and be masters of the universe is a red herring at best.
Some reasons that it is not all you might think it is:
1) The salaries are often lower. Much lower. It used to be that multinationals paid Western wages for work in China, but that is not always true today. You'll be told that the standard of living is lower, so that makes up for it, but even though you can live like a king in many areas for $10,000 / year, you aren't going to be saving much for retirement at that level.
2) The salaries are not necessarily going up for Westerners. A lot of foreigners are drawn by the oft-repeated story of the boom economy in China. As a result, there is downward pressure on salaries for Westerners in many sectors with companies offering less to people who they perceive as having a desire to live in China. When I was talking to a friend who has been here for some time about working in China, he said if you express a desire to work in China, they'll offer you Chinese wages.
3) There is a very real glass ceiling.
- Few foreigners really learn the language. It takes about 3-4 times as long to learn Chinese as another European language, and that's if you're really trying. Most foreigners come to China thinking they'll learn the language by osmosis and ultimately return home several years later knowing how to give directions to a cab driver and not much else.
- Moreover, the cultures are vastly different, and it's difficult to establish the kinds of quality relationships that you need to progress in business. And certain concepts such as honesty and integrity are very different here, resulting in many foreigners under the impression that they are establishing sound business relationships and friendships getting screwed in the end.
- There is still a very nationalistic "us versus them" kind of attitude among Chinese nationals, and this bias makes it difficult for a foreigner to be treated as an equal, even if they speak Chinese, in terms of promotion and opportunities for advancement.
While there are certainly opportunities here in China, I would recommend anyone thinking of making a career move to China doing extra due diligence before they dive in.
Whoever has such a sad, lonely life that they gain some kind of emotional satisfaction out of posting this kind of thing *over and over* again needs some counseling. Seriously.
Is there someone out there in the Slashdot universe who could delete these things?
You may also consider adjusting the amount of time you have to devote to various tasks to increase the amount of time you spend cultivating the ecosystem. For example, if you spend 70% of your time coding, 20% managing documentation / the web site / etc., and 10% of your time with PR, answering user e-mails, reaching out to users, etc., try upping the 10% to 20% or more. Linus' coding chops were only one part of why we've all heard of Linux.
I don't know which is sadder, that this poor loser needs whatever juvenile emotional gratification comes with anonymously posting this kind of thing, or that his life is so empty that he feels the need to do it over and over again.
Just plain sad. Here is someone clearly in need of counseling, but he's not going to get it on Slashdot.
Whoever posted this needs to get out of their darkened basement, acquire an additional 10 years or so of maturity, and look into what is commonly known as a life. It's just so sad.
Of course, that means the open source vendors are providing over $60 billion of additional value to customers, who are able to divert whatever would be spent on proprietary software to more productive use.
In other words, it is making the overall market more efficient. That's just Economics 101.
For those who try to spin this as some sort of problem, can you imagine if a single company owned a patent granting them exclusive rights to produce what Apache provides for free? The gains to said company would pale in comparison to the astronomical loss to the overall marketplace.
Like you, I was of humble means. I went to graduate school at a respectable state university rather than in the Ivy League. When I graduated with my degree (in economics), however, I secured a position at an elite consulting group populated almost exclusively with University of Chicago graduates, the 2nd ranked economics department in the world, an unprecedented opportunity.
So although I can only offer my own experience, I worked in an office full of graduates from a top-ranked university and my perspective on the relative merits of a public vs. Ivy League education comes from firsthand experience.
From a practical perspective, my impression is that although the average level of capability of a University of Chicago graduate student would certainly be above that of someone from a lower-ranked school, the capabilities of the top students are relatively comparable. When I first started with the firm, I was somewhat intimidated by the fact that I did not come with a pedigree, but by the time I left, I was a top-billing consultant. So I don't think your education or ability level will suffer if you don't go to MIT or some other prestigious school.
However, the opportunities available to those who attend a school with a pedigree far exceed the opportunities available to the commoners. The networking opportunities are tremendous, and when you come from a top institution, people just assume you must be brilliant. When you come from a public school, you have to prove that you're brilliant. Moreover, there is a self-perpetuating cycle. More prestigious positions are filled by people from top-ranked universities, and when it is time for them to do the hiring, they likewise restrict their attention only to the top-ranked universities. The difference in terms of starting salaries due to factors that are wholly independent of your actual ability level make a huge difference to your marketability just after you graduate, and will probably have a large impact on your lifetime earnings.
So my advice to you, having seen what it's like on both sides of the tracks, would be to spend the extra money, incur debt, etc., and attend the more prestigious institution. You probably won't come away with better skills, but purely from the perspective of a lifetime earnings guesstimate, I would guesstimate the extra spending would be well worth it.
Hope this helps.
I use a Windows Mobile device. Involuntarily. Aside from my other beefs (the biggest of which is that they do not support anything other than Outlook to sync ... I am indescribably perturbed by that "feature"), the voice recognition software is completely useless.
Sitting alone in a room with no background noise whatsoever, speaking as clearly as an evening news anchor, I get about a 5-10% success rate.
If that's the best voice recognition out there for mobile devices at the moment, it's got a very long way to go before it could be useful for Joe Average.
In many business programs, students are exhorted to compete from day one. Many students take away the message that they should maximize profits (or market share or whatever they use as a metric of success) by any means necessary.
(I have worked on a number of antitrust regulatory issues, and you would be astonished at the number of e-mails that have been unearthed in which executives send each other messages to the effect, "Let's use unfair competitive practices to squash the little guy!" I'm paraphrasing, of course, but not by much.)
In IT, on the other hand, the issues pertain more to privacy and intellectual property rights. If a system administrator reads someone's e-mail, it may be for personal gain or just out of curiosity, but it's not due to any sort of overriding business objective. Competition in IT is to build the best product, not to "get" the other guy. And the ethics reflect that.
By the way, I've also worked at a company where an admin, who reported to a manager I worked beside, was reading e-mails. The manager let him know that he knew, and that if anything came of it, it would come back to bite him, but also let it slide because (1) someone has to have access, and whoever it is will probably take a peek from time to time, and (2) he was relatively discrete about it, and others may not be. Was he unethical in letting the behavior persist?
Would someone be so kind as to set up a mirror for those of us in China? Blogspot is blocked by the Great Firewall.
Thanks in advance.
Barring further information, I'll put my money on the latter. What a bunch of nobs.
Bribery and corruption is just a fact of life in most of the world. I have been living in a developing nation for over a year now, and I can say from experience that most Slashdotters who are writing from the U.S. or Europe have no idea how endemic, and even accepted, corruption is outside the West. If the allegation were true, it would not be the least bit surprising to the average Nigerian.
Microsoft would not bribe the Nigerian government. They would bribe a few well-placed officials, then charge the Nigerian government enough to cover both their costs and their bribes and earn a tidy profit.
Supposing the alleged allegation is true, the winners would Microsoft and a few Nigerian decision-makers. The losers would be the Nigerian taxpayers and/or, if costs were passed on to the schools that use the computers, the children.
However, if a bribe were given, under the FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act), someone at Microsoft would be criminally liable. U.S. citizens who bribe overseas government officials are subject to prosecution at home.
Hardly. Wolfram disappeared for a decade to produce A New Kind of Science. Was he picking his toes while his team of crack Mathematica techies were developing the ideas for the book? I find that hard to believe. In fact, the way I heard it, he did all of his own editing on the book, much to the dismay of some who found it in need of editing.
He probably did have staffers assisting in running simulations (and with his bankroll, I would certainly entertain that notion myself), but name me one prominent professor who hasn't stood on the shoulders of graduate students.
Whether you consider him a genius or a crackpot (and he certainly gives reason to entertain both opinions), Wolfram is undoubtedly brilliant and seems to be dedicated to the advancement of mathematical ideas that he considers to be important. It hardly seems that a lack of academic integrity would be consistent with his actions to date.
Whether history will ultimately judge him a genius or a crackpot, I would guess that he has done more to advance mathematics than all the posters to this article combined, myself included. So give the man some credit.
They call it a "cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios." What kind of patent portfolio can Turbolinux possibly have, and how could it possibly be a threat to Microsoft? A related question would be whether you can call it a patent portfolio if you have less than two patents.
Assuming (and I think this would be a reasonable assumption) that Microsoft would feel exactly zero threat from Turbolinux's patent portfolio, and assuming they're going to be paying Turbolinux a healthy sum to enter into the agreement as they have with Novell, executives at Turbolinux and GNU/Linux users in general have to be asking themselves what Microsoft is actually buying for the bundle they'll (presumably) be handing over to Turbolinux.
This is not a rhetorical question. Perhaps I'm daft, but the fact that, on the surface, a "cross-licensing" arrangement doesn't seem to make economic sense for one of the parties for the reasons ostensibly given by the parties entering into the agreement piques my curiosity.
Step 1: Figure out what you want to know and why you want to know it.
You are probably living a rich, full life without knowing advanced group theory. So you are probably thinking about learning math for a specific reason, either for professional advancement or curiosity. If you are going to be successful, figure out what it is you really want to know or what it is that piques your curiosity. Are you frustrated because you want to save for retirement but don't know how to handle investment returns? Do you just want to not be embarrassed when you have to do simple addition and subtraction in front of your peers? Are there specific problems that crop up at work?
Once you've identified these issues, then refer to the advice from the other posts and put together a game plan.
The key is to pursue the things you're interested in. The approach is the same as, for example, you want to know more about cars. Finding out about auto mechanics is much easier and more interesting when your car is broken and you've got a specific problem to solve. Or if you have friends who are grease monkeys and you want to be able to talk to them on their own level.
Pick some problems in the books or classwork, but also just pick little problems that crop up in your life and try to work them out while you're on the bus, waiting in line, at the gym, whatever. And be sure to talk to other people who know more. Don't be embarrassed. If you don't meet someone in your class, join in online forums. Trust me, people who enjoy math really enjoy talking to other people about math. Like learning a foreign language, you can't learn it by reading a book. You have to do it and you are most efficient when you engage other people in your learning process.
I base this advice on experience: I stopped taking mathematics courses in my sophomore year in high school because I found it boring. (Unfortunately, the way high school math is typically taught, it usually is boring). Later, because there were things I was interested in, I took it up again in college and went on to earn a BA in mathematics, probably one of the best choices (both for my intellectual enrichment and my professional life) I've ever made in my life. I kept my focus by finding things that made me curious and following up on them and have never looked back.
"On the one hand, .... On the other hand, .... On the third hand, ...."
Would that be the gripping hand?