They're making Jews wear yellow ribbons!Quick, bomb them!
I am not certain if this form of discrimination warrants an air strike, but certainly, it would make this the country that practices it a sort of Pariah in the minds of the civilized world.
Don't forget the case of the Boeing 767 aircraft which was ordered by the Chinese government a few years ago. Once the aircrafts were delivered, the Chinese found dozens of spying bugs in those airplanes. I feel pretty embarassed for my government if they really think the Chinese are so stupid that they won't check for things like that.
Be very afraid. One thing that sets Microsoft apart from many of its competitors is persistence when it comes to products and technologies that are important to Microsoft's core business. Add to that the fact that MS has a huge multi-billion $$ war chest and their dominant position in the operating systems and web browsers and you see that they have not only the will but also the resources to be persistent. This battle won't be over any time soon.
I don't know if that's related but I noticed that googling for "en" stopped rendering en.wikipedia.org as the first match. I used to just type "en" in the firefox address bar to go there. Now I have to type the whole name or use bookmarks.
Computer Science is a great major and has very practical applications. However, I personally would suggest also to cultivate interests in the related applied math subjects such as operations research, financial modeling, statistics, etc while you're in school. The more diverse your interests are, the more resilent you will be to ups and downs in a particular industry.
Don't make any projections on what the job market will look like 5 years from now (because you can't). Also don't believe all the whinning about outsourcing. The United States has the world's best universities, researchers, students, and companies in the technology related subjects. Think beyond being a plain coder. Think of being on the edge of your field. Then outsourcing will not be a big threat.
Once you make the decision to get into CS, try to get into the best CS program that you can afford to attend and be admitted to. The reputation of a university does matter when applying for the top jobs because the reputation is usually closely linked to the quality of education (but it is only a part of the equation for getting a job, of course).
This looks like yet another software product or strategy coming from Sun that's meant to put thin clients on everyone's desktop and to put all applications on the (Sun Microsystems, of course) server..
You don't need to follow a theory to come to this conclussion at least intuitively. Just look at how many tangible items that you bought recently were made abroad. As for the theory, I thought the general consensus among economists today is that, yes, free trade is good and that was the consensus since Adam Smith published his works centuries ago. More competition is always better for the consumers.
Based on this, you're not telling us the whole story. Yes, a relatively small number of people will lose their jobs. At the same time, the vast majority of Americans are benefiting from a higher standard of living due to lover priced consumer goods. Also millions of Chinese and other East Asian poor are benefiting from the jobs created in their export oriented economist. It's a tough world. Can you give me a reason why a textile worker in USA should have a job when there is someone else willing to do this work for 10 times less?
Really? What other major do you suggest other than Business Administration? According to UC Berkeley's career center, CS grads are still some of the most employable majors with starting salaries comparable to EECS and actually higher than Bus.Adm and most of engineering varieties. In any case, I hope there will be around more people like you trying to convice the dumb "get rich fast" types that CS is not good for them. Then the CS departments will be a much better place to be in without them. All of my friends who are recent graduates not only in CS but also some other major + CS minor got decent jobs after at most a few months of job search.
Google News can be good for online newspapers because google news is how people can find their articles. I suspect that many of those newspapers would probably stop whinning if google offered them to stop from being indexed if they wished (and if the practice was found to be illegal).
It seems like what those newspapers really want is to have have a cake and eat it too (that is, they want to be listed through news.google.com because it's certainly benefitial to them. They also want to get paid for that).
UC Berkeley recently implemented the hideous Blackboard courseware system. The biggest problem with it is that you -have- to login into it to see the course web site. It's closed to outsiders. Not all course web sites use it (for example CS/EE ones have their own web site) but professors from other departments too. Argh.. so stupid.
Sorry. I was referring to post-2002 period too. (Around 1999 it was more like.. "hey, we give you keys to a new 3-series BMW, just come work for our startup"). Ok, maybe I have exhagerated a bit about "right after graduation" bit but it still seems like everyone who didn't have a previous intership experience is employed anyways somewhere following 3-4 months of job search. Even non-CS majors get decent jobs in programming and network and system administration when they have done at least some relevant coursework. Hell, I have seen even drop-outs get decent jobs. The school is located near a major technology hot spot, so make sure to move near one if theren't many jobs within your geographic area.
Only if your major is political science and the like. AFAIK, people in engineering, many sciences, computing, operations research, statistics, accounting, CIS, and the like are getting decent job offers because their years of study weren't wholly 'wasted' on subjects that do not find direct applications in the real life. Going back to the topic, a bachelors degree in Computer Science from a respectable university is still worth a lot. I had many friends who graduated with BA in CS and related subjects from a respectable state university in the US and all of them seem to have gotten excellent job offers right after graduation from -major- e-comerce and software companies.
I don't buy this argument. You give a copy of NY Times to English-reading kids every day and the chances are that a whole bunch of them will read it and probably learn something new, something that will probably make them better citizens overall. On the other hand, it's quite possible that giving computers to random kids will likely lead to a whole bunch of them learning how to use computers primarily for IM, file sharing, games, accessing porn, buying and selling things and whatnot. This -will- certainly improve the welfware and quality of life of these people but I doubt that having access to a computer will make someone necessarily more educated. I personally don't even see how computers should belong to any classroom (other than the one used for teaching hands-on computer skills). I often get astonished when I see papers written by kids in freshman writing courses at US universities right now. This is a generation that grew up with computers and yet they can't think critically and/or express themselves coherently despite having unlimited, uncensored internet access and some of world's best computer software and hardware.
You should also check how many valves per cylinder it has and whether those valves use variable timing. There are still many large American-made V6/V8 engines with only two valves per cylinder and that easily means a 30% or more performance hit relatively to more sophisticated engines of the same size. Again, horsepowers and torque figures alone can give you a good metric without having to worry about all other matters (unless you have to haul a boat or something, in which case a more relaxed but larger engine with more cylinders is better).
If I go to buy a car, the only metric I'll use to evaluate the engine is the number of cylinders.
This is not a good analogy as your car engine performance metric is extremely flawed. I think HP and torque are a better ways of measuring engine performance. In your view the 145HP 3.0L V6 Ford Vulcan engine with two valves per cylinder is about as good as a 200HP 3.0L V6 Ford Duratec engine which has four valves per cylinder. On the other hand, Saab's sophisticated 250HP 2.3L 4-cylinder engine must be necessarily worse than the (ancient) Ford Vulcan.
We need a standard so that third-party kernel modules do not need to be recompiled with every minor kernel update. Only on Linux deals with this issue in such archain way. The third party drivers I install on Solaris or Windows boxes do not need to be reinstalled for YEARS despite numerous kernel updates until you do a major OS upgrade.
This doesn't explain it as the eastern span of bridge is supposed to cost $6B and it will be an entirely new bridge built parallel to the existing one.
I am slightly surprised that this project is expected to cost at most as much, if not less, than the extected cost of seismic retrofit for the relatively shorter San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (that project involves the construction of a completely new replacement for the eastern span of the bridge). How come? I suppose one reason is that the cost of everything in Bay Area is much much higher than in southern Italy. What about other factors? Is there something that makes the Italian design inherently cheaper to implement?
I don't mind static ads but animated, flashing ads are extremely irritating, specially when you're reading text (perhaps a news site). That's why I selectively block ads. If the ads are not too annoying I spare them but if the ad belongs to an annoying kind, I simply block all images from that ad server which is a built-in mozilla feature.
I thought the point of insurance was to spread risk. Since noody can afford the treatment for certain catastrophic illnesses, the idea is to put everyone in a pool to share the risk.
In general, that's not the point of insurance (specially insurance as a business). The point of getting insurance policy for anything is not to mayke someone else pay for your risks (or vice versa) but spead YOUR risk over time. That is, to reduce or remove the risk of making huge payoffs by making small payments regularly. In the end, you end up paying more on the average with insurance than without. Nonetheless, your expected utility is supposedly higher when you make a number of small regular payments compared to having to make huge payoffs once in a while. You can also derive this conclussion more rigorously by starting solely from the axioms of rational behavior in an intermediate microeconomics course. However, based on your thinking, there should be one rate for insurance of all drivers regardless of how they drive, and one rate against floods and earthquakes regardless of where you live. In the abscence of accurate information, the insurance companies will be forced to charge a single rate to everyone. The biggest problem with this scenario is that high risk people who are more likely to benefit from insurance than others (and who know it) are more likely to obtain insurance at the rate that's very afforable to them. At the same time, the low-risk individuals will be forced out of the insurance market since they still have to pay the average price for insurance which might be significantly higher than the price they're willing to pay for insurance given their lower risks. This problem is present in markets with asymetric information and economists call such behavior 'adverse selection'.
Having said that, I think there are serious ethical issues in denying or overcharging for insurance of those who might become seriously ill due to a genetic makeup since their genetic makeup is completely out of their control.
I don't think noise was a consideration for Apple. These days, even the 7200RPM (S)ATA hard drives are designed to be very quiet. My PC has two and I can barely can hear them. I also don't think the user of any class of personal computers deserves to deal with such slow hard drives any more. Besides, who said that Mac mini isn't supposed to be used for tasks that might benefit from a faster hard drive?
Slashdot Mirror
They're making Jews wear yellow ribbons!Quick, bomb them!
I am not certain if this form of discrimination warrants an air strike, but certainly, it would make this the country that practices it a sort of Pariah in the minds of the civilized world.
Don't forget the case of the Boeing 767 aircraft which was ordered by the Chinese government a few years ago. Once the aircrafts were delivered, the Chinese found dozens of spying bugs in those airplanes. I feel pretty embarassed for my government if they really think the Chinese are so stupid that they won't check for things like that.
Be very afraid. One thing that sets Microsoft apart from many of its competitors is persistence when it comes to products and technologies that are important to Microsoft's core business. Add to that the fact that MS has a huge multi-billion $$ war chest and their dominant position in the operating systems and web browsers and you see that they have not only the will but also the resources to be persistent. This battle won't be over any time soon.
I don't know if that's related but I noticed that googling for "en" stopped rendering en.wikipedia.org as the first match. I used to just type "en" in the firefox address bar to go there. Now I have to type the whole name or use bookmarks.
Computer Science is a great major and has very practical applications. However, I personally would suggest also to cultivate interests in the related applied math subjects such as operations research, financial modeling, statistics, etc while you're in school. The more diverse your interests are, the more resilent you will be to ups and downs in a particular industry.
Don't make any projections on what the job market will look like 5 years from now (because you can't). Also don't believe all the whinning about outsourcing. The United States has the world's best universities, researchers, students, and companies in the technology related subjects. Think beyond being a plain coder. Think of being on the edge of your field. Then outsourcing will not be a big threat.
Once you make the decision to get into CS, try to get into the best CS program that you can afford to attend and be admitted to. The reputation of a university does matter when applying for the top jobs because the reputation is usually closely linked to the quality of education (but it is only a part of the equation for getting a job, of course).
This looks like yet another software product or strategy coming from Sun that's meant to put thin clients on everyone's desktop and to put all applications on the (Sun Microsystems, of course) server..
You don't need to follow a theory to come to this conclussion at least intuitively. Just look at how many tangible items that you bought recently were made abroad. As for the theory, I thought the general consensus among economists today is that, yes, free trade is good and that was the consensus since Adam Smith published his works centuries ago. More competition is always better for the consumers.
Based on this, you're not telling us the whole story. Yes, a relatively small number of people will lose their jobs. At the same time, the vast majority of Americans are benefiting from a higher standard of living due to lover priced consumer goods. Also millions of Chinese and other East Asian poor are benefiting from the jobs created in their export oriented economist. It's a tough world. Can you give me a reason why a textile worker in USA should have a job when there is someone else willing to do this work for 10 times less?
Really? What other major do you suggest other than Business Administration? According to UC Berkeley's career center, CS grads are still some of the most employable majors with starting salaries comparable to EECS and actually higher than Bus.Adm and most of engineering varieties. In any case, I hope there will be around more people like you trying to convice the dumb "get rich fast" types that CS is not good for them. Then the CS departments will be a much better place to be in without them. All of my friends who are recent graduates not only in CS but also some other major + CS minor got decent jobs after at most a few months of job search.
Google News can be good for online newspapers because google news is how people can find their articles. I suspect that many of those newspapers would probably stop whinning if google offered them to stop from being indexed if they wished (and if the practice was found to be illegal).
It seems like what those newspapers really want is to have have a cake and eat it too (that is, they want to be listed through news.google.com because it's certainly benefitial to them. They also want to get paid for that).
UC Berkeley recently implemented the hideous Blackboard courseware system. The biggest problem with it is that you -have- to login into it to see the course web site. It's closed to outsiders. Not all course web sites use it (for example CS/EE ones have their own web site) but professors from other departments too. Argh.. so stupid.
Sorry. I was referring to post-2002 period too. (Around 1999 it was more like.. "hey, we give you keys to a new 3-series BMW, just come work for our startup"). Ok, maybe I have exhagerated a bit about "right after graduation" bit but it still seems like everyone who didn't have a previous intership experience is employed anyways somewhere following 3-4 months of job search. Even non-CS majors get decent jobs in programming and network and system administration when they have done at least some relevant coursework. Hell, I have seen even drop-outs get decent jobs. The school is located near a major technology hot spot, so make sure to move near one if theren't many jobs within your geographic area.
Only if your major is political science and the like. AFAIK, people in engineering, many sciences, computing, operations research, statistics, accounting, CIS, and the like are getting decent job offers because their years of study weren't wholly 'wasted' on subjects that do not find direct applications in the real life. Going back to the topic, a bachelors degree in Computer Science from a respectable university is still worth a lot. I had many friends who graduated with BA in CS and related subjects from a respectable state university in the US and all of them seem to have gotten excellent job offers right after graduation from -major- e-comerce and software companies.
I don't buy this argument. You give a copy of NY Times to English-reading kids every day and the chances are that a whole bunch of them will read it and probably learn something new, something that will probably make them better citizens overall. On the other hand, it's quite possible that giving computers to random kids will likely lead to a whole bunch of them learning how to use computers primarily for IM, file sharing, games, accessing porn, buying and selling things and whatnot. This -will- certainly improve the welfware and quality of life of these people but I doubt that having access to a computer will make someone necessarily more educated. I personally don't even see how computers should belong to any classroom (other than the one used for teaching hands-on computer skills). I often get astonished when I see papers written by kids in freshman writing courses at US universities right now. This is a generation that grew up with computers and yet they can't think critically and/or express themselves coherently despite having unlimited, uncensored internet access and some of world's best computer software and hardware.
You'd be surprised to find out how much people care about the horsepowers in cars.
You should also check how many valves per cylinder it has and whether those valves use variable timing. There are still many large American-made V6/V8 engines with only two valves per cylinder and that easily means a 30% or more performance hit relatively to more sophisticated engines of the same size. Again, horsepowers and torque figures alone can give you a good metric without having to worry about all other matters (unless you have to haul a boat or something, in which case a more relaxed but larger engine with more cylinders is better).
If I go to buy a car, the only metric I'll use to evaluate the engine is the number of cylinders.
This is not a good analogy as your car engine performance metric is extremely flawed. I think HP and torque are a better ways of measuring engine performance. In your view the 145HP 3.0L V6 Ford Vulcan engine with two valves per cylinder is about as good as a 200HP 3.0L V6 Ford Duratec engine which has four valves per cylinder. On the other hand, Saab's sophisticated 250HP 2.3L 4-cylinder engine must be necessarily worse than the (ancient) Ford Vulcan.
San Antonio's SBC Center probably will have to be renamed too.
We need a standard so that third-party kernel modules do not need to be recompiled with every minor kernel update. Only on Linux deals with this issue in such archain way. The third party drivers I install on Solaris or Windows boxes do not need to be reinstalled for YEARS despite numerous kernel updates until you do a major OS upgrade.
This doesn't explain it as the eastern span of bridge is supposed to cost $6B and it will be an entirely new bridge built parallel to the existing one.
I am slightly surprised that this project is expected to cost at most as much, if not less, than the extected cost of seismic retrofit for the relatively shorter San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (that project involves the construction of a completely new replacement for the eastern span of the bridge). How come? I suppose one reason is that the cost of everything in Bay Area is much much higher than in southern Italy. What about other factors? Is there something that makes the Italian design inherently cheaper to implement?
I don't mind static ads but animated, flashing ads are extremely irritating, specially when you're reading text (perhaps a news site). That's why I selectively block ads. If the ads are not too annoying I spare them but if the ad belongs to an annoying kind, I simply block all images from that ad server which is a built-in mozilla feature.
I thought the point of insurance was to spread risk. Since noody can afford the treatment for certain catastrophic illnesses, the idea is to put everyone in a pool to share the risk.
In general, that's not the point of insurance (specially insurance as a business). The point of getting insurance policy for anything is not to mayke someone else pay for your risks (or vice versa) but spead YOUR risk over time. That is, to reduce or remove the risk of making huge payoffs by making small payments regularly. In the end, you end up paying more on the average with insurance than without. Nonetheless, your expected utility is supposedly higher when you make a number of small regular payments compared to having to make huge payoffs once in a while. You can also derive this conclussion more rigorously by starting solely from the axioms of rational behavior in an intermediate microeconomics course. However, based on your thinking, there should be one rate for insurance of all drivers regardless of how they drive, and one rate against floods and earthquakes regardless of where you live. In the abscence of accurate information, the insurance companies will be forced to charge a single rate to everyone. The biggest problem with this scenario is that high risk people who are more likely to benefit from insurance than others (and who know it) are more likely to obtain insurance at the rate that's very afforable to them. At the same time, the low-risk individuals will be forced out of the insurance market since they still have to pay the average price for insurance which might be significantly higher than the price they're willing to pay for insurance given their lower risks. This problem is present in markets with asymetric information and economists call such behavior 'adverse selection'.
Having said that, I think there are serious ethical issues in denying or overcharging for insurance of those who might become seriously ill due to a genetic makeup since their genetic makeup is completely out of their control.
I don't think noise was a consideration for Apple. These days, even the 7200RPM (S)ATA hard drives are designed to be very quiet. My PC has two and I can barely can hear them. I also don't think the user of any class of personal computers deserves to deal with such slow hard drives any more. Besides, who said that Mac mini isn't supposed to be used for tasks that might benefit from a faster hard drive?