Um, HELLO, if someone is getting a pink slip doesn't that imply some sort of deficiency? This entire article hinges on "Foreign Students == Good"! Why is the author's solution for us to go over to India and China to grab talent when foreign companies are coming to the US? Isn't that playing into their hands? This part makes no sense.
But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell. If that is not a "lesson in global capitalism" I don't know what is. And as far as I know the Big Companies that DO have the money to do R&D... *gasp* do it.
What this author doesn't seem to realize is that many US firms are coming to grips with cost undercutting. Maybe proprietary HW meant something back in 1990 but not any more. So companies cut those groups and buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. The author seems to think that this is just some Anti-R&D attitude, when all it is is the proper reaction to a market reality
I think this would work well for most web-server DB backends as the data isn't changing on the fly that much. But what about even/. where the content of a discussion thread is changing possibly several times a second (with new posts and mods)? I'd think then you'd want to use the strong atomic operators of the DB to pull directly from the tables instead of relying on serial operators to try and refresh.
Since the benchmark page was slashdotted I might be speaking out of my ass. But I never trust "9000 times faster!". It sounds too "2 extra inches to your penis, guaranteed!"
Look on the back or the bottom of your radios and televisions and you get the FCC warning that you cannot modify it to listen on non-stantdards signals AND it must accept any outside interference. To do so is a federal crime. This is nothing new.
Hell, if I stick a pre-ban 30 round magazine in my post-ban AK-47, that is a federal crime. And if I decided to "mod" it... let's just say the ATF would go Branch Davidian on my ass.
I usuall write binaries (since I do genetic algorithms/pattern recognition experiments) and then play with my data in Matlab (do some PCA to get the dimensions down, draw it up nicely, etc).
I guess the issue is that the major suites have SO many tools that, once you are used to them, mesh well with your way of thinking/coding/problem solving. In that way you usually find one tool and stick with it.
A hypothetical case: Let's say I was going to blow up VA Software with a cruise missile and inside this cruise missile I was running embedded RTLinux. You find this out because I have a Sourceforge project where I am releasing my modified source in compliance with the GPL.
As we can see the GPL is only a legal document, not an ethical or moral one. As I'm following the letter of the GPL, the RTLinux developers shouldn't care... legally.
Sure, they can be outraged and upset with everything else (and why not?). But ethical use has nothing to do with the GPL. Open Source is egalitarian in that way. I can use Apache to host anti-abortion or anti-death penalty websites. As many as I want. The license isn't there to judge intent.
Now could they create a new OS license that makes it illegal for someone to use the technology in weaponry? SURE! But it isn't, so right now it is moot.
Isn't much of CPU pricing relative from the Biggest/Baddest Chip? Didn't the advent of an IA-64 chip push down the price of all 32 bit chips? In this way it made it's competition more viable for that much longer (and hurt the few things that made it worthwhile to get).
Huh... Didn't know that. I used it in the "guns akimbo" style. The way John Woo's protagonists are described when they run around with a pistol in each hand.
Not only are the two groups not-mutually exclusive, but both tools are used akimbo. How often do programmers run their compiled binaries with shell scripts? Or Perl?
Any such distinction between them is better explained along the software programmer versus system admin dimension (programmers do more programming, admins more scripting). At that point its more of a trivial social exercise: the same with Emacs versus Vi (and how often has someone been "discriminated" against for that?).
In the end this is ridiculous. No one is getting denied health care, civil rights, or a way of living depending on their ability to code or script. If work was denied to you it just means the person is an asshole. And assholes only follow their own twisted logic. They might shit on you for being a woman, or fat, or any other non-important reason.
In the real world, this pales against real issues.
Remember that PBS has News Hour every evening (with rational debates... not arguments) and then possibly the best content show in Frontline. Just in the last two weeks Frontline has covered the War on Terror from INSIDE the White House and how the idea of Preemption has gained a foothold and the effects of capitalism over the last four years in China.
Ok, PBS isn't a 24/7 news channel. But there is good content out there.
The problem is that American News is not news, it is "news magazine" fluff. Things like 20/20 and Dateline with their feelgood stories and scaremongering ("this town didn't know it had chemicals in its water supply... UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE!") are very popular with folks who don't usually like "news". The mainstream news as compromised itself by trying to co-opt such tactics. That's what happens when you aren't government/public subsudized (BBC or PBS).
But the most important thing is that most people only want to listen to what they want, not what they need. Most people (in and outside of the US) put more value in entertainment over news. The fallacy is assuming that a nation's Media reflects on the nation (as compared to the Media's income type).
In Hip-hop and R&B bootlegging of albums has always been rampant (you can usually find a cd for 10 bucks on a street corner a week before it officially comes out). So much so that there is a conspiracy that the labels themselves are doing it (as a way of making untraceable money off the back of a truck... and not have to pay the artists for it). P2P is then seen as cutting into this money stream and, as the theory goes, this is why the labels are so amped to stop file sharing.
Of course it doesn't make sense for folks like Dr Dre and Eminem to get into a twist about it (since they would be bootlegging their own material). Still, conspiracies like this run rampant in the industry.
Nature v. Nuture: 19th century thinking
on
The Taste of Pain
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ask any modern psychologist and they'll tell you that the only people who talk about Nature versus Nurture are Psych 101 students. The concept is old and buried (as the field has come to the realization that psychological principles are more unified in nature).
A correlary would for someone to say that big iron and dumb terminals are the way of the future because your Comp Sci 101 handbook published in 1978 says so.
Someone else mentioned the pseudo-science of eugenics and social darwinism. Both are known to be BS. The problem is that it took a long time for the field of psychology to shake them and become a formal science.
The problem is that most people think it is so "obvious" that the field can be mastered in a sixteen week freshman level course. People like that are the Script Kiddies of the psych world.
Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.
Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?
Graham goes on here to talk about how "some" children are "intrinsically cruel"... implying that adults are not. Excuse me, but that's BS. Hasn't he ever been in a group, team, or company where there are overbearing assholes who seem to think that politicking for no good reason is the best thing to do between 8am and 5pm?
No. Adults are just as cruel as children.
The difference? Adults can choose their environment... children can't.
In High School you are FORCED into closed spaces with people who you share nothing in common, day in and day out for weeks on end. Before them you may be asked to perform humilating tasks at which you are completely inept.
Compare this to adults who can at least choose their work environment (specializing to an area of likeminded folk) where you have some autonomy and privacy.
Also adults have rewards for excellence. If someone is a slouch and a social butterfly, they can be stuck in the same damn job for 40 years. If I decided to work my tail off I can advance in wage, privilege, work and retire at 50 with a fat package and a red Escalade. I can improve my social standing through money gained from hard work.
For kids no amount of showing off will get you out of work. Personally I've never understood this. If someone proves themselves, why can't they be given less mindless work? Instead you're stuck and any excellence is just "showing off"... and you are soon shown your place.
If you caught Dinner for Five (the Daredevil actor special with Kevin Smith, Colin Farrell, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner. Hosted by Jon Favreau) you would have seen what movie insiders think of programming.
Favreau asked Colin about the orchestral computer in Minority Report (remember Farrell was in that too). Favreau then compared the sweeping arm motions to the "You know. They just sit there all day silently like this [makes keyboarding motions with hands]"
Colin replied that they had figured out a precise sign language (that doing [this] with your hands meant "stop", etc) so there was an underlying syntax... but it wasn't as dry as toast as normal keyboarding.
I have to agree. Watching someone else key is like watching someone else play golf... touch of death!
Actually instant evolution is a misnomer. I know someone who does Alife simulations on simple biological structures. And what he found is that, although there are epochs where new genes are introduced, there is a long and gradual period of "preparation". This is where the ancestors end up (arbitrarily) putting in the genetic support structure for said gene (as all previous attempts to enter the gene usually results in some "bad things").
It's not like a bunch of neanderthals were sitting around a fire and then Bob Dylan popped out.
Actually I think it is more economic than anything else. I think we are past the post-Joel Schumacher/Batman and Robin backlash which iced the idea of comic book movies for a while. Then X-Men came along and, although flimsy, it went on to make big cash. From that Marvel was able to sell the rights to three of its biggest movies (Hulk, Daredevil, and Spiderman... along with franchising X-Men).
This occured after 2000 (when X-Men was released and became a hit). Soon after that the rights were sold and all the projects entered the development stages (I remember the whispers appearing online and in publications like Wizard at the time), over a year before 9-11.
Sure they might get more push now but you have to remember how long it takes for the movie industry to go from buying the rights on a movie to lining up the off-screen talent that will pick the on-screen talent to writing the screenplay... even before shooting starts.
Take Daredevil. According to the Coming Attractions page on it, February 24, 2000 was the first time that Mark Johnson's (the director) name was attached to the project and July 13, 2000 when New Regency locked him in along with the Electra and Kingpin properties to make the movie. Over a year before WTC.
and I hope the movie is on par with Clarke's 2001!"
Yeah and why shouldn't every contemporary drama be on par with Citzen Kane and every epic be on par with Lawrence of Arabia? I'm sorry but constant comparison to other excellent movies has buried more than a few dozen movies.
In truth all great movies are usually done out of a desire to make a film unlike any other. If you end up using another movie as a measuring stick, you end up with something that's derivative. So it would be best to get off of Fincher's back and let him make a movie instead of living up to another one.
(And I'll ignore the fact that it was Kubrick's movie based off of Clarke's book).
"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Of course this was a popular quotation for Timothy McVeigh. The second part of the quote: "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Donald Richie has lived in Japan for over 40 years and is a well known cultural critic, specifically movies (I believe he did the commentary track on the Criterion Seven Samurai DVD and was interviewed extensively for the Kurosawa documentary on 20th Century Masters on PBS). He has also written several books on Japanese film and its stylistic differences from the rest of the world.
I think a very specific point in his A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (which I recommend regardless) might answer this. Richie says that one of the fundamental differences between Japanese and Western (specifically American) cinema is the drama that they are derived from: Japanese plays (Noh, Kabuki) are presentational while Western plays are realistic.
Ok so what does that mean? Well in Western drama (and which was then carried over into Western cinema), there is an assumption of naturalism: things are as they seem, as they are in the Real World. Japanese drama though, with its stylized movements, its paramount importance of placement means that in many ways the form of the style dictates much of the logic.
This has meant that many things that are considered avant-garde (i.e. Adult) in the West (Expressionism, Surealism) are actually incorporated into all levels of entertainment in Japan.
An example would be a sword fight. In the West when someone is hit with a sword they are expected to bleed normally, scream out, and fall down dead.
In Japan you can have someone hit in the throat with a sword, stand there, say something ("The irony... to hear it from my own neck"), then a gyser of blood shoots out, and they tip over silently (ala Lone Wolf and Cub). Where in the West this would be seen as an experimental choice, in Japan it is commonly accepted.
This is important for anima as animation is a stylistic choice. So fans of Japanese cinema would have no problem accepting it while a standard Western audience, with their realism indoctrination, have trouble accepting such a Fantastical step is Adult entertainment. The touching adult morality of Neon Genesis: Evangelion is thus less than the realistic dopiness of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, based purely on how the form of each is perceived.
Well I guess they are hoping that the BIOSes that ship on their mobos never need any sort of flashing. It is quite simple to throw together a Win95 (or whatever) floppy with a new image on there.
Of course my one friend is an avid flash from bootable CD guy. But for this job the floppy is perfect: the size, the ease of creation, and the simplicity. Until we hit those next gen motherboards where such things aren't necessary, I see having a floppy being a great safety measure.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, HELLO, if someone is getting a pink slip doesn't that imply some sort of deficiency? This entire article hinges on "Foreign Students == Good"! Why is the author's solution for us to go over to India and China to grab talent when foreign companies are coming to the US? Isn't that playing into their hands? This part makes no sense.
But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell. If that is not a "lesson in global capitalism" I don't know what is. And as far as I know the Big Companies that DO have the money to do R&D... *gasp* do it.
What this author doesn't seem to realize is that many US firms are coming to grips with cost undercutting. Maybe proprietary HW meant something back in 1990 but not any more. So companies cut those groups and buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. The author seems to think that this is just some Anti-R&D attitude, when all it is is the proper reaction to a market reality
*hack hack hack* Hey look, I won! *hack hack hack* Heh! I won AGAIN! Gee, what are the odds ;)
I think this would work well for most web-server DB backends as the data isn't changing on the fly that much. But what about even /. where the content of a discussion thread is changing possibly several times a second (with new posts and mods)? I'd think then you'd want to use the strong atomic operators of the DB to pull directly from the tables instead of relying on serial operators to try and refresh.
Since the benchmark page was slashdotted I might be speaking out of my ass. But I never trust "9000 times faster!". It sounds too "2 extra inches to your penis, guaranteed!"
Look on the back or the bottom of your radios and televisions and you get the FCC warning that you cannot modify it to listen on non-stantdards signals AND it must accept any outside interference. To do so is a federal crime. This is nothing new.
Hell, if I stick a pre-ban 30 round magazine in my post-ban AK-47, that is a federal crime. And if I decided to "mod" it... let's just say the ATF would go Branch Davidian on my ass.
I usuall write binaries (since I do genetic algorithms/pattern recognition experiments) and then play with my data in Matlab (do some PCA to get the dimensions down, draw it up nicely, etc).
I guess the issue is that the major suites have SO many tools that, once you are used to them, mesh well with your way of thinking/coding/problem solving. In that way you usually find one tool and stick with it.
A hypothetical case: Let's say I was going to blow up VA Software with a cruise missile and inside this cruise missile I was running embedded RTLinux. You find this out because I have a Sourceforge project where I am releasing my modified source in compliance with the GPL.
As we can see the GPL is only a legal document, not an ethical or moral one. As I'm following the letter of the GPL, the RTLinux developers shouldn't care... legally.
Sure, they can be outraged and upset with everything else (and why not?). But ethical use has nothing to do with the GPL. Open Source is egalitarian in that way. I can use Apache to host anti-abortion or anti-death penalty websites. As many as I want. The license isn't there to judge intent.
Now could they create a new OS license that makes it illegal for someone to use the technology in weaponry? SURE! But it isn't, so right now it is moot.
Crick and Watson (can't let the Americans get first bill on everything).
Isn't much of CPU pricing relative from the Biggest/Baddest Chip? Didn't the advent of an IA-64 chip push down the price of all 32 bit chips? In this way it made it's competition more viable for that much longer (and hurt the few things that made it worthwhile to get).
Huh... Didn't know that. I used it in the "guns akimbo" style. The way John Woo's protagonists are described when they run around with a pistol in each hand.
Not only are the two groups not-mutually exclusive, but both tools are used akimbo. How often do programmers run their compiled binaries with shell scripts? Or Perl?
Any such distinction between them is better explained along the software programmer versus system admin dimension (programmers do more programming, admins more scripting). At that point its more of a trivial social exercise: the same with Emacs versus Vi (and how often has someone been "discriminated" against for that?).
In the end this is ridiculous. No one is getting denied health care, civil rights, or a way of living depending on their ability to code or script. If work was denied to you it just means the person is an asshole. And assholes only follow their own twisted logic. They might shit on you for being a woman, or fat, or any other non-important reason.
In the real world, this pales against real issues.
Remember that PBS has News Hour every evening (with rational debates... not arguments) and then possibly the best content show in Frontline. Just in the last two weeks Frontline has covered the War on Terror from INSIDE the White House and how the idea of Preemption has gained a foothold and the effects of capitalism over the last four years in China.
Ok, PBS isn't a 24/7 news channel. But there is good content out there.
The problem is that American News is not news, it is "news magazine" fluff. Things like 20/20 and Dateline with their feelgood stories and scaremongering ("this town didn't know it had chemicals in its water supply... UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE!") are very popular with folks who don't usually like "news". The mainstream news as compromised itself by trying to co-opt such tactics. That's what happens when you aren't government/public subsudized (BBC or PBS).
But the most important thing is that most people only want to listen to what they want, not what they need. Most people (in and outside of the US) put more value in entertainment over news. The fallacy is assuming that a nation's Media reflects on the nation (as compared to the Media's income type).
In Hip-hop and R&B bootlegging of albums has always been rampant (you can usually find a cd for 10 bucks on a street corner a week before it officially comes out). So much so that there is a conspiracy that the labels themselves are doing it (as a way of making untraceable money off the back of a truck... and not have to pay the artists for it). P2P is then seen as cutting into this money stream and, as the theory goes, this is why the labels are so amped to stop file sharing.
Of course it doesn't make sense for folks like Dr Dre and Eminem to get into a twist about it (since they would be bootlegging their own material). Still, conspiracies like this run rampant in the industry.
Ask any modern psychologist and they'll tell you that the only people who talk about Nature versus Nurture are Psych 101 students. The concept is old and buried (as the field has come to the realization that psychological principles are more unified in nature).
A correlary would for someone to say that big iron and dumb terminals are the way of the future because your Comp Sci 101 handbook published in 1978 says so.
Someone else mentioned the pseudo-science of eugenics and social darwinism. Both are known to be BS. The problem is that it took a long time for the field of psychology to shake them and become a formal science.
The problem is that most people think it is so "obvious" that the field can be mastered in a sixteen week freshman level course. People like that are the Script Kiddies of the psych world.
No. Adults are just as cruel as children.
The difference? Adults can choose their environment... children can't.
In High School you are FORCED into closed spaces with people who you share nothing in common, day in and day out for weeks on end. Before them you may be asked to perform humilating tasks at which you are completely inept.
Compare this to adults who can at least choose their work environment (specializing to an area of likeminded folk) where you have some autonomy and privacy.
Also adults have rewards for excellence. If someone is a slouch and a social butterfly, they can be stuck in the same damn job for 40 years. If I decided to work my tail off I can advance in wage, privilege, work and retire at 50 with a fat package and a red Escalade. I can improve my social standing through money gained from hard work.
For kids no amount of showing off will get you out of work. Personally I've never understood this. If someone proves themselves, why can't they be given less mindless work? Instead you're stuck and any excellence is just "showing off"... and you are soon shown your place.
If you caught Dinner for Five (the Daredevil actor special with Kevin Smith, Colin Farrell, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner. Hosted by Jon Favreau) you would have seen what movie insiders think of programming.
Favreau asked Colin about the orchestral computer in Minority Report (remember Farrell was in that too). Favreau then compared the sweeping arm motions to the "You know. They just sit there all day silently like this [makes keyboarding motions with hands]"
Colin replied that they had figured out a precise sign language (that doing [this] with your hands meant "stop", etc) so there was an underlying syntax... but it wasn't as dry as toast as normal keyboarding.
I have to agree. Watching someone else key is like watching someone else play golf... touch of death!
FUD
Actually instant evolution is a misnomer. I know someone who does Alife simulations on simple biological structures. And what he found is that, although there are epochs where new genes are introduced, there is a long and gradual period of "preparation". This is where the ancestors end up (arbitrarily) putting in the genetic support structure for said gene (as all previous attempts to enter the gene usually results in some "bad things").
It's not like a bunch of neanderthals were sitting around a fire and then Bob Dylan popped out.
Actually I think it is more economic than anything else. I think we are past the post-Joel Schumacher/Batman and Robin backlash which iced the idea of comic book movies for a while. Then X-Men came along and, although flimsy, it went on to make big cash. From that Marvel was able to sell the rights to three of its biggest movies (Hulk, Daredevil, and Spiderman... along with franchising X-Men).
This occured after 2000 (when X-Men was released and became a hit). Soon after that the rights were sold and all the projects entered the development stages (I remember the whispers appearing online and in publications like Wizard at the time), over a year before 9-11.
Sure they might get more push now but you have to remember how long it takes for the movie industry to go from buying the rights on a movie to lining up the off-screen talent that will pick the on-screen talent to writing the screenplay... even before shooting starts.
Take Daredevil. According to the Coming Attractions page on it, February 24, 2000 was the first time that Mark Johnson's (the director) name was attached to the project and July 13, 2000 when New Regency locked him in along with the Electra and Kingpin properties to make the movie. Over a year before WTC.
Pr0n never asks you to say sorry.
Or heroin for that matter!
Steve Martin's LA Story? Also wasn't Chinatown shot in LA?
In truth all great movies are usually done out of a desire to make a film unlike any other. If you end up using another movie as a measuring stick, you end up with something that's derivative. So it would be best to get off of Fincher's back and let him make a movie instead of living up to another one.
(And I'll ignore the fact that it was Kubrick's movie based off of Clarke's book).
"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Of course this was a popular quotation for Timothy McVeigh. The second part of the quote: "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Makes one think.
Um... Actually both Barnes and Noble and Borders have Graphic Novels sections... and had them for some time.
Sure, they aren't large but they are there. And they usually have a good showing by Manga (I've picked up most of Lone Wolf and Cub there).
Donald Richie has lived in Japan for over 40 years and is a well known cultural critic, specifically movies (I believe he did the commentary track on the Criterion Seven Samurai DVD and was interviewed extensively for the Kurosawa documentary on 20th Century Masters on PBS). He has also written several books on Japanese film and its stylistic differences from the rest of the world.
I think a very specific point in his A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (which I recommend regardless) might answer this. Richie says that one of the fundamental differences between Japanese and Western (specifically American) cinema is the drama that they are derived from: Japanese plays (Noh, Kabuki) are presentational while Western plays are realistic.
Ok so what does that mean? Well in Western drama (and which was then carried over into Western cinema), there is an assumption of naturalism: things are as they seem, as they are in the Real World. Japanese drama though, with its stylized movements, its paramount importance of placement means that in many ways the form of the style dictates much of the logic.
This has meant that many things that are considered avant-garde (i.e. Adult) in the West (Expressionism, Surealism) are actually incorporated into all levels of entertainment in Japan.
An example would be a sword fight. In the West when someone is hit with a sword they are expected to bleed normally, scream out, and fall down dead.
In Japan you can have someone hit in the throat with a sword, stand there, say something ("The irony... to hear it from my own neck"), then a gyser of blood shoots out, and they tip over silently (ala Lone Wolf and Cub). Where in the West this would be seen as an experimental choice, in Japan it is commonly accepted.
This is important for anima as animation is a stylistic choice. So fans of Japanese cinema would have no problem accepting it while a standard Western audience, with their realism indoctrination, have trouble accepting such a Fantastical step is Adult entertainment. The touching adult morality of Neon Genesis: Evangelion is thus less than the realistic dopiness of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, based purely on how the form of each is perceived.
Well I guess they are hoping that the BIOSes that ship on their mobos never need any sort of flashing. It is quite simple to throw together a Win95 (or whatever) floppy with a new image on there.
Of course my one friend is an avid flash from bootable CD guy. But for this job the floppy is perfect: the size, the ease of creation, and the simplicity. Until we hit those next gen motherboards where such things aren't necessary, I see having a floppy being a great safety measure.