Not wasting time with the dupes today I see. Why wait 12 hours before posting it again to the front page instead of section where it probably belonged?
Forget the codec for a moment. If I want to install the latest client operating system from Microsoft there is only 1. (This is the ideal - I know we've had Me/98/XP running concurrently but that's still only 3). How many Linux distributions exist - each version with its quirks and styles. It may be fantastic from the point of view of evolution of the software. Its not going to get users switching over.
First of all, this is stupid. Imagine if we did away with all that pointless branching into different car manufacturers (who needs all of Toyota, Nissan, Ford, GM etc. each with their quirks and styles) and just had a single make and model of car? Much easier right? Huh?
Secondly, this is stupid. You are comparing apples with rubber ducks. If you want the latest client operating system from SuSE there is only 1, just like Microsoft. If you want the latest client operating system from Mandrake there is only 1, just like Microsoft. You may as well be saying "If you want the latest client operating system from Apple there is only 1, Mac OS X 10.3. How many x86 operating systems exist - each version with its quirks and styles."
In some senses they actually did do that. They made a very impressive rendering engine, and a means of rending GUI widgets via that rendering engine. It seems to do that very well. The fact that other people have taken that and used it to build a wide variety of complex applications is hardly the fault of Gecko and XUL.
What you are saying doesn't really make sense. It's like blaming QT or GTK+ for every app ever produced with them.
Actually the Netherlands do have a national cricket side, though they usually get slaughtered by almost any other international side (even Kenya). Still, there must be a reasonable number of cricket players there to manage to have a national side, a national cricket board and be involved in the ICC.
Except he's not even asking for Microsoft and Mozilla to work together. He's asking for Mozilla to come and work with Microsoft, without any clearly defined APIs or featuresets, and little apparent intent of releasing any any time soon.
If Microsoft was prepared to work together with Mozilla - well, that would probably involve Microsoft engineers comitting code to Firefox to add Avalon and WinFS support themselves.
So Firefox doesn't use Avalon or WinFS yet. Not surprising considering they are not in use except in Microsoft development shops. His argument seems to be "but then you'll be a couple of years behind everyone else". I'm not sure it matters that much. I doubt anyone but IE developers are doing any coding against these frameworks ATM because they just aren't solidly locked down yet. Coding against a changing framework and API with disappearing/suddenly new features is a recipe for disaster unless you have a good inside track.
If you read the comments he spends a lot of time saying how wonderful Avalon and WinFS are. If anyone asks why he says "because they're revolutionary". So what sort of features are they actually going to have in the release version? He spends pretty much the entire thread dodging that.
Microsoft has no clue exactly what is going to make it into Longhorn, nor exactly what sort of feature set these "revolutionary" technologies will posses. Why on earth would start trying to code against them now?!
And in the end, if he really thinks it will be that wonderful to have Firefox using Avalon and WinFS... well, he can always write the code himself can't he. It is open source, so he can fork and do what he likes.
My impression (after reading through the comments to the blog): All hype and bluster and no content. I don't think Mozilla should be the least bit concerned.
Excellent, hopefully they can ask hima simple question and we can put another argument to rest - Was he aware of the exploit from his own hacking, or being told about it by someone, or did he just read the exploit advisory from Microsoft when they released the patch?
Realistically odds have to favour just reading the advisory, but there have been plenty of claims to the contrary.
The next question is, will any media actually bother to find out and publish the answer to that question. I'm guessing "absolutely no chance in hell".
Jedidiah.
In theory it is the card vendors problem
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RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I had my credit card number stolen - still no idea how. May have been random card number generation for all I know - I did nothing particularly unsafe (using your credit card at all is pretty unsafe). I was immediately contacted by my bank who were suspicious because the charges were (a) out of line with my current spending pattern (b) in a completely different country to my previous charges. I simply verified that no, I hadn't been to Spain recently, they faxed me some forms (basically just signing to say that no, the following charges were not made by me) and 3 days later my new credit card arrived by courier. everything else was handled by the bank.
In some ways I got lucky because the nature of the spending raised flags, and because my bank actually has incredibly good service. The catch is, it is up to the credit card companies to wear the cost of stolen cards etc. presuming you take reasonable precautions. If they want to embed easily readable RFID tags and have to cover a shitload of costs for easily stolen card numbers... well, more power to them. They'll be out of that business soon enough.
No, that's not about patents at all. The things stopping you from running straight to the competitor and selling them all your ideas are contracts and trade secret laws, not patents.
Patents are not there to give the inventor a monopoly on what they invent. If that were the case, patents wouldn't bother with expiry dates. The original principle of patents was to give small inventors an opportunity to sell their invention - that is, if someone comes up with a brilliant new widget a large company could get his invention to market much quicker than the inventor can. The inventor can't hide their invention away - they have to go out and advertise it to venture capitalists and potential backers so that they can raise funds to bring it to market. A patent was there to let the inventor publish their invention and have a monopoly on it long enough to get to market and become established.
That's certainly not the way patents work these days - especially with the various extensions, and other cunning techniques (constantly revising a patent to keep it in the works for as long as possible) used to extend the length of patents. Furthermore, with business method and software patents you can now patent general broad ideas and algorithms of how to do things. Once things get that broad there are problems.
In the current world of patents R&D is discouraged, not encouraged. Why should a smaller steel mill put in any research into anything? Odds are the larger steel mill with the larger amount of cash to throw into R&D and patents will manage to patent (through broad patents) pretty much anything you might happen to invent. All they have to do is keep a vague eye on your R&D department then crash research and patent anything you're workign on. To spend 4 years on research only to find the larger mill has just patented something sufficently close to your idea to block it - well, that's a waste of money. You're better off not bothering and just licensing whatever new stuff the bigger mill comes up with.
The real question you should be asking is "Why should a steel mill invest in R&D?". The answer is, because they can make better products more efficiently if they do. That should be reason and incentive enough.
We know what problems they've caused and how the media's gone nuts over each virus, making things seem bigger and bigger. But some old viruses were much nastier, and I sure don't hear about those types of infections anymore.
Well, in the past several years the focus for worms and viruses has been on how quickly and efficiently they can spread rather than how much damage they can do. I guess you could sy virus writers have gotten a little more mature, and aren't out to do as much damage as possible.
On the subject of efficiently spreading viruses and worms though, here's an interesting concept for one. It is all a bit overstated and massively exaggerates the risk, but I think some sort of semi coordinated worm will come out soon rather than the blind pounding attacks that we usually get. It will be interesting to see how things go once that is the standard for worms.
It gets worse when you note the extra rule that only 10% of the non fuel mass of the craft can be replaced between flights. That pretty much counts out all the Apollo program stuff, even if they had managed a launch in 2 weeks. Also, while I'm not clear on the exact numbers, I suspect those rockets used to launch the space shuttle account for more than 10% of the non fuel mass.
Of course the Shuttle gets to LEO, which is a much larger step than 100km up, but if you cna get 100km up easily and efficiently, it may well be possible to extend the capabilities and slowly stretch toward LEO.
might want to go to India to speak with someone smarter than you with a better grasp on mathe and science than you'll ever have - more than likely he'll do better work for less.
Except there's not just a single job to go around. Just because there's someone better than me doesn't mean I will be outsourced. It's a case of supply and demand. The number of people in India who have as much (or greater) grasp of mathematics as me is probably quite high - but not that high. There just aren't that many people with sufficient time and inclination to do graduate level mathematics, even though there is a growing market for it. That means someone in India might be willing to work for less, but he doesn't have to, because demand outstrips supply. Besides, I work cheap - by not living in countries with an overly inflated cost of living.
Supply an ddemand is busy moving all the "connect a webserver to a database" jobs to India though. Being able to write a web front end to a database used to be a relatively uncommon skill - but there wasn't much market for it either. Then the dot com boom hit, and all of a sudden there was HUGE demand, which completely outstripped the current supply. That meant salaries shot through the roof, and every other idiot was learning how to do it. Pretty soon supply caught up with demand. Of course, given that an intelligent person can learn how to do such things in month or so, and bothering to spend that month meant you could earn 10 times what you would get otherwise in India, a whole lot of the people learning how were in India. Right now there is a massive surplus of supply which drives salaries back down. The fact that a lot of that supply is in India is causing a lot of jobs to head that way.
And you will learn it, and employers will not give a shit, because they just want to connect a webserver to a database, which is not science, and when you realize that your ego about your science knowledge has prevented you from finding a job anywhere but McDonald's, you will realize the error of your ways, and you will want to connect a webserver to a database.
On the other hand, when your job of just connecting a server to a database gets outsourced to monkeys in the congo, the person who learned the math and the science will be getting a serious software engineering and design job.
Analysis of algorithms and big O type work requires at least some experience with proof by induction, which you encounter in Calculus II in relation to series and sequences. I haven't done anything more advanced (I'm just a freshman) but I would think it starts there. Probability is important too, I would imagine, for analyzing hash codes and cache misses and other random stuff.
If you are doing any sort of information theoretic work I would strongly reccomend also doing some courses in commutativbe algebra (groups, rings, fields etc.), as having a good understanding of polynomial rings and finite fields will make otherwise complicated topics trivial.
Advanced math? You call linear algebra advanced math? Hmm... Maybe I overrated math.:)
I agree. I am quite surprised by the low expectations of many people here for "advanced math". To be honest I would have expected a CS major to, depending on their area of interest, done courses in commutative algebra (groups, rings, fields etc.) and basic galois theory, or, if heading if a different direction differential geometry. The prerequisites for those courses of course covering a lot of other very valuable material.
Another interesting quote: If you have the chance to take calculus in high school, I may surprise you with my advice. I would not automatically jump at the opportunity for a couple reasons. I think I agree on this one. You're going to start at ground zero when you take Calc I in college. So use high school to become badass proficient in algebra and trig.
To be honest, that's just stupid. You should already be badass proficient in basic algebra and trig going into your final year of high school. I am constantly amazed by the poor level of preparation in mathematics of North American, and particularly US students coming in to College. Where I come from introductory calculus was covered in the second to last year of high school, and the only math course going in the final year (I'm counting statistics as its own discipline) was a pure calculus course. Most students didn't seem to have any difficulty with this. It seems to me that the US sets its expectations of students too low with regard to mathematics education at the high school level.
They also enlisted the help of a sole Kiwi inventor, who'd made a handheld laser modeling gun. Held in the hand, with no external supports or machinery (like a barcode scanner at the shops), it can quickly scan a model into the computer with great detail. You "paint" it with the laser, and it draws it on screen.
It's a small company in New Zealand. They do a lot of interestign work, including some interesting non-mesh based methods for 3D models. Their website is here: http://www.aranz.co.nz
It happens all the time. Joe Consumer isn't going to put in venture capitol. The devs raise it on their own from private sources. Eventually they have to go to a publisher if they want to get it on store shelves (its one thing to raise capitol for making a game, its another to raise money for a production run, marketing, wining and dining distributors to get it on store shelves, etc).
Yes, but that capital is BORROWED, not paid as in the model I was suggesting. Such money must therefore be PAID BACK. That means the developers need to SELL individual copies of the game, and hence piracy thwarts them. I'm talking about rasing money directly as payment for the game. Once the money is raised, the game is paid for, and it does not need to be sold. See the difference?
And I laugh at your suggestion people would donate based on a concept while the biggest piracy apologist argument is that there's so much crap people want to try before they buy. In your plan they're going to pay for story drafts and concept art?
Or maybe a (short) runnable demo. In theory you are also running on the success of your previous games. That means a company like Valve would probably have been able to raise some cash for Half Life 2 based solely on the success of Half Life. It is undeniable that SOME people would donate under such a situation. I am in no way claiming that anywhere near enough money would be able to be raised. In fact, that was kind of my point - this is the model which the piracy fans ought to be advocating... it is, essentially, what they are advocating when they say piracy is okay. The question is, would such a model work? I'm thinking no, probably not. Not enough donations would occur to cover the costs of modern game development. You also seem to think it won't work. It might though, so I'm interested for other opinions.
Word of mouth sells me a game more than any bought-and-paid for "review."
Well, that's what the pirates are trying to say really - if a game is freely copyable it gets much better word of mouth transmission. Of course, if the game sucks, that word of mouth transmission isn't very useful, but a good game that is absolutely free (development has been paid for under above funding model) would have VERY GOOD word of mouth. The theory is that the game company that developed that game would then have a good chance at raising some funds for a sequel, or their next game. Once again, I am NOT saying this is a workable model for game development. I am merely throwing the idea out there for opinions. My personal opinion is as follows:
A game compoany that worked in such manner would have huge community support, and lots of people saying how wonderful they were... Until they very quickly run out of money, because while everyone was cheering them on, no one was actually donating any cash to develop new games.
Copyright holders' rights are being completely ignored. Well, except when it's a GPL violation article, that is! Suddenly copyright enforcement becomes a really big deal then...
Indeed - but that doesn't mean freely copying and trading is wrong per se, it merely means it is wrong in the current model (where games are bought/licensed on a per consumer basis). It would be interesting to see if other models could work. I would be suspicious as to how well all the people busying pirating now would take it if game companies shofted to a new model of operation.
Imagine this. Id software says "We're not going to sell Doom3. When it's done everyone can just grab copies for free, and copy it as much as they like. To cover the time and effort of our development of the game, however, we are not going to do any more work on it until $15 million (random number, I have idea of game development costs and expected profits) has been donated. Donations can be made by credit card HERE..."
Would enough people donate to raise the sort of cash required? Hard to say. It does make for an interesting model. The consumers and gamers become the venture capitalists, supporting whichever games have the most promising story ideas/artwork/mockups/short demos. I think it would be a fantastic system if it worked. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that everyone would be waiting for the free ride and not enough capital would be raised for development.
Has anyone tried such a game development model (not one man band geocities, but a serious games company looking to raise some venture capital for a game idea)?
You mean something that might look a little like this, with nice descriptions of the packages, and filters to see only upgradable packages, or new packages in the archive or even searches, like this?
Right, well, done. It;s called Synaptic. Except it works with apt not portage and is available for debian, fedora, connectiva, and any other distro using apt.
I'm sure a system is being developed for Gentoo - only logical really - but Synpatic has been available for quite some time now to make package management, installation, and upgrade simple.
Gentoo is a great distribution, but don't try to claim superiority for the wrong reasons.
Dreading the release of 2004.2? No sweat...Gentoo isn't like other distros (read: Redhat/Fedora) where upgrading remotely is a nightmare...
You mean updating your repositories in Synaptic, then just hitting upgrade all? Yes, upgrading remotely used to be a problem for some distributions, but I can think of very few that haven't worked out a nice system for making it simple these days.
The flexibility this system provides is well worth the extra few minutes rather than installing *.deb or *.rpm files and entering dependency hell.
I don't recall ever being in dependency hell with *.deb - apt seemed to take care of all of that for me. Of course apt is now available for rpm, or you can use yum if you want. Throw in urpmi and I think we can safely say most distros have dependency hell sorted... unless you want to go installing random third party rpms. Of course, if you try and install random third party rpms on a Gentoo system...
Portage is a neat system, and compiling everything from source does have some advantages, but don't pretend that other distros haven't neatly handled the same sorts of issues in different ways.
What exactly does Sun have to offer in such a merger? Sun's big attributes are UltraSPARC, Java, Solaris, and some knowledge about big server engineering.
Apple has no need of UltaSPARC, it's already made its deals with IBM for the PowerPC line, which is looking like a pretty good bet these days. Apple has as much Java as they need right now, I don't think Sun's Java expertise is going to bring much to the table. Solaris is of no use to Apple whatsoever really. Big servers - well that is something that Apple lacks, but they re beginning to make some slow but steady server progress on their own with the Xserve line - I don't think they are that desperate for a huge shot in the arm in the server market (let alone the conflicting chip architectures and OSs involved in expanding that way!).
No, it's Apple that has value to offer Sun, because right now Sun is making a bid for the desktop, and that is Apple's true strength right now.
That means there will be no merger. Sun might try buying Apple, but I think that would be rather too expensive for them right now.
Now how are they going to force people to give up millions of dollors in investment. Both software and training, let alone the new hardware that may be required (WinTel). For the so far unproven benifits of LongHorn?
Shiny things. IT management loves shiny things. As long as there are lots of nice shiny features that they can market to death it will sell. The reason the uptake of XP and Server 2003 has been so slow is because they don't really do a hell of a lot more thna Win2k. Yes, there are some nice new bits and pieces, but I don't know of any major shiny new features that actually break any ground.
On the other hand, Longhorn is their chance to fianlly add some of these "new groundbreaking" features - it's an all out overhaul rather than the incremental stuff that XP and 2003 have been. Of course Longhorn is, for now anyway, the vaporware repository too: "Objected Filesystem? Sure, in Longhorn.", "Graphics card accelerated desktop with scalable graphics? Sure, in Longhorn", "Uncrackable security model, Dancing bears and World peace? Sure, in Longhorn."
Some of the talked about features will undoubtedly make it in. Avalon, I gather, is making reasonable headway. Some of them might not - every time I hear about WinFS it has been scaled back even further, and will do even less. The point is that there are potentially enough shiny things to impress managment.
The thing to remember is that management cares about shiny things. Vendor lock in and ensuing extortion, security issues, and pretty much anything that requires contemplating more than a quarter in advance are irrelevant. Look! Shiny things... oooooh.
It should also be very obvious to anyone who knows this stuff just how giant a security risk all that sort of technology would present. I'm sure g-man thinks they've got it all sewn up now with these hardware controls, but cracks in the structure are inevitable and one can only imagine a world where just clicking to visit a website, rather than downloading a trojan installer that may or may not complete, instead downloads a robust trojan installer that will complete.
What Miguel is afraid of, I think, is not that this technology will be mind blowingly good, but merely that it will be good enough. Let's face it, Microsoft has been very good at "good enough". What do I mean by "good enough"? Well, potentially riddled with security holes that will be sloely patched over the 5-10 years following it's release - a debacle as far as security concious users are concerned - would still count as good enough. You see, the people in management who buy into these things are notorious for their lack of long term planning, and consideration of security. Look at what Microsoft has already happly foisted onto the corporate world - code riddled with exploits, but because it offered the right new features business bought into it.
The catch with XAML is that if business buys into it in a big way, it's going to be a serious blow to any OS other than an MS produced one. Why? It's the ultimate embrace and extend of HTML to lock people in. It's an HTML extension that is intimately tied to copyrighted Windows code that MS has exclusive control over. It offers enough in the way of new wizzy features that, management ignoring security issues as they usually do, it could easily get serious uptake. Once you take a dose of that drug though, it will be very hard indeed to break the habit.
Or, to put it another way, this is Microsofts latest and most addictive crack. It has the potential to get a whole new generation of computers hopelessly, horribly, unescapably addicted to Microsoft products. It is worth being afraid of it.
If you're interested in something a little more complex than basic plots and charts I very highly reccomend VTK a visualisation toolkit that is unparalelled for putting together complex 3D visualisations of data. It's all in C++, is open source, and has Java, and Python bindings.
I generally used the Python myself - and the python API is very nicely done - a pleasure to use, and a great way to do complex 3D data visualisation.
Slashdot Mirror
Not wasting time with the dupes today I see. Why wait 12 hours before posting it again to the front page instead of section where it probably belonged?
Jedidiah.
Forget the codec for a moment. If I want to install the latest client operating system from Microsoft there is only 1. (This is the ideal - I know we've had Me/98/XP running concurrently but that's still only 3). How many Linux distributions exist - each version with its quirks and styles. It may be fantastic from the point of view of evolution of the software. Its not going to get users switching over.
First of all, this is stupid. Imagine if we did away with all that pointless branching into different car manufacturers (who needs all of Toyota, Nissan, Ford, GM etc. each with their quirks and styles) and just had a single make and model of car? Much easier right? Huh?
Secondly, this is stupid. You are comparing apples with rubber ducks. If you want the latest client operating system from SuSE there is only 1, just like Microsoft. If you want the latest client operating system from Mandrake there is only 1, just like Microsoft. You may as well be saying "If you want the latest client operating system from Apple there is only 1, Mac OS X 10.3. How many x86 operating systems exist - each version with its quirks and styles."
Please try to make sense in future.
Jedidiah.
In some senses they actually did do that. They made a very impressive rendering engine, and a means of rending GUI widgets via that rendering engine. It seems to do that very well. The fact that other people have taken that and used it to build a wide variety of complex applications is hardly the fault of Gecko and XUL.
What you are saying doesn't really make sense. It's like blaming QT or GTK+ for every app ever produced with them.
Jedidiah
Actually the Netherlands do have a national cricket side, though they usually get slaughtered by almost any other international side (even Kenya). Still, there must be a reasonable number of cricket players there to manage to have a national side, a national cricket board and be involved in the ICC.
Jedidiah.
Except he's not even asking for Microsoft and Mozilla to work together. He's asking for Mozilla to come and work with Microsoft, without any clearly defined APIs or featuresets, and little apparent intent of releasing any any time soon.
If Microsoft was prepared to work together with Mozilla - well, that would probably involve Microsoft engineers comitting code to Firefox to add Avalon and WinFS support themselves.
Even he isn't crazy enough to ask for that one.
Jedidiah.
So Firefox doesn't use Avalon or WinFS yet. Not surprising considering they are not in use except in Microsoft development shops. His argument seems to be "but then you'll be a couple of years behind everyone else". I'm not sure it matters that much. I doubt anyone but IE developers are doing any coding against these frameworks ATM because they just aren't solidly locked down yet. Coding against a changing framework and API with disappearing/suddenly new features is a recipe for disaster unless you have a good inside track.
If you read the comments he spends a lot of time saying how wonderful Avalon and WinFS are. If anyone asks why he says "because they're revolutionary". So what sort of features are they actually going to have in the release version? He spends pretty much the entire thread dodging that.
Microsoft has no clue exactly what is going to make it into Longhorn, nor exactly what sort of feature set these "revolutionary" technologies will posses. Why on earth would start trying to code against them now?!
And in the end, if he really thinks it will be that wonderful to have Firefox using Avalon and WinFS... well, he can always write the code himself can't he. It is open source, so he can fork and do what he likes.
My impression (after reading through the comments to the blog): All hype and bluster and no content. I don't think Mozilla should be the least bit concerned.
Jedidiah.
Excellent, hopefully they can ask hima simple question and we can put another argument to rest - Was he aware of the exploit from his own hacking, or being told about it by someone, or did he just read the exploit advisory from Microsoft when they released the patch?
Realistically odds have to favour just reading the advisory, but there have been plenty of claims to the contrary.
The next question is, will any media actually bother to find out and publish the answer to that question. I'm guessing "absolutely no chance in hell".
Jedidiah.
I had my credit card number stolen - still no idea how. May have been random card number generation for all I know - I did nothing particularly unsafe (using your credit card at all is pretty unsafe). I was immediately contacted by my bank who were suspicious because the charges were (a) out of line with my current spending pattern (b) in a completely different country to my previous charges. I simply verified that no, I hadn't been to Spain recently, they faxed me some forms (basically just signing to say that no, the following charges were not made by me) and 3 days later my new credit card arrived by courier. everything else was handled by the bank.
In some ways I got lucky because the nature of the spending raised flags, and because my bank actually has incredibly good service. The catch is, it is up to the credit card companies to wear the cost of stolen cards etc. presuming you take reasonable precautions. If they want to embed easily readable RFID tags and have to cover a shitload of costs for easily stolen card numbers... well, more power to them. They'll be out of that business soon enough.
Jedidiah.
No, that's not about patents at all. The things stopping you from running straight to the competitor and selling them all your ideas are contracts and trade secret laws, not patents.
Patents are not there to give the inventor a monopoly on what they invent. If that were the case, patents wouldn't bother with expiry dates. The original principle of patents was to give small inventors an opportunity to sell their invention - that is, if someone comes up with a brilliant new widget a large company could get his invention to market much quicker than the inventor can. The inventor can't hide their invention away - they have to go out and advertise it to venture capitalists and potential backers so that they can raise funds to bring it to market. A patent was there to let the inventor publish their invention and have a monopoly on it long enough to get to market and become established.
That's certainly not the way patents work these days - especially with the various extensions, and other cunning techniques (constantly revising a patent to keep it in the works for as long as possible) used to extend the length of patents. Furthermore, with business method and software patents you can now patent general broad ideas and algorithms of how to do things. Once things get that broad there are problems.
In the current world of patents R&D is discouraged, not encouraged. Why should a smaller steel mill put in any research into anything? Odds are the larger steel mill with the larger amount of cash to throw into R&D and patents will manage to patent (through broad patents) pretty much anything you might happen to invent. All they have to do is keep a vague eye on your R&D department then crash research and patent anything you're workign on. To spend 4 years on research only to find the larger mill has just patented something sufficently close to your idea to block it - well, that's a waste of money. You're better off not bothering and just licensing whatever new stuff the bigger mill comes up with.
The real question you should be asking is "Why should a steel mill invest in R&D?". The answer is, because they can make better products more efficiently if they do. That should be reason and incentive enough.
Jedidiah.
We know what problems they've caused and how the media's gone nuts over each virus, making things seem bigger and bigger. But some old viruses were much nastier, and I sure don't hear about those types of infections anymore.
Well, in the past several years the focus for worms and viruses has been on how quickly and efficiently they can spread rather than how much damage they can do. I guess you could sy virus writers have gotten a little more mature, and aren't out to do as much damage as possible.
On the subject of efficiently spreading viruses and worms though, here's an interesting concept for one. It is all a bit overstated and massively exaggerates the risk, but I think some sort of semi coordinated worm will come out soon rather than the blind pounding attacks that we usually get. It will be interesting to see how things go once that is the standard for worms.
Jedidiah.
No, NASA can't do that, not within 2 weeks.
It gets worse when you note the extra rule that only 10% of the non fuel mass of the craft can be replaced between flights. That pretty much counts out all the Apollo program stuff, even if they had managed a launch in 2 weeks. Also, while I'm not clear on the exact numbers, I suspect those rockets used to launch the space shuttle account for more than 10% of the non fuel mass.
Of course the Shuttle gets to LEO, which is a much larger step than 100km up, but if you cna get 100km up easily and efficiently, it may well be possible to extend the capabilities and slowly stretch toward LEO.
Jedidiah.
might want to go to India to speak with someone smarter than you with a better grasp on mathe and science than you'll ever have - more than likely he'll do better work for less.
Except there's not just a single job to go around. Just because there's someone better than me doesn't mean I will be outsourced. It's a case of supply and demand. The number of people in India who have as much (or greater) grasp of mathematics as me is probably quite high - but not that high. There just aren't that many people with sufficient time and inclination to do graduate level mathematics, even though there is a growing market for it. That means someone in India might be willing to work for less, but he doesn't have to, because demand outstrips supply. Besides, I work cheap - by not living in countries with an overly inflated cost of living.
Supply an ddemand is busy moving all the "connect a webserver to a database" jobs to India though. Being able to write a web front end to a database used to be a relatively uncommon skill - but there wasn't much market for it either. Then the dot com boom hit, and all of a sudden there was HUGE demand, which completely outstripped the current supply. That meant salaries shot through the roof, and every other idiot was learning how to do it. Pretty soon supply caught up with demand. Of course, given that an intelligent person can learn how to do such things in month or so, and bothering to spend that month meant you could earn 10 times what you would get otherwise in India, a whole lot of the people learning how were in India. Right now there is a massive surplus of supply which drives salaries back down. The fact that a lot of that supply is in India is causing a lot of jobs to head that way.
Jedidiah.
And you will learn it, and employers will not give a shit, because they just want to connect a webserver to a database, which is not science, and when you realize that your ego about your science knowledge has prevented you from finding a job anywhere but McDonald's, you will realize the error of your ways, and you will want to connect a webserver to a database.
On the other hand, when your job of just connecting a server to a database gets outsourced to monkeys in the congo, the person who learned the math and the science will be getting a serious software engineering and design job.
Jedidiah.
Analysis of algorithms and big O type work requires at least some experience with proof by induction, which you encounter in Calculus II in relation to series and sequences. I haven't done anything more advanced (I'm just a freshman) but I would think it starts there. Probability is important too, I would imagine, for analyzing hash codes and cache misses and other random stuff.
If you are doing any sort of information theoretic work I would strongly reccomend also doing some courses in commutativbe algebra (groups, rings, fields etc.), as having a good understanding of polynomial rings and finite fields will make otherwise complicated topics trivial.
Jedidiah.,
Advanced math? You call linear algebra advanced math? Hmm... Maybe I overrated math. :)
I agree. I am quite surprised by the low expectations of many people here for "advanced math". To be honest I would have expected a CS major to, depending on their area of interest, done courses in commutative algebra (groups, rings, fields etc.) and basic galois theory, or, if heading if a different direction differential geometry. The prerequisites for those courses of course covering a lot of other very valuable material.
Jedidiah.
To be honest, that's just stupid. You should already be badass proficient in basic algebra and trig going into your final year of high school. I am constantly amazed by the poor level of preparation in mathematics of North American, and particularly US students coming in to College. Where I come from introductory calculus was covered in the second to last year of high school, and the only math course going in the final year (I'm counting statistics as its own discipline) was a pure calculus course. Most students didn't seem to have any difficulty with this. It seems to me that the US sets its expectations of students too low with regard to mathematics education at the high school level.
Jedidiah.
They also enlisted the help of a sole Kiwi inventor, who'd made a handheld laser modeling gun. Held in the hand, with no external supports or machinery (like a barcode scanner at the shops), it can quickly scan a model into the computer with great detail. You "paint" it with the laser, and it draws it on screen.
It's a small company in New Zealand. They do a lot of interestign work, including some interesting non-mesh based methods for 3D models. Their website is here: http://www.aranz.co.nz
Jedidiah.
It happens all the time. Joe Consumer isn't going to put in venture capitol. The devs raise it on their own from private sources. Eventually they have to go to a publisher if they want to get it on store shelves (its one thing to raise capitol for making a game, its another to raise money for a production run, marketing, wining and dining distributors to get it on store shelves, etc).
Yes, but that capital is BORROWED, not paid as in the model I was suggesting. Such money must therefore be PAID BACK. That means the developers need to SELL individual copies of the game, and hence piracy thwarts them. I'm talking about rasing money directly as payment for the game. Once the money is raised, the game is paid for, and it does not need to be sold. See the difference?
And I laugh at your suggestion people would donate based on a concept while the biggest piracy apologist argument is that there's so much crap people want to try before they buy. In your plan they're going to pay for story drafts and concept art?
Or maybe a (short) runnable demo. In theory you are also running on the success of your previous games. That means a company like Valve would probably have been able to raise some cash for Half Life 2 based solely on the success of Half Life. It is undeniable that SOME people would donate under such a situation. I am in no way claiming that anywhere near enough money would be able to be raised. In fact, that was kind of my point - this is the model which the piracy fans ought to be advocating... it is, essentially, what they are advocating when they say piracy is okay. The question is, would such a model work? I'm thinking no, probably not. Not enough donations would occur to cover the costs of modern game development. You also seem to think it won't work. It might though, so I'm interested for other opinions.
Word of mouth sells me a game more than any bought-and-paid for "review."
Well, that's what the pirates are trying to say really - if a game is freely copyable it gets much better word of mouth transmission. Of course, if the game sucks, that word of mouth transmission isn't very useful, but a good game that is absolutely free (development has been paid for under above funding model) would have VERY GOOD word of mouth. The theory is that the game company that developed that game would then have a good chance at raising some funds for a sequel, or their next game. Once again, I am NOT saying this is a workable model for game development. I am merely throwing the idea out there for opinions. My personal opinion is as follows:
A game compoany that worked in such manner would have huge community support, and lots of people saying how wonderful they were... Until they very quickly run out of money, because while everyone was cheering them on, no one was actually donating any cash to develop new games.
Jedidiah.
Copyright holders' rights are being completely ignored. Well, except when it's a GPL violation article, that is! Suddenly copyright enforcement becomes a really big deal then...
Indeed - but that doesn't mean freely copying and trading is wrong per se, it merely means it is wrong in the current model (where games are bought/licensed on a per consumer basis). It would be interesting to see if other models could work. I would be suspicious as to how well all the people busying pirating now would take it if game companies shofted to a new model of operation.
Imagine this. Id software says "We're not going to sell Doom3. When it's done everyone can just grab copies for free, and copy it as much as they like. To cover the time and effort of our development of the game, however, we are not going to do any more work on it until $15 million (random number, I have idea of game development costs and expected profits) has been donated. Donations can be made by credit card HERE..."
Would enough people donate to raise the sort of cash required? Hard to say. It does make for an interesting model. The consumers and gamers become the venture capitalists, supporting whichever games have the most promising story ideas/artwork/mockups/short demos. I think it would be a fantastic system if it worked. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that everyone would be waiting for the free ride and not enough capital would be raised for development.
Has anyone tried such a game development model (not one man band geocities, but a serious games company looking to raise some venture capital for a game idea)?
Jedidiah.
You mean something that might look a little like this, with nice descriptions of the packages, and filters to see only upgradable packages, or new packages in the archive or even searches, like this?
Right, well, done. It;s called Synaptic. Except it works with apt not portage and is available for debian, fedora, connectiva, and any other distro using apt.
I'm sure a system is being developed for Gentoo - only logical really - but Synpatic has been available for quite some time now to make package management, installation, and upgrade simple.
Gentoo is a great distribution, but don't try to claim superiority for the wrong reasons.
Jedidiah.
Dreading the release of 2004.2? No sweat...Gentoo isn't like other distros (read: Redhat/Fedora) where upgrading remotely is a nightmare...
You mean updating your repositories in Synaptic, then just hitting upgrade all? Yes, upgrading remotely used to be a problem for some distributions, but I can think of very few that haven't worked out a nice system for making it simple these days.
The flexibility this system provides is well worth the extra few minutes rather than installing *.deb or *.rpm files and entering dependency hell.
I don't recall ever being in dependency hell with *.deb - apt seemed to take care of all of that for me. Of course apt is now available for rpm, or you can use yum if you want. Throw in urpmi and I think we can safely say most distros have dependency hell sorted... unless you want to go installing random third party rpms. Of course, if you try and install random third party rpms on a Gentoo system...
Portage is a neat system, and compiling everything from source does have some advantages, but don't pretend that other distros haven't neatly handled the same sorts of issues in different ways.
Jedidiah.
What exactly does Sun have to offer in such a merger? Sun's big attributes are UltraSPARC, Java, Solaris, and some knowledge about big server engineering.
Apple has no need of UltaSPARC, it's already made its deals with IBM for the PowerPC line, which is looking like a pretty good bet these days. Apple has as much Java as they need right now, I don't think Sun's Java expertise is going to bring much to the table. Solaris is of no use to Apple whatsoever really. Big servers - well that is something that Apple lacks, but they re beginning to make some slow but steady server progress on their own with the Xserve line - I don't think they are that desperate for a huge shot in the arm in the server market (let alone the conflicting chip architectures and OSs involved in expanding that way!).
No, it's Apple that has value to offer Sun, because right now Sun is making a bid for the desktop, and that is Apple's true strength right now.
That means there will be no merger. Sun might try buying Apple, but I think that would be rather too expensive for them right now.
Jedidiah.
Now how are they going to force people to give up millions of dollors in investment. Both software and training, let alone the new hardware that may be required (WinTel). For the so far unproven benifits of LongHorn?
Shiny things. IT management loves shiny things. As long as there are lots of nice shiny features that they can market to death it will sell. The reason the uptake of XP and Server 2003 has been so slow is because they don't really do a hell of a lot more thna Win2k. Yes, there are some nice new bits and pieces, but I don't know of any major shiny new features that actually break any ground.
On the other hand, Longhorn is their chance to fianlly add some of these "new groundbreaking" features - it's an all out overhaul rather than the incremental stuff that XP and 2003 have been. Of course Longhorn is, for now anyway, the vaporware repository too: "Objected Filesystem? Sure, in Longhorn.", "Graphics card accelerated desktop with scalable graphics? Sure, in Longhorn", "Uncrackable security model, Dancing bears and World peace? Sure, in Longhorn."
Some of the talked about features will undoubtedly make it in. Avalon, I gather, is making reasonable headway. Some of them might not - every time I hear about WinFS it has been scaled back even further, and will do even less. The point is that there are potentially enough shiny things to impress managment.
The thing to remember is that management cares about shiny things. Vendor lock in and ensuing extortion, security issues, and pretty much anything that requires contemplating more than a quarter in advance are irrelevant. Look! Shiny things... oooooh.
Jedidiah.
It should also be very obvious to anyone who knows this stuff just how giant a security risk all that sort of technology would present. I'm sure g-man thinks they've got it all sewn up now with these hardware controls, but cracks in the structure are inevitable and one can only imagine a world where just clicking to visit a website, rather than downloading a trojan installer that may or may not complete, instead downloads a robust trojan installer that will complete.
What Miguel is afraid of, I think, is not that this technology will be mind blowingly good, but merely that it will be good enough. Let's face it, Microsoft has been very good at "good enough". What do I mean by "good enough"? Well, potentially riddled with security holes that will be sloely patched over the 5-10 years following it's release - a debacle as far as security concious users are concerned - would still count as good enough. You see, the people in management who buy into these things are notorious for their lack of long term planning, and consideration of security. Look at what Microsoft has already happly foisted onto the corporate world - code riddled with exploits, but because it offered the right new features business bought into it.
The catch with XAML is that if business buys into it in a big way, it's going to be a serious blow to any OS other than an MS produced one. Why? It's the ultimate embrace and extend of HTML to lock people in. It's an HTML extension that is intimately tied to copyrighted Windows code that MS has exclusive control over. It offers enough in the way of new wizzy features that, management ignoring security issues as they usually do, it could easily get serious uptake. Once you take a dose of that drug though, it will be very hard indeed to break the habit.
Or, to put it another way, this is Microsofts latest and most addictive crack. It has the potential to get a whole new generation of computers hopelessly, horribly, unescapably addicted to Microsoft products. It is worth being afraid of it.
Jedidiah.
If you're interested in something a little more complex than basic plots and charts I very highly reccomend VTK a visualisation toolkit that is unparalelled for putting together complex 3D visualisations of data. It's all in C++, is open source, and has Java, and Python bindings.
I generally used the Python myself - and the python API is very nicely done - a pleasure to use, and a great way to do complex 3D data visualisation.
Jedidiah.