Mey point was merely to highlight the corpoprate/capitalistic slant of globalization (as opposed to the socialist connotation that OSS has). You are referring to technological globalization while I was referring to economic/industrial globalization.
The president of the regional council, Jean-Paul Huchon, is a self-confessed "partisan of the rebalancing of the supply of proprietary and open-source software" who previously welcomed the launch of the Firefox 2 browser and led the support for a creation of a competitiveness hub based on open source.
If anything, I'd imagine that they are attempting to build a competency around OSS.
Copernics called - turns out the US isn't the center of the Universe (and yes, I live in the US).
Almost anything in graphics programming is entirely mathematics (or physics, which once again, brings us to math).
Networking - network optimization algorithms and the like use queuing theory, routing algorithms, graph theory and related stuff, which is math.
Almost everything in quantitative AI is math - machine learning, neural nets and the like.
Multimedia - codecs and the like use transforms, compression algorithms etc. which are, once again, math.
Cryptography - crypto is almost entirely number theory. Sure, implementation needs coding skills, but the fundamentals of crypto itself is entirely math.
Data strutures, compilers and the like are once again discrete math and graph theory, stacks, queues and trees.
Information theory is almost entirely applied math.
Distributed computing, parallel computing etc. once again use routing mechanisms, load distribution algorithms and other things which are heavily dependent on math.
Theoretical computer science by itself is, well, applied math (look at computational complexity).
If you wanted to do "web development" (heh) you are in the wrong area. Other than parts of systems programming (and even there, paging algorithmsm memory management etc. are mathematical), Computer "Science" is, well, math oriented.
You might just end up with the, "Body is willing but the mind is not" thing though.
Old people tend to have the opposite kinda problem, but hey. Mid-life crisis and all that.
(Kidding, kidding)
On a serious note, I know several people who decided to take up alternative careers or go for a PhD much later in life. When I was in grad school, there was this guy who had graduated from MIT in the 80s and came back in his 40s to go to grad school.
He had his own company, so that was helping him support himself. And I've seen several people who decide later on in life that they want to specialize in something different because they felt that they weren't using their head enough at their current job.
I think at the end of the day, anyone can do it - you just have to like it enough. Goodluck!
hey, i've had a yahoo id pretty much as long as they've been available, and i guess i should get it tattooed on me so when i meet people they will know how cool i am and how old skooool. there are some whiny people out there.
I was a Rocketmail user from 1997, long before Yahoo! bought out Rocketmail and it became Yahoo! mail.
Shortly thereafter, my email account mysteriously disappeared. By the time I had gotten through, someone else had already taken my existing username - and of course, it was a very joyful experience.
A couple of years later, my inbox mysteriously was empty, and once again, complaints to Yahoo! customer support did not do a thing.
I could go on, but let's just say that from my past experience, Yahoo! acquisitions have been ugly experiences for me, and so has the "Yahoo! experience" in general.
OK, you invested all this time in creating metadata and didn't back it up.
Some do, most don't. You assume that everyone who does photography know technology. There is no particularly easy way to backup all that meta-data, and it becomes harder still if you are not a techie.
And you're earning a living off it to some degree.
Some do, some don't.
Sorry, again, it's not very bright to not have a backup of the data that is critical to your continued success.
Perhaps, I can't say I disagree with that. But like I said, the idea behind being a paying customer is that you hope these situations do not come to pass (I pay you for a service, you provide that service well).
Now, if this were a corporate account, such data loss would be met with lawsuits. Since it is individuals here, there isn't a whole lot people can do about it.
At the end of the day, people are worried about the integrity of their data. Are there alternatives and possibilities for backup? Sure, but it's not something that can happen overnight.
The only bone that people have to pick is that Flickr is moving to a company with a known trackrecord for poor data integrity, poor maintenance and lack of customer support. The reason that they gave us was a stupid one - that they wanted to give all the cool features that Yahoo! had. The point is, those that are interested in those features would have merged anyway, those of us who aren't don't particularly care.
As original users, we were the first to be with Flickr before it became a part of Yahoo!, the first community. When Yahoo! bought Flickr, it wasn't just the service, it was also this community. By doing this, Flickr is essentially telling the community that helped it all along that it does not care for them anymore.
Isn't there a lesson in business and usability about listening to your customers? Or something?
Wait a minute... are you telling me that there are professional photographers who store their content on Flickr and don't have backup copies? Excuse me, but that doesn't sound very professional. That sounds stupid.
You don't get it, do you? It's not just about backup - it is about everything else. The organization, the tags, the categorized way of storing your pictures.
It is not merely the photos, but rather the meta-data. People who like photography put in a lot of work on their photos, and have them categorized and tagged in detail. Not to mention user comments and the like.
They are worried about losing that.
Consider this - you have taken a photograph 5 years ago, and you wrote all about it. Do you think you'd be able to remember anything in detail about it today? Now imagine this for 5,000 photographs. Do you think you'd be able to remember everything about every photograph that you'd categorized and organized?
That is what people are afraid of losing.
Do you think it would be easy to go back and redo all that? I would imagine not.
> Oh my god! If you don't pay for the service, they may delete your content.
Umm, which part of, "some of us paying customers" did not make sense to you?
If your Yahoo! email account goes to hell for some reason, you lose your Flickr account and everything in with it. This has happened to a lot of folks, and people do not want this happening to them.
And since we are - I repeat - paying customers - we thought we should have a say in the matter.
The problem is that Yahoo! has a nasty habit of deleting accounts for a number of reasons, and there have been several instances of this happening.
I've had my Yahoo! account disappearing, my mails disappearing etc. I guess when you've paid for the service (some of us Pro users) and have put in several years of effort uploading thousands of photographs (a lot of the pro users in Flickr are professional photographers), you are a little worried about your photos disappearing overnight.
I guess it boils down to the fact that as paying customers, we thought our opinions would have a say in the matter. But it turns out that it does not, and they are going to go ahead and do something that almost the entire Old Skool userbase of Flickr is against. I do not know, I guess maybe I am being naive in some ways.
There are so many movies out there that I do not care about, but if it's a movie I really like, I will go out and buy the DVD.
Ditto for a book - if it's good, I will go ahead and buy it.
And people with tastes different than mine will do the same for books and movies.
The advantage of a book is that most books are quite cheap (well, unless you are looking for a specific one in a narrow area, say something by Springer Verlag or something).
Movie DVDs are getting there, but music is far, far away. That is the problem. And the signal to noise is terrible for music - so much crap out there.
And finally, I can do anything I want with my book - photocopy it, scan the pages, rip it - whatever the hell I want.
The music and movie industry is trying to stop me from doing just that - and that is the heart of the problem.
My Dad, who is a lawyer, always used to say: "Law is not justice, legal is not right and illegal is not wrong."
Law is just a set of rules for the smooth functioning of society and has nothing to do with morality or ethics - they may overlap in places, but that does not mean a thing.
Holy crap dude! I just saw the pictures of the potholes and the roads on your commute. That looks terrible. Biking in a place like that has gotta be hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Mey point was merely to highlight the corpoprate/capitalistic slant of globalization (as opposed to the socialist connotation that OSS has). You are referring to technological globalization while I was referring to economic/industrial globalization.
Wow, do you also watch Fox and worship Bill O'Reilly?
Seriously - nothing about the language is being mentioned in the article.
Anti-corporation/anti-globalization? Perhaps. Anti-American? Please.
The president of the regional council, Jean-Paul Huchon, is a self-confessed "partisan of the rebalancing of the supply of proprietary and open-source software" who previously welcomed the launch of the Firefox 2 browser and led the support for a creation of a competitiveness hub based on open source.
If anything, I'd imagine that they are attempting to build a competency around OSS.
Copernics called - turns out the US isn't the center of the Universe (and yes, I live in the US).
If you wanted to do "web development" (heh) you are in the wrong area. Other than parts of systems programming (and even there, paging algorithmsm memory management etc. are mathematical), Computer "Science" is, well, math oriented.
You might just end up with the, "Body is willing but the mind is not" thing though.
Old people tend to have the opposite kinda problem, but hey. Mid-life crisis and all that.
(Kidding, kidding)
On a serious note, I know several people who decided to take up alternative careers or go for a PhD much later in life. When I was in grad school, there was this guy who had graduated from MIT in the 80s and came back in his 40s to go to grad school.
He had his own company, so that was helping him support himself. And I've seen several people who decide later on in life that they want to specialize in something different because they felt that they weren't using their head enough at their current job.
I think at the end of the day, anyone can do it - you just have to like it enough. Goodluck!
Well, yeah, I guess, kinda-sorta, in a way, I suppose. Actually, come to think of it, maybe not. Or maybe I just am not sure.
:-\
I'm confused.
Shortly thereafter, my email account mysteriously disappeared. By the time I had gotten through, someone else had already taken my existing username - and of course, it was a very joyful experience.
A couple of years later, my inbox mysteriously was empty, and once again, complaints to Yahoo! customer support did not do a thing.
I could go on, but let's just say that from my past experience, Yahoo! acquisitions have been ugly experiences for me, and so has the "Yahoo! experience" in general.
OK, you invested all this time in creating metadata and didn't back it up.
Some do, most don't. You assume that everyone who does photography know technology. There is no particularly easy way to backup all that meta-data, and it becomes harder still if you are not a techie.
And you're earning a living off it to some degree.
Some do, some don't.
Sorry, again, it's not very bright to not have a backup of the data that is critical to your continued success.
Perhaps, I can't say I disagree with that. But like I said, the idea behind being a paying customer is that you hope these situations do not come to pass (I pay you for a service, you provide that service well).
Now, if this were a corporate account, such data loss would be met with lawsuits. Since it is individuals here, there isn't a whole lot people can do about it.
At the end of the day, people are worried about the integrity of their data. Are there alternatives and possibilities for backup? Sure, but it's not something that can happen overnight.
The only bone that people have to pick is that Flickr is moving to a company with a known trackrecord for poor data integrity, poor maintenance and lack of customer support. The reason that they gave us was a stupid one - that they wanted to give all the cool features that Yahoo! had. The point is, those that are interested in those features would have merged anyway, those of us who aren't don't particularly care.
As original users, we were the first to be with Flickr before it became a part of Yahoo!, the first community. When Yahoo! bought Flickr, it wasn't just the service, it was also this community. By doing this, Flickr is essentially telling the community that helped it all along that it does not care for them anymore.
Isn't there a lesson in business and usability about listening to your customers? Or something?
Wait a minute... are you telling me that there are professional photographers who store their content on Flickr and don't have backup copies? Excuse me, but that doesn't sound very professional. That sounds stupid.
You don't get it, do you? It's not just about backup - it is about everything else. The organization, the tags, the categorized way of storing your pictures.
It is not merely the photos, but rather the meta-data. People who like photography put in a lot of work on their photos, and have them categorized and tagged in detail. Not to mention user comments and the like.
They are worried about losing that.
Consider this - you have taken a photograph 5 years ago, and you wrote all about it. Do you think you'd be able to remember anything in detail about it today? Now imagine this for 5,000 photographs. Do you think you'd be able to remember everything about every photograph that you'd categorized and organized?
That is what people are afraid of losing.
Do you think it would be easy to go back and redo all that? I would imagine not.
> Oh my god! If you don't pay for the service, they may delete your content.
Umm, which part of, "some of us paying customers" did not make sense to you?
If your Yahoo! email account goes to hell for some reason, you lose your Flickr account and everything in with it. This has happened to a lot of folks, and people do not want this happening to them.
And since we are - I repeat - paying customers - we thought we should have a say in the matter.
Actually, it is a little more complex than that.
The problem is that Yahoo! has a nasty habit of deleting accounts for a number of reasons, and there have been several instances of this happening.
I've had my Yahoo! account disappearing, my mails disappearing etc. I guess when you've paid for the service (some of us Pro users) and have put in several years of effort uploading thousands of photographs (a lot of the pro users in Flickr are professional photographers), you are a little worried about your photos disappearing overnight.
I wrote a detailed rant about it, The Flickr Fiasco - Why Yahoo! Should Learn to Listen to Its Customers.
I guess it boils down to the fact that as paying customers, we thought our opinions would have a say in the matter. But it turns out that it does not, and they are going to go ahead and do something that almost the entire Old Skool userbase of Flickr is against. I do not know, I guess maybe I am being naive in some ways.
*shrug*
...and civilization vanishes in a puff of logic? :)
How about original, quality stuff for a change?
There are so many movies out there that I do not care about, but if it's a movie I really like, I will go out and buy the DVD.
Ditto for a book - if it's good, I will go ahead and buy it.
And people with tastes different than mine will do the same for books and movies.
The advantage of a book is that most books are quite cheap (well, unless you are looking for a specific one in a narrow area, say something by Springer Verlag or something).
Movie DVDs are getting there, but music is far, far away. That is the problem. And the signal to noise is terrible for music - so much crap out there.
And finally, I can do anything I want with my book - photocopy it, scan the pages, rip it - whatever the hell I want.
The music and movie industry is trying to stop me from doing just that - and that is the heart of the problem.
IMHO and all that.
Correct.
My Dad, who is a lawyer, always used to say: "Law is not justice, legal is not right and illegal is not wrong."
Law is just a set of rules for the smooth functioning of society and has nothing to do with morality or ethics - they may overlap in places, but that does not mean a thing.
Dude! It's called duct tape, man. And you call yourself a geek?
Tsk, tsk.
Hey! Speak for yourself. My realdoll took my virginity.
Well, this ruling would only apply to gmail.de, right? It seems unlikely that it would apply to gmail.com, as well.
;)
In that case, German Gmail users suffer - of course, given how EU laws work, European Gmail users suffer.
Secondly, the services provided are quite different (similar to Apple Records and Apple Computer, pre-Apple, Inc. of course).
But you're probably right. There is no problem that large amounts of moolah can't solve.
Dude!
That is so wrong. I could say something about mice and pussycats, but that would just be wrong.
Wait a while, and it'll be eight times as good! ;-)
Well, look at the bright side.
At least, you have a use for the cup holder now.
You mean 98.7 percent of the entire adult population.
Male adult population - most women I know do not particularly care for porn. Stories, on the other hand. Oh yeah, boobies for men and smut for women.
I meant, it doesn't return any results.
:-\
I should try using the preview button one of these days.
Of course, tiananmen square student tanks return any results, unlike the same elsewhere.
Personally, I'm all for Virgin Brides!
I agree.
That was my very first thought when I read about this. I mean, if all you wanted was a stimulant, get yourself some caffeine pills.
Part of what makes a coffee special is its taste.
Holy crap dude! I just saw the pictures of the potholes and the roads on your commute. That looks terrible. Biking in a place like that has gotta be hell.