Now what about realloc(), calloc(), free(), open(), read(), write(), etc, etc, etc?
I won't claim that C works best for every purpose - Don't make this into a holy war, I only
meant that the underlying problem comes from the coders, not the languages they use.
But to answer your question, you can wrap every failable library function, if you want to. You
can even find premade wrapper libraries/classes to make C/C++ behave like exception-oriented
languages (the latter actually has some exception abilities already, actually, but not to the
extent you appear to prefer).
Now suppose you want to allow the error to trickle up to some top-level code,
where you can clean up after yourself and maybe generate a nice log message. How
would you do that?
You register an atexit function, and take care of whatever cleanup and logging needs
to happen.
For finer granularity, you can write a wrapper (or several variations) around "exit()"
that do what you want.
Or, you can actually handle the error, which IMO should always
happen, even if you can't recover from the error. And there, this issue
comes down to a matter of what the programmer does rather than what the language
does. When a program throws an exception rather than popping up a nice human-targetted
message telling me what went wrong, that tells me that the programmer simply didn't
expect the error in question to happen. And if he didn't expect that error,
who knows what else he didn't expect.
Assuming that Flash is made in C or C++, here is another very vivid example of why these languages should be banned.
You do understand that all those nasty loosely-typed pointer-based exploits you and others disdain in C, exist
because C nicely mirrors how the actual hardware handles similar concepts?
If failure of allocation threw an exception, instead of just returning null, there would be no problem.
And if programmers would check that the allocation succeeded, we would also have no problem.
In your hypothetical "safe" language (C#, for example), I can't count how many times I've seen
system calls wrapped in a try/catch to hide the exception, then carry on pretending the call worked
just fine. Guess what? SAME DAMNED PROBLEM!
Don't blame the pipe-wrench for making a poor hammer. Blame the craftsman too lazy to find a hammer.
What's the point in the web if authors are putting up masturbatory works of web design that handicap the readers in favor of the author?
Exactly my point, if not your intended meaning - Why do we have the web, if not to use the features it
offers beyond linked pure-text content?
Everyone saying "why do you hate group-X" apparently doesn't remember that the predecessor to the web, Gopher,
had "perfect" accessibility. It worked very similarly, with the teensy difference that it used plain text for
everything. The blind could use it (screenreaders do great on plain text), the deaf could use it, those stuck
with only dialup could use it... A win for everybody - Except the fully-functional 99% of humanity.
Like it or not, the web became popular not because of its text-oriented content. Yeah, news sites
could do a better job at accessibility. Storefronts could do better - And both of those care more about
reaching everybody than presentation. But the "real" content? How do you make a webcomic blind-accessible
(and don't say to add an "alt" tag, describing a comic does not substitute for seeing it)?
How do you make music deaf-accessible (again, "captions" do not express the magic we call "music")?
How do you make a mountain wheelchair accessible? If you answer "pave it", you've kinda missed the
point of climbing the mountain in the first place. And speaking of missed points...
I think you kind of miss the point about the World Wide Web.
No, I've ignored your version of what how you want the WWW. I, as a fully-functional human, want
text, images, and sound. I want subtlety of presentation that no screenreader will ever have
the ability to render. I want crappy music videos on YouTube without the distraction of useless captioning
that only a tiny segment of their audience needs - The same segment, insultingly enough, that probably wouldn't
click on a music video in the first place.
You want "accessibility"? As an introverted misanthrope, I don't "get" social networking. Call me an
emotional cripple, if you will. So I want you to make all the annoying little gits with a million
"friends" they've never met, start writing in proper English and acting in a rational manner to make
their content "accessible" to me.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING SPECIAL TO MAKE THE WEBSITE EASIER
TO USE FOR THE BLIND Just stop using those damned javacrap shit
unnecessarily
The first post, as does your own, nicely glossed over the fact
that all of those points count as "doing something".
Why script a link? Because I want to break wget. Because where
it goes might change in response to something else on the
page. Because the next page heavily depends on JSt and I can use
JS links to filter out those with noncompliant browsers. Because
I can. Why not?
As long as a page remains compliant to its declared doctype, not
using a given feature very much amounts to handicapping the author
in favor of the reader.
Yes, because it's easy for terrorists to train a highly skilled computer programmer
Don't you read Slashdot?
Apparenly, the ability to think methodically and rationally, paying careful attention to detail
and real-world tolerances, means engineers make good terrorists.
Oh, and let's not forget the fact that many of us grew up getting teased (or much worse) for precisely
what makes us the single most valuable members of a society, and as a result harbor general feelings of
misanthropy...
That, and some of us would do it just for the challenge. C'mon, they claim you can't beat this
thing - Doesn't that make you want to take a crack at it just because?;)
If it's a random probability, if you try enough times, you'll get through eventually.
Kudos, you win. You get it.
Pity that The Powers That Be consider statistics spooooooky liberal mojo, but "the bad guys" will eventually
blow something else up with nothing more than determination and repeated attempts. A 30% chance
of getting searched in line-A still translates to a 70% chance of getting through line-A.
what the fuck is it that motivates people to post absolute, made-up, bullshit, nonsense?
Ever heard of "making a mistake", you sanctimonious asshole?
I had it wrong. I actually had Gallium in mind, and confused it for
Germanium. Mea culpa.
That doesn't, however, make me a troll, or flamebait, or my words
"absolute, made-up, bullshit" (which implies motive rather than
factual incorrecctness).
if they have some reasonable good marks pertinent papers then that's good they go into a pile.
You joke, right?
What the hell kind of hiring manager looks at "pertinent papers", unless talking about actual publications
listed on the resume? For any "real" university, you produce exactly one "pertinent paper" - A diploma.
Now, for internships and companies closely tied with the uni, recommendations by faculty may carry some weight.
But reviewing basic coursework to screen candidates? Wow. Just... Wow.
But Germanium-Arsonide is a much-neglected technology that could do with more investment, as it should do much better than silicon.
Germanium-anything counts as a dead-end road, due to the vanishingly small amount of it available on
this planet. For a few specialty parts here and there, it works great. Start using it on the same scale we
currently use silicon, and we'll run out in under a year.
high-k/metal gate technology at 32 nm can result in performance gains up to 30% and power savings up to 50%, compared to 45-nm process.
Really revolutionary announcement there...
Power consumption scales with the square of gate size. (32*32)/(45*45) = 0.51, or 50%.
Clock speed scales linearly with gate size. 32/45 = 0.71, or 29%.
Not to minimize the fact that these gates reduce leakage enough to actually get those gains,
but the drop in gate size alone (all other factors equal) would give the same numbers.
but the energy content was not, the temperature at t=0 is infinite.
Okay, at time t= +e(psilon), wiseguy.:).
Of course, this quantity already goes by the name "Planck temperature",
so we have a nice tidy number: 1.417 x10^32 Kelvin.
How are you going to make such a scale any less arbitrary
than Kelvin scale
Well, any value on that scale gives a meaningful number in the sense
that it expresses the portion of the maximum energy possible in this
universe, with a well-behaved upper (100) and lower (0) bound.
Of course, on the down side, we'd have to use microyoctodegrees
to measure temperatures in our everyday range of experience, with
water freezing at 193myD and boiling at 263myD.
use the blackbody radiation: the base unit corresponds to
the temperature of a blackbody object who's peak of radiation
has wavelength of 1 meter.
Not a bad idea, but that just gives you the identity of Wein's law,
or 2.898K. Not really all that bad as a base unit for scientific
purposes, but it puts water in a range of 94.2 to 128.7... Still not
all that great for expressing everyday temperatures.
A proper distribution channel exists so a company that
spends money on R&D, engineering, manufaturing, etc. can
turn a (relatively low margin) profit.
For motherboards, your argument works. For handbags made by
slave labor from $0.15 worth of raw materials that sell for a
few hundred dollars, not so much.
Cutting out the 'evil capitalistic profits' eh? If it were not for
profit there would be no incentive for DFI or any other company to
make any product in the first place.
If the workers can't afford to buy what they make, you have an
inherently unsustainable economy. Call it Marxism if you want,
but output can't exceed input in a closed system. For most of modern
history, that "worked" due to economic imperialism. In the next
50 years, that will break down as the "third world" ceases
to exist (at least in an exploitable sense).
or you just want to rationalize your purchase of low cost
counterfeit products so you don't feel guilty.
I'll pay for name-brand when that actually correlates with
quality. When it comes to matters of "fashion", where people
pay only for the name - I'd actually prefer to buy the
knockoff at the same price, just to punish the idiots
that really believe a name has value.
So.. explain to me why people hire computer illiterate people again?
Because companies still think of most jobs in old-school terms, despite the
irrelevance of most traditional office skills.
Consider an accounting-oriented job (AP/AR, for example) - Most companies would
hire someone with 10 years experience and "some" computer experience (ie, can read
email with the clicky buttony thing their nephew set up on the desktop) over
someone with basic accounting skills who can make Excel sit up and beg for
mercy - Yet, in the modern office, the latter could work circles around the former.
Until that changes, and computer literacy becomes no less important than English
literacy (or whatever lingua Franca you prefer), companies will continue to pay
me to help coworkers get through tasks that we geeks consider comparable to helping
someone read "See Spot run. Run, spot, run!".
And believe me, I sincerely wish more people could maintain their own machines.
As another user responded to my previous post, I far prefer dealing with "servers,
data infrastructure, advanced developmental work, and systems design and implementation".
But all that means Jack as long as people still need my help just to figure out how to
leave an away message in Outlook for the 14th time.
Because for every one of you, we have a hundred
people who can barely manage to get around in MS Office, and
most dangerous of all, three or four people who think
they know computers (yet strangely manage to cause more
restore-from-backup sessions that all other users combined).
That said, if I didn't work in IT, I sure as hell wouldn't
do the same work unrelated to my job description. Dealing with
helpless coworkers without having it go into my pay or performance
reviews? Not bloody likely!
Technology will overtake this. When everyone has an iPhone or like in their pocket,
who is going to send potentially compromising emails through their employer?
Technology already has made this a moot point. Nearly every connection from my
machines, both at home and at work, use some form of encryption. No one (except
perhaps the NSA) will peek in on my IM conversations.
As for email - Also a moot point. Don't use your work email for personal reasons, simple
as that. You can get free 3rd party email accounts from dozens (if not hundreds) of places.
Use one (or more), and keep your work inbox clean. That doesn't take a rocket scientist
to figure out.
Regarding phone calls... At least in the US, these fall into a magical category. Unless your
employer explicitly says they record/monitor them, you have the expectation of privacy. Even so,
I still make all but the most mundane personal calls on my cell.
I go to work, to work. Yes, I have a personal life that occasionally needs attention
between 9-5 M-F, and won't neglect that in favor of winning Employee of the Fortnight. But
most of the issues raised in this topic vanish if you take even the most basic of
precautions.
The FCC has fined 11 retailers and television manufacturers
The FCC did what now?
The FCC has the authority to regulate the use of a few communications-valuable
portions of the RF spectrum.
To the best of my knowledge, they have no authority to regulate trade. We
even have a similarly-named governmental TLA for that - The FTC.
Anyone care to 'splain it to me, by what stretch of the imagination fining retailers
satisfies the goal of allocating spectrum for the greatest public good?
a Boeing patent on the lunar flyby process that would be used to correct the satellite's orbit.
So this amounts to a patent on moving in a given direction? April first passed by almost two weeks ago. C'mon, guys, bad joke?
Unbelievable. We don't need patent reform, we need an angry mob to storm the USPTO and burn the place to dust, then
sift through the dust and re-burn anything left, then haul the entire mess to a live volcano. You just can't have
a monopoly on basic physics, Boeing, whether or not the rules allow it. Seriously, grow the fuck up and go back to competing
with Airbus on technical merits rather than endless pissing contests with the WTO/WIPO.
After a bit more research, this may turn into techniques to more reliably avoid them in the
design stage, rather than having to go through various tweaks on the injector / combustion chamber
to remove them should they appear.
"I cannot be played on [rocket engine] X".
Everything has resonant frequencies. Most phenomena do not input enough energy at those
frequencies to cause damage to arbitrary man-made devices, but when they do - Watch out Tacoma
Narrows.
In the case of a rocket engine, you have a LOT of energy (enough to hurl a many-ton
vehicle off-planet) across a rather broad range of frequencies. It surprises me much
more that these things can work at all - But as you point out, they currently have
to do tedious manual tweaking of the injectors and reaction chamber specifically to avoid
at least the dominant resonances that would appear.
Many of them probably remember playing games like Oregon Trail, so they would know that games can be at least somewhat educational.
As someone who enjoys gaming, and does believe they can have some educational value[1], I don't consider them
appropriate as part of most existing curricula[2].
Educational gaming has one major problem, IMO... The "education" part invariably either gets shoved down the
players' throats, making the game not even remotely fun (Elmo's "Let's Factor Polynomials!" just doesn't do it
for me, sorry), or it occurs as side-trivia - "Color text", if you will - that the player can and will simply
ignore.
Now, Gaming can teach some useful skills, while remaining "fun": Problem-solving skills, I would put at the
top of the list, though modern Western education has no interest in actually teaching people to think. They can
teach tactics, and done right, the historical context for countless battles (the former, useless to Education, the
latter probably won't help you pass History when you crush the confederacy at the first battle of Manassas playing in
"hard" mode as McDowell). Mythology you can likely pick up quite a bit of in most RPGs, but that again has only
a faint connection with history (at least not as currently taught).
1 - For teaching "traditional" subjects, what does it say that we still hold a 20-year-old, mostly text-based
game as the pinnacle of educational gaming? Hey, I liked Oregon Trail too, but as someone else said, I only really
remember the game teaching me not to ford rivers. And it took place sometime in the 1800s. And Oxen taste like hardpack.
2 - I also question the validity of "existing curricula", which focus not on producing problem-solvers and free-thinkers,
but on good little future Citizens and Corporate Slaves. Entirely different issue from the topic at hand, however.
I can only guess it's like tax refunds, the delay goes up steeply
the longer you wait to send in your request.
Of course, so do the number and quality of qualifying boxes, and you won't
need them until February 2009.
Since analog won't go dark for another 10 months, the ideal time to
sign up for coupons will occur as late as possible but before they
run out - Or, since this just made the Slashdot front page, yesterday.
Except some ass hat is going to print 10,000 coupons
with someone else serial number.
Which can't happen with sturdy credit-card like coupons, many of
which will go toward internet purchases, why?
Pepsi and McDonalds and other companies have dealt with this issue
for almost a decade. They use "serial numbers" consisting of a
hard-cryptographic hash. You have literally less than a
one-in-a-billion chance of guessing a valid code (given twelve
base-36 digits and 100 million valid codes).
customers were forced to renew with GoDaddy or lose the domain
So transfer it and then update your info. Although registrars
shouldn't get away with this crap, I fail to see how this amounts to
more than a minor nuissance.
Even in the worst-case scenario (changing your info a few weeks before
expiration, before realizing you want to transfer), a domain's owner
only "loses" a couple bucks at most for using GoDaddy for one more
year. Not a big deal, IMO, even if I do fully encourage the
spanking of GoDaddy over such games.
I still, on a daily basis, run into people who would rather buy
software than use OSS alternatives because they firmly believe "you
get what you pay for". And this in the "Joe Sixpack" crowd, not
even talking about fellow IT professionals.
Among them, I get much more polarized attitudes - They either
embrace it, or shun it (with reasons ranging from the "viral" licensing
BS, to (yes, seriously) tirades about damned hippies trying to buck
the system).
Me, I'll just use what works. Sometimes that means paying for
software, but I can usually find something comparable and
Free (and with a price tag of "free", I give "comparable" quite
a bit of leeway).
Thats it, I say webservers move to SSL only transactions.
I agree completely, but keep in mind that even with encryption, ISPs can still collect
quite enough information on us to put together a truly impressive profile. Sure, they
won't know exactly what you read, but if you visit Erowid, I'd call it a good bet you
don't want recommendations on a cheese to go with dinner.
For targetted advertising purposes, the simple "where" counts for 90% of the "what".
My only real beef is the removal of lasguns and the addition
of "wierding modules." This is not enough to make me hate the
movie, however.
I would agree with you in that I much prefer Lynch's version.
However, the addition of the weirding modules (and the complete avoidance
of the lasgun/shield interaction problem) almost ceompletely undermined
Herbert's intended mockery of religion...
In the book, Paul (and Jessica)
basically exploit the natives' superstitions to use them as pawns in a
mostly-political game (although in fairness they do eventually
"go native"). Lynch makes it out as more of a tune-in-turn-on-drop-out
messianic fairy-tale.
Both have their merits, but I'd hardly even call them the same story.
We discussed finances, and to my horror, I found out that he is making $1100/month.
But remember, his employer can only import him if they can't find locally comparable
talent.
"Comparable" as the key word - I personally know half a dozen "underemployed" engineers who
could probably do the same job. But they sure as hell wouldn't do it for $13k/year. Thus,
we need more H1Bs to help all those poor starving CEOs improve their bottom lines.
But I can't help thinking my reaction if I was dropped into a country where I would make
less than your average waiter, after years of hard schooling. I'd harbor a grudge, that's for sure.
...Or, say, if you spent 4/5/9 years in college and every applicable employer in your area
calls you "overqualified", so you actually do work as your average waiter.
Yeah... Thinking about it like that, I can see why engineers would make good terrorists!
You can only shit on people for so long before they rise up against their oppressors (real or
perceived).
Fortunately, engineers tend toward naivete and poor social skills, so the odds of any collaborative
acts of terrorism seem low. But never underestimate even a single engineer with a roll of duct-tape
and a spool of cat5.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Now what about realloc(), calloc(), free(), open(), read(), write(), etc, etc, etc?
I won't claim that C works best for every purpose - Don't make this into a holy war, I only meant that the underlying problem comes from the coders, not the languages they use.
But to answer your question, you can wrap every failable library function, if you want to. You can even find premade wrapper libraries/classes to make C/C++ behave like exception-oriented languages (the latter actually has some exception abilities already, actually, but not to the extent you appear to prefer).
Now suppose you want to allow the error to trickle up to some top-level code, where you can clean up after yourself and maybe generate a nice log message. How would you do that?
You register an atexit function, and take care of whatever cleanup and logging needs to happen.
For finer granularity, you can write a wrapper (or several variations) around "exit()" that do what you want.
Or, you can actually handle the error, which IMO should always happen, even if you can't recover from the error. And there, this issue comes down to a matter of what the programmer does rather than what the language does. When a program throws an exception rather than popping up a nice human-targetted message telling me what went wrong, that tells me that the programmer simply didn't expect the error in question to happen. And if he didn't expect that error, who knows what else he didn't expect.
Assuming that Flash is made in C or C++, here is another very vivid example of why these languages should be banned.
You do understand that all those nasty loosely-typed pointer-based exploits you and others disdain in C, exist because C nicely mirrors how the actual hardware handles similar concepts?
If failure of allocation threw an exception, instead of just returning null, there would be no problem.
And if programmers would check that the allocation succeeded, we would also have no problem.
In your hypothetical "safe" language (C#, for example), I can't count how many times I've seen system calls wrapped in a try/catch to hide the exception, then carry on pretending the call worked just fine. Guess what? SAME DAMNED PROBLEM!
Don't blame the pipe-wrench for making a poor hammer. Blame the craftsman too lazy to find a hammer.
What's the point in the web if authors are putting up masturbatory works of web design that handicap the readers in favor of the author?
Exactly my point, if not your intended meaning - Why do we have the web, if not to use the features it offers beyond linked pure-text content?
Everyone saying "why do you hate group-X" apparently doesn't remember that the predecessor to the web, Gopher, had "perfect" accessibility. It worked very similarly, with the teensy difference that it used plain text for everything. The blind could use it (screenreaders do great on plain text), the deaf could use it, those stuck with only dialup could use it... A win for everybody - Except the fully-functional 99% of humanity.
Like it or not, the web became popular not because of its text-oriented content. Yeah, news sites could do a better job at accessibility. Storefronts could do better - And both of those care more about reaching everybody than presentation. But the "real" content? How do you make a webcomic blind-accessible (and don't say to add an "alt" tag, describing a comic does not substitute for seeing it)? How do you make music deaf-accessible (again, "captions" do not express the magic we call "music")?
How do you make a mountain wheelchair accessible? If you answer "pave it", you've kinda missed the point of climbing the mountain in the first place. And speaking of missed points...
I think you kind of miss the point about the World Wide Web.
No, I've ignored your version of what how you want the WWW. I, as a fully-functional human, want text, images, and sound. I want subtlety of presentation that no screenreader will ever have the ability to render. I want crappy music videos on YouTube without the distraction of useless captioning that only a tiny segment of their audience needs - The same segment, insultingly enough, that probably wouldn't click on a music video in the first place.
You want "accessibility"? As an introverted misanthrope, I don't "get" social networking. Call me an emotional cripple, if you will. So I want you to make all the annoying little gits with a million "friends" they've never met, start writing in proper English and acting in a rational manner to make their content "accessible" to me.
See the problem?
YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING SPECIAL TO MAKE THE WEBSITE EASIER TO USE FOR THE BLIND Just stop using those damned javacrap shit unnecessarily
The first post, as does your own, nicely glossed over the fact that all of those points count as "doing something".
Why script a link? Because I want to break wget. Because where it goes might change in response to something else on the page. Because the next page heavily depends on JSt and I can use JS links to filter out those with noncompliant browsers. Because I can. Why not?
As long as a page remains compliant to its declared doctype, not using a given feature very much amounts to handicapping the author in favor of the reader.
Yes, because it's easy for terrorists to train a highly skilled computer programmer
;)
Don't you read Slashdot?
Apparenly, the ability to think methodically and rationally, paying careful attention to detail and real-world tolerances, means engineers make good terrorists.
Oh, and let's not forget the fact that many of us grew up getting teased (or much worse) for precisely what makes us the single most valuable members of a society, and as a result harbor general feelings of misanthropy...
That, and some of us would do it just for the challenge. C'mon, they claim you can't beat this thing - Doesn't that make you want to take a crack at it just because?
If it's a random probability, if you try enough times, you'll get through eventually.
Kudos, you win. You get it.
Pity that The Powers That Be consider statistics spooooooky liberal mojo, but "the bad guys" will eventually blow something else up with nothing more than determination and repeated attempts. A 30% chance of getting searched in line-A still translates to a 70% chance of getting through line-A.
what the fuck is it that motivates people to post absolute, made-up, bullshit, nonsense?
Ever heard of "making a mistake", you sanctimonious asshole?
I had it wrong. I actually had Gallium in mind, and confused it for Germanium. Mea culpa.
That doesn't, however, make me a troll, or flamebait, or my words "absolute, made-up, bullshit" (which implies motive rather than factual incorrecctness).
Get over yourself.
if they have some reasonable good marks pertinent papers then that's good they go into a pile.
You joke, right?
What the hell kind of hiring manager looks at "pertinent papers", unless talking about actual publications listed on the resume? For any "real" university, you produce exactly one "pertinent paper" - A diploma.
Now, for internships and companies closely tied with the uni, recommendations by faculty may carry some weight. But reviewing basic coursework to screen candidates? Wow. Just... Wow.
But Germanium-Arsonide is a much-neglected technology that could do with more investment, as it should do much better than silicon.
Germanium-anything counts as a dead-end road, due to the vanishingly small amount of it available on this planet. For a few specialty parts here and there, it works great. Start using it on the same scale we currently use silicon, and we'll run out in under a year.
high-k/metal gate technology at 32 nm can result in performance gains up to 30% and power savings up to 50%, compared to 45-nm process.
Really revolutionary announcement there...
Power consumption scales with the square of gate size. (32*32)/(45*45) = 0.51, or 50%.
Clock speed scales linearly with gate size. 32/45 = 0.71, or 29%.
Not to minimize the fact that these gates reduce leakage enough to actually get those gains, but the drop in gate size alone (all other factors equal) would give the same numbers.
but the energy content was not, the temperature at t=0 is infinite.
:).
Okay, at time t= +e(psilon), wiseguy.
Of course, this quantity already goes by the name "Planck temperature", so we have a nice tidy number: 1.417 x10^32 Kelvin.
How are you going to make such a scale any less arbitrary than Kelvin scale
Well, any value on that scale gives a meaningful number in the sense that it expresses the portion of the maximum energy possible in this universe, with a well-behaved upper (100) and lower (0) bound.
Of course, on the down side, we'd have to use microyoctodegrees to measure temperatures in our everyday range of experience, with water freezing at 193myD and boiling at 263myD.
use the blackbody radiation: the base unit corresponds to the temperature of a blackbody object who's peak of radiation has wavelength of 1 meter.
Not a bad idea, but that just gives you the identity of Wein's law, or 2.898K. Not really all that bad as a base unit for scientific purposes, but it puts water in a range of 94.2 to 128.7... Still not all that great for expressing everyday temperatures.
A proper distribution channel exists so a company that spends money on R&D, engineering, manufaturing, etc. can turn a (relatively low margin) profit.
For motherboards, your argument works. For handbags made by slave labor from $0.15 worth of raw materials that sell for a few hundred dollars, not so much.
Cutting out the 'evil capitalistic profits' eh? If it were not for profit there would be no incentive for DFI or any other company to make any product in the first place.
If the workers can't afford to buy what they make, you have an inherently unsustainable economy. Call it Marxism if you want, but output can't exceed input in a closed system. For most of modern history, that "worked" due to economic imperialism. In the next 50 years, that will break down as the "third world" ceases to exist (at least in an exploitable sense).
or you just want to rationalize your purchase of low cost counterfeit products so you don't feel guilty.
I'll pay for name-brand when that actually correlates with quality. When it comes to matters of "fashion", where people pay only for the name - I'd actually prefer to buy the knockoff at the same price, just to punish the idiots that really believe a name has value.
So.. explain to me why people hire computer illiterate people again?
Because companies still think of most jobs in old-school terms, despite the irrelevance of most traditional office skills.
Consider an accounting-oriented job (AP/AR, for example) - Most companies would hire someone with 10 years experience and "some" computer experience (ie, can read email with the clicky buttony thing their nephew set up on the desktop) over someone with basic accounting skills who can make Excel sit up and beg for mercy - Yet, in the modern office, the latter could work circles around the former.
Until that changes, and computer literacy becomes no less important than English literacy (or whatever lingua Franca you prefer), companies will continue to pay me to help coworkers get through tasks that we geeks consider comparable to helping someone read "See Spot run. Run, spot, run!".
And believe me, I sincerely wish more people could maintain their own machines. As another user responded to my previous post, I far prefer dealing with "servers, data infrastructure, advanced developmental work, and systems design and implementation". But all that means Jack as long as people still need my help just to figure out how to leave an away message in Outlook for the 14th time.
Remind me why we even have an IT dept. again?
Because for every one of you, we have a hundred people who can barely manage to get around in MS Office, and most dangerous of all, three or four people who think they know computers (yet strangely manage to cause more restore-from-backup sessions that all other users combined).
That said, if I didn't work in IT, I sure as hell wouldn't do the same work unrelated to my job description. Dealing with helpless coworkers without having it go into my pay or performance reviews? Not bloody likely!
Technology will overtake this. When everyone has an iPhone or like in their pocket, who is going to send potentially compromising emails through their employer?
Technology already has made this a moot point. Nearly every connection from my machines, both at home and at work, use some form of encryption. No one (except perhaps the NSA) will peek in on my IM conversations.
As for email - Also a moot point. Don't use your work email for personal reasons, simple as that. You can get free 3rd party email accounts from dozens (if not hundreds) of places. Use one (or more), and keep your work inbox clean. That doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out.
Regarding phone calls... At least in the US, these fall into a magical category. Unless your employer explicitly says they record/monitor them, you have the expectation of privacy. Even so, I still make all but the most mundane personal calls on my cell.
I go to work, to work. Yes, I have a personal life that occasionally needs attention between 9-5 M-F, and won't neglect that in favor of winning Employee of the Fortnight. But most of the issues raised in this topic vanish if you take even the most basic of precautions.
The FCC has fined 11 retailers and television manufacturers
The FCC did what now?
The FCC has the authority to regulate the use of a few communications-valuable portions of the RF spectrum.
To the best of my knowledge, they have no authority to regulate trade. We even have a similarly-named governmental TLA for that - The FTC.
Anyone care to 'splain it to me, by what stretch of the imagination fining retailers satisfies the goal of allocating spectrum for the greatest public good?
a Boeing patent on the lunar flyby process that would be used to correct the satellite's orbit.
So this amounts to a patent on moving in a given direction? April first passed by almost two weeks ago. C'mon, guys, bad joke?
Unbelievable. We don't need patent reform, we need an angry mob to storm the USPTO and burn the place to dust, then sift through the dust and re-burn anything left, then haul the entire mess to a live volcano. You just can't have a monopoly on basic physics, Boeing, whether or not the rules allow it. Seriously, grow the fuck up and go back to competing with Airbus on technical merits rather than endless pissing contests with the WTO/WIPO.
After a bit more research, this may turn into techniques to more reliably avoid them in the design stage, rather than having to go through various tweaks on the injector / combustion chamber to remove them should they appear.
"I cannot be played on [rocket engine] X".
Everything has resonant frequencies. Most phenomena do not input enough energy at those frequencies to cause damage to arbitrary man-made devices, but when they do - Watch out Tacoma Narrows.
In the case of a rocket engine, you have a LOT of energy (enough to hurl a many-ton vehicle off-planet) across a rather broad range of frequencies. It surprises me much more that these things can work at all - But as you point out, they currently have to do tedious manual tweaking of the injectors and reaction chamber specifically to avoid at least the dominant resonances that would appear.
Many of them probably remember playing games like Oregon Trail, so they would know that games can be at least somewhat educational.
As someone who enjoys gaming, and does believe they can have some educational value[1], I don't consider them appropriate as part of most existing curricula[2].
Educational gaming has one major problem, IMO... The "education" part invariably either gets shoved down the players' throats, making the game not even remotely fun (Elmo's "Let's Factor Polynomials!" just doesn't do it for me, sorry), or it occurs as side-trivia - "Color text", if you will - that the player can and will simply ignore.
Now, Gaming can teach some useful skills, while remaining "fun": Problem-solving skills, I would put at the top of the list, though modern Western education has no interest in actually teaching people to think. They can teach tactics, and done right, the historical context for countless battles (the former, useless to Education, the latter probably won't help you pass History when you crush the confederacy at the first battle of Manassas playing in "hard" mode as McDowell). Mythology you can likely pick up quite a bit of in most RPGs, but that again has only a faint connection with history (at least not as currently taught).
1 - For teaching "traditional" subjects, what does it say that we still hold a 20-year-old, mostly text-based game as the pinnacle of educational gaming? Hey, I liked Oregon Trail too, but as someone else said, I only really remember the game teaching me not to ford rivers. And it took place sometime in the 1800s. And Oxen taste like hardpack.
2 - I also question the validity of "existing curricula", which focus not on producing problem-solvers and free-thinkers, but on good little future Citizens and Corporate Slaves. Entirely different issue from the topic at hand, however.
I can only guess it's like tax refunds, the delay goes up steeply the longer you wait to send in your request.
Of course, so do the number and quality of qualifying boxes, and you won't need them until February 2009.
Since analog won't go dark for another 10 months, the ideal time to sign up for coupons will occur as late as possible but before they run out - Or, since this just made the Slashdot front page, yesterday.
Except some ass hat is going to print 10,000 coupons with someone else serial number.
Which can't happen with sturdy credit-card like coupons, many of which will go toward internet purchases, why?
Pepsi and McDonalds and other companies have dealt with this issue for almost a decade. They use "serial numbers" consisting of a hard-cryptographic hash. You have literally less than a one-in-a-billion chance of guessing a valid code (given twelve base-36 digits and 100 million valid codes).
customers were forced to renew with GoDaddy or lose the domain
So transfer it and then update your info. Although registrars shouldn't get away with this crap, I fail to see how this amounts to more than a minor nuissance.
Even in the worst-case scenario (changing your info a few weeks before expiration, before realizing you want to transfer), a domain's owner only "loses" a couple bucks at most for using GoDaddy for one more year. Not a big deal, IMO, even if I do fully encourage the spanking of GoDaddy over such games.
now it is widely embraced
Er, no.
I still, on a daily basis, run into people who would rather buy software than use OSS alternatives because they firmly believe "you get what you pay for". And this in the "Joe Sixpack" crowd, not even talking about fellow IT professionals.
Among them, I get much more polarized attitudes - They either embrace it, or shun it (with reasons ranging from the "viral" licensing BS, to (yes, seriously) tirades about damned hippies trying to buck the system).
Me, I'll just use what works. Sometimes that means paying for software, but I can usually find something comparable and Free (and with a price tag of "free", I give "comparable" quite a bit of leeway).
Thats it, I say webservers move to SSL only transactions.
I agree completely, but keep in mind that even with encryption, ISPs can still collect quite enough information on us to put together a truly impressive profile. Sure, they won't know exactly what you read, but if you visit Erowid, I'd call it a good bet you don't want recommendations on a cheese to go with dinner.
For targetted advertising purposes, the simple "where" counts for 90% of the "what".
My only real beef is the removal of lasguns and the addition of "wierding modules." This is not enough to make me hate the movie, however.
I would agree with you in that I much prefer Lynch's version. However, the addition of the weirding modules (and the complete avoidance of the lasgun/shield interaction problem) almost ceompletely undermined Herbert's intended mockery of religion...
In the book, Paul (and Jessica) basically exploit the natives' superstitions to use them as pawns in a mostly-political game (although in fairness they do eventually "go native"). Lynch makes it out as more of a tune-in-turn-on-drop-out messianic fairy-tale.
Both have their merits, but I'd hardly even call them the same story.
We discussed finances, and to my horror, I found out that he is making $1100/month.
...Or, say, if you spent 4/5/9 years in college and every applicable employer in your area
calls you "overqualified", so you actually do work as your average waiter.
:)
But remember, his employer can only import him if they can't find locally comparable talent.
"Comparable" as the key word - I personally know half a dozen "underemployed" engineers who could probably do the same job. But they sure as hell wouldn't do it for $13k/year. Thus, we need more H1Bs to help all those poor starving CEOs improve their bottom lines.
But I can't help thinking my reaction if I was dropped into a country where I would make less than your average waiter, after years of hard schooling. I'd harbor a grudge, that's for sure.
Yeah... Thinking about it like that, I can see why engineers would make good terrorists! You can only shit on people for so long before they rise up against their oppressors (real or perceived).
Fortunately, engineers tend toward naivete and poor social skills, so the odds of any collaborative acts of terrorism seem low. But never underestimate even a single engineer with a roll of duct-tape and a spool of cat5.