Evolution says nothing about the origin of life on Earth. It does provide for the possibility of abiogenesis, and there are many theories as to how this work, but they aren't part of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory simply tells us that organisms change (because their DNA changes) over time in response to their environment, and that the primary two mechanisms of this change are variation and natural selection.
Thus, evolutionary theory *is* testable, even in a lab -- you can take a fast-breeding species like the common fruit fly, apply artifical selective pressures, and watch the allelle frequencies[1] shift in real time compared to control groups. Dog breeding is another example; humans use a the natural mechanisms of evolution, but add in their own constraints in the selection and variation departments.
If you could prove, experimentally, that some other mechanism accounted for this; or even that it wasn't the combination of selection and variation that prompted observed shifts in allelle frequencies, then you would easily be able to disprove evolutionary theory as it currently stands, and would open up new realms in modern Biology.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, says absolutely nothing about any of this; instead, it makes a claim about the origin of life that is by definition unfalsifiable, as it is vacuously true. Beyond this, discussion of ID as science is moot, because falsifiability is a prerequisite for ANYTHING to be considered a scientific theory. Want to prove me wrong? Give me a test scenario where ID can be invalidated through experimental results; after all, I just gave you one for evolution.
[1] For the non-genetically inclined reader:
Allelles are, if you will, defined points on the strand of DNA. Each group of allelles governs a set of physical traits, and each group of allelles can be populated by different genes, giving rise to different traits. For example, a single allelle governs the RH factor of your blood, so depending on what gene gets stuck in that allelle, which is determined by your parents' genetics, you are either RH+ or RH-. Since these points are well-defined, and produce physically observable characteristics, it is relatively easy to see the genetic change in a population over time, and link that change back to changes in the way the allelles are populated.
To the genetically inclined: I know this is a simplistic explanation, but I think it's adequate for the purpose of this post.
Er, the role of oxygen in the establishment of organic life was well outside the scope of my analogy, but just to clarify -- the reason for an atmosphere has little to do with its oxygen content, and much to do with its radiation shielding effects.
I agree that the anaerobic formation of life is a more plausible scenario, given how utterly caustic oxygen is (thanks to its valence electron configuration).
However, given the dependence of organic molecules on that particular atom with atomic weight sixteen, I think you'd be hard-pressed to claim that all oxygen is detrimenal to the formation of life; redox reactions, as basic as they are, are still essential in organic chemistry. So, while an oxygen atmosphere would have likely destroyed early self-replicating molecules, they would never have formed without access to oxidized compounds.
(As a footnote, I only *started* as a Chem major, and switched to Math, so my Organic is more than a little rusty).
Well, radiation is the first problem; there's a hell of a lot of organic-molecule-shattering 'waves of doom' in space, way more than on the surface of a planet that has the shielding of both an atmosphere and a magenetosphere[1].
Second, tidal pools on a planet keep everything nicely together in the same general area, courtesey of Our Friend Gravity. Tidal pools, at least on Earth, also provide a very necessary solvent for the whole organic chemistry process -- water. No water, and pretty much all of the organic processes that we know about stop working; in fact, when you look at the chemistry, it almost seems that an oxygen atmosphere is optional, but that water is a base requiremet for life because of its properties as a solvent.
So, no, it's doubtful that complex molecules like Keith Richards will form outside of a suitable gravity well, and doubly doubtful that complex organic molecules (e.g., DNA) will form without liquid water.
[1] That's a magnetic field around a planet, not a hamster ball for Sir Ian McKellen.
I think he (the article poster) needs to make it clear that computers are tools with continuous maintenance requirements, much like other large-scale capital goods. Most industrial equipment requires a fair amount of maintenance to keep it running, and not performing that maintenance leads to Big Problems and Massive Expenses down the road.
The article poster is correct in his assessment; a company with over a hundred users, nearly all of which have a computer, needs about two full-time IT guys (desktops take more work to manage than servers, doubly so in a Windows environment). Management needs to know not only how overworked this guy is in his current position, but what the ramifications are of not having any 'preventive maintenance' being done on their systems.
Data theft is just one possibility, of course. Loss of critical data due to lack of a cohesive backup procedure, downtime from failed equipment, and even potential loss of customers -- I know I wouldn't place any sort of large order with a company if they didn't take steps to protect my information.
Have you told your bank? Because problems like this never get fixed if nobody complains. More importantly, if you tell them that their pages are broken in Firefox/Safari, and they tell you to get IE, switch banks, because businesses tend to listen when they lose customers because of things like this. When you close your accounts, and they ask the reason, tell them why.
You wouldn't buy a lawnmower that only worked on 'Black & Decker' grass, you wouldn't buy a knife that only cut 'Chicago Cutlery' brand onions, so why the hell would you do business with a bank that forces you to use tools that you don't want to, namely, Windows and IE?
I have no idea why I'm responding to this, but it's kind of funny, so at least I'm amused. *grin*
I prefer being a sysadmin to being a developer, because I honestly hate writing code for a living. As a sysadmin, for me at least, I get more variety, and definitely more freedom than the developers do, and the pay is about the same. Hey, I can like my job, you can like yours; remember, the farmers and the cattlemen always hated each other.
This isn't to say that I can't code; I've been programming since I was a kid, have written several large internal projects for my various employers, and even spent some time learning 68k and X86 assembly Back In The Day. More importantly, unlike a lot of hotshot CS grads, I actually know how the math behind the computer works at a very abstract level, which gives me an edge in system and program design.
More importantly, I've implemented a big pile of very bad ideas, and learned from my mistakes in a very direct fashion.
Yes, but Japan has also had a very large influx of Japanese-speaking Koreans and Chinese over the past twenty years; there's a reason that Japan Town in San Fransisco has more signs in Korean than in Japanese.
The Japanese 'labor shortage' was never a problem; what fucked the Japanese, as the parent poster noted, was that they lost their currency edge, and then the inefficency of Japanese business practices caught up with them. The yuan is currently at an 8:1 ratio with U.S. dollars, much the same as the Yen was back during the early 70s, and the situation is indeed quite similar.
The difference on the U.S. side is that we still had an edge on the Japanese back during the 80s -- IT. Japan may have been making the cars and appliances more cheaply, but we were turning out engineers at a very brisk pace, and managed to build one hell of a computer software industry.
Unfortunately, we've by-and-large sold this out, crippled our educational system in a number of ways, and have made it almost impossible to start a company in the same way one would in the 1970s, because of all the new IP laws designed to protect big business.
Of course, time will tell one way or the other, but I'm happy that I'll be near-fluent in both German and Japanese by the time I get done with school, because I sure as hell don't want to limit my work options to the U.S. alone.
For the record, I ran a Linux-only desktop for about six years, and five of those years, up to the present day, have been while working as a Real Sysadmin -- Solaris, BSD, Linux, and Windows (NT/2K), datacenter environment with high-uptime on a shoestring budget. Oh, and most of our clients were litigators, so we had good reason to not violate our SLAs.
Working, of course, slows down school, so it's taking me quite awhile to finish up two degrees.
While I certainly don't have the chops of a fifty-year-old veteran of the AIX wars, I am certainly not some Mac zealot that thinks he knows UNIX because OS X is based off of BSD.
I totally agree; Pages is, for me at least, useless -- and I can't find a way to tell it to use something *other* than its default save format of 'a directory with files'.
Keynote rocks. Plain and simple. I have always hated powerpoint because it's just a pain in the ass, and Keynote has given me faith that computers can be used in a productive manner for creating presentations.
Speaking of which, I'm going to finish this slashdot post, and go back to Keynote and finish up that presentation that's due on Tuesday...
The problem is twofold. First, OpenOffice.org is anything *but* an 'open-source'; Sun basically owns any of the contributions that you submit to the project, so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one). The codebase originally came from StarOffice, and given what they started with, I'd say that they've made a hell of a lot of progress -- OOo 2.0 is light-years ahead of what StarOffice used to be.
That being said, yes, OOo is pretty much crap and utterly useless for anything beyond basic office duties; its spreadsheet capabilities are laughable at best (no simplex or network model solvers), and what's an even bigger kicker (for me) is that you can't really use it on OS X!
Sure, you can run it in the X11 emulation layer, but one of the reasons I bloody switched to Apple was that I was very tired of dealing with X11 being useful only for displaying terminals. Why would I want to run X11 when I finally escaped from it? Oh, and if you do run OOo under X11.app, you don't get any of your local TrueType fonts (IIRC), or any of the integration that makes OS X so much a pleasure to work with, from a desktop perspective.
Don't get me started on NeoOffice. It's maintained by two guys who have better things to do with their time, and still suffers from the shortcomings of OOo, as well as some integration problems (i.e., it doesn't even use the native printing or file dialogues).
But these problems are endemic on a per-project basis; Firefox is an overall fantastic program, LaTeX is great as well, and libgaim powers AdiumX, which gets a lot of use on my system.
But someone has to come along and make something better than OOo; I've half a mind to do it myself, when I'm finding myself not working full-time as a UNIX sysadmin while going to school full-time.
You obviously haven't been to Japan, then. Cyber cafes (Manga-kisa) over there provide, in exchange for a (usually small) hourly fee, not only access to an internet-connected computer, but access to a large media library (these places evolved from Manga cafes), some type of inexpensive food and beverage, and very commonly, your own little private cubicle, large enough to sleep in!
Some even have showers and actual beds.
These places are also nominally open twenty-four hours.
It's not uncommon for someone who has missed the last train home to rent out a cubicle in one of these places for the night, because it's a lot cheaper to buy six or eight hours of sleep at seven hundred yen per hour than it is to pay for a ten-thousand-yen per-night business hotel.
For me, I call Japan a lot, and while it's more expensive than the states, I know that this is because the Japanese government levies all kinds of taxes -- things like, calling a normal phone line has the same cost as calling a U.S. phone, but calling a Japanese mobile costs almost $0.14 USD per minute!
Or, you know, use it to keep in touch with loved ones who live too far away to visit regularly -- my girlfriend lives in Japan, I live in California, and I actually went as far as to throw Windows on a spare box just for MSN video chat.
And no, it's not 'that' kind of a phone call -- her webcam and computer live in the kitchen, and her parents already have enough in the way of reasons to not like me (e.g.: I'm not Japanese).
If you have knowledge of security, you know why this is a bad idea.
If an application can access data on the backend, so can a thief who either breaks in through that application, or who manages to gain login access to the machine, because THE APPLICATION NEEDS THE CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY. All the encryption in the world is useless if the key is known by Alice, Charlie, AND Bruce.
The only valid use I can think of for encrypting information that goes into the database is a public key system. For example, let's say that I've got some type of system that bills customers using their credit cards. The front-end application doesn't need to know what those credit card numbers are, but needs a way of telling the back-end application (that does the billing and is otherwise separate) about those cards.
Enter public key crypto. The front-end app has a key that can be used to encrypt, but not decrypt, the sensitive data, and the backend has the keys needed for both encryption and decryption. That way, the front end can write, but not read, and the back end, which is totally isolated from the front-end app, has full control.
I've had a real job before; left it to go back and finish up my degrees. Given what the government charges me in taxes, and what they spend on pork-barrel programs for defense contractors, I think they can afford to spend some money to give the lower-class citizens some basic healthcare, and let us higher-ups pay for better care if we want to.
First off, if I had to choose between the Christian Fundamentalists, or the Islamic Fundamentalists, I'd rather go with the latter. They have less history of violent persecution of non-believers, and before you bring terrorists into the equation, remember that Jerry Falwell would be the same as Osama Bin Laden if he didn't have so much bloody power over here in the 'States.
Second, I see the overall worldwide belief in religion in general declining. All the Japanese and Chinese I know are atheists or agnostics, as are most of the Europeans and Canadians, and a good number of my fellow college students. Christianity just doesn't matter that much anymore outside of the U.S., and Islam doesn't matter that much outside the middle east.
That's true, but there is a fairly close bond between Japan and the U.S., with a lot of Japanese companies (Sony, Honda, Sumitomo Bank) doing business over in America, and with a lot of American companies (Citibank, Tricon Global, Starbucks) doing business in Japan, and without the same level of cultural baggage that exists between the Japanese and pretty much all of the rest of Asia. It's good business sense to speak the languages of your trading partners, so a smart Japanese would study English and either Korean or Chinese (or both). Also, a native speaker of Japanese and any of the European languages can also make a decent amount of money, because that's a fairly rare skillset.
My big point is that the Japanese, as with many things they do, put out a great 'face' on English education, but it's nothing more. They should either drop the facade, or actually teach people to speak English.
Slightly off-topic: Although I've been studying Japanese solidly only for about three years, and have only spent about a month in Japan, I've honestly stopped finding Engrish to be all that funny. I mean, now that I understand Japanese a lot better, I understand why they make the mistakes that they do, and it just saddens me that people point and laugh, rather than point out the error. People can't improve if they don't know that they're doing something wrong.
You know, I keep hearing about this, but none of my Canadian friends have ever mentioned it; I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen, but I don't think it's the big problem that a bunch of Americans make it out to be. Hell, last time my friend Sarah got sick with a nasty cold (!), the local hospital offered to send out an AMBULANCE to pick her up.
On the flip side, if you're a student in the US, you can shell out $100 a month for CRAP healthcare -- as in, if the Student Heath Center is open and you don't go there first, you can pay your own bills, and unless it's an emergency (life-threatening), you had better not even think of going to see a doctor, because the student insurance won't cover it. Oh, and it won't cover anything out-of-network, so I owe my dentist $150 because the student insurance I forked out about won't cover cleanings with my regular dentist.
At least I have healthcare; half of the people I go to school with don't, because $100 a month is more than they can afford.
Now that I'm working 'full time' again, things are better (back to real healthcare), but having experienced 'cheap healthcare' for a year, I'd rather see us Americans with a better system.
I hate to say it, but I think the Japanese have something going with the way they run things -- even without being on the 'National Insurance', I was able to go to a Japanese clinic and have my cough diagnosed as a really nasty case of pneumonia -- and was out the door after a total of an hour, with a small bag filled with about five different kinds of medication, and all for about $200 (IIRC). I shudder to think of what two sets of chest X-rays and about two weeks of meds would have cost in the U.S. without insurance.
Given that I travel up to B.C. about twice a year, and that I'm going to be looking for employment up north after I graduate (two years down the road), I say 'Hell, yes!'
No worries about healthcare, low crime, fantastic local beers, hockey in the winter, Tim Hortons...er, what am I not supposed to like, again?
Actually, Japanese is considered to be harder to learn than Chinese, at least for native English speakers. This is mostly due to a combination of three things: Massively different writing systems (Chinese also has this), SOV grammar (Chinese is SVO like English), and large gradiation in politeness levels (Chinese is on a par with German in this area, AFIK).
So, yes, Japanese is a bitch to learn for English speakers, and English is a bitch for Japanese speakers.
On the flip side, Japanese English education is a joke compared to the foreign language education in the States. Students in the U.S. are required to take a whopping four semesters of foreign language to get a Bachelors' degree, and this includes classes taken in high school. Japanese students are drilled on English (as I recall) from 6th grade on, and are required to take English classes in University as well.
So, the average American will have had two or three years of a foreign language, most likely Spanish. They won't be able to converse, but they can ask how to find a bathroom, and likely provide a response if someone asks them. Hell, I took *German* in high school, and I can still tell when someone is asking 'Where is the bathroom?' in Spanish or French, because I've overheard enough to make sense of simple phrases like that. I am not uncommon in this regard.
Try asking, in English, 'Where is the bathroom?' in Japan. Most people will have no idea what you are saying. This, despite having three times the practice of American students, in English, GUARANTEED by the Ministry of Education.
This is pretty pathetic. It's not that I think that all Japanese should speak English or anything, but that for each student to emerge from school with such limited capability after SIX YEARS of education is, to my way of thinking, asinine. This isn't because the students are dumb, either; it's because English is taught as a bunch of disjointed concepts to memorize, rather than a language.
Re:That kind of qualification smokes my baloney
on
Recruiting IT Students?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This isn't a 'qualification', this is a question from a job interview. I ask this question at *every* interview I give for an entry-level UNIX position.
The correct answer is simple, and shows an important piece of knowledge -- a sysadmin who doesn't at least grasp the importance of cryptography will get his servers 0wned and r00ted within about ten minutes.
See, that's how you filter out interviewees -- by asking them questions.
I also ask applicants about their favorite command-line tools and whether or not they run a Unix at home. The ones that use Unix for their home systems invariably have an excellent grasp of the command line and know how to troubleshoot, whereas the people who have just 'played' with Linux/BSD, installing it on a spare box and never using it, don't. How is this somehow bad?
That's pretty much my attitude. At my school, you are REQUIRED to take 'upper-division' General Education classes. ALL of these classes are liberal arts, no science, math, business, or foreign language. Basically, a complete waste of time for someone who isn't a liberal arts major, doubly so because I've already done an insane amount of lower-division G.E.
So, what do I do in my bullshit G.E. classes? Whip out the PowerBook and get some work done. I still have an A in the class, because this is Liberal Arts and requires zero thought, and I can use that otherwise wasted time to work on the massive project I've got coming down the pipe in my Japanese class, or to study up on group theory.
On the flip side, in the classes that matter to my degree (and are thus interesting), the laptop stays in its case, except when I'm looking up something I don't understand, or when it's a slow review day and I don't really need most of the information presented.
No, no. Sure, *some* fifth-order polynomials are factorable to a set of reduced-order polynominals, but not all. What's being said here is that you can't take an arbitrary fifth-order polynomial, in the form ax^5 + bx^4 + cx^3 + dx^2 + ex + f, and have a formula to provide a solution. So there can be no 'quintic formula' along the same lines as the 'quadratic' formula, making polynomials of fifth-order or higher much harder to solve.
I assume you've never looked under the iTunes Preferences? You know, like under 'Advanced' and 'Importing' where you can tell iTunes to import files in MP3 format with whatever bitrate you prefer? Takes about ten minutes for me to 'import' (rip) a CD on my PowerBook to MP3.
Sheesh. At least *use* the application before you criticize it.
Oh, and another reply is correct -- AAC on what you rip yourself is not DRMed.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad your argument is a strawman.
Evolution says nothing about the origin of life on Earth. It does provide for the possibility of abiogenesis, and there are many theories as to how this work, but they aren't part of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory simply tells us that organisms change (because their DNA changes) over time in response to their environment, and that the primary two mechanisms of this change are variation and natural selection.
Thus, evolutionary theory *is* testable, even in a lab -- you can take a fast-breeding species like the common fruit fly, apply artifical selective pressures, and watch the allelle frequencies[1] shift in real time compared to control groups. Dog breeding is another example; humans use a the natural mechanisms of evolution, but add in their own constraints in the selection and variation departments.
If you could prove, experimentally, that some other mechanism accounted for this; or even that it wasn't the combination of selection and variation that prompted observed shifts in allelle frequencies, then you would easily be able to disprove evolutionary theory as it currently stands, and would open up new realms in modern Biology.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, says absolutely nothing about any of this; instead, it makes a claim about the origin of life that is by definition unfalsifiable, as it is vacuously true. Beyond this, discussion of ID as science is moot, because falsifiability is a prerequisite for ANYTHING to be considered a scientific theory. Want to prove me wrong? Give me a test scenario where ID can be invalidated through experimental results; after all, I just gave you one for evolution.
[1] For the non-genetically inclined reader:
Allelles are, if you will, defined points on the strand of DNA. Each group of allelles governs a set of physical traits, and each group of allelles can be populated by different genes, giving rise to different traits. For example, a single allelle governs the RH factor of your blood, so depending on what gene gets stuck in that allelle, which is determined by your parents' genetics, you are either RH+ or RH-. Since these points are well-defined, and produce physically observable characteristics, it is relatively easy to see the genetic change in a population over time, and link that change back to changes in the way the allelles are populated.
To the genetically inclined: I know this is a simplistic explanation, but I think it's adequate for the purpose of this post.
Er, the role of oxygen in the establishment of organic life was well outside the scope of my analogy, but just to clarify -- the reason for an atmosphere has little to do with its oxygen content, and much to do with its radiation shielding effects.
I agree that the anaerobic formation of life is a more plausible scenario, given how utterly caustic oxygen is (thanks to its valence electron configuration).
However, given the dependence of organic molecules on that particular atom with atomic weight sixteen, I think you'd be hard-pressed to claim that all oxygen is detrimenal to the formation of life; redox reactions, as basic as they are, are still essential in organic chemistry. So, while an oxygen atmosphere would have likely destroyed early self-replicating molecules, they would never have formed without access to oxidized compounds.
(As a footnote, I only *started* as a Chem major, and switched to Math, so my Organic is more than a little rusty).
Hence my comment. ;)
Well, radiation is the first problem; there's a hell of a lot of organic-molecule-shattering 'waves of doom' in space, way more than on the surface of a planet that has the shielding of both an atmosphere and a magenetosphere[1].
Second, tidal pools on a planet keep everything nicely together in the same general area, courtesey of Our Friend Gravity. Tidal pools, at least on Earth, also provide a very necessary solvent for the whole organic chemistry process -- water. No water, and pretty much all of the organic processes that we know about stop working; in fact, when you look at the chemistry, it almost seems that an oxygen atmosphere is optional, but that water is a base requiremet for life because of its properties as a solvent.
So, no, it's doubtful that complex molecules like Keith Richards will form outside of a suitable gravity well, and doubly doubtful that complex organic molecules (e.g., DNA) will form without liquid water.
[1] That's a magnetic field around a planet, not a hamster ball for Sir Ian McKellen.
I think he (the article poster) needs to make it clear that computers are tools with continuous maintenance requirements, much like other large-scale capital goods. Most industrial equipment requires a fair amount of maintenance to keep it running, and not performing that maintenance leads to Big Problems and Massive Expenses down the road.
The article poster is correct in his assessment; a company with over a hundred users, nearly all of which have a computer, needs about two full-time IT guys (desktops take more work to manage than servers, doubly so in a Windows environment). Management needs to know not only how overworked this guy is in his current position, but what the ramifications are of not having any 'preventive maintenance' being done on their systems.
Data theft is just one possibility, of course. Loss of critical data due to lack of a cohesive backup procedure, downtime from failed equipment, and even potential loss of customers -- I know I wouldn't place any sort of large order with a company if they didn't take steps to protect my information.
Have you told your bank? Because problems like this never get fixed if nobody complains. More importantly, if you tell them that their pages are broken in Firefox/Safari, and they tell you to get IE, switch banks, because businesses tend to listen when they lose customers because of things like this. When you close your accounts, and they ask the reason, tell them why.
You wouldn't buy a lawnmower that only worked on 'Black & Decker' grass, you wouldn't buy a knife that only cut 'Chicago Cutlery' brand onions, so why the hell would you do business with a bank that forces you to use tools that you don't want to, namely, Windows and IE?
I have no idea why I'm responding to this, but it's kind of funny, so at least I'm amused. *grin*
I prefer being a sysadmin to being a developer, because I honestly hate writing code for a living. As a sysadmin, for me at least, I get more variety, and definitely more freedom than the developers do, and the pay is about the same. Hey, I can like my job, you can like yours; remember, the farmers and the cattlemen always hated each other.
This isn't to say that I can't code; I've been programming since I was a kid, have written several large internal projects for my various employers, and even spent some time learning 68k and X86 assembly Back In The Day. More importantly, unlike a lot of hotshot CS grads, I actually know how the math behind the computer works at a very abstract level, which gives me an edge in system and program design.
More importantly, I've implemented a big pile of very bad ideas, and learned from my mistakes in a very direct fashion.
Oh, and I'm paying for my own degree, thanks.
Yes, but Japan has also had a very large influx of Japanese-speaking Koreans and Chinese over the past twenty years; there's a reason that Japan Town in San Fransisco has more signs in Korean than in Japanese.
The Japanese 'labor shortage' was never a problem; what fucked the Japanese, as the parent poster noted, was that they lost their currency edge, and then the inefficency of Japanese business practices caught up with them. The yuan is currently at an 8:1 ratio with U.S. dollars, much the same as the Yen was back during the early 70s, and the situation is indeed quite similar.
The difference on the U.S. side is that we still had an edge on the Japanese back during the 80s -- IT. Japan may have been making the cars and appliances more cheaply, but we were turning out engineers at a very brisk pace, and managed to build one hell of a computer software industry.
Unfortunately, we've by-and-large sold this out, crippled our educational system in a number of ways, and have made it almost impossible to start a company in the same way one would in the 1970s, because of all the new IP laws designed to protect big business.
Of course, time will tell one way or the other, but I'm happy that I'll be near-fluent in both German and Japanese by the time I get done with school, because I sure as hell don't want to limit my work options to the U.S. alone.
For the record, I ran a Linux-only desktop for about six years, and five of those years, up to the present day, have been while working as a Real Sysadmin -- Solaris, BSD, Linux, and Windows (NT/2K), datacenter environment with high-uptime on a shoestring budget. Oh, and most of our clients were litigators, so we had good reason to not violate our SLAs.
Working, of course, slows down school, so it's taking me quite awhile to finish up two degrees.
While I certainly don't have the chops of a fifty-year-old veteran of the AIX wars, I am certainly not some Mac zealot that thinks he knows UNIX because OS X is based off of BSD.
I totally agree; Pages is, for me at least, useless -- and I can't find a way to tell it to use something *other* than its default save format of 'a directory with files'.
Keynote rocks. Plain and simple. I have always hated powerpoint because it's just a pain in the ass, and Keynote has given me faith that computers can be used in a productive manner for creating presentations.
Speaking of which, I'm going to finish this slashdot post, and go back to Keynote and finish up that presentation that's due on Tuesday...
The problem is twofold. First, OpenOffice.org is anything *but* an 'open-source'; Sun basically owns any of the contributions that you submit to the project, so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one). The codebase originally came from StarOffice, and given what they started with, I'd say that they've made a hell of a lot of progress -- OOo 2.0 is light-years ahead of what StarOffice used to be.
That being said, yes, OOo is pretty much crap and utterly useless for anything beyond basic office duties; its spreadsheet capabilities are laughable at best (no simplex or network model solvers), and what's an even bigger kicker (for me) is that you can't really use it on OS X!
Sure, you can run it in the X11 emulation layer, but one of the reasons I bloody switched to Apple was that I was very tired of dealing with X11 being useful only for displaying terminals. Why would I want to run X11 when I finally escaped from it? Oh, and if you do run OOo under X11.app, you don't get any of your local TrueType fonts (IIRC), or any of the integration that makes OS X so much a pleasure to work with, from a desktop perspective.
Don't get me started on NeoOffice. It's maintained by two guys who have better things to do with their time, and still suffers from the shortcomings of OOo, as well as some integration problems (i.e., it doesn't even use the native printing or file dialogues).
But these problems are endemic on a per-project basis; Firefox is an overall fantastic program, LaTeX is great as well, and libgaim powers AdiumX, which gets a lot of use on my system.
But someone has to come along and make something better than OOo; I've half a mind to do it myself, when I'm finding myself not working full-time as a UNIX sysadmin while going to school full-time.
You obviously haven't been to Japan, then. Cyber cafes (Manga-kisa) over there provide, in exchange for a (usually small) hourly fee, not only access to an internet-connected computer, but access to a large media library (these places evolved from Manga cafes), some type of inexpensive food and beverage, and very commonly, your own little private cubicle, large enough to sleep in!
Some even have showers and actual beds.
These places are also nominally open twenty-four hours.
It's not uncommon for someone who has missed the last train home to rent out a cubicle in one of these places for the night, because it's a lot cheaper to buy six or eight hours of sleep at seven hundred yen per hour than it is to pay for a ten-thousand-yen per-night business hotel.
Is it cheaper than a normal phone call?
For me, I call Japan a lot, and while it's more expensive than the states, I know that this is because the Japanese government levies all kinds of taxes -- things like, calling a normal phone line has the same cost as calling a U.S. phone, but calling a Japanese mobile costs almost $0.14 USD per minute!
Or, you know, use it to keep in touch with loved ones who live too far away to visit regularly -- my girlfriend lives in Japan, I live in California, and I actually went as far as to throw Windows on a spare box just for MSN video chat.
And no, it's not 'that' kind of a phone call -- her webcam and computer live in the kitchen, and her parents already have enough in the way of reasons to not like me (e.g.: I'm not Japanese).
If you have knowledge of security, you know why this is a bad idea.
If an application can access data on the backend, so can a thief who either breaks in through that application, or who manages to gain login access to the machine, because THE APPLICATION NEEDS THE CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY. All the encryption in the world is useless if the key is known by Alice, Charlie, AND Bruce.
The only valid use I can think of for encrypting information that goes into the database is a public key system. For example, let's say that I've got some type of system that bills customers using their credit cards. The front-end application doesn't need to know what those credit card numbers are, but needs a way of telling the back-end application (that does the billing and is otherwise separate) about those cards.
Enter public key crypto. The front-end app has a key that can be used to encrypt, but not decrypt, the sensitive data, and the backend has the keys needed for both encryption and decryption. That way, the front end can write, but not read, and the back end, which is totally isolated from the front-end app, has full control.
I've had a real job before; left it to go back and finish up my degrees. Given what the government charges me in taxes, and what they spend on pork-barrel programs for defense contractors, I think they can afford to spend some money to give the lower-class citizens some basic healthcare, and let us higher-ups pay for better care if we want to.
Despite your low slashdot ID, you're an idiot.
First off, if I had to choose between the Christian Fundamentalists, or the Islamic Fundamentalists, I'd rather go with the latter. They have less history of violent persecution of non-believers, and before you bring terrorists into the equation, remember that Jerry Falwell would be the same as Osama Bin Laden if he didn't have so much bloody power over here in the 'States.
Second, I see the overall worldwide belief in religion in general declining. All the Japanese and Chinese I know are atheists or agnostics, as are most of the Europeans and Canadians, and a good number of my fellow college students. Christianity just doesn't matter that much anymore outside of the U.S., and Islam doesn't matter that much outside the middle east.
That's true, but there is a fairly close bond between Japan and the U.S., with a lot of Japanese companies (Sony, Honda, Sumitomo Bank) doing business over in America, and with a lot of American companies (Citibank, Tricon Global, Starbucks) doing business in Japan, and without the same level of cultural baggage that exists between the Japanese and pretty much all of the rest of Asia. It's good business sense to speak the languages of your trading partners, so a smart Japanese would study English and either Korean or Chinese (or both). Also, a native speaker of Japanese and any of the European languages can also make a decent amount of money, because that's a fairly rare skillset.
My big point is that the Japanese, as with many things they do, put out a great 'face' on English education, but it's nothing more. They should either drop the facade, or actually teach people to speak English.
Slightly off-topic: Although I've been studying Japanese solidly only for about three years, and have only spent about a month in Japan, I've honestly stopped finding Engrish to be all that funny. I mean, now that I understand Japanese a lot better, I understand why they make the mistakes that they do, and it just saddens me that people point and laugh, rather than point out the error. People can't improve if they don't know that they're doing something wrong.
You know, I keep hearing about this, but none of my Canadian friends have ever mentioned it; I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't ever happen, but I don't think it's the big problem that a bunch of Americans make it out to be. Hell, last time my friend Sarah got sick with a nasty cold (!), the local hospital offered to send out an AMBULANCE to pick her up.
On the flip side, if you're a student in the US, you can shell out $100 a month for CRAP healthcare -- as in, if the Student Heath Center is open and you don't go there first, you can pay your own bills, and unless it's an emergency (life-threatening), you had better not even think of going to see a doctor, because the student insurance won't cover it. Oh, and it won't cover anything out-of-network, so I owe my dentist $150 because the student insurance I forked out about won't cover cleanings with my regular dentist.
At least I have healthcare; half of the people I go to school with don't, because $100 a month is more than they can afford.
Now that I'm working 'full time' again, things are better (back to real healthcare), but having experienced 'cheap healthcare' for a year, I'd rather see us Americans with a better system.
I hate to say it, but I think the Japanese have something going with the way they run things -- even without being on the 'National Insurance', I was able to go to a Japanese clinic and have my cough diagnosed as a really nasty case of pneumonia -- and was out the door after a total of an hour, with a small bag filled with about five different kinds of medication, and all for about $200 (IIRC). I shudder to think of what two sets of chest X-rays and about two weeks of meds would have cost in the U.S. without insurance.
Given that I travel up to B.C. about twice a year, and that I'm going to be looking for employment up north after I graduate (two years down the road), I say 'Hell, yes!'
No worries about healthcare, low crime, fantastic local beers, hockey in the winter, Tim Hortons...er, what am I not supposed to like, again?
Actually, Japanese is considered to be harder to learn than Chinese, at least for native English speakers. This is mostly due to a combination of three things: Massively different writing systems (Chinese also has this), SOV grammar (Chinese is SVO like English), and large gradiation in politeness levels (Chinese is on a par with German in this area, AFIK).
So, yes, Japanese is a bitch to learn for English speakers, and English is a bitch for Japanese speakers.
On the flip side, Japanese English education is a joke compared to the foreign language education in the States. Students in the U.S. are required to take a whopping four semesters of foreign language to get a Bachelors' degree, and this includes classes taken in high school. Japanese students are drilled on English (as I recall) from 6th grade on, and are required to take English classes in University as well.
So, the average American will have had two or three years of a foreign language, most likely Spanish. They won't be able to converse, but they can ask how to find a bathroom, and likely provide a response if someone asks them. Hell, I took *German* in high school, and I can still tell when someone is asking 'Where is the bathroom?' in Spanish or French, because I've overheard enough to make sense of simple phrases like that. I am not uncommon in this regard.
Try asking, in English, 'Where is the bathroom?' in Japan. Most people will have no idea what you are saying. This, despite having three times the practice of American students, in English, GUARANTEED by the Ministry of Education.
This is pretty pathetic. It's not that I think that all Japanese should speak English or anything, but that for each student to emerge from school with such limited capability after SIX YEARS of education is, to my way of thinking, asinine. This isn't because the students are dumb, either; it's because English is taught as a bunch of disjointed concepts to memorize, rather than a language.
This isn't a 'qualification', this is a question from a job interview. I ask this question at *every* interview I give for an entry-level UNIX position.
The correct answer is simple, and shows an important piece of knowledge -- a sysadmin who doesn't at least grasp the importance of cryptography will get his servers 0wned and r00ted within about ten minutes.
See, that's how you filter out interviewees -- by asking them questions.
I also ask applicants about their favorite command-line tools and whether or not they run a Unix at home. The ones that use Unix for their home systems invariably have an excellent grasp of the command line and know how to troubleshoot, whereas the people who have just 'played' with Linux/BSD, installing it on a spare box and never using it, don't. How is this somehow bad?
That's pretty much my attitude. At my school, you are REQUIRED to take 'upper-division' General Education classes. ALL of these classes are liberal arts, no science, math, business, or foreign language. Basically, a complete waste of time for someone who isn't a liberal arts major, doubly so because I've already done an insane amount of lower-division G.E.
So, what do I do in my bullshit G.E. classes? Whip out the PowerBook and get some work done. I still have an A in the class, because this is Liberal Arts and requires zero thought, and I can use that otherwise wasted time to work on the massive project I've got coming down the pipe in my Japanese class, or to study up on group theory.
On the flip side, in the classes that matter to my degree (and are thus interesting), the laptop stays in its case, except when I'm looking up something I don't understand, or when it's a slow review day and I don't really need most of the information presented.
No, no. Sure, *some* fifth-order polynomials are factorable to a set of reduced-order polynominals, but not all. What's being said here is that you can't take an arbitrary fifth-order polynomial, in the form ax^5 + bx^4 + cx^3 + dx^2 + ex + f, and have a formula to provide a solution. So there can be no 'quintic formula' along the same lines as the 'quadratic' formula, making polynomials of fifth-order or higher much harder to solve.
I assume you've never looked under the iTunes Preferences? You know, like under 'Advanced' and 'Importing' where you can tell iTunes to import files in MP3 format with whatever bitrate you prefer? Takes about ten minutes for me to 'import' (rip) a CD on my PowerBook to MP3.
Sheesh. At least *use* the application before you criticize it.
Oh, and another reply is correct -- AAC on what you rip yourself is not DRMed.