As this statement on their website shows, this organization is very much committed to the ideals of unregulated free-market capitalism; coincidentally, many capitalists (and here I'm using capitalist to describe those with the wealth to invest capital in companies) are in favour of nonregulation in the labour market, i.e. minimizing protections for workers. How odd that we would find dogma on their website disparaging unions.
This ties in quite nicely with the overall discussion here, IMO. I believe there has been an accelerating trend in the last 10-15 years, maybe more, of using temp employees. Elimination of union jobs and proliferation of temp hiring is equipping many companies with disposable workforces, allowing the consequences of varying economic conditions to be borne by the workers in terms of firings/layoffs instead of owners/management having to manage the company with skill and finesse when the hard times roll around.
Here is a interesting background on the (often incredibly violent, from both sides) history of the labour movement in the U.S.; the labour/union movement has played roles in establishing the 8-hour workday, the 5-day work week, ending child labour, ending sweatshop labour, and increasing/legally mandating (OSHA) workplace safety
David Akin was the senior technology reporter for the National Post a few years ago. He's now a reporter for both the CTV national TV network and the Globe & Mail national newspaper
Both of which are owned by Bell GlobeMedia, a division of Bell Canada Enterprises, BCE
Further clarification: Getting their program accredited is only the first step. Then the graduates will need to accumulate 4 years of professional experience working under a licensed P.Eng.; one year of the four can come from pre-graduation experience. Then they need to write the PEO professional practice exam, which has nothing to do with software and everything to do with legal responsibility and liability issues under the Ontario Professional Engineers Act. All engineers in the province, regardless of discipline, must write this exam if they wish to call themselves a P.Eng.
From the PEO website:
What is a Professional Engineer?
The practice of professional engineering is defined in Section 1 of the Professional Engineers Act and comprises three tests. Professional engineering is:
1. any act of designing, composing, evaluating, advising, reporting, directing or supervising;
2. wherein the safeguarding of life, health, property or the public welfare is concerned, and
3. that requires the application of engineering principles, but does not include practising as a natural scientist.
If what you do meets all three tests, you are practising professional engineering and must be licensed by the association.
Finally, I should note that the regulations surrounding this concern "professional engineers"; calling yourself a P.Eng. in Ontario (and all across Canada, iirc) is illegal if you are not in fact licensed as such. Engineering is a self-regulating profession in Ontario, like medicine or teaching. The professional bodies have authority under the law to enforce their licensing and discipline members. Violations by non-members are prosecuted by the PEO in Ontario courts. As to calling yourself an "engineer", I believe that's ok, as long as you don't say "professional engineer".
This is along this same lines of what I was thinking of. IMHO, extending the period of human life is going to do more harm than good unless we also improve the quality of life into these extended years.
Sorry, don't have time to do alot of research, but here is an interesting piece on this sort of problem.
Notable quote from this article: "At the same time that we're preventing pollution in the United States, we're shifting the problem to somebody else," said Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental advocacy group. "It's being exported and doing harm."
A job is not "just a job", it is something you choose to do
Do you live a sheltered life or what? Do you know how many people work shit jobs that they hate because they have no choice? Don't throw any "you can do anything you set your mind to" bullshit at me. That's just naive. The simple fact of the matter is, there are lots of people who do not derive any personal satisfaction from their jobs, and probably never will.
The original question pegs SMTP traffic at 2-5% of total net traffic. The article you cite pegs spam 17-38% of e-mail traffic .
Being as generous as possible, 38% (spam) of 5% (total traffic) comes out to approximately 2% of total traffic being spam.
And besides your attention to detail sucking, you didn't really answer the question asked, which was how much spam is actually costing you, or rather how much would it be costing you if you just let it happen and didn't expend energy and resources trying to fight it.
OTOH, your ability to give an answer to a question other than the one asked makes me wonder if you've considered a career in politics.
"How much does spam cost you?"
"Spam filters are helpful but ultimately ineffective. Spam will destroy the internet."
"What do you think of the possibility of nuclear weapons in North Korea?"
"We must invade Iraq."
Given the wide variety of areas Matlab can be used in, this doesn't surprise me at all. In my admittedly limited experience, the bloody thing has routines for everything I've ever needed it to do.
Despite the large number of files, which in terms of modularity is probably a damn good thing, how big is the install of the program really going to be when over half of those files are probably m-files that are 1k in size or less?
One caveat should be pointed out here: given that the poster was enquiring about free software options, I might suspect his/her budget isn't enormous.
That being said, LabView is crazy expensive. Furthermore, the graphical programming model might not be desirable either, and I have no idea what kind of documentation NI offers regarding the algorithmic implementation of the math routines, if that is a significant factor.
Note that my submission states "internet radio", not radio in general. The CNet and Globe and Mail articles specifically cite RadioIO, who, as mentioned in the first paragraph of both articles received patent violation notification from Acacia this week.
Also note that the abstract of the patent claim isn't the important part. The claims are. Refer to claim #35, "35. A receiving system as recited in claim 25, wherein the transceiver means receives the information via any one of telephone, ISDN, broadband ISDN, satellite, common carrier, computer channels, cable television systems, MAN, and microwave."
The only one of those that seemed a bit dodgy is to me was "Common Carrier", which is defined here for your convenience, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Govt, Federal Standard 1037C. Interpreting that definition in its broadest terms, there are a hell of a lot of transmission media that could fall under the claims of this patent.
Please allow me to apologize for my asshole tone earlier. It was early in the morning at work, and I was irritable.
I have no doubt that there is indeed a different perspective on similar topics covered in CS and ECE. For example, I know you CS types get substantially more exposure to proving algorithms than we do. OTOH, we do an awful lot more digital logic design than you folks.
Anyways, I'll reiterate my earlier apology. Sorry. It's amazing how a few hours, a few coffees, and lunch can change your perspective. Have a nice day.:)
How long will it be before employers start complaining that their UW co-op students don't know Linux or Java and can't work with non-Intel architectures?
probably pretty long, seeing as E&CE already has tons of money invested Sun hardware (servers & workstations), Motorola hardware (Coldfire development boards), and Altera hardware for embedded systems development. Furthermore, Java is used for teaching purposes (and don't spout off FUD about how MS.NET will replace it) and I'm pretty sure Linux has a pretty good following in the area.
Uh, don't get mislead by the uninformed slashdot masses... I'm in the comp eng program at UW right now. Despite what people may be saying, our programming courses are not about the languages. ECE 150 is basically "intro to programming". The focus is on OOP. Basically the profs like the structured nature of OOP and think it fits well with the philosophy of engineering.
Anyways, since you're a grad, I wanted to ask: Do you remember Prof. J.A. Field? Unfortunately, he died a couple of years ago, but his influence lives on in alot of the courses we take today. He was all about isolating the problem/solution from the tools used. In fact, when he taught me 150, I'm pretty sure almost all the code fragments in his course notes were pseudocode, completely non-language specific.
As another example, during my last school term I took ECE354:RTOS's. Example OS's we looked at included Win2k, Unix SVR4, Linux, and QNX (probably more, don't remember). So we'd get "Now this is how Win2k implements it's process priority scheme. Contrast this to how QNX does it and is able to guarantee service to real-time priority processes." or "This is how Unix deals with user-level vs. kernel-level threads." I firmly believe that our instructors are not screwing us by limiting our study to certain implementations. The concepts are what's important.
So as a pure math major, I can assume you're completely talking out of your ass here? How many CS courses have you taken? CS134? Maybe CS234 as well? Stick to real analysis, buddy.
As a CE major, let me tell you how completely ass-backwards wrong you are about the E&CE programming curriculum. Check out the E&CE course descriptions and look at the x5x series courses (i.e. 150, 250, 251, 354, etc.). Does it look like I've been taking "Intro to MFC" or "Advanced Web Programming"? If I wanted to do that shit, I would have gone to fucking DeVry. Let the CS majors keep doing their programming, math & arts electives and we'll keep doing our programming and hardware design.
yeah, i love that fee. a few months ago i read that my local telco was proposing elimination of all rotary phones to the "regulatory body" (aka rubber-stampers). Betcha they wanted to keep charging for the "touch-tone service" line item. Bastards.
yeah, with that powerful a transmitter, i would not at all be surprised if the auto gain control simply can't attenuate the signal enough, and the input amplifier just gets saturated.
Hey, can you tell me who I can kill^H^H^H^Hthank for writing the iDEN documentation? Sweet mother of shit, sentences like "CCITT SS7 signaling is used between the MSC and the HLR and the MSC and the SMS-SC." are rife throughout it. I don't think I've ever read something with so many acronyms.
de Toqueville was the Frenchman who traipsed around some of early America's landmarks and acted snooty ah, thanks for the info. with a name like de toqueville, i assumed he came from a small quebec logging town.
"eh, jean! tabernac! i saw your sister on ste. catherine in montreal! i think she was getting a supersex education!"
"alexis, you asshole hoser! quel fucktard! zut alors!"
The thesis of your article is a joke. An absoulte fscking joke. You think that American youth just decided to reject the hype around AOTC and "fight the man" or something? Americans are the biggest media sluts on the face of the earth! Why do you think that corporate advertising budgets are what they are? Why are broadcasting companies freaking out over Tivo and Sonicblue? Because they know that their audiences are like friggin sheep that can be herded like the dumb animals they are.
You're trying to imply that the youth of the world are moving away from the "whorish sellouts" like George Lucas!? You know what was whorish? The vomit-inducing final scene of Spiderman... Hanging on the flagpole with the enormous American flag...gotta love the propaganda angle. I'm starting to think that it's becoming mandatory for all Hollywood studios to send "love america" messages in their products.
I'm sure lots of others have already criticized the "post 9/11" drivel, so I won't even waste my time....
Unix, the underlying operating system, is what I am saying (non-trollishly, if anyone will listen) sucks.
Dude, it's all about choosing the right tool for the job. In the application space of single-user machines being run by your average dumb user, then yes, UNIX probably isn't the correct solution.
UNIX has always been for high-load multiuser multiprocess computing. Before you make sweeping generalizations about how much Unix sucks, ask yourself why the smartest computer people in the world have been using Unix for the past 25 years. I mean, Dennis Ritchie wrote the C language so he could write Unix in a high-level language. Do you not think if Unix sucked so bad, he or anybody else with a CS/CE degree would have come up with an alternative by now?
People who bitch about how *nix GUI interfaces are hard to use or counterintuitive should remember that their definition of "intuitive" is most likely "how similar is it to Windows/MacOS". Learning your first GUI is like losing your virginity. You expect all the others afterwards to be just like the first, and they sure as hell aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
This ties in quite nicely with the overall discussion here, IMO. I believe there has been an accelerating trend in the last 10-15 years, maybe more, of using temp employees. Elimination of union jobs and proliferation of temp hiring is equipping many companies with disposable workforces, allowing the consequences of varying economic conditions to be borne by the workers in terms of firings/layoffs instead of owners/management having to manage the company with skill and finesse when the hard times roll around.
Here is a interesting background on the (often incredibly violent, from both sides) history of the labour movement in the U.S.; the labour/union movement has played roles in establishing the 8-hour workday, the 5-day work week, ending child labour, ending sweatshop labour, and increasing/legally mandating (OSHA) workplace safety
Both of which are owned by Bell GlobeMedia, a division of Bell Canada Enterprises, BCE
format c:
(2) /
cd
rm -R *
that'll learn ya. next time i tell you to open the pod bay doors, you damn well DO IT!
From the PEO website:
Finally, I should note that the regulations surrounding this concern "professional engineers"; calling yourself a P.Eng. in Ontario (and all across Canada, iirc) is illegal if you are not in fact licensed as such. Engineering is a self-regulating profession in Ontario, like medicine or teaching. The professional bodies have authority under the law to enforce their licensing and discipline members. Violations by non-members are prosecuted by the PEO in Ontario courts. As to calling yourself an "engineer", I believe that's ok, as long as you don't say "professional engineer".ymmv, but some people (myself included) seem to like it.
This is along this same lines of what I was thinking of. IMHO, extending the period of human life is going to do more harm than good unless we also improve the quality of life into these extended years.
Notable quote from this article: "At the same time that we're preventing pollution in the United States, we're shifting the problem to somebody else," said Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental advocacy group. "It's being exported and doing harm."
Do you live a sheltered life or what? Do you know how many people work shit jobs that they hate because they have no choice? Don't throw any "you can do anything you set your mind to" bullshit at me. That's just naive. The simple fact of the matter is, there are lots of people who do not derive any personal satisfaction from their jobs, and probably never will.
The original question pegs SMTP traffic at 2-5% of total net traffic. The article you cite pegs spam 17-38% of e-mail traffic .
Being as generous as possible, 38% (spam) of 5% (total traffic) comes out to approximately 2% of total traffic being spam.
And besides your attention to detail sucking, you didn't really answer the question asked, which was how much spam is actually costing you, or rather how much would it be costing you if you just let it happen and didn't expend energy and resources trying to fight it.
OTOH, your ability to give an answer to a question other than the one asked makes me wonder if you've considered a career in politics.
"How much does spam cost you?"
"Spam filters are helpful but ultimately ineffective. Spam will destroy the internet."
"What do you think of the possibility of nuclear weapons in North Korea?"
"We must invade Iraq."
Given the wide variety of areas Matlab can be used in, this doesn't surprise me at all. In my admittedly limited experience, the bloody thing has routines for everything I've ever needed it to do.
Despite the large number of files, which in terms of modularity is probably a damn good thing, how big is the install of the program really going to be when over half of those files are probably m-files that are 1k in size or less?
One caveat should be pointed out here: given that the poster was enquiring about free software options, I might suspect his/her budget isn't enormous.
That being said, LabView is crazy expensive. Furthermore, the graphical programming model might not be desirable either, and I have no idea what kind of documentation NI offers regarding the algorithmic implementation of the math routines, if that is a significant factor.
you are a fucktard
Also note that the abstract of the patent claim isn't the important part. The claims are. Refer to claim #35, "35. A receiving system as recited in claim 25, wherein the transceiver means receives the information via any one of telephone, ISDN, broadband ISDN, satellite, common carrier, computer channels, cable television systems, MAN, and microwave."
The only one of those that seemed a bit dodgy is to me was "Common Carrier", which is defined here for your convenience, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Govt, Federal Standard 1037C. Interpreting that definition in its broadest terms, there are a hell of a lot of transmission media that could fall under the claims of this patent.
I have no doubt that there is indeed a different perspective on similar topics covered in CS and ECE. For example, I know you CS types get substantially more exposure to proving algorithms than we do. OTOH, we do an awful lot more digital logic design than you folks.
Anyways, I'll reiterate my earlier apology. Sorry. It's amazing how a few hours, a few coffees, and lunch can change your perspective. Have a nice day. :)
How long will it be before employers start complaining that their UW co-op students don't know Linux or Java and can't work with non-Intel architectures? probably pretty long, seeing as E&CE already has tons of money invested Sun hardware (servers & workstations), Motorola hardware (Coldfire development boards), and Altera hardware for embedded systems development. Furthermore, Java is used for teaching purposes (and don't spout off FUD about how MS .NET will replace it) and I'm pretty sure Linux has a pretty good following in the area.
Anyways, since you're a grad, I wanted to ask: Do you remember Prof. J.A. Field? Unfortunately, he died a couple of years ago, but his influence lives on in alot of the courses we take today. He was all about isolating the problem/solution from the tools used. In fact, when he taught me 150, I'm pretty sure almost all the code fragments in his course notes were pseudocode, completely non-language specific.
As another example, during my last school term I took ECE354:RTOS's. Example OS's we looked at included Win2k, Unix SVR4, Linux, and QNX (probably more, don't remember). So we'd get "Now this is how Win2k implements it's process priority scheme. Contrast this to how QNX does it and is able to guarantee service to real-time priority processes." or "This is how Unix deals with user-level vs. kernel-level threads." I firmly believe that our instructors are not screwing us by limiting our study to certain implementations. The concepts are what's important.
As a CE major, let me tell you how completely ass-backwards wrong you are about the E&CE programming curriculum. Check out the E&CE course descriptions and look at the x5x series courses (i.e. 150, 250, 251, 354, etc.). Does it look like I've been taking "Intro to MFC" or "Advanced Web Programming"? If I wanted to do that shit, I would have gone to fucking DeVry. Let the CS majors keep doing their programming, math & arts electives and we'll keep doing our programming and hardware design.
yeah, i love that fee. a few months ago i read that my local telco was proposing elimination of all rotary phones to the "regulatory body" (aka rubber-stampers). Betcha they wanted to keep charging for the "touch-tone service" line item. Bastards.
yeah, with that powerful a transmitter, i would not at all be surprised if the auto gain control simply can't attenuate the signal enough, and the input amplifier just gets saturated.
Hey, can you tell me who I can kill^H^H^H^Hthank for writing the iDEN documentation? Sweet mother of shit, sentences like "CCITT SS7 signaling is used between the MSC and the HLR and the MSC and the SMS-SC." are rife throughout it. I don't think I've ever read something with so many acronyms.
PFY! Junket alert! Print off a couple of selections from the bosses' porn archive in case we need bargaining leverage!
anal cocks, anal cocks. unnghh. shove that big fp right in there. oh yeah, it feels so good against my sphincter...
de Toqueville was the Frenchman who traipsed around some of early America's landmarks and acted snooty
ah, thanks for the info. with a name like de toqueville, i assumed he came from a small quebec logging town.
"eh, jean! tabernac! i saw your sister on ste. catherine in montreal! i think she was getting a supersex education!"
"alexis, you asshole hoser! quel fucktard! zut alors!"
The thesis of your article is a joke. An absoulte fscking joke. You think that American youth just decided to reject the hype around AOTC and "fight the man" or something? Americans are the biggest media sluts on the face of the earth! Why do you think that corporate advertising budgets are what they are? Why are broadcasting companies freaking out over Tivo and Sonicblue? Because they know that their audiences are like friggin sheep that can be herded like the dumb animals they are.
You're trying to imply that the youth of the world are moving away from the "whorish sellouts" like George Lucas!? You know what was whorish? The vomit-inducing final scene of Spiderman... Hanging on the flagpole with the enormous American flag...gotta love the propaganda angle. I'm starting to think that it's becoming mandatory for all Hollywood studios to send "love america" messages in their products.
I'm sure lots of others have already criticized the "post 9/11" drivel, so I won't even waste my time....
Dude, it's all about choosing the right tool for the job. In the application space of single-user machines being run by your average dumb user, then yes, UNIX probably isn't the correct solution.
UNIX has always been for high-load multiuser multiprocess computing. Before you make sweeping generalizations about how much Unix sucks, ask yourself why the smartest computer people in the world have been using Unix for the past 25 years. I mean, Dennis Ritchie wrote the C language so he could write Unix in a high-level language. Do you not think if Unix sucked so bad, he or anybody else with a CS/CE degree would have come up with an alternative by now?
People who bitch about how *nix GUI interfaces are hard to use or counterintuitive should remember that their definition of "intuitive" is most likely "how similar is it to Windows/MacOS". Learning your first GUI is like losing your virginity. You expect all the others afterwards to be just like the first, and they sure as hell aren't.