When I was a student, I took many surveys conducted on Mechanical Turk by any number of Ivy League universities. So in regards to your methodological objections, the one against conducting such surveys in that venue doesn't seem well founded.
And yes, a completely unscientific facebook article, whose purpose is obviously merely to reinforce a narrative that the author's have already decided is true, is hardly worth debunking. Is this guy's "study" slightly more accurate than that? Well yes...but so what.
These numbers likely include the retail employees at Apple stores. This is why Apple's diversity numbers are so much less skewed than any of the other tech companies, which are reporting based on a much different employee mixture (i.e. Engineers + Sales and Marketing, vs. Apples Engineers + Sales and Marketing + Retail store employees.. Much easier to pump up the numbers this way.
As to why publish a report saying, look at me, I'm so diverse (at least compared to Twitter, FB, et al.) I would think it's obvious. Risk management from "corrective" action by government, i.e. discrimination lawsuits, regulatory action, etc. Particularly when one's company is so tightly aligned with the democratic party .
You can hate religion all you want, just not Islam..and that only because muslims are not responsible for their violent actions. It's like shouting fire in a crowded room, apparently muslims have no more control over themselves than a fire does over burning. This logic is f*cking crap, and it passes for PC here. Seriously, they can put crosses in jars of piss and the US Federal government *pays* for it, but some guy posts a video on youtube muslims don't like and suddenly someone needs to go to jail for hate crimes?
In Canada catholic priests are prevented from teaching catholic doctrine relating to homosexuals. But because they are not violent, they are suppressed. It is *only Islam* that gets this treatment. Keep it up and sooner or later things will only get much more violent, since that is what you are rewarding. Islam doesn't have to be a crazy violent religion, but lots of muslims are crazy violent people, from crazy violent places and we are telling them that if they riot and kill they will be rewarded. Think you'll see more of this?
Mod me down all you want, or you can grow a pair and mod me up, though I'm sure our editors in Ann Arbor will take me down regardless.
He grows balls big enough to say that Islam is batsh*t crazy. Just as many good reasons to say this about Islam as there are about Mormonism. But he won't. No one will. Because then muslims will start killing people.
The NEA funded Andres Serrano and 'Piss Christ' (crucifixes in urine jars for those who don't remember) in 1987. Barely a murmur from the christians, and then it was only about why should we have to pay for this blashphemy. Some douche makes a youtube video about Islam and the pundit class (I'm looking at you MSNBC) talks about how he should be crucified.
Seriously, I actually have no problem with *whatever* someone wants to believe, but hurt feelings do not justify violence. And fear definitely doesn't justify silencing people, however batsh*t crazy they are. Because your beliefs (or lack thereof) look just that way to someone else.
It's easy to talk smack about folks you know won't hit you. Takes some balls to say it about someone you are pretty sure will.
It's a job, and therefore not slavery any more than any other one. Also you are very stupid for even making the comparison, though I suppose you hear that often enough.
I'm sure companies everywhere will be eager to list somewhere where the law dictates that they must give up one third of their representation that should be determined by ownership, in their company, to consumers. And I'm sure shareholders will be oh so eager to buy shares where their representation is likewise diluted, in companies listed in countries with such regulations. But dream on shiny socialists!
What you want is a nice SIP API. SIP will be your session layer in this case, allowing for standards based signalling between all the endpoints. In addition, it can be used to provide integrated instant messaging and even setup the gamimg session itself. Much progress has been made in the past year, and real implementations are starting to appear. The Vovida stack would probably be the best place to start, but a slightly higher level interface might be helpful for this sort of application (a GPL'd stack wouldn't hurt either, they use the Vovida license). For those interested in SIP checkout Henning Schulzrinne's SIP page @ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/sip/
As someone responsible for working to develop multimedia technologies to the classroom and desktop throughout a large land grant university in the US, I take exception to this.
While certainly there have been many idiotic purchases that fit your description, these have almost always been forced on us by our state legislature. Bad deciscions are going to happen regardless of what sort of technology we are discussing. It is the job of you and I and others like us to see that good technology decisions are made. As an example of good use of multimedia technology in the classroom, we have a professor using videoconferencing (h.323), a multimedia technology, to have a joint class on Islamic Studies with the American University of Cairo, all for a one time cost of less than $5000 including A/V integration... Oh, and the students happen to love it too.
Just for reference a broadcast HDTV is not "max 20Mb/s". This is apparently referencing the 19.4Mb/s compressed HD signal that is the "max" supported decode that most consumer HDTV's currently handle. REAL HD is a 1.5Gb/s uncompressed, though there are many compression levels beneath that. Hell, standard definition (SMPTE270)is 270Mb/s uncompressed over a dedicated lambda on the fiber. If you don't want to give the signal it's own lambda, it gets even larger if you want to encapsulate the signal in IP. ResearchChannel did just that, from Stanford to UWashington, over a year ago. (http://www.researchchannel.com/special/HDtech_9_2 2.html).
Sorry for the rant, I just couldn't let such a blatantly untrue statement pass by...
If you are teaching from a university of some size, you will likely have the internet2 advanced research network, Abilene (http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/) connecting you to all the other universites that happen to be members (there is a list). This provides you with a reliable data path for real time audio and video, via H.323 (an ITU standard) or non-standards based approches (not recommended) and soon via SIP (an IETF standard, less ghastly than H.323 by most accounts), once some SIP video clients are availible as most focus has been on VoIP to date. If you wish to conference with off campus sites, as most people do, you can conference with I2 schools, which will work pretty much every time, you can *attempt* it over the commodity internet, or you can use an H.323 to H.320 gateway (RadVision makes a nice one) that will allow you to communicate to sites that have ISDN connectivity for only money. There is a currently existing mesh of H.323 zones in existance across Internet 1 and 2, and advanced research networks globally (10-155 in europe, apan in asia, Ca*net in canada, they mostly all peer together) called ViDeNet, of which more info can be found at http://www.cavner.org/videnet/ .
So don't listen to the vendors who poo-poo realtime voice and video over IP networks, it can work just not usually over the commodity internet. Abilene and other advanced research networks change the whole equation for those with access to them.
Internet 2 is alive and well (and having a conference in Atlanta at the end of October). But they are an organisation really part of UCAID. The physical network used as the national research and education backbone is now called Abilene, and was built by Qwest. This replaces vBNS which was built by MCI/Worldcom under the orginal 1995 grant (expired in 2000) and has since been sold off too the highest bidder. As I said this is alive and well, and peers with the European (10-155) and Asian (APAN) as well as Canadian (CA*Net3) equivalents. There is a world wide interconnected series of research networks (where do you think the grid traffic is running over, the commodity internet). I just got back from NorduNet 2000 in Helsinki (I live in the states) and the EU is already working on upgrading 10-155 and all the sub networks it encompasses. More info at http://www.internet2.edu and
Here are links to two of the siemens products I reffered to in the last post. The first is the Siemens LP 5100, a fully h.323 compliant, open hardware IP phone. The second is the TA 1100, an adapter which allows a normal POTS phone to act as a VoIP device.
Unlike the cisco IP phones, which can only communicate with Cisco's call manager, these IP phones are fully H.323 v2 compliant and can interoperate nicely with any standards compliant H.323 gatekeeper, such as the excellent Radvision gatekeepers, or the Open H.323 Gatekeeper . Cisco does OEM the Radvision MCU's and H.320/H.323/PSTN Gateways, which both contain an embedded Radvision gatekeeper, but it won't work with their IP phones.
The Roman Empire was in its INFANCY under Nero. He was after all only the third emperor. (Caesar was never emperor, so it was Augustus, Caligula, Nero). The fall of the western roman empire is usually dated by the battle of Adrianople in 478 AD. 400 years off buddy. Your conspiracy theory sounds sort of weak when you put it in historical context. Everyone knows the Bavarian Illuminati run the world anyways.
Keep in mind that this is an article produced by the Hudson Group, the right wing think tank that employed Dan Quayle to chair a the 'Competitiveness Center' to "study ways to increase America's competitiveness in a global economy". So of course they are against taxation. What they are correct about are the relatively small amounts of truly taxable revenue vs. the costs and difficulties of collecting the taxes.
None of the solutions discussed in the article seemed at all viable, but I don't imagine they picked them for their competitive value. I mean, Tax-farming! This has been a widely discredited practice since the late days of the roman empire.
The only viable answer, wait to implement taxation until the market is much larger (read, some of that potential is realized)
While legally this would not affect non-US users, it will in fact have an effect, especially if it is adopted in the majority of states. The software produced in the US will likely contain the enforcement mechanism for the self help provision of UCITA. As a result, the company will have the ability, if not the legal right to shut down your software (or is it their's now?) at will. Not legally, mind you. But that won't stop crackers, either.
The entire comment is rendered invalid by even suggesting that W2K is worse than 98. I mean, didn't you ever talk to the guys doing desktop support? 98 is practically unsupportable. Add in a large environment and you are just screwed. W2k may be more complicated than it is worth, but it is still so much better than 98 that they don't belong in the same sentence. We all like *nix better (or are some kind of masochists), but there are hierarchies of crap.
If you are so intent on playing the race card, you had better go out and get Johnnie Cochran, because that "If the Wookies don't live on Endor, you must acquit" shit doesn't fly coming out of anyone elses piehole.
The proprietors of slashdot didn't make the comments that you took offense to. VA Linux sure as hell didn't have anything to do with it. This is just a cheap shot (Admittedly, some people have taken cheap shots at your organisation as well.)
You are right in saying that "That we've fucked up is not in dispute", no one here thinks you didn't fuck up. I personally think that it took big swinging pendulous balls to go to Linux World Expo, but since apparently you didn't send anyone with technical merit or significant knowledge of Linux or the user community, the people whose balls were on the line probably had no idea where they were sticking them.
Voice over IP provides an excellent example of a 'new' internet standard H.323 (V2 was only ratified in '98). H.323 provides a standard way of setting up communications and negotiating audio and video codecs for either a striaght voice, or video conference. The H.323 gatekeeper provides a policy server to control this (the real choke point, other than the H.323 stack itself). Both are being worked on by the OpenH323 folks.
Untrue, at UNC we are using IBM Videocharger to stream MPEG, and multicast it. It uses a proprietary player, but it is a step in the right direction, better than realplayer or windows media.
The Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, NC)is not at all bad either.
There are plenty of research jobs at the Universities (NC State, UNC-Ch, Duke). Plenty of jobs for software companies that are startups (in Cary mainly), big companies to go work for (IBM, SAS). Redhat out in Durham. Commutes seem painful to me, but they are nothing compared to Boston or Silicon Valley.
High speed internet (mainly ADSL right now) is availible to anyone not living in the boonies. Rent is not too high either, you can get a fairly nice house for under a grand a month.
And the one thing that Pittsburgh will never have, nice weather all the year round!
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a student, I took many surveys conducted on Mechanical Turk by any number of Ivy League universities. So in regards to your methodological objections, the one against conducting such surveys in that venue doesn't seem well founded.
And yes, a completely unscientific facebook article, whose purpose is obviously merely to reinforce a narrative that the author's have already decided is true, is hardly worth debunking. Is this guy's "study" slightly more accurate than that? Well yes...but so what.
These numbers likely include the retail employees at Apple stores. This is why Apple's diversity numbers are so much less skewed than any of the other tech companies, which are reporting based on a much different employee mixture (i.e. Engineers + Sales and Marketing, vs. Apples Engineers + Sales and Marketing + Retail store employees.. Much easier to pump up the numbers this way.
As to why publish a report saying, look at me, I'm so diverse (at least compared to Twitter, FB, et al.) I would think it's obvious. Risk management from "corrective" action by government, i.e. discrimination lawsuits, regulatory action, etc. Particularly when one's company is so tightly aligned with the democratic party .
And how many things did the christians burn? How many people did they kill? Oh that's right, nothing and no one.
Also free speech as I define it only truly exists in the US so I'm not interested on what other countries did.
You can hate religion all you want, just not Islam..and that only because muslims are not responsible for their violent actions. It's like shouting fire in a crowded room, apparently muslims have no more control over themselves than a fire does over burning. This logic is f*cking crap, and it passes for PC here. Seriously, they can put crosses in jars of piss and the US Federal government *pays* for it, but some guy posts a video on youtube muslims don't like and suddenly someone needs to go to jail for hate crimes?
In Canada catholic priests are prevented from teaching catholic doctrine relating to homosexuals. But because they are not violent, they are suppressed. It is *only Islam* that gets this treatment. Keep it up and sooner or later things will only get much more violent, since that is what you are rewarding. Islam doesn't have to be a crazy violent religion, but lots of muslims are crazy violent people, from crazy violent places and we are telling them that if they riot and kill they will be rewarded. Think you'll see more of this?
Mod me down all you want, or you can grow a pair and mod me up, though I'm sure our editors in Ann Arbor will take me down regardless.
He grows balls big enough to say that Islam is batsh*t crazy. Just as many good reasons to say this about Islam as there are about Mormonism. But he won't. No one will. Because then muslims will start killing people.
The NEA funded Andres Serrano and 'Piss Christ' (crucifixes in urine jars for those who don't remember) in 1987. Barely a murmur from the christians, and then it was only about why should we have to pay for this blashphemy. Some douche makes a youtube video about Islam and the pundit class (I'm looking at you MSNBC) talks about how he should be crucified.
Seriously, I actually have no problem with *whatever* someone wants to believe, but hurt feelings do not justify violence. And fear definitely doesn't justify silencing people, however batsh*t crazy they are. Because your beliefs (or lack thereof) look just that way to someone else.
It's easy to talk smack about folks you know won't hit you. Takes some balls to say it about someone you are pretty sure will.
Grow a pair Linus.
It's a job, and therefore not slavery any more than any other one. Also you are very stupid for even making the comparison, though I suppose you hear that often enough.
amen!
I'm sure companies everywhere will be eager to list somewhere where the law dictates that they must give up one third of their representation that should be determined by ownership, in their company, to consumers. And I'm sure shareholders will be oh so eager to buy shares where their representation is likewise diluted, in companies listed in countries with such regulations. But dream on shiny socialists!
What you want is a nice SIP API. SIP will be your session layer in this case, allowing for standards based signalling between all the endpoints. In addition, it can be used to provide integrated instant messaging and even setup the gamimg session itself. Much progress has been made in the past year, and real implementations are starting to appear. The Vovida stack would probably be the best place to start, but a slightly higher level interface might be helpful for this sort of application (a GPL'd stack wouldn't hurt either, they use the Vovida license). For those interested in SIP checkout Henning Schulzrinne's SIP page @ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/sip/
As someone responsible for working to develop multimedia technologies to the classroom and desktop throughout a large land grant university in the US, I take exception to this.
While certainly there have been many idiotic purchases that fit your description, these have almost always been forced on us by our state legislature. Bad deciscions are going to happen regardless of what sort of technology we are discussing. It is the job of you and I and others like us to see that good technology decisions are made. As an example of good use of multimedia technology in the classroom, we have a professor using videoconferencing (h.323), a multimedia technology, to have a joint class on Islamic Studies with the American University of Cairo, all for a one time cost of less than $5000 including A/V integration... Oh, and the students happen to love it too.
Check out www.exeter.edu
This is a prep high school, sister school to Andover of Bush family fame...
Just for reference a broadcast HDTV is not "max 20Mb/s". This is apparently referencing the 19.4Mb/s compressed HD signal that is the "max" supported decode that most consumer HDTV's currently handle. REAL HD is a 1.5Gb/s uncompressed, though there are many compression levels beneath that. Hell, standard definition (SMPTE270)is 270Mb/s uncompressed over a dedicated lambda on the fiber. If you don't want to give the signal it's own lambda, it gets even larger if you want to encapsulate the signal in IP. ResearchChannel did just that, from Stanford to UWashington, over a year ago. (http://www.researchchannel.com/special/HDtech_9_2 2.html).
Sorry for the rant, I just couldn't let such a blatantly untrue statement pass by...
If you are teaching from a university of some size, you will likely have the internet2 advanced research network, Abilene (http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/) connecting you to all the other universites that happen to be members (there is a list). This provides you with a reliable data path for real time audio and video, via H.323 (an ITU standard) or non-standards based approches (not recommended) and soon via SIP (an IETF standard, less ghastly than H.323 by most accounts), once some SIP video clients are availible as most focus has been on VoIP to date. If you wish to conference with off campus sites, as most people do, you can conference with I2 schools, which will work pretty much every time, you can *attempt* it over the commodity internet, or you can use an H.323 to H.320 gateway (RadVision makes a nice one) that will allow you to communicate to sites that have ISDN connectivity for only money. There is a currently existing mesh of H.323 zones in existance across Internet 1 and 2, and advanced research networks globally (10-155 in europe, apan in asia, Ca*net in canada, they mostly all peer together) called ViDeNet, of which more info can be found at http://www.cavner.org/videnet/ .
So don't listen to the vendors who poo-poo realtime voice and video over IP networks, it can work just not usually over the commodity internet. Abilene and other advanced research networks change the whole equation for those with access to them.
Internet 2 is alive and well (and having a conference in Atlanta at the end of October). But they are an organisation really part of UCAID. The physical network used as the national research and education backbone is now called Abilene, and was built by Qwest. This replaces vBNS which was built by MCI/Worldcom under the orginal 1995 grant (expired in 2000) and has since been sold off too the highest bidder. As I said this is alive and well, and peers with the European (10-155) and Asian (APAN) as well as Canadian (CA*Net3) equivalents. There is a world wide interconnected series of research networks (where do you think the grid traffic is running over, the commodity internet). I just got back from NorduNet 2000 in Helsinki (I live in the states) and the EU is already working on upgrading 10-155 and all the sub networks it encompasses. More info at http://www.internet2.edu and
http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/
any time she wants...let's get this girl petrified, she rocks!
Here are links to two of the siemens products I reffered to in the last post. The first is the Siemens LP 5100, a fully h.323 compliant, open hardware IP phone. The second is the TA 1100, an adapter which allows a normal POTS phone to act as a VoIP device.
Unlike the cisco IP phones, which can only communicate with Cisco's call manager, these IP phones are fully H.323 v2 compliant and can interoperate nicely with any standards compliant H.323 gatekeeper, such as the excellent Radvision gatekeepers, or the Open H.323 Gatekeeper . Cisco does OEM the Radvision MCU's and H.320/H.323/PSTN Gateways, which both contain an embedded Radvision gatekeeper, but it won't work with their IP phones.
The Roman Empire was in its INFANCY under Nero. He was after all only the third emperor. (Caesar was never emperor, so it was Augustus, Caligula, Nero). The fall of the western roman empire is usually dated by the battle of Adrianople in 478 AD. 400 years off buddy. Your conspiracy theory sounds sort of weak when you put it in historical context. Everyone knows the Bavarian Illuminati run the world anyways.
Keep in mind that this is an article produced by the Hudson Group, the right wing think tank that employed Dan Quayle to chair a the 'Competitiveness Center' to "study ways to increase America's competitiveness in a global economy". So of course they are against taxation. What they are correct about are the relatively small amounts of truly taxable revenue vs. the costs and difficulties of collecting the taxes.
None of the solutions discussed in the article seemed at all viable, but I don't imagine they picked them for their competitive value. I mean, Tax-farming! This has been a widely discredited practice since the late days of the roman empire.
The only viable answer, wait to implement taxation until the market is much larger (read, some of that potential is realized)
While legally this would not affect non-US users, it will in fact have an effect, especially if it is adopted in the majority of states. The software produced in the US will likely contain the enforcement mechanism for the self help provision of UCITA. As a result, the company will have the ability, if not the legal right to shut down your software (or is it their's now?) at will. Not legally, mind you. But that won't stop crackers, either.
The entire comment is rendered invalid by even suggesting that W2K is worse than 98. I mean, didn't you ever talk to the guys doing desktop support? 98 is practically unsupportable. Add in a large environment and you are just screwed. W2k may be more complicated than it is worth, but it is still so much better than 98 that they don't belong in the same sentence. We all like *nix better (or are some kind of masochists), but there are hierarchies of crap.
If you are so intent on playing the race card, you had better go out and get Johnnie Cochran, because that "If the Wookies don't live on Endor, you must acquit" shit doesn't fly coming out of anyone elses piehole.
The proprietors of slashdot didn't make the comments that you took offense to. VA Linux sure as hell didn't have anything to do with it. This is just a cheap shot (Admittedly, some people have taken cheap shots at your organisation as well.)
You are right in saying that "That we've fucked up is not in dispute", no one here thinks you didn't fuck up.
I personally think that it took big swinging pendulous balls to go to Linux World Expo, but since apparently you didn't send anyone with technical merit or significant knowledge of Linux or the user community, the people whose balls were on the line probably had no idea where they were sticking them.
Voice over IP provides an excellent example of a 'new' internet standard H.323 (V2 was only ratified in '98). H.323 provides a standard way of setting up communications and negotiating audio and video codecs for either a striaght voice, or video conference. The H.323 gatekeeper provides a policy server to control this (the real choke point, other than the H.323 stack itself). Both are being worked on by the OpenH323 folks.
Untrue, at UNC we are using IBM Videocharger to stream MPEG, and multicast it. It uses a proprietary player, but it is a step in the right direction, better than realplayer or windows media.
The Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, NC)is not at all bad either.
There are plenty of research jobs at the Universities (NC State, UNC-Ch, Duke). Plenty of jobs for software companies that are startups (in Cary mainly), big companies to go work for (IBM, SAS). Redhat out in Durham. Commutes seem painful to me, but they are nothing compared to Boston or Silicon Valley.
High speed internet (mainly ADSL right now) is availible to anyone not living in the boonies. Rent is not too high either, you can get a fairly nice house for under a grand a month.
And the one thing that Pittsburgh will never have, nice weather all the year round!