Who said anything about a legal case or copyright infringement? They are simply asking Amazon to stop.
I can see where these guys are coming from, and there is a big difference in the fact that Amazon is a market leader (and a seller of new books at all - which a library isn't)...
The guy rooting around in a used book store or borrowing a book from a library has already made the decision not to buy new, and is often not even looking for a specific title - just browsing.
If a major seller of new books such as Amazon (particularly an internet retailer - as if Barnes and Noble had instantly this up in their brick and mortar stores nationwide, rather than doing a local trial) make it so easy to buy a used book as providing the option every time you want to buy a new one, then they really are changing the marketplace very fundamentally.
Say you're the author of a high priced low volume technical book (priced high because you know it's going to be low volume) - how would you feel if every purchaser was offered the choice of buy it new for $60 (you get your cut), or buy it used for $20 (you get zip)?
It's one thing if people on a budget search for something in a used book store or on e-bay, but it really alters the balance if everyone buying the book new automatically gets offered the "or buy it cheaper used" option. No laws being broken, for sure, but it's easy to see how this could have a huge impact on book sales, and ultimately reduce choice or increase prices for us all as book writing becomes finacially less attractive (not that it's very attractive to start with).
I think the tiered pricing/outlet system works well (books, cars, airline tickets). Full price for those with the money and who want instant gratification, and used/lower price for those on a budget who prefer to spend time searching out a bargain.
Virtual communities that only offer information, data and text-based messaging are sometimes fragmented, brittle and cold. They don't allow the kind of sequential communications and storytelling vital to any community, work or personal. Those that emphasize human contact are too limited. The Virtual Community of tomorrow may have to incorporate both.
Has Katz ever been part of a virtual community?
People chat on ICQ both 1-on-1 and in groups, share personal photos, meet each other, form relationships, get married...
Sequential communications and storytelling? Uh, don't these things always evolve out of message boards....
Has anyone else noticed that pop-up ads appear to be becoming mainstream? At first it was just geocities, and I'd always cringe when I followed a link there (although nowadays they're pretty unobtrusive), but very recently mainstream sites like abcnews.com are starting to carry pop-up ads, and it annoys me to the extent I'm starting to avoid them.
Re:If you can't hack CS, don't be a programmer
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
So you don't want to work for anyone who won't hire you?:)
The thing is though, that you want to be in the position of rejecting job offers, not having them reject you. There may be reasons (such as a good salary, interesting work, or no other offers!) that you'd still like to work for some company who (whether correctly or not) you view as unenlightened.
In the same vein, you should never "throw" an interview or declare your disinterest on the spot... Always try your best to get the offer, then decide with a cool head whether or not you want to accept it.
Re:If you can't hack CS, don't be a programmer
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
That may be true right now, but...
a) It appears we may be heading into recession
b) No (job) market imbalance lasts forever
Just because it's a great time for a programmer to look for a job right now, doesn't mean it'll still be so great next year, or when someone now entering college is graduating.
Re:I'd rather hire a BA in history or indust-desig
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 4
Sure, you're not likely to use the math (or for that matter much from your CS degree!) directly, but a CS degree does nonethless teach you a valuable structured way of thinking, and encourage a disciplined approach. Certainly, the worst programmers - in terms of quality/maintainability of code - I've seen have been those without a CS background.
Regardless of it's "practical" utility, though, a CS degree is going to be preferentially viewed by many screening resumes (incl. myself when I was in that role), and I think it's also resonable to say that if a CS degree (math included) is too tough for you, then it's an indication that you don't have the logical thought capabilities that you'll need to rely on as a programmer.
Re:Programmer != CS major
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
Who would YOU pick for a programming job - resume A with the CIS degree, or resume B with the CS degree?
Everything else being equal, whichever candidate was best able to answer the technical interview questions.
True, but that only applies once the candidate has made it past the resume screening stage...
Until you've actually got your foot in the door (i.e. scored an interview), then it's your resume working for you, and if you're fresh out of school then your degree is going to be a pretty major part of that (other than any summer work experience).
If you can't hack CS, don't be a programmer
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 5
Sure the calculus stuff may be a pain in the ass, but do you think that being a professional programmer is always a joy-ride?
If you can't make it through a CS degree, then I'd question if you've really got what it takes to be a programmer unless you're just shooting to do business programming.
Remember also that you're going to be competing for jobs with others who will have CS degrees. Who would YOU pick for a programming job - resume A with the CIS degree, or resume B with the CS degree?
Once you've got 4-5yrs experience the college degree fades in importance, but for a first job IMO a CIS degree would definitely put you at a competetive disadvantage.
The Heroine Virtual MPEG library is MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, and the comment on their web page about MPEG-4 being basically a wrapper for MPEG-2 is BS.
I really doubt the claim that the Heroine MPEG-2 CODEC has been optimized to the point where it can achieve the same quality as Microsoft's MPEG-4 (i.e. DivX) at the same bitrate. I havn't checked out the exact same clip compressed both ways, but I've played the xmovie samples and a bunch of DivX's, and it seems that for the same quality DivX's are way smaller...
Hopefully I'm right, because I can't see how web users will accept advertizing if it becomes so obtrusive as replacing content or a forced popup on page exit.
Sure advertizers may entice web sites to try these types of approaches if they pay enough, but I think the result will be people staying away in droves. There's enough choice of information sources on the web, that no-one has the monopoly power to force users to put up with crappy ad-laden web sites.
Personally, my concern is with the bandwidth those ads might consume. I've disabled the ads in AIM just because I dont want anything dirtying my bandwidth without my permission, no matter how small it might be.
According to their web site, it's just a single banner ad that changes once a week and gets downloaded and cached locally.
AFAIK as long as you're a US citizen, you have to pay US taxes on ALL your overseas/worlwide income, not just that in excess of $75K. You will, however, I believe, get a tax credit for any tax paid another country (i.e. you won't be double taxed).
Any object is going to absorb/reflect a whole range of different wavelengths of light, not just a single one. To really be able to detect the true color (i.e. light reflective properties) of an object we'd have to have seperate wavelength sensors tuned to each possible wavelength of light! Instead normal people have three color sensors each with different response curves (peaks at red, green and blue) that let us differentiate a broad selection of sets of wavelengths of light...someone with additional sensors with different response curves is going to be able to differentiate (i.e. "see") more sets of wavelengths ("colors") than we do.
Just as someone who's red-green color blind can't see red or green, only "red-green", a trichomat is partially colorblind compared to a tetrachromat. Two objects that appear the same "yellow" color to us may in fact appear as colors "yel" and "low" to the tetrachromat - colors that are as meaningless to us as "red" and "green" are to the red-green colorblind person.
The specs for Konqueror sound pretty complete and impressive, so I'd be interested to head from anyone who could give a comparison of Konqueror vs Netscape 6/Mozilla both in terms of features and performance/usability etc. I don't care about the mail/news stuff in Netscape - just how it compares as a browser.
In my experience if you tell people the MUST work 9-5, then that is precisely what they do - if you remove their flexibility to come in when traffic and their personal schedule/preference suits them, then they will usually react by going home at 5:00 pm (and zero seconds). Careful what you ask for!
When people are allowed to come in when they choose, then they are much more likely to respond with a more flexible give-and-take attitude and stay beyond 8 hours.
Finally a company that switches from flex time to fixed hours is likely to lose at least a few people (probably some of the more creative/productive ones) to who the flexibility was important.
I believe Clawhammer (x86-64) isn't due until the end of next year at earliest. Still, we're getting to the point now where processor speeds arn't the bottleneck for too many tasks...
From following the AMD news sites, I believe the real version of this confused story (replacing a processor with a chipset???) is that AMD are dropping the server (large cache) variant of the Mustang in favor of concentrating on the Clawhammer (first member of their 64-bit x86-64 Hammer family, indended for 2 or 4-way SMP) as their first server targetted processor. However, they will still launch the Mustang based Athlon desktop replacement (Palomino) and the Duron version sometime fairly soon (Q1 2001?).
These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you've already ruled out the obvious.
Oh well, too bad.
Who said anything about a legal case or copyright infringement? They are simply asking Amazon to stop.
I can see where these guys are coming from, and there is a big difference in the fact that Amazon is a market leader (and a seller of new books at all - which a library isn't)...
The guy rooting around in a used book store or borrowing a book from a library has already made the decision not to buy new, and is often not even looking for a specific title - just browsing.
If a major seller of new books such as Amazon (particularly an internet retailer - as if Barnes and Noble had instantly this up in their brick and mortar stores nationwide, rather than doing a local trial) make it so easy to buy a used book as providing the option every time you want to buy a new one, then they really are changing the marketplace very fundamentally.
Say you're the author of a high priced low volume technical book (priced high because you know it's going to be low volume) - how would you feel if every purchaser was offered the choice of buy it new for $60 (you get your cut), or buy it used for $20 (you get zip)?
It's one thing if people on a budget search for something in a used book store or on e-bay, but it really alters the balance if everyone buying the book new automatically gets offered the "or buy it cheaper used" option. No laws being broken, for sure, but it's easy to see how this could have a huge impact on book sales, and ultimately reduce choice or increase prices for us all as book writing becomes finacially less attractive (not that it's very attractive to start with).
I think the tiered pricing/outlet system works well (books, cars, airline tickets). Full price for those with the money and who want instant gratification, and used/lower price for those on a budget who prefer to spend time searching out a bargain.
Virtual communities that only offer information, data and text-based messaging are sometimes fragmented, brittle and cold. They don't allow the kind of sequential communications and storytelling vital to any community, work or personal. Those that emphasize human contact are too limited. The Virtual Community of tomorrow may have to incorporate both.
Has Katz ever been part of a virtual community?
People chat on ICQ both 1-on-1 and in groups, share personal photos, meet each other, form relationships, get married...
Sequential communications and storytelling? Uh, don't these things always evolve out of message boards....
(This is the third in a series.)
And let's hope the last.
Has anyone else noticed that pop-up ads appear to be becoming mainstream? At first it was just geocities, and I'd always cringe when I followed a link there (although nowadays they're pretty unobtrusive), but very recently mainstream sites like abcnews.com are starting to carry pop-up ads, and it annoys me to the extent I'm starting to avoid them.
So you don't want to work for anyone who won't hire you? :)
The thing is though, that you want to be in the position of rejecting job offers, not having them reject you. There may be reasons (such as a good salary, interesting work, or no other offers!) that you'd still like to work for some company who (whether correctly or not) you view as unenlightened.
In the same vein, you should never "throw" an interview or declare your disinterest on the spot... Always try your best to get the offer, then decide with a cool head whether or not you want to accept it.
That may be true right now, but...
a) It appears we may be heading into recession
b) No (job) market imbalance lasts forever
Just because it's a great time for a programmer to look for a job right now, doesn't mean it'll still be so great next year, or when someone now entering college is graduating.
Sure, you're not likely to use the math (or for that matter much from your CS degree!) directly, but a CS degree does nonethless teach you a valuable structured way of thinking, and encourage a disciplined approach. Certainly, the worst programmers - in terms of quality/maintainability of code - I've seen have been those without a CS background.
Regardless of it's "practical" utility, though, a CS degree is going to be preferentially viewed by many screening resumes (incl. myself when I was in that role), and I think it's also resonable to say that if a CS degree (math included) is too tough for you, then it's an indication that you don't have the logical thought capabilities that you'll need to rely on as a programmer.
Who would YOU pick for a programming job - resume A with the CIS degree, or resume B with the CS degree?
Everything else being equal, whichever candidate was best able to answer the technical interview questions.
True, but that only applies once the candidate has made it past the resume screening stage...
Until you've actually got your foot in the door (i.e. scored an interview), then it's your resume working for you, and if you're fresh out of school then your degree is going to be a pretty major part of that (other than any summer work experience).
Sure the calculus stuff may be a pain in the ass, but do you think that being a professional programmer is always a joy-ride?
If you can't make it through a CS degree, then I'd question if you've really got what it takes to be a programmer unless you're just shooting to do business programming.
Remember also that you're going to be competing for jobs with others who will have CS degrees. Who would YOU pick for a programming job - resume A with the CIS degree, or resume B with the CS degree?
Once you've got 4-5yrs experience the college degree fades in importance, but for a first job IMO a CIS degree would definitely put you at a competetive disadvantage.
The Heroine Virtual MPEG library is MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, and the comment on their web page about MPEG-4 being basically a wrapper for MPEG-2 is BS.
I really doubt the claim that the Heroine MPEG-2 CODEC has been optimized to the point where it can achieve the same quality as Microsoft's MPEG-4 (i.e. DivX) at the same bitrate. I havn't checked out the exact same clip compressed both ways, but I've played the xmovie samples and a bunch of DivX's, and it seems that for the same quality DivX's are way smaller...
Hopefully I'm right, because I can't see how web users will accept advertizing if it becomes so obtrusive as replacing content or a forced popup on page exit.
Sure advertizers may entice web sites to try these types of approaches if they pay enough, but I think the result will be people staying away in droves. There's enough choice of information sources on the web, that no-one has the monopoly power to force users to put up with crappy ad-laden web sites.
-1 Troll
/. paycheck
Katz recipe for writing an article:
1) Pick a topic that involves a lot of the slashdot readership (e.g. gaming, high schools)
2) Dream up some profound societal issue related to 1), and fire up the katzian bullshit generator to write an article about it
3) Hope troll article successfully generates lots of responses and big
Hell, it'd be nice to see people serve 7 years for murder
For spamming it'd be more appropriate to give them a large fine and temporarily ban them from any computer career (a la Mitnik).
I'd rather they let advertisers pay for it.
As long as the ads don't slow the page from loading, who cares? (and if they do slow it, you can always use junkbusters or whatever to block the ad).
My thoughts exactly. How difficult is it to hit a target as big as an ocean?
And what idiot approved Iridium in the first place if they never had a workable plan how to safely deorbit the things?
Personally, my concern is with the bandwidth those ads might consume. I've disabled the ads in AIM just because I dont want anything dirtying my bandwidth without my permission, no matter how small it might be.
According to their web site, it's just a single banner ad that changes once a week and gets downloaded and cached locally.
Interesting - thanks.
AFAIK as long as you're a US citizen, you have to pay US taxes on ALL your overseas/worlwide income, not just that in excess of $75K. You will, however, I believe, get a tax credit for any tax paid another country (i.e. you won't be double taxed).
Any object is going to absorb/reflect a whole range of different wavelengths of light, not just a single one. To really be able to detect the true color (i.e. light reflective properties) of an object we'd have to have seperate wavelength sensors tuned to each possible wavelength of light! Instead normal people have three color sensors each with different response curves (peaks at red, green and blue) that let us differentiate a broad selection of sets of wavelengths of light...someone with additional sensors with different response curves is going to be able to differentiate (i.e. "see") more sets of wavelengths ("colors") than we do.
Just as someone who's red-green color blind can't see red or green, only "red-green", a trichomat is partially colorblind compared to a tetrachromat. Two objects that appear the same "yellow" color to us may in fact appear as colors "yel" and "low" to the tetrachromat - colors that are as meaningless to us as "red" and "green" are to the red-green colorblind person.
The specs for Konqueror sound pretty complete and impressive, so I'd be interested to head from anyone who could give a comparison of Konqueror vs Netscape 6/Mozilla both in terms of features and performance/usability etc. I don't care about the mail/news stuff in Netscape - just how it compares as a browser.
In my experience if you tell people the MUST work 9-5, then that is precisely what they do - if you remove their flexibility to come in when traffic and their personal schedule/preference suits them, then they will usually react by going home at 5:00 pm (and zero seconds). Careful what you ask for!
When people are allowed to come in when they choose, then they are much more likely to respond with a more flexible give-and-take attitude and stay beyond 8 hours.
Finally a company that switches from flex time to fixed hours is likely to lose at least a few people (probably some of the more creative/productive ones) to who the flexibility was important.
I believe Clawhammer (x86-64) isn't due until the end of next year at earliest. Still, we're getting to the point now where processor speeds arn't the bottleneck for too many tasks...
From following the AMD news sites, I believe the real version of this confused story (replacing a processor with a chipset???) is that AMD are dropping the server (large cache) variant of the Mustang in favor of concentrating on the Clawhammer (first member of their 64-bit x86-64 Hammer family, indended for 2 or 4-way SMP) as their first server targetted processor. However, they will still launch the Mustang based Athlon desktop replacement (Palomino) and the Duron version sometime fairly soon (Q1 2001?).
Given that Steve Balmer's horse is called "Pentium", this hi-tech horse fetish thing seems to be spreading!
These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc.
22-inch display on a cellphone? Damn!