Not only does he explain the Pioneer anomaly but also proposes a radically different explanation for just about every physical phenomenon. I doubt wether there's anything to his claims, but then again, 500 years ago we were sure that the Earth was the center of the universe. If nothing else his theory seems quite consistent (if you can bring yourself to accept the underlying premise).
I've been doing alot of PHP Programming over the past 3 years (after doing Java for the 4 years before that) and have grown to really like the language. It's easy, you can get started in 1 evening and if you have the proper background (ie: a few other programming languages), you can understand it (at least conceptually) just about as fast. If you know what you're doing, you can write proper frameworks the way you can in any other decent programming language.
However, if you don't know what you're doing, PHP makes it easy create to a garbled mess, tangled and obtuse enough give bad perl programs a run for their money. If you have the discipline to adhere to proper abstraction and coding guidlines, it becomes a very powerful language.
True, before PHP5 the object model was lacking but this should soon be a thing of the past. It's a great fit when coding dynamic web apps. It even makes a decent shell language + once you grok the idea of (generally) typeless data, you just appreciate it for the fact that it *just*works* and that it's practical.
Java on the other hand is fussy. I don't know how many times I've gotten a compile error when I passed an 'int' to an 'Integer' argument. I know *why* it's happening but I don't care! Java forces you be (theoretically) correct and complete, which is both a good and a bad thing. PHP *allows* you to be (theoretically) correct and complete but doesn't force you to do anything.
The biggest difference is the fact that java is further along in the frameworks which are available to the language. PHP has some nice stuff scattered in many places but nothing to really compare to Apache's Jakarta.
These days, unless you're doing something really weird, it's not about machine performance but about programmer performance. For the average application, who cares if some calculation takes 0.005 or 0.006 seconds?
What however does matter, is the fact that your code is clean, understandable and easily maintained and extended by other programmers.
Although I'm certainly no compression expert, I think this makes sense. Many (most?) natural systems have fractal structures on some level so it only makes sense for them to compress better (ie: have more self-similar features) than systems which don't have this feature.
Then again, what do I know? Maybe something more immersed in this field can tell us whether there's a seed of truth to my ramblings...
For years now MSFT has said that their platform is more user friendly by providing nice GUIs for all admin modules.
For them to turn around and now build this super-shell basically amounts to admitting that a GUI based aproach does have some serious shortcomings and that the UNIX way of allowing everything to be scripted provides serious benefits which are hard to come by if everything is accessed through a GUI. If nothing else, this validates the UNIX way of doing things and should make it easier to argue this point when competing for (a) large (number of) server installs/farms.
Nettrek is (or at least was) a great waste of time
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I first encountered Nettrek in 1988, during my Sophomore year at CMU. It was one of those things where you would walk into the computing center at 4AM only to find the hardcore Nettrekkies (for lack of a better word) battling it out with each other, sometimes yelling obscenities across the room.
Part of the addictiveness of the game stems from the fact that it is easy to learn; yet it takes a while to become proficient it it. The second really cool feature was that it allowed you to play against other humans (or robots) in real time. These days that's nothing special, but back then most multi-player games were turn based (one other notable exception to this (from memory) is/was xtank).
A few years later, when Linux showed up, I was delighted to find that Nettrek compiled out the box (actually, some minor Makefile changes were needed, if I remember correctly) and worked very well on my then brand-new 486-33. Unfortunately I wasn't connected to a university network (or any other network for that fact), so the human competition/element was missing for me.
While looking very dated (no 3D graphics, no colors, simple graphics), I think nettrek underscores the point that if your gameplay is good, the graphics are secondary. If you've never tried nettrek, check it out sometime; it's quite cool, especially when seen in historic context.
Without copyright protection we will change our business model
And how exactly is this is bad? First of all, no corporation on earth has a guarantee that their business model will remain valid. To assume so, is a guarantee of (future) failure.
Given the quality and (lack of) originality of most the stuff that comes out of major studios, I would be more than happy for them to change their business model. Maybe they could actually produce something I wanted! Then again, maybe their new business model will be to stop producing anything at all. This will allow them to control distribution and prevent piracy:-)
I guess it boils down to this question: what do you want to become (eventually) after you return to the working life.
If you want to become a development guru, who manages the technical side of projects, makes technical decisions, discusses implementation details and really knows & understands the technical choices you'll face and make, CS is the way to go.
If you want to move up the corporate ladder, become a manager who's satisfied with the prespective from 10 miles up, get an MIS degree.
One thing which is important to keep in mind though: most companies will hire you with either degree for the simple matter that you've got a degree and know about computers. What you do (and which direction you develop in) once you've got the choice is pretty much up to you. It really depends on where your interests lie.
I did CS and notice on a regular basis that my technical background is much more solid than the MIS guys I run into. On the other hand, they have a better understanding of business matters, understand accounting issues, etc. Since I don't really care for their business perspective and have pretty technical job, this suits me just fine:-)
A teacher of mine once said "make your job your hobby and your hobby your job". I think this generally is good advice. Study what truly interests you; the rest will fall into place given some time and energy...
Well, how do I say this while remaining polite? Let me try: I don't buy it.
You're a consultant at a major consulting organization. Fine. However, I deal with people from major consulting organizations just about every day, and while they might have some very practical skills, most of them are pretty mediocre (speaking from a CS point of view) and come from a business background. There's nothing wrong with this in itself, but it's a very different thing than having a CS background. CS teaches you a ton of things which you'll never need in your daily job (especially not in the position you've described yourself as having) but which form the foundations of the Computer Science discipline.
Also, I'm a bit sceptical about your claim that you've read hundreds of CS books. I'm a bit older than you and do have a CS degree and I can not claim that I've read 100s of CS books (maybe 100, but that would probably be stretching it; I may have browsed 100s, but that's not quite the same as reading & understanding them). Things like advanced algorithms, design patterns, compiler design and other related stuff are not light reading and can't be read in a weekend (at least not if you really want to *understand* the stuff they cover). And once you start reading Knuth's books, well, then you should have some serious free time if you want to understand them (despite several tries, I've never actually managed to dig through the entire 1st volume of his AoCP).
I found that duing my CS studies, much of the grueling time spent in my compiler design classes (to name a paricularly 'fun' one), was time well spent. I doubt you could really get the most out of these types of classes without actually doing all the work & projects; this unfortunately takes time. In summary, real CS and the stuff you do at work are probably quite different. Having done Business Process Design (yuck!) or some high level project work is not the same.
Lastly (unrelated to you, since I don't know you), my favorite anecdote from a big-5 consulting organization was a Business Process Design person (native English speaker) who, when I commented on one of his questions "Yes, we have an API for that" replied (with a straight face): "What's an API?". To me this is equivalent of working for Ford, Crysler or BMW and not knowing what a steering wheel is. I'm sorry, but every since that episonde, I have a certain measure of contempt for these people and the major consulting organizations who employ people like that.
Bottom line: I think doing a (serious) CS degree in 1 year is impossible. On the other hand, you may be some sort of genius who can do it in a year, but if you're normal like the rest of us (whatever you consider to be 'normal') you'll need more time to do real CS. It seems like you like the technical field you're in in which case you'll probably find the time spent to get a CS degree well spent.
The contrast of how the US judicial system can work is interesting: Dimitri circumvents the protection on some minor piece of software and gets thrown into jail. MSFT leaves behind a trail of dead competitors and obvious monopolistic abuses, their executives basically deceive the court with false or doctored testimonies and they're looking at another slap on the wrist.
Well, given that you're getting an improved/updated product, it makes sense that the companies are trying to recoup some of the costs of developing/supporting this. You *do* have the choice of using the old product, even if it is not (anymore) optimally suited to what you need it to do.
It would be a different matter if the product would stop working after a certain amount of months/years but this case is about updating a product to handle changed market/security condsiderations. Would you buy a hammer which was designed to break after having hit a nail 1000 times? Probably not. Would you buy a new and radically improved hammer if it offered compelling features that the old hammer didnt? Probably.
The irony is that there's an entire industry feeding of the security holes in Microsoft's product line. If everyone were running Linux/xxBSD/UNIX, there would be no Anti-Virus software industry, at least certainly not one as big as we have it today.
Disclaimer: I'm not a professional musician and am not involved in the music industry. At the same time I don't think I'm 100% clueless about the music business.
Well, while a recording budget $500K - $1000K may be the "typical recording budget for an artist's first album" it seems rather high. While that may be true for the types of Britney Spears and your favorite boy band of the week (which really are just products rather than artists), you can record quality music for far less.
To give you an example: I listen to a lot of Heavy Metal. One of the more interesting bands I've come across over the past year or so has been "Children of Bodom" (for those who don't know them, they are a speed metal band from Finland and quite musically skilled; their live album puts most other bands to shame). Their first album, which admittedly was pretty rough, was recorded in 2 days. Their second album (Hatebreeder) is a wonderful symphony of high-speed power rock and melody which sounds good and was recorded in a week. While I don't know the recodring budget they had, I can assure that it wasn't anything in the $500K region.
Another example I can give is a local band here (2 of my friends play in it) which just recorded their first album. They had 4 days to do it and the studio cost them
My whole point is this: decent musicians can produce quality music on a much lower budget. You don't need 1/2 year of studio time to record your songs (provided you have written them prior to waking into the studio).
The story about music videos is similar. Artists are often required to do videos which basically puts them into more debt. So they are effectively owned by the record companies who are in effect pimping them; it's like indentured servitude.
Part of the problem is that the music industry requires expensive productions and videos as marketing tools. Where they should be more like reporters (ie: finding and covering the news rather than creating it) they have become the creators of bands which then require huge budgets to be pushed to popularity. It doesn't have to be like this.
While I think the authors have a point in the sense that gradual migration to an OSS codebase is something that will happen, there's a few points we should not overlook:
MSFT has 25+ Billion in cash. This means that for the foreseeable future they can:
place strategic bets by investing in whatever they think will be the next big thing. Witness their investments in the cable providers. Not all their bets have to work out...
bribe their way into the enterprise. As long as the average IT manager is fed the 'research' reports (in part) paid for by MSFT, Windows will be very hard to disloge
MSFT may still succeed in buying laws which make it difficult for OSS to compete. Witness DMCA, which together with patents may well make certain technologies out-of-reach for OSS implementations. Unforunately, recent history in theis area is not very encouraging...
money talks, even in court. It's still rather difficult to buy a brand-name PC without windows preinstalled. MSFT has enough clout to force vendors to comply and buy it's way out of any dangerous lawsuits it may come to face.
Hailstorm (if it ever works out) might give MSFT a far more insidious monopoly: the information monopoly
The MSFT monopoly (at this) point is not based on Windows anymore (think about it; Windows (as an OS) would be easy to replace) but on application lock-in with the ever changing Office file formats.
I think technically (and from a usability point of view) linux is pretty much there but it will take (lots of) time for it to permeate the non-geek computing circles. It took MSFT 25 years to get where they are today; it will take quite some time for them to loose their position of influence.
The biggest irony may well be that by the time linux became competitive on the desktop (ie: the last 12-18 months), MSFT was (for the first time) able to respond with a product which didn't suck (Win2K).
However, MSFT may still shoot itself in the foot by being too overbearing (restrictive licencing, 'forced' upgrades, cumbersome product activation, etc). If they squeeze to hard, people will look much harder at any alternatives out there. I for one think this is the biggest danger they face...
IMHO this is a good thing; the more (friendlhy) competition we have, the better the resulting products will (eventually) be. So maybe a year from now, we'll have the choice of which GUI environment you want to start. If you want to do Word processing, email, and other 'normal' stuff, you could do "startx"; if you want maximum FPS for the latest strategy simulation or Quake clone, you could do a "startdfb". Since there's a GTK port, it should be possible to run all your favorite Gtk/Gnome apps either way...
Hopefully once of these we'll have an alternative to X. I was hoping for the Berlin project to provide this, but there doesn't seem to be much movement on their front (but then again, I don't follow it closely). Don't get me wrong, I have no major complaints about X (actually like it) but another system geared towards maximum perfromance (at the cost of sacrificing some flexibility) to choose from is good; especially in light of the fact that most modern apps (Gnome, KDE) should be pretty easy to port (./configure & make should suffice) once the base libraries have been ported.
The usability of Linux (is pretty good by now)
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I just upgraded my home machine to Mandrake 8.1, which comes with the same general software packages that RedHat ships. While I (of course) haven't tried the new RH yet, I'll make a general observation based on KDE, Gnome and all the other little goodies which ship on a modern Linux distribution: Usability of Linux (on a well-setup machine) is no longer an argument against it's use.
Let me explain: when people talk about usabuility, they typically mean "it is (or it isn't) like on Windows" and maybe "it is (or it isn't) like on a Mac". This is not what I would call usability, but rather something like "environment inertia"; people don't like change even if it is for the (long term) better.
After seeing my mom (aged 60+, bought her first computer 1 year ago, never used a computer before that) struggle with Windows when needing to do rather simple/basic things, I've grown convinced that a (well set up) KDE desktop is just as usable as Windows and that the so often touted Windows usability is nothing more than a myth. Windows is usable once you're used to it; otherwise is't as difficult (or easy) than any other decent windowing system (yes, KDE certainly fits this description, GNOME probably does; this is *not* meant as flamebait but just an abservation of the way these Desktops are configured in the newest Mandrake 8.1 release; your milage may vary). These don't work quite the same way as Windows, but it basically do the same things, provides you with menus, with end-user friendly software (KOffice is pretty cool & looks nice, KMail is quite user friendly, etc) and nice GUI configuration tools. If you have a chance sometime, watch someone who's never used a computer try to figure out Windows; it's very instructive to see that Windows itself is not more or less intuitive than any other windowing
system; once you've mastered the concepts and abstractions, it becomes easy. The so called usability advantange of Windows is mostly imprinting, inertia and FUD; the functional differences are starting to disappear or become neglegible.
The biggest obstacle at this point is device/drive support and the need to recompile kernels to get some stuff to work. Usability is (generally speaking) just fine, provided you're working on a well-setup & installed box...
Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.
That may be factually true, but have you seen how butt-ugly Motif & CDE are?? They really show their age by now. After seeing a Sun workstation running their (preinstalled) CDE environment, I am surprised Sun that manages to sell more than 2 workstations/year. The hardware is not bad (but nothing really special either) but horribly overpriced and the desktop looks like crap. It may be a standard but it looks slightly neolithic and is IMHO even more unusable than the worst of Gnome and/or KDE (combined).I found myself cursing at that environment all day. For the record, I curse ever once in a while when working on Win2K and almost never curse behind my Linux box (which is currently running KDE).
Of course, the one the server side (which is Sun's bread and butter) this doesn't count since you don't need a GUI...
I've just checked out the sample mojo-world gallery (I'm a sucker for any web pages that claims to show me (almost) photo-realistic rendered terrain images) and while the output is quite cool, it still has ways to go before it's going to be photorealistic. On the other hand, the point of MojoWorld is that you don't need a lot of data to re-create your scenes: you just save the seed parameters (which are tiny as compared to a real height-field) and the engine re-creates the scene from these parameters.
I have been working on terraform (which is aimed more at the generation and manipulation of digial terrain rather than the rendering of it) for a while now and in the course of doing so have learned a few things about fractal terrain generation. The fact that you can regenerate the terrain from a few seed parameters is not that special (dimension, scale factor, random seed, etc); these are the kind of parameters that are typically passed to these functions anyways. The more interesting thing (to me) is that they have apparently found a compact representation of all the data needed to create a (semi)realistic scene from it. All in all, I think this is quite cool. Hopefully they (at some point) will write a white paper detailing some of the algorithms used by the (closed source) generator.
Given that now they have extended their feedback period, take the time to let them know that this is *BAD*. However, please take a few minutes to create an intelligent response rather than firing off an "This sucks, you are all corrupt idiots" type comment.
Also, read the already posted comments. There are many well thought out replies that nicely summarize *why* this is bad; I would certainly recommend reading Alan Cox's post which presents some very good arguments against this. I personally don't think I have anything fundamentally new to add (+ I only found out about the opportunity to comment after the original deadline) but I am planning to post a comment stating my view that this proposal is fundamentally flawed and refer to other comments which I agree with.
Above all, let them know that there is a *huge* number of people out there who value open standards and don't care to play the 'You need IP protection in order to stimulate research' game (as was stated/posted by some MSFT drone).
We have enough boring shopping malls already; we don't need to turn the internet into another one when it could be much more and be a truly open medium.
I think with the publically recognized adoption of Linux for large, mission critical systems, Microsoft may well face it's Vietnam. The fact is that financial institutions and stock traders are amongst the most risk averse crowd there is (in terms of IT/infrastructure decsions). If Linux has come far enough to win over wall street firms for high volume trading systems, it spells trouble for MSFT (and the other high-end proprietary UNIX vendors (who IMHO have other problems of their own)) simply because the choice for a server architecture doesn't default to Windows vs big Unix anymore.
The bad part of this is that it took MSFT 20+ years to get where they are; it will probably take another 20+ years for them to be relegated to insignificance (in terms of their influence on the market).
However, it's announcements like this which show that major institutions are now beginning to see past the FUD of 'not proven', 'no support', 'not scalable' and 'not stable'. Of course, there will still be myriads of clueless CIOs who believe the FUD, but it's data points like this one which will play a role in converting even this crowd. After all, (we all know) Linux is stable and you can't really beat the price. It's funny/ironic though that by time Linux became viable, MSFT for the first time in 20+ years actually got their act together and produced a reasonably stable system (Win2K). If guess competition is good for something after all...
While I'm usually not much of a gamer, I have purchased a few (3 to be exact) of Loki's games, for the following reasons:
1) While I'm not a hardcore gamer, I enjoy playing a game from time to time
2) It makes sense to support a company who makes cool stuff for your platform of choice (similarly, I donated to Mandrake after downloading their latest release). I have a decent job and can afford to miss some cash in exchange for a quality product.
3) Not everything should/can be free. If you want Linux ports of closed source (ie: professional) games, someone will have to pay for them. Otherwise resign yourself to the fact that you'll have to resort to the likes of Tuxracer and Freeciv in terms of games (and I'm not dissing these games, they're written by hobbyists and simply don't compete in the professional game market).
So to sum it up, if you want Loki to be around a year from now, fork over some $ for a game. If you think the price is too steep, team up with your fellow Linux diehards and purchase a game for a few of you. While not exactly right/legal, it's still better if 3 people buy 1 game to share than nobody buying the game at all. Loki makes quality products for our favorite OS; I hope that they'll still be around a few years from now...
I am European and find this quite horrible but also full of possibilities. I think I will submit the following:
Description: The patent covers the 'swap' operation, both on a primitive (type) as well as complex object level.
Rationale: I will then be able to sue the pants off anyone making use of any sequence of instructions which will swap the values of 2 memory locations/areas. Just about every sorting routine and countless other applications use this, so I should now be able to retire...
Slashdot Mirror
I believe I fall under the category of "no famous but very good" ... I'd like to talk to your employer.
This guy here has the answer :-)
Not only does he explain the Pioneer anomaly but also proposes a radically different explanation for just about every physical phenomenon. I doubt wether there's anything to his claims, but then again, 500 years ago we were sure that the Earth was the center of the universe. If nothing else his theory seems quite consistent (if you can bring yourself to accept the underlying premise).
I've been doing alot of PHP Programming over the past 3 years (after doing Java for the 4 years before that) and have grown to really like the language. It's easy, you can get started in 1 evening and if you have the proper background (ie: a few other programming languages), you can understand it (at least conceptually) just about as fast. If you know what you're doing, you can write proper frameworks the way you can in any other decent programming language.
However, if you don't know what you're doing, PHP makes it easy create to a garbled mess, tangled and obtuse enough give bad perl programs a run for their money. If you have the discipline to adhere to proper abstraction and coding guidlines, it becomes a very powerful language.
True, before PHP5 the object model was lacking but this should soon be a thing of the past. It's a great fit when coding dynamic web apps. It even makes a decent shell language + once you grok the idea of (generally) typeless data, you just appreciate it for the fact that it *just*works* and that it's practical.
Java on the other hand is fussy. I don't know how many times I've gotten a compile error when I passed an 'int' to an 'Integer' argument. I know *why* it's happening but I don't care! Java forces you be (theoretically) correct and complete, which is both a good and a bad thing. PHP *allows* you to be (theoretically) correct and complete but doesn't force you to do anything.
The biggest difference is the fact that java is further along in the frameworks which are available to the language. PHP has some nice stuff scattered in many places but nothing to really compare to Apache's Jakarta.
These days, unless you're doing something really weird, it's not about machine performance but about programmer performance. For the average application, who cares if some calculation takes 0.005 or 0.006 seconds?
What however does matter, is the fact that your code is clean, understandable and easily maintained and extended by other programmers.
Although I'm certainly no compression expert, I think this makes sense. Many (most?) natural systems have fractal structures on some level so it only makes sense for them to compress better (ie: have more self-similar features) than systems which don't have this feature.
...
Then again, what do I know? Maybe something more immersed in this field can tell us whether there's a seed of truth to my ramblings
Greetings
--> R
For years now MSFT has said that their platform is more user friendly by providing nice GUIs for all admin modules.
For them to turn around and now build this super-shell basically amounts to admitting that a GUI based aproach does have some serious shortcomings and that the UNIX way of allowing everything to be scripted provides serious benefits which are hard to come by if everything is accessed through a GUI. If nothing else, this validates the UNIX way of doing things and should make it easier to argue this point when competing for (a) large (number of) server installs/farms.
Part of the addictiveness of the game stems from the fact that it is easy to learn; yet it takes a while to become proficient it it. The second really cool feature was that it allowed you to play against other humans (or robots) in real time. These days that's nothing special, but back then most multi-player games were turn based (one other notable exception to this (from memory) is/was xtank).
A few years later, when Linux showed up, I was delighted to find that Nettrek compiled out the box (actually, some minor Makefile changes were needed, if I remember correctly) and worked very well on my then brand-new 486-33. Unfortunately I wasn't connected to a university network (or any other network for that fact), so the human competition/element was missing for me.
While looking very dated (no 3D graphics, no colors, simple graphics), I think nettrek underscores the point that if your gameplay is good, the graphics are secondary. If you've never tried nettrek, check it out sometime; it's quite cool, especially when seen in historic context.
A good OS installer is like the old A/UX 3.0 installer - it literally was a one button install if you had a disk ready for it.
:-)
Sure, but that's because the Mac mouse only has 1 button
And how exactly is this is bad? First of all, no corporation on earth has a guarantee that their business model will remain valid. To assume so, is a guarantee of (future) failure.
Given the quality and (lack of) originality of most the stuff that comes out of major studios, I would be more than happy for them to change their business model. Maybe they could actually produce something I wanted! Then again, maybe their new business model will be to stop producing anything at all. This will allow them to control distribution and prevent piracy
to choose the shortest month of the year as their bug fixing month ...
:-)
I guess it boils down to this question: what do you want to become (eventually) after you return to the working life.
:-)
...
If you want to become a development guru, who manages the technical side of projects, makes technical decisions, discusses implementation details and really knows & understands the technical choices you'll face and make, CS is the way to go.
If you want to move up the corporate ladder, become a manager who's satisfied with the prespective from 10 miles up, get an MIS degree.
One thing which is important to keep in mind though: most companies will hire you with either degree for the simple matter that you've got a degree and know about computers. What you do (and which direction you develop in) once you've got the choice is pretty much up to you. It really depends on where your interests lie.
I did CS and notice on a regular basis that my technical background is much more solid than the MIS guys I run into. On the other hand, they have a better understanding of business matters, understand accounting issues, etc. Since I don't really care for their business perspective and have pretty technical job, this suits me just fine
A teacher of mine once said "make your job your hobby and your hobby your job". I think this generally is good advice. Study what truly interests you; the rest will fall into place given some time and energy
Well, how do I say this while remaining polite? Let me try: I don't buy it.
You're a consultant at a major consulting organization. Fine. However, I deal with people from major consulting organizations just about every day, and while they might have some very practical skills, most of them are pretty mediocre (speaking from a CS point of view) and come from a business background. There's nothing wrong with this in itself, but it's a very different thing than having a CS background. CS teaches you a ton of things which you'll never need in your daily job (especially not in the position you've described yourself as having) but which form the foundations of the Computer Science discipline.
Also, I'm a bit sceptical about your claim that you've read hundreds of CS books. I'm a bit older than you and do have a CS degree and I can not claim that I've read 100s of CS books (maybe 100, but that would probably be stretching it; I may have browsed 100s, but that's not quite the same as reading & understanding them). Things like advanced algorithms, design patterns, compiler design and other related stuff are not light reading and can't be read in a weekend (at least not if you really want to *understand* the stuff they cover). And once you start reading Knuth's books, well, then you should have some serious free time if you want to understand them (despite several tries, I've never actually managed to dig through the entire 1st volume of his AoCP).
I found that duing my CS studies, much of the grueling time spent in my compiler design classes (to name a paricularly 'fun' one), was time well spent. I doubt you could really get the most out of these types of classes without actually doing all the work & projects; this unfortunately takes time. In summary, real CS and the stuff you do at work are probably quite different. Having done Business Process Design (yuck!) or some high level project work is not the same.
Lastly (unrelated to you, since I don't know you), my favorite anecdote from a big-5 consulting organization was a Business Process Design person (native English speaker) who, when I commented on one of his questions "Yes, we have an API for that" replied (with a straight face): "What's an API?". To me this is equivalent of working for Ford, Crysler or BMW and not knowing what a steering wheel is. I'm sorry, but every since that episonde, I have a certain measure of contempt for these people and the major consulting organizations who employ people like that.
Bottom line: I think doing a (serious) CS degree in 1 year is impossible. On the other hand, you may be some sort of genius who can do it in a year, but if you're normal like the rest of us (whatever you consider to be 'normal') you'll need more time to do real CS. It seems like you like the technical field you're in in which case you'll probably find the time spent to get a CS degree well spent.
The contrast of how the US judicial system can work is interesting: Dimitri circumvents the protection on some minor piece of software and gets thrown into jail. MSFT leaves behind a trail of dead competitors and obvious monopolistic abuses, their executives basically deceive the court with false or doctored testimonies and they're looking at another slap on the wrist.
Isn't it great what (lots of) money can buy you??
Well, given that you're getting an improved/updated product, it makes sense that the companies are trying to recoup some of the costs of developing/supporting this. You *do* have the choice of using the old product, even if it is not (anymore) optimally suited to what you need it to do.
It would be a different matter if the product would stop working after a certain amount of months/years but this case is about updating a product to handle changed market/security condsiderations. Would you buy a hammer which was designed to break after having hit a nail 1000 times? Probably not. Would you buy a new and radically improved hammer if it offered compelling features that the old hammer didnt? Probably.
The irony is that there's an entire industry feeding of the security holes in Microsoft's product line. If everyone were running Linux/xxBSD/UNIX, there would be no Anti-Virus software industry, at least certainly not one as big as we have it today.
The songs were written (by the band members) prior to walking into the studio. The 2 days were what it took to record these tunes.
Well, while a recording budget $500K - $1000K may be the "typical recording budget for an artist's first album" it seems rather high. While that may be true for the types of Britney Spears and your favorite boy band of the week (which really are just products rather than artists), you can record quality music for far less.
To give you an example: I listen to a lot of Heavy Metal. One of the more interesting bands I've come across over the past year or so has been "Children of Bodom" (for those who don't know them, they are a speed metal band from Finland and quite musically skilled; their live album puts most other bands to shame). Their first album, which admittedly was pretty rough, was recorded in 2 days. Their second album (Hatebreeder) is a wonderful symphony of high-speed power rock and melody which sounds good and was recorded in a week. While I don't know the recodring budget they had, I can assure that it wasn't anything in the $500K region.
Another example I can give is a local band here (2 of my friends play in it) which just recorded their first album. They had 4 days to do it and the studio cost them
My whole point is this: decent musicians can produce quality music on a much lower budget. You don't need 1/2 year of studio time to record your songs (provided you have written them prior to waking into the studio).
The story about music videos is similar. Artists are often required to do videos which basically puts them into more debt. So they are effectively owned by the record companies who are in effect pimping them; it's like indentured servitude.
Part of the problem is that the music industry requires expensive productions and videos as marketing tools. Where they should be more like reporters (ie: finding and covering the news rather than creating it) they have become the creators of bands which then require huge budgets to be pushed to popularity. It doesn't have to be like this.
I think I'll be putting on my asbestos suit
I think technically (and from a usability point of view) linux is pretty much there but it will take (lots of) time for it to permeate the non-geek computing circles. It took MSFT 25 years to get where they are today; it will take quite some time for them to loose their position of influence.
The biggest irony may well be that by the time linux became competitive on the desktop (ie: the last 12-18 months), MSFT was (for the first time) able to respond with a product which didn't suck (Win2K).
However, MSFT may still shoot itself in the foot by being too overbearing (restrictive licencing, 'forced' upgrades, cumbersome product activation, etc). If they squeeze to hard, people will look much harder at any alternatives out there. I for one think this is the biggest danger they face
IMHO this is a good thing; the more (friendlhy) competition we have, the better the resulting products will (eventually) be. So maybe a year from now, we'll have the choice of which GUI environment you want to start. If you want to do Word processing, email, and other 'normal' stuff, you could do "startx"; if you want maximum FPS for the latest strategy simulation or Quake clone, you could do a "startdfb". Since there's a GTK port, it should be possible to run all your favorite Gtk/Gnome apps either way ...
Hopefully once of these we'll have an alternative to X. I was hoping for the Berlin project to provide this, but there doesn't seem to be much movement on their front (but then again, I don't follow it closely). Don't get me wrong, I have no major complaints about X (actually like it) but another system geared towards maximum perfromance (at the cost of sacrificing some flexibility) to choose from is good; especially in light of the fact that most modern apps (Gnome, KDE) should be pretty easy to port (./configure & make should suffice) once the base libraries have been ported.
I just upgraded my home machine to Mandrake 8.1, which comes with the same general software packages that RedHat ships. While I (of course) haven't tried the new RH yet, I'll make a general observation based on KDE, Gnome and all the other little goodies which ship on a modern Linux distribution: Usability of Linux (on a well-setup machine) is no longer an argument against it's use.
...
Let me explain: when people talk about usabuility, they typically mean "it is (or it isn't) like on Windows" and maybe "it is (or it isn't) like on a Mac". This is not what I would call usability, but rather something like "environment inertia"; people don't like change even if it is for the (long term) better.
After seeing my mom (aged 60+, bought her first computer 1 year ago, never used a computer before that) struggle with Windows when needing to do rather simple/basic things, I've grown convinced that a (well set up) KDE desktop is just as usable as Windows and that the so often touted Windows usability is nothing more than a myth. Windows is usable once you're used to it; otherwise is't as difficult (or easy) than any other decent windowing system (yes, KDE certainly fits this description, GNOME probably does; this is *not* meant as flamebait but just an abservation of the way these Desktops are configured in the newest Mandrake 8.1 release; your milage may vary). These don't work quite the same way as Windows, but it basically do the same things, provides you with menus, with end-user friendly software (KOffice is pretty cool & looks nice, KMail is quite user friendly, etc) and nice GUI configuration tools. If you have a chance sometime, watch someone who's never used a computer try to figure out Windows; it's very instructive to see that Windows itself is not more or less intuitive than any other windowing
system; once you've mastered the concepts and abstractions, it becomes easy. The so called usability advantange of Windows is mostly imprinting, inertia and FUD; the functional differences are starting to disappear or become neglegible.
The biggest obstacle at this point is device/drive support and the need to recompile kernels to get some stuff to work. Usability is (generally speaking) just fine, provided you're working on a well-setup & installed box
Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.
...
That may be factually true, but have you seen how butt-ugly Motif & CDE are?? They really show their age by now. After seeing a Sun workstation running their (preinstalled) CDE environment, I am surprised Sun that manages to sell more than 2 workstations/year. The hardware is not bad (but nothing really special either) but horribly overpriced and the desktop looks like crap. It may be a standard but it looks slightly neolithic and is IMHO even more unusable than the worst of Gnome and/or KDE (combined).I found myself cursing at that environment all day. For the record, I curse ever once in a while when working on Win2K and almost never curse behind my Linux box (which is currently running KDE).
Of course, the one the server side (which is Sun's bread and butter) this doesn't count since you don't need a GUI
I've just checked out the sample mojo-world gallery (I'm a sucker for any web pages that claims to show me (almost) photo-realistic rendered terrain images) and while the output is quite cool, it still has ways to go before it's going to be photorealistic. On the other hand, the point of MojoWorld is that you don't need a lot of data to re-create your scenes: you just save the seed parameters (which are tiny as compared to a real height-field) and the engine re-creates the scene from these parameters.
I have been working on terraform (which is aimed more at the generation and manipulation of digial terrain rather than the rendering of it) for a while now and in the course of doing so have learned a few things about fractal terrain generation. The fact that you can regenerate the terrain from a few seed parameters is not that special (dimension, scale factor, random seed, etc); these are the kind of parameters that are typically passed to these functions anyways. The more interesting thing (to me) is that they have apparently found a compact representation of all the data needed to create a (semi)realistic scene from it. All in all, I think this is quite cool. Hopefully they (at some point) will write a white paper detailing some of the algorithms used by the (closed source) generator.
Given that now they have extended their feedback period, take the time to let them know that this is *BAD*. However, please take a few minutes to create an intelligent response rather than firing off an "This sucks, you are all corrupt idiots" type comment.
Also, read the already posted comments. There are many well thought out replies that nicely summarize *why* this is bad; I would certainly recommend reading Alan Cox's post which presents some very good arguments against this. I personally don't think I have anything fundamentally new to add (+ I only found out about the opportunity to comment after the original deadline) but I am planning to post a comment stating my view that this proposal is fundamentally flawed and refer to other comments which I agree with.
Above all, let them know that there is a *huge* number of people out there who value open standards and don't care to play the 'You need IP protection in order to stimulate research' game (as was stated/posted by some MSFT drone).
We have enough boring shopping malls already; we don't need to turn the internet into another one when it could be much more and be a truly open medium.
The bad part of this is that it took MSFT 20+ years to get where they are; it will probably take another 20+ years for them to be relegated to insignificance (in terms of their influence on the market).
However, it's announcements like this which show that major institutions are now beginning to see past the FUD of 'not proven', 'no support', 'not scalable' and 'not stable'. Of course, there will still be myriads of clueless CIOs who believe the FUD, but it's data points like this one which will play a role in converting even this crowd. After all, (we all know) Linux is stable and you can't really beat the price. It's funny/ironic though that by time Linux became viable, MSFT for the first time in 20+ years actually got their act together and produced a reasonably stable system (Win2K). If guess competition is good for something after all
1) While I'm not a hardcore gamer, I enjoy playing a game from time to time
2) It makes sense to support a company who makes cool stuff for your platform of choice (similarly, I donated to Mandrake after downloading their latest release). I have a decent job and can afford to miss some cash in exchange for a quality product.
3) Not everything should/can be free. If you want Linux ports of closed source (ie: professional) games, someone will have to pay for them. Otherwise resign yourself to the fact that you'll have to resort to the likes of Tuxracer and Freeciv in terms of games (and I'm not dissing these games, they're written by hobbyists and simply don't compete in the professional game market).
So to sum it up, if you want Loki to be around a year from now, fork over some $ for a game. If you think the price is too steep, team up with your fellow Linux diehards and purchase a game for a few of you. While not exactly right/legal, it's still better if 3 people buy 1 game to share than nobody buying the game at all. Loki makes quality products for our favorite OS; I hope that they'll still be around a few years from now ...
I am European and find this quite horrible but also full of possibilities. I think I will submit the following:
...
Description: The patent covers the 'swap' operation, both on a primitive (type) as well as complex object level.
Rationale: I will then be able to sue the pants off anyone making use of any sequence of instructions which will swap the values of 2 memory locations/areas. Just about every sorting routine and countless other applications use this, so I should now be able to retire