If you're high enough up you can even work it out voluntarily: our college president just quit but she'll officially be on sabbatical leave for the next year. She won't even be in the area- she's moving to rural Kansas to a farm...
Yes, it's not graphic in the sense of showing blown apart people, but if you don't think people are actually dying during some of that footage you're very naive- the 1:37 mark certainly shows live people being shot, and you have bits where the troops are cheering bomb strikes on targets.
Or is it ok so long as it's *our* bombs blowing people up?
I've been playing WoW for a while and frankly I'm getting fairly bored- I've seen a good chunk of the PvE content (Midway through Hyjal and Black temple) as both DPS and healbot and it's getting to seem more of a chore. I've been looking forward to AoC and I'll be picking up a copy tomorrow.
But the one thing that Blizz absolutely nailed was the UI extensibility. I simply could not play a raiding priest with the stock UI- Grid and Clique are utterly essential, and without deadly boss mods I'd die even more often. Other folks in my guild use healbot, or x-perl, or who knows what. The UI in WoW is unbelieveably flexible, and there are a brazilion mods out there to tweak every detail of your interaction with the world. I haven't heard anything at all about this from any of the testers and I really hope they got this one right, or I suspect I'll drop it as soon as I start getting into serious combat
It's an old military saying, and it's right. By far the most damning bits in his article don't deal with Sugar, Windows or anything else- they deal with the utter and total lack of planning on the part of the deployment folks. (Err, folk) The fact that they had virtually no plan, no infrastructure and no supply chain management indicates to me that they were simply not living in the real world- any Army 2LT could have sat down with them and explained how they were about to fail. How you get to a point where you have a quarter of a million pieces of hardware sitting around with no coherent way to get them to the people who actually need them is beyond me. Why didn't they hire a pile of old brigade S4s? You know, folks who actually have experience getting stuff to people out in the middle of nowhere?
I've been tremendously disappointed by the entire project- the goals were wonderful, the hardware ended up pretty nice, the software has ended up pretty meh, but the overall project seems to be run by pie-in-the-sky idealists, Open Source fanatics and others for whom the real world is a place they only visit from time to time.
I think you need to take a step back and look again.
Yahoo is in serious trouble. Google is basically moving into every space they own and they are (for the most part) winning. Yahoo spent a fortune to overhaul their online ad services with Panama and got absolutely zero growth from it- now they're going to Google hat-in-hand to try and fix their disaster. They have *no* fallback if online ads tank or they can't compete with Google- they don't sell a product, just a service. Their revenues have been basically flat since at least 2005 and their "brand" is pretty dated.
If Yahoo is a doing well, MS is a staggering success. MSFT earnings are still growing, albeit more slowly. They can afford expensive failures because they have both Windows and Office to fall back on. They are deeply entrenched in the corporate infrastructure- for all/. geeks love to talk about how Linux is taking over, it's going to be a long time before you see companies pull out back end stuff like Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server and the like. Tons and tons of internal business apps are written in crap like Excel macros and VB6. Geeks can sneer all they want, but it's the glue that holds a lot of companies together. We're in the process of upgrading from Office 2003->2007- the biggest problem by far is chasing down issues in these apps. ("Why is mail merge having issues with data downloaded from Advance?") You can claim OS products would make it better, but they won't because A) It's a ton of effort to rewrite everything and B) The same non-programmers would write the glue code in OO macros and it would suck just as badly.
Is MSFT a healthy company? I would argue that it has serious issues, but it's going to be around for a lot longer than the/. groupthink will ever admit. Certainly, it's going to be here long after Yahoo has gone the way of pets.com
No free market in education? Not even close- the competition between colleges for students is brutal. If you ever work in higher ed at a competitive school (non-open admissions) the pressure to make the admit numbers for the year is intense. This takes two forms- palace complex and massive discounts to the tuition.
Palace complex is of the reasons that tutition is skyrocketing- one college puts in a apartment-style dorms and suddenly everyone has to have them or you lose students. The college I work for is sinking ~$30 million into an athletic center right now. There's nothing spectacularly wrong with the existing pool and fitness center- but they're old, small and less beautiful than the one at the college up the street. Our location, size and student bodies are virtually identical, our US News rankings are effectively tied, so why pick us over the bastards to the north? A high end athletic center is one of the top 3 demands of incoming students, so we have to do it. Next up is a new arts center, a rebuild of the student center, more high-end dorms, etc. Note that none of these (with the partial exception of the arts) has anything to do with academics- students are demanding gold plated service nowdays and we have to cough up or we die.
Then of course there's the great secret of colleges- tutition discounting. You think anyone really pays the $44k/year it costs to go where I work? Right- try talking to admissions counselors who have taken calls from parents that say "I need another $2k/year off the rate or my kid is going to that school up the street." The school I used to work at got caught in that trap- at one point the average actual tuition was only 31% of what we claimed to cost. This is extreme (and almost caused the college to fail) but rates of 60-70% are common.
Don't fool yourself- the free market is very alive and well in education.
I hardly "mock" open source- I've been the leading advocate for it at both my current and previous jobs. I put in an Open Source LMS at my previous school long before it was cool, gave back new features and bug fixes, then went around and gave talks about it. I've been pushing OS CMSes here (to no avail so far) I use OpenOffice daily.
I *do* mock Linux fanboyism. Open Source stuff is often quite good and should be considered when looking into options for new projects. But mindless "Why do you need Outlook anyway?" type opinions don't help OS at all- they make the serious advocates look like idiots. Replacing Outlook&Exchange even at the fairly small school I currently work at would be a nightmare of the first order- you'd have to deal with issues ranging from permanent archive/storage/retrieval of the president's email to syncing with the dozens of brands of smartphones we have around campus. It would involve a monsterous amount of planning, testing, education and endless help desk calls even if everything went perfectly.
Wow- I'm sorry you had such bad professors. I'm hardly a great teacher (I know lots of people better) but there's no way that's going to work in one of my classes- I've sat through far too many "I will now read my Powerpoint slides" lectures to ever settle for teaching that way. I'm not going to do examples out of the book- that's what the book is for. I'll add and delete information from the text as needed- most textbooks skip the interesting bits and have great swaths of crud. Lecture slides*? You've got to be kidding- my typical lecture notes are about 2-3 pages of scrawl in a notebook that nobody but me can read. (And sometimes not even me, to the great amusement of my class) They're only there so that I can remember the sequence of what I wanted to write on the blackboard and to keep all the numbers straight. If you can't do the rest extemporaneously you don't know the material well enough or you're just plain lazy.
You have the right idea by listening though-don't try and copy everything your prof writes down, just the highlights along with the references to what s/he's talking about. For most people though, taking some kind of note is essential or you will drift off after 30 minutes or so no matter how interested you are.
*Speaking as someone who's been doing instructional tech work for more than a decade, Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. The first thing you need to say to yourself if you ever think about using it for more than projecting a few pictures is "No", then ago talk to your local IT guy and ask them for a better way.
Of course not. The entire reason I went to XP was to use it at work, and we have a site license for XP. (And everything else MS makes.) I could install Office 2K7 on it if I was really masochistic.
Something like I have with my digital camera- you plug the battery directly into the charger. Right now the eee charges rather slowly from wall current so when the battery is dead I'm stuck for a while. It would be far easier just to pull a fresh battery from the charger and swap with the dead one.
Which has the more accessible professors in your discipline? Which will get you undergrad research projects?
CS majors are a dime a dozen, from tech schools or liberal arts colleges. You need something to set you apart from the crowd, and doing a serious undergrad research project is one of the absolute best ways to do it. You get huge benefits all the way around
A recommendation letter from someone who actually knows your skills, not just a "Yea, he got an A in my course"
A chance to show employers that you can work on a single, difficult project for an extended time, not just YA compiler for CS323.
A chance to show that you can adapt and learn on a project where the final answer may not be known.
A chance to show that you can communicate effectively with other people, both written and oral.
Ask what the majors in your field have done for senior projects. Do they sound interesting? Are the seniors enthusiastic about them? Ask how many *undergrad* students there are per professor working on research. (The ideal answer here is less than 5, with no grad students, but you'll only get that at a small liberal arts college.)
One of the recently faculty lunches here was given by a CS professor and his student- they developed a program over the summer to solve the 1-die per player/2 player version of Dudo. How many undergrads get to give a talk that a bunch of faculty members listen to avidly? (It was the best talk I've seen this year)
I have XP on my eee since I couldn't get it to talk to my school's 802.1x network. I honestly don't see many problems with it that the Linux version also doesn't have. It's all of 5 seconds slower to boot, it hasn't crashed and the screen size issues appear with any program that assumes a normal screen- there are dialog windows that run off the screen in Linux apps too.
I do miss the nice tabbed interface, but most of the bundled apps were pretty worthless and those that were actually useful are free downloads anyway.
The one thing I really want is a 2nd battery pack and external charger- the battery life on an eee is pretty maarginal.
I used to hate all lawyers all the time, then I ran into a mortgage company that tried to screw me out of my house two days before settlement. I spoke with a lawyer for a bit, got some exact words to tell them along with some very specific legal threats, then called the company back.
The 5 seconds of silence on the other end of the line before the "Uuuh, I think I need to talk to my supervisor" was classic. Took them only a few more minutes before all those horrible problems with my mortgage just vanished.
Since then I've been a lot more accepting of lawyers- calling down the legal napalm on those assholes was one of the most fun things I've ever done.
I have a Linux eee that I paved and installed XP Pro onto since I just could not get it to talk to our campus 802.1x network. It runs fine (not noticeably slower than the Linux version and I've yet to crash it), but most of the software you list are just terrible choices.
Open Office is a total dog. It's a dog on the Linux version too. AbiWord is a much better choice, and the first thing I installed on the XP version.
GIMP? You can't be serious- you really want to do photo editing at 800x480?
Inkscape? See GIMP
Audacity? Maybe if you want to do single track editing for short clips, but you've got very limited disk and RAM on an eee.
Mplayer? Perhaps.
Oh, and FreeCiv just sucks at 800x600 scroll mode- I thought it might be a good choice.
I love the eee for what it is- it's a near perfect meeting laptop. Weighs almost nothing, runs VPN fine so I can get to all my network files, you can touch type (with some training) so you can take notes easily, runs Opera nicely so I can keep both webmail and/. and Fark open for the boring bits. The screen is by far the biggest limitation, but most basic stuff can be made to work. It's not a replacement for the Dell on my desk.
I know you're beiung funny, but in reality this doesn't matter. I built a PC back when I was in VA- my power provider was AEP, which is probably the worst polluter in the country- lots of old, dirty coal plants. I moved up to PA a month later- I'm in a electric co-op now, with 60% of the power being nuclear and 20% hydro, very little from coal.
Did the computer suddenly get more green just beacause I moved it north 200 miles?
The iPhone will get nowhere in business until they gain compatibility with Exchange and lose AT&T.
My boss has an iPhone, and after seeing it I went and got a Samsung i760 instead. Why? I live on email, and forwarding everything to gmail just doesn't cut it. The calendaring functions in Exchange/Outlook are critical to a lot of businesses, and there's no mac or open source package that's anywhere close. Jobs needs to do some groveling at the feet of MS, since Entourage is a bad joke as well when it comes to calendaring and it really slows the uptake of Macs in the business world.
AT&T is the other reason. I can't even get service in my office on AT&T- Verizon has 3 bars. I've got a full 3G connection and the 760 is really pretty snappy on web pages. How's that EDGE thing working out?
Would I rather have an iPhone? Probably- it's smaller, lighter, has a better interface and looks a lot nicer. (Although the external keypad and keyboard on the 860 make up for a lot of that.) But there are a bunch of i760s in my department and only 1 iPhone.
Yes, there is nothing at all funny about the things that Scientology does. But their beliefs *should* be held up for public ridicule, all the more so since they are so damn protective of them. Ridicule is an amazingly powerful tool when engaged in a battle of ideas, and this is at the core a battle of ideas. They want people to think they are some sort of wonderful self help operation that will give you insight into your mind and help you through difficult times. Having a pile of people pointing out what they really believe and laughing at them infuriates them, helps keep the suckers away and defuses their power as a "church".
Think about the South Park episode that went through the entire theology of the CoS, with a big blinking sign that read "This is what Scientologists actually believe" over the animation. That was even more effective than the "Dum Dum Dum Dum Dum" song refrain about the Mormons, all the more so since there was no attempt at all at the end of the episode to paint actual CoS members as decent human beings, unlike the Mormon episode.
Since lots of folks are bringing up arguments about why OS/2 ended up where it is, I'll throw in my two cents.
It's 1996, and I'm working at a university where the department IT guy is a rabid OS/2 fanatic. The whole department ran on Warp, but this brand new version of NT (4.0) has just come out with a Win95-like interface but decent internals, so the battle was on.
One day I wander down to the campus bookstore. They have copies of OS/2 in stock- the version with TCP/IP and a web browser was something like $200. Next to it was the development kit, in a plain box- $700.
On the other shelf is a copy of WinNT 4.0. $99. That $99 was the full version, and it included a full copy of Visual C++ as well.
IBM simply didn't care about the academic market at all. MS cares a *lot*- they learned from Apple that if you get people hooked earlier they are stuck with you for life.
You're assuming that most people live close enough to do this, they set up internet for their family and that they can get the same company. Total numbers of people taking their grannies with them probably won't be all that high, albeit not zero.
My grandparents are dead, but I only wish I could get the service my parents are getting. They will have FIOS soon- I'm stuck with 1.5Mbps Embarq DSL for the forseeable future.
Don't know who modded this funny, but it's what they want. You aren't a customer they want to keep- you stress their network and force them to reduce the number of people on a single cable, which costs them money far beyond the $50/month you pay back. They'll be much happier with the grandmothers who download a few pictures of their grandkids every now and then.
I honestly wonder how much of the success of World of Warcraft is due to this. WoW isn't the best looking game out there by a long shot, but it runs on junky hardware just fine if you turn down the graphics a bit. It doesn't require any funky OS version or patch level either, nor DX10. Couple that with the "I don't need to find a CD and stuff it in the drive" insta-play and perhaps the eye candy just isn't worth the hassle.
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Some of us have kids. Work *is* my break...
If you're high enough up you can even work it out voluntarily: our college president just quit but she'll officially be on sabbatical leave for the next year. She won't even be in the area- she's moving to rural Kansas to a farm...
Yes, it's not graphic in the sense of showing blown apart people, but if you don't think people are actually dying during some of that footage you're very naive- the 1:37 mark certainly shows live people being shot, and you have bits where the troops are cheering bomb strikes on targets.
Or is it ok so long as it's *our* bombs blowing people up?
But the one thing that Blizz absolutely nailed was the UI extensibility. I simply could not play a raiding priest with the stock UI- Grid and Clique are utterly essential, and without deadly boss mods I'd die even more often. Other folks in my guild use healbot, or x-perl, or who knows what. The UI in WoW is unbelieveably flexible, and there are a brazilion mods out there to tweak every detail of your interaction with the world. I haven't heard anything at all about this from any of the testers and I really hope they got this one right, or I suspect I'll drop it as soon as I start getting into serious combat
(I'm allowed to make fun of other musicians- I play viola :^)
It's an old military saying, and it's right. By far the most damning bits in his article don't deal with Sugar, Windows or anything else- they deal with the utter and total lack of planning on the part of the deployment folks. (Err, folk) The fact that they had virtually no plan, no infrastructure and no supply chain management indicates to me that they were simply not living in the real world- any Army 2LT could have sat down with them and explained how they were about to fail. How you get to a point where you have a quarter of a million pieces of hardware sitting around with no coherent way to get them to the people who actually need them is beyond me. Why didn't they hire a pile of old brigade S4s? You know, folks who actually have experience getting stuff to people out in the middle of nowhere?
I've been tremendously disappointed by the entire project- the goals were wonderful, the hardware ended up pretty nice, the software has ended up pretty meh, but the overall project seems to be run by pie-in-the-sky idealists, Open Source fanatics and others for whom the real world is a place they only visit from time to time.
Yahoo is in serious trouble. Google is basically moving into every space they own and they are (for the most part) winning. Yahoo spent a fortune to overhaul their online ad services with Panama and got absolutely zero growth from it- now they're going to Google hat-in-hand to try and fix their disaster. They have *no* fallback if online ads tank or they can't compete with Google- they don't sell a product, just a service. Their revenues have been basically flat since at least 2005 and their "brand" is pretty dated.
If Yahoo is a doing well, MS is a staggering success. MSFT earnings are still growing, albeit more slowly. They can afford expensive failures because they have both Windows and Office to fall back on. They are deeply entrenched in the corporate infrastructure- for all /. geeks love to talk about how Linux is taking over, it's going to be a long time before you see companies pull out back end stuff like Exchange, Sharepoint, AD, SQL Server and the like. Tons and tons of internal business apps are written in crap like Excel macros and VB6. Geeks can sneer all they want, but it's the glue that holds a lot of companies together. We're in the process of upgrading from Office 2003->2007- the biggest problem by far is chasing down issues in these apps. ("Why is mail merge having issues with data downloaded from Advance?") You can claim OS products would make it better, but they won't because A) It's a ton of effort to rewrite everything and B) The same non-programmers would write the glue code in OO macros and it would suck just as badly.
Is MSFT a healthy company? I would argue that it has serious issues, but it's going to be around for a lot longer than the /. groupthink will ever admit. Certainly, it's going to be here long after Yahoo has gone the way of pets.com
Palace complex is of the reasons that tutition is skyrocketing- one college puts in a apartment-style dorms and suddenly everyone has to have them or you lose students. The college I work for is sinking ~$30 million into an athletic center right now. There's nothing spectacularly wrong with the existing pool and fitness center- but they're old, small and less beautiful than the one at the college up the street. Our location, size and student bodies are virtually identical, our US News rankings are effectively tied, so why pick us over the bastards to the north? A high end athletic center is one of the top 3 demands of incoming students, so we have to do it. Next up is a new arts center, a rebuild of the student center, more high-end dorms, etc. Note that none of these (with the partial exception of the arts) has anything to do with academics- students are demanding gold plated service nowdays and we have to cough up or we die.
Then of course there's the great secret of colleges- tutition discounting. You think anyone really pays the $44k/year it costs to go where I work? Right- try talking to admissions counselors who have taken calls from parents that say "I need another $2k/year off the rate or my kid is going to that school up the street." The school I used to work at got caught in that trap- at one point the average actual tuition was only 31% of what we claimed to cost. This is extreme (and almost caused the college to fail) but rates of 60-70% are common.
Don't fool yourself- the free market is very alive and well in education.
I *do* mock Linux fanboyism. Open Source stuff is often quite good and should be considered when looking into options for new projects. But mindless "Why do you need Outlook anyway?" type opinions don't help OS at all- they make the serious advocates look like idiots. Replacing Outlook&Exchange even at the fairly small school I currently work at would be a nightmare of the first order- you'd have to deal with issues ranging from permanent archive/storage/retrieval of the president's email to syncing with the dozens of brands of smartphones we have around campus. It would involve a monsterous amount of planning, testing, education and endless help desk calls even if everything went perfectly.
Sure, I'll replace the most important app for 1000 people with " couple of Linux projects which at least claim to support that."
You'll pick up my mortgage and other expenses when I get canned, right? Please be slightly realistic in the Linux fanaticism.
You have the right idea by listening though-don't try and copy everything your prof writes down, just the highlights along with the references to what s/he's talking about. For most people though, taking some kind of note is essential or you will drift off after 30 minutes or so no matter how interested you are.
*Speaking as someone who's been doing instructional tech work for more than a decade, Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. The first thing you need to say to yourself if you ever think about using it for more than projecting a few pictures is "No", then ago talk to your local IT guy and ask them for a better way.
Of course not. The entire reason I went to XP was to use it at work, and we have a site license for XP. (And everything else MS makes.) I could install Office 2K7 on it if I was really masochistic.
Something like I have with my digital camera- you plug the battery directly into the charger. Right now the eee charges rather slowly from wall current so when the battery is dead I'm stuck for a while. It would be far easier just to pull a fresh battery from the charger and swap with the dead one.
CS majors are a dime a dozen, from tech schools or liberal arts colleges. You need something to set you apart from the crowd, and doing a serious undergrad research project is one of the absolute best ways to do it. You get huge benefits all the way around
Ask what the majors in your field have done for senior projects. Do they sound interesting? Are the seniors enthusiastic about them? Ask how many *undergrad* students there are per professor working on research. (The ideal answer here is less than 5, with no grad students, but you'll only get that at a small liberal arts college.)
One of the recently faculty lunches here was given by a CS professor and his student- they developed a program over the summer to solve the 1-die per player/2 player version of Dudo. How many undergrads get to give a talk that a bunch of faculty members listen to avidly? (It was the best talk I've seen this year)
*That's* what gets you a good job.
I do miss the nice tabbed interface, but most of the bundled apps were pretty worthless and those that were actually useful are free downloads anyway.
The one thing I really want is a 2nd battery pack and external charger- the battery life on an eee is pretty maarginal.
The 5 seconds of silence on the other end of the line before the "Uuuh, I think I need to talk to my supervisor" was classic. Took them only a few more minutes before all those horrible problems with my mortgage just vanished.
Since then I've been a lot more accepting of lawyers- calling down the legal napalm on those assholes was one of the most fun things I've ever done.
I have a Linux eee that I paved and installed XP Pro onto since I just could not get it to talk to our campus 802.1x network. It runs fine (not noticeably slower than the Linux version and I've yet to crash it), but most of the software you list are just terrible choices.
I love the eee for what it is- it's a near perfect meeting laptop. Weighs almost nothing, runs VPN fine so I can get to all my network files, you can touch type (with some training) so you can take notes easily, runs Opera nicely so I can keep both webmail and /. and Fark open for the boring bits. The screen is by far the biggest limitation, but most basic stuff can be made to work. It's not a replacement for the Dell on my desk.
He's not exactly who we want on the bench
Acid toungue, funny as hell, complete jackass in RL.
Did the computer suddenly get more green just beacause I moved it north 200 miles?
My boss has an iPhone, and after seeing it I went and got a Samsung i760 instead. Why? I live on email, and forwarding everything to gmail just doesn't cut it. The calendaring functions in Exchange/Outlook are critical to a lot of businesses, and there's no mac or open source package that's anywhere close. Jobs needs to do some groveling at the feet of MS, since Entourage is a bad joke as well when it comes to calendaring and it really slows the uptake of Macs in the business world.
AT&T is the other reason. I can't even get service in my office on AT&T- Verizon has 3 bars. I've got a full 3G connection and the 760 is really pretty snappy on web pages. How's that EDGE thing working out?
Would I rather have an iPhone? Probably- it's smaller, lighter, has a better interface and looks a lot nicer. (Although the external keypad and keyboard on the 860 make up for a lot of that.) But there are a bunch of i760s in my department and only 1 iPhone.
Think about the South Park episode that went through the entire theology of the CoS, with a big blinking sign that read "This is what Scientologists actually believe" over the animation. That was even more effective than the "Dum Dum Dum Dum Dum" song refrain about the Mormons, all the more so since there was no attempt at all at the end of the episode to paint actual CoS members as decent human beings, unlike the Mormon episode.
Laugh at them.
It's 1996, and I'm working at a university where the department IT guy is a rabid OS/2 fanatic. The whole department ran on Warp, but this brand new version of NT (4.0) has just come out with a Win95-like interface but decent internals, so the battle was on.
One day I wander down to the campus bookstore. They have copies of OS/2 in stock- the version with TCP/IP and a web browser was something like $200. Next to it was the development kit, in a plain box- $700.
On the other shelf is a copy of WinNT 4.0. $99. That $99 was the full version, and it included a full copy of Visual C++ as well.
IBM simply didn't care about the academic market at all. MS cares a *lot*- they learned from Apple that if you get people hooked earlier they are stuck with you for life.
My grandparents are dead, but I only wish I could get the service my parents are getting. They will have FIOS soon- I'm stuck with 1.5Mbps Embarq DSL for the forseeable future.
Don't know who modded this funny, but it's what they want. You aren't a customer they want to keep- you stress their network and force them to reduce the number of people on a single cable, which costs them money far beyond the $50/month you pay back. They'll be much happier with the grandmothers who download a few pictures of their grandkids every now and then.
I honestly wonder how much of the success of World of Warcraft is due to this. WoW isn't the best looking game out there by a long shot, but it runs on junky hardware just fine if you turn down the graphics a bit. It doesn't require any funky OS version or patch level either, nor DX10. Couple that with the "I don't need to find a CD and stuff it in the drive" insta-play and perhaps the eye candy just isn't worth the hassle.