When I said good company, I meant they came out with a good product that everyone liked and that no one really had any problems using. I thought everything up through Netscape 3.x was golden...
THEN they did what you said. And on top of that, their next product (Communicator 4.x) was such utter crap that I can't believe I used it for so long. I mean, it was nice on features... but HORRIBLE on stability. Halfway through a web-surfing session, hyperlinks wouldn't work anymore! That's why I started using IE - cause I didn't like it when that happened. Of course, then I discovered that I liked IE better than Netscape when it came to features (but that's typical of MS - beat 'em to death with features), and it happened that IE was faster too (code bloat won over bad code), and IE integrated better with the OS - and I've been well rewarded for my decision to switch ever since I did it.
Oh, btw, I'd rather see MS get slammed by the SEC than broken up by the DOJ. MS makes its real money from stocks, and pays no taxes because of it either. Even though I'm an MS sympathizer, if you're gonna watch something die, I'd prefer it would be in the most spectacular way. Splitting the company in two wouldn't hurt it at all (AT&T is splitting themselves again - into four parts!) but telling MS that its investment strategies are shady... well, I think a couple of buildings in Redmond would collapse on an announcement like that!
I'm not gonna sit here and rag on Netscape all day... it's pointless, they were a good company and then they screwed up, everyone knows that by now... but I think people easily forget that MS had to make a lot of the right moves (right for them, anyway) to get where they are today.
This is what I didn't like about the DOJ case, and this is what I don't like about people who diss IE in favor of Netscape. Netscape, as a company and as a product, are NOT better than MS or IE - they're arguably much much worse. What Microsoft did to other companies can be described as just plain despicable, but you can't blame them for what happened to Netscape...
As a matter of fact, Netscape has a lot of life in them simply based on the number of people who still have their browser installed. Beyond this point, if Netscape slips any further in market share by a sizable margin, that's a big loss to them - and entirely their own fault. But that's considering that I'm thinking Linux users, corporate licensees, and IE haters are their main user base right now. If they lose THOSE people to IE, then that's sad.
Of course, I'm rooting for IE because it's the better product, IMO. But this is slashdot, and I can lose a lot of karma for saying that...
I know Access sucks a lot... I would never use it to power a website...
I'd use it as a development tool, though. It takes bona fide SQL queries, and it is a database, so you can build some stuff around that and then just use another database as the real live thing.
MySQL + PHP is great for websites. But then again, if that's true, obviously everyone's learned to live without transactions and row-level locking, eh? And if you need something more powerful than the current MySQL... well then you might as well step up to Oracle at that point anyway, rather than wait for a better MySQL...
Just pony up the dough for Oracle in the first place, ya cheap fux0rs.
Or, if you need something quick and dirty, go with the quickest and dirtiest of them all: Access. (that is, if you have a Windows box available)
I'm being serious. MySQL has it's good uses, but if there's severe limitations in its use, why wait for it to get better? (if it will at all) I don't believe that the announcement is vaporware, but there's more problems with MySQL for serious usage than row-level locking. If you're not happy with it right now, I can point you to a handful of solutions that will fit your needs one way or another.
And if you are happy with it right now... well, then nevermind, have a nice day.
While I do believe that open source software is very reliable and stable, and that it would be appropriate in a medical setting, I don't think it will happen anytime soon.
First of all, major vendors spread all kinds of FUD around, and you don't know what independent corporate salesmen/consultants are saying to doctors who know very little about computers. While this doesn't mean that open source software is any worse in that environment, admittedly it doesn't have much of a presence currently. That means there's few examples for OS advocates to present when recommending OSS.
More importantly, open source software is generally produced by a undefinable group of people... not one company. However, if something goes wrong with the software, there needs to be someone to be held liable. The main disadvantage of OSS in this environment is that generally NO one can be held liable if something does go wrong - sadly, whether it's the software's fault or not... because the equipment manufacturers can just blame the software in cases of hardware failure and no one would figure out the real cause nor would anyone defend the software. At least with a company being contracted for the software, there's someone to point a finger at.
That's another issue... these things have to be contracted out, and obtained on a set budget. The medical industry isn't going to look on Freshmeat for their critical applications, they're going to call a contractor or a consultant who will give them a definite recommendation for a software solution. And as far as I know, there are currently few medical-use open source applications, and there's virtually no incentive for anyone to write them. (other than the "challenge")
It's a chicken and egg problem, one that won't be avoided because a couple of hard working medical software companies will get generous one day and simply release the source code to programs that happen to make a lot of money for them already. The advantage of having thousands of people test and fix the software instead of a small in-house team is very tempting... but ultimately, the concept of OSS needs to gain more widespread popularity overall before it starts really reaching into these very specialized, mission critical, lucrative markets.
No offense guys. OSS will probably work better, but that's gonna be down the line.
Then again, who said I was gonna get any karma out of it? I was actually moderated DOWN... which I assumed was going to happen. (it's not on topic enough to be modded up)
Besides, I still have my plus 2 (which I'm disabling for this post) so it's not as if I need to karma whore.
goody goody. now your karma is mine! (when I get my mod points back...)
What's the problem here? Does it matter really if your boss or the government is reading your e-mail? After all, I'm already reading it!
Yes, I know the results of your purity test! I know that you subscribe to half of the ZDNet Newsletters out there! I saw that you got a new login name for the Stileproject forums! I know that you got a e-mail receipt from "Internet Billing Company" regarding your "new subscription"... and that you did it during work hours!
By the way, that sick, sad love letter you sent to Jacquie from electronicwhore.com? I know your girlfriend wouldn't like to see that! (Judging from the nasty response you got back, I see Jacquie wasn't too thrilled about it either)
You see, at least the government or your company won't extort you if they read your e-mail...
Leave $200,000 in the white mailbox under the Cooch's Road bridge by 10pm Wednesday night and I'll THINK about keeping my mouth shut...
... is that it's never a mistake to censor anything that doesn't deserve it.
Those who fight for censorship ultimately claim that it's for the good of society to prevent certain information from seeing the light of day. The main fallacy behind that line of thinking is the idea that information can harm people, directly or indirectly - when in truth, information is just the composition of ideas and thoughts, while it's MOTIVATION and FEELINGS that actually cause harm and discomfort.
Anyway, you could reason that censorship advocates hold no value for the information that they want to be censored. This means that there IS a set of information that they consider to have value, because they at the very least have to have thoughts and ideas that motivate them to feel that other thoughts and ideas are bad.
One ugly result of this logic is that censorship advocates are motivated to tell you what you can't have available, but are equally motivated to have control over information and communication systems so that what you ONLY see is the information that they consider valuable. Not all censorship advocates directly feel this way, but if they thought this deep about it, they'd come to this conclusion. Luckily, the Internet is under no such threat of control overall...
My main point: With this logic, if non-offensive information is censored unfairly, that's okay. Why? Censorship advocates discriminately consider a certain set of information valuable. By definition, it has to be in the set of information that they know and have learned already. So the set of information that they consider as value-less includes the entire set of information that they are unfamiliar with. Therefore anything they don't know about is worthy of censorship. If a website that they do not know about happens to be censored, there is absolutely no problem in that; strangely, if information that they value happens to be censored, they're enraged when they find out - but until they find out, or if they don't find out, then it's not possible for it to be a problem, because what they don't know has no value to them.
On the other hand, if you don't selectively discriminate among groupings of ideas and thoughts, then all information possibly holds some value - and none of it should be censored. This is what we like to call freedom...
This you should not forget, however: You can't control or affect other people's motivation and feelings without altering their frame of reference - their entire collection of knowledge and information. And you can't control or affect other people's actions without imprisoning them or altering their motivations and feelings. If you do not pay attention to the spread of information, you leave everything to chaos theory. Sanity issues aside, people in general will not infringe on the basic civil rights of others if they are correctly guided through our collection of human knowledge. In the end, we do need to make sure that information is presented properly for all human beings to maintain order on this planet... otherwise you WILL have suicide bombings and 4-year olds getting upset at pictures of naked women. It's just that discriminately preventing information from being presented to certain people is not fair to those people, not the proper way to share information, and certainly not a foolproof way to prevent anyone from having misguided ideas, thoughts, motivations, feelings, and actions. (Columbine HS being the most tragic and convincing argument of this)
I thought it was highly interesting when AOL bought Nullsoft. I equated it to their purchase of Netscape... even though some people might have a problem with that analogy, I'd say that the amount of people using Winamp at the time was probably about equal to the number of people using Netscape. (Market share aside... although Sonique wasn't as popular and there were no other decent MP3 players for Windows at the time)
Netscape withered and died, though. A lot of good talent left the company. But with Nullsoft, the whole team went over... and they're still there.
Now, it's only a matter of "When's Justin Frankel gonna get fired?" Don't get me wrong, he's a genius and a hero in a lot of respects (Shawn Fanning doesn't hold a candle to him, IMO) but he has a knack for doing things to piss off the big corporations... including those that are in the same company as his now. This is a GOOD thing... generally, the stuff that he has made has went pretty far (Winamp, Shoutcast, Gnutella... that's one hell of a resume) but one day someone in another branch of that giant media conglomerate is going to overreact and demand Justin's termination.
It's not as if that would matter, though. So far, anything of his that AOL has shot down made it into the public domain, anyway. He's smart enough to know how to get things out there too, under the radar of AOL until it's too late.
Nullsoft is proof that good things can come out of corporate America, that large corporations don't always go for the loot at the expense of innovation. I'm not saying that AOL actively supports Nullsoft, but their general hands-off approach is almost surprising, considering since they own the company, they can just send a few managers in there to look over everyone's shoulder and make sure that they're not writing the Next Big Thing in Copyright Violations...
I believe you, except that I think that the company might not release actual hardware-specific drivers for it under Linux, and if no one can write a GPL driver then all the Linux people using it will be SOL.
Then again, who's gonna have one anyway? I'd rather get one very nice regular-sized flat screen display and a sports car for the money...
I prefer CRT based monitors anyway. They are more fun to drop out of a window when they get old or break. Find a local high school that's upgrading to new Windows machines (high school can be a dreadful place) and get some of their old Apple IIe's, and let the mayhem begin!
Oh one more thing: this thing is a beauty. Too bad it probably won't have Linux drivers! You'll have to dual boot into Win2K to use it! *snicker* Somebody prove me wrong and write an open source driver as a side project, please.
Hold on a second... I'm absolutely sure that Win95 and OS/2 were both in the works at the same time, regardless of who may have started "first". Remember, IBM and MS were in bed together for a long time, and OS/2, NT were the children for whom each took custody. I'm sure that MS already had something like Win95 in the works as soon as they parted ways with IBM, partly because they had been working on that kind of product for a while, partly because they didn't want to lose out to IBM with their own tech.
If my memory serves me right, OS/2 came out first, with a huge lead over Win95. But the day Win95 came out, no matter how big, bloated, or buggy it was, that was the day OS/2 died. And to blame that on MS is like blaming MS for Netscape's fall, too... if someone gets punched in the face by another person, and then they stab themselves to death, can't really accuse the other person of murder, right?
I see your point. You think that if you pay for the service, you shouldn't be entitled to share your files and your computer/network resources to "help" them.
You're actually not entitled to share anything right now, either. Yet many people do. Why is that?
Simply put, I believe that people are glad to help out the Napster network as long as it's worth something to them. It's kind of both generous and selfish at the same time, but the net effect is that everyone gets what they want... the world gets your help through shared files and bandwidth, and you get to choose among millions of songs to download.
Add money into the equation, and I don't think things are affected much. I think most people like Napster enough that the subscription fee in itself is an acceptable tradeoff for keeping the service available. I think that people won't see their bandwidth as being worth as much as the subscription fee, which is why Napster has been a roaring sucess so far - no one had to share anything at first, but they did, and in tremendous numbers. So if there is a fee, I don't think people will close off their file lists.
I think the only thing that WOULD provoke people to unshare their files would be if their quality of service to Napster or the Internet as a whole was affected by people downloading. In other words, if too many people are downloading from you, and it's slowing down your computer or Internet connection, you will be inclined to lock people out of your files. I've already run into that situation, and I only share a small download directory of files on Napster when I do use it - as opposed to all of my 10,000 mp3s. Sure, I could also limit the number of people allowed to download at once, but I find that ineffective because then you just have less people saturating the same quantity bandwidth/processor time at once (and the rest of world will patiently wait for their turn anyway).
I do figure that if I did pay for Napster, I'd probably be using it more to download songs just to increase the overall value of my money... which, for me, would mean that I would have more files in my download directory to share, and therefore I'd be sharing more files anyway. And just out of laziness, that's how things would work for most people. Considering that, perhaps a subscription fee would make it GROW FASTER...
Hey, look at it this way... if you're lucky enough to keep an IT job for 10 years, forget promotion after that... the people with college degrees, even if they are idiots, are going to rise to the top while you stay shackled to your post.
I like the idea of meritocracies, because that means that people earn their positions. But you have to admit, sticking through college and getting your degree is the tried and true way to earn higher positions... otherwise, you start out pushing against the tide when the shit hits the fan in the IT industry...
Although I'm now stuck in CS (hey, only one year to go, rather than switch majors and have 3 more years) earlier on I should have switched to something else. Why? CS bores me, and I'm not going into the field (most of the industry nauseates me, I need some time outdoors in my career) so I would have rather had some breadth in another field. There are a lot of sciences and disciplines I would have liked to take more than an elective class in.
Two insights: To redeem myself, I'm minoring in MIS, which gives me business courses to complement my CS education (this along with taking serious elective courses in other fields). Also, since I'm not going into IT, then my CS degree gives me breadth for whatever field I DO go into... and no matter what I do for a living, I can also be the indispensable "office tech guy" on the side...
$2200 a semester? Do they have transfer papers on the web?:)
See my other two replies to the replies for this message and see me being idiotically apolegetic. (the original act, not the apologies, are the idiotic part) Although what you did for college requires a lot of dedication, it makes a CS degree look very possible with zero funding.
That said, when I was 18, I wouldn't have been able to handle that kind of responsibility. Then again, having the money for a high-priced college got me out of that problem. And one would argue greatly over which is preferrable - a college education, or a solid brain with the ability to maturely handle a lot of responsibility. (usually the second isn't necessarily included with the first)
Sorry, this is a subject I'm sore about... mostly because most people in CS that I know are DEFINITELY arrogant about what it takes to know as much as they do (which is, a combination of brains, effort/dedication, and fortunate living)...
I do agree, mostly. My nitpicks (and they are minor) are:
Between Pell grants and working through college, neither of these ways are easy, guaranteed ways to get the money to make it through a good CS program. I can't speak for Pell grants other than I know a lot of PRISONERS get them here, but I do know that pulling off a full-time job before/during college requires a lot of stamina. Again, easier said than done.
Also, internship/co-op programs are getting very competitive... to the point where it's like trying to get into an Ivy League school. Especially for internships, since companies are not interested in employing a programmer for just 3 summer months. It's much easier to score a f/t job outside of school or training, yet much harder to keep up with both school and a f/t job at the same time.
-UNNECESSARY RANT-
I suppose, in the end, I'm speaking out of jealousy. Right now I'm taking a full load senior year at my university, looking to graduate in May, and I'll be happy to be out of CS forever once I get my degree. I've seen none of the riches, fame, or opportunities that they speak of in the news a lot (see the other NYT article on/. that got posted after this). I already did an internship (for free) for a major media company for a whole summer, and since then the only decent job I've gotten was delivering chicken. I'm too focused on school (as I do struggle a lot with keeping focused and organized, as opposed to understanding or learning anything) to become distracted with a professional job DURING school, I have inconvenient circumstances that have prevented me from finding a decent internship in my home area for the past few years (quitting school nor permanently choosing to live near school are acceptable choices to me), and AFAIK this school has no co-op opportunities. Furthermore, from what I know of the tech industry and tech jobs, it's all unappealing enough to turn me off entirely, no matter how skilled or interested I am in the material. 70 hour workweeks, cubicles, and flourescent lights are all horrifying to me. The point? It'll be a sorely missed $80k I spent on college, even though that sheepskin will probably help me out wherever I go.
-END RANT-
Anyway, yes it is possible for a lot of people to afford college in the US, but there are no guarantees... and hard work does not equal success all the time. And remember the main topic of this discussion... that if these companies need tech workers so badly, why aren't they training them and hiring them from THIS country?
To your credit, they do hire lots of people without college degrees, and it is possible to just take it the long way around (although that's admittedly very difficult to pull off, wouldn't you agree) to get the college degree... but my personal bias is that it's bad enough to spend 4 years and $80k schooling for a field I won't want to work for... but even worse to have a job you don't want AND a degree you don't need, and to spend 8 years and $80k doing both at the same time.
That's true, and I apologize for a hasty response.
But you're right, there are more issues attached to getting the money for college, even if it isn't exactly $30k/year, which is the point I was trying to make.
Don't you think there's something wrong in an industry where you can spend $20k/yr for four years preparing for a career, only to find some dropout is making a lot more money?
I'm not saying that the situation you describe is unfair or unbalanced... in all probability, you are all being paid accordingly to skill. However, it makes me sick that I'm gonna have a hard time looking for a job next June, as good as I am, because companies hired lots of dropouts like you... knowing full well that they'll never have to promote you or give you a raise because, hey, you don't have a college degree!
I'm sorry... but we all just got fucked in the ass. At least don't be a smart alec about it, saying that you like it.
Awww Jesus Christ, this is arrogance at it's best...
First off, let me say that if you can afford college AT ALL in this country (yes even the $5k/yr variety), you're kinda lucky. Even if it is commonplace to be able to afford that, a lot of people CAN'T, having other priorities to take care of. Specifically, a lot of kids have cheap ass parents that won't pay a cent for school, and the kids can't work while taking classes (see the reply in the main thread about the practice of "weeding out") hence they're stuck in a Catch-22 when it comes to finding a decent career... can't get a job until they finish college, can't get into college without getting a job to make money first. So, it's really easy for them to get a low-wage job, just barely make ends meet, and make excruciatingly slow (if any) progress toward saving up enough for college. Sometimes it's just practially impossible, considering that starting college late is a huge pain in the ass and that you will STILL have expenses but no more full-time job to pay for them. Easier to stick with that low-wage job indefinitely.
Let's move to spoiled white kids, though, one of which I am...
State school tuition is cheap, but you're forgetting that room and board is expensive too, which usually ups the total package to around $10k/yr. Go out of state or to a private school, $20k/yr. Go to a really prestigious school/Ivy League/big-time enginnering school (MIT, CalTech, Georgia Tech, etc.) and you're paying $30k/yr. Let's leave alone the third option, since you either get a HUGE scholarship, assume HUGE debt, or get Mommy and Daddy to pitch in usually with that. (Three scenarios that usually don't happen with the average American) Starting with community college and jumping to a university is possible, however it takes a lot of focus and effort, and usually it requires that you live near a decent community college. That will put you on a route that will have you spending, with $3k/yr CC and $10k/yr Uni. ed, something like $30k total. Not bad, but it doesn't get you an education with any kind of prestige or breadth. Plus, some twerp who went to a trade school will know more about current technology than you will after 4 years of college. And, more importantly, you have to get $30k somehow. It's not THAT hard though.
The $20k/yr route will cost you $80k total. Your blind arrogance forgot that a lot of states have policies that don't allow students to move into a state just for the tuition discount... that is, you have to have lived in the state for at least X number of years for that to take effect. And, it's not easy for an 18 year old to step out of his cap and gown from HS and move to another state, alone, after having lived home their entire lives. Aside from that, $80k is a LOT of money. And sometimes that's what you wind up paying to get into a decent school with a good program... especially in specialty fields (occupational therapy, flight/aeronautical school, hotel and restaurant management, etc.) where there are a handful of schools on one side of the country that have respectable programs in those fields.
In total, yes a lot of US schools are cheaper than $30k/year. But remember that the money has to come from somewhere, and nowadays your average 16 year old working at McDonalds barely can save up for a used car that runs okay. I know a lot of kids who didn't go to college because no money was there. In total, it's NOT as easy as it looks, unless someone is spoiled rotten...
Dude, I'm like 20 years old myself, so I AM counterculture... actually, I'm part of mainstream culture with the tongue piercing since that's actually the big thing right now...
The whole computer thing is facetious. Frankly, a girl doesn't have to know about me and computers because I don't spend that much time on them anyway. (And I'm a Slashdot reader on a modem, and I don't spend much time on computers at all, which gives you an indication that I'm not the typical geek...)
Oh, and I've never been to a wedding... but I'm trying to get to one somehow someday:)
Who is that girl? How old is she? And is she spoken for?
I don't have any stock options but I can cook and do laundry. Plus, I have a tongue piercing. And I have a Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive to compensate for the tinyness of my bandwidth (56K).
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Who modded this up?
Christ, people, this is totally off topic.
So he's in the nanotech industry (or so he says). What does he want, a cookie!?!
Exactly...
When I said good company, I meant they came out with a good product that everyone liked and that no one really had any problems using. I thought everything up through Netscape 3.x was golden...
THEN they did what you said. And on top of that, their next product (Communicator 4.x) was such utter crap that I can't believe I used it for so long. I mean, it was nice on features... but HORRIBLE on stability. Halfway through a web-surfing session, hyperlinks wouldn't work anymore! That's why I started using IE - cause I didn't like it when that happened. Of course, then I discovered that I liked IE better than Netscape when it came to features (but that's typical of MS - beat 'em to death with features), and it happened that IE was faster too (code bloat won over bad code), and IE integrated better with the OS - and I've been well rewarded for my decision to switch ever since I did it.
Oh, btw, I'd rather see MS get slammed by the SEC than broken up by the DOJ. MS makes its real money from stocks, and pays no taxes because of it either. Even though I'm an MS sympathizer, if you're gonna watch something die, I'd prefer it would be in the most spectacular way. Splitting the company in two wouldn't hurt it at all (AT&T is splitting themselves again - into four parts!) but telling MS that its investment strategies are shady... well, I think a couple of buildings in Redmond would collapse on an announcement like that!
Too bad I don't have points here...
I'm not gonna sit here and rag on Netscape all day... it's pointless, they were a good company and then they screwed up, everyone knows that by now... but I think people easily forget that MS had to make a lot of the right moves (right for them, anyway) to get where they are today.
This is what I didn't like about the DOJ case, and this is what I don't like about people who diss IE in favor of Netscape. Netscape, as a company and as a product, are NOT better than MS or IE - they're arguably much much worse. What Microsoft did to other companies can be described as just plain despicable, but you can't blame them for what happened to Netscape...
As a matter of fact, Netscape has a lot of life in them simply based on the number of people who still have their browser installed. Beyond this point, if Netscape slips any further in market share by a sizable margin, that's a big loss to them - and entirely their own fault. But that's considering that I'm thinking Linux users, corporate licensees, and IE haters are their main user base right now. If they lose THOSE people to IE, then that's sad.
Of course, I'm rooting for IE because it's the better product, IMO. But this is slashdot, and I can lose a lot of karma for saying that...
I know Access sucks a lot... I would never use it to power a website...
I'd use it as a development tool, though. It takes bona fide SQL queries, and it is a database, so you can build some stuff around that and then just use another database as the real live thing.
MySQL + PHP is great for websites. But then again, if that's true, obviously everyone's learned to live without transactions and row-level locking, eh? And if you need something more powerful than the current MySQL... well then you might as well step up to Oracle at that point anyway, rather than wait for a better MySQL...
Just pony up the dough for Oracle in the first place, ya cheap fux0rs.
Or, if you need something quick and dirty, go with the quickest and dirtiest of them all: Access. (that is, if you have a Windows box available)
I'm being serious. MySQL has it's good uses, but if there's severe limitations in its use, why wait for it to get better? (if it will at all) I don't believe that the announcement is vaporware, but there's more problems with MySQL for serious usage than row-level locking. If you're not happy with it right now, I can point you to a handful of solutions that will fit your needs one way or another.
And if you are happy with it right now... well, then nevermind, have a nice day.
While I do believe that open source software is very reliable and stable, and that it would be appropriate in a medical setting, I don't think it will happen anytime soon.
First of all, major vendors spread all kinds of FUD around, and you don't know what independent corporate salesmen/consultants are saying to doctors who know very little about computers. While this doesn't mean that open source software is any worse in that environment, admittedly it doesn't have much of a presence currently. That means there's few examples for OS advocates to present when recommending OSS.
More importantly, open source software is generally produced by a undefinable group of people... not one company. However, if something goes wrong with the software, there needs to be someone to be held liable. The main disadvantage of OSS in this environment is that generally NO one can be held liable if something does go wrong - sadly, whether it's the software's fault or not... because the equipment manufacturers can just blame the software in cases of hardware failure and no one would figure out the real cause nor would anyone defend the software. At least with a company being contracted for the software, there's someone to point a finger at.
That's another issue... these things have to be contracted out, and obtained on a set budget. The medical industry isn't going to look on Freshmeat for their critical applications, they're going to call a contractor or a consultant who will give them a definite recommendation for a software solution. And as far as I know, there are currently few medical-use open source applications, and there's virtually no incentive for anyone to write them. (other than the "challenge")
It's a chicken and egg problem, one that won't be avoided because a couple of hard working medical software companies will get generous one day and simply release the source code to programs that happen to make a lot of money for them already. The advantage of having thousands of people test and fix the software instead of a small in-house team is very tempting... but ultimately, the concept of OSS needs to gain more widespread popularity overall before it starts really reaching into these very specialized, mission critical, lucrative markets.
No offense guys. OSS will probably work better, but that's gonna be down the line.
actually, I forgot to check the anon box...
Then again, who said I was gonna get any karma out of it? I was actually moderated DOWN... which I assumed was going to happen. (it's not on topic enough to be modded up)
Besides, I still have my plus 2 (which I'm disabling for this post) so it's not as if I need to karma whore.
goody goody. now your karma is mine! (when I get my mod points back...)
What's the problem here? Does it matter really if your boss or the government is reading your e-mail? After all, I'm already reading it!
Yes, I know the results of your purity test! I know that you subscribe to half of the ZDNet Newsletters out there! I saw that you got a new login name for the Stileproject forums! I know that you got a e-mail receipt from "Internet Billing Company" regarding your "new subscription"... and that you did it during work hours!
By the way, that sick, sad love letter you sent to Jacquie from electronicwhore.com? I know your girlfriend wouldn't like to see that! (Judging from the nasty response you got back, I see Jacquie wasn't too thrilled about it either)
You see, at least the government or your company won't extort you if they read your e-mail...
Leave $200,000 in the white mailbox under the Cooch's Road bridge by 10pm Wednesday night and I'll THINK about keeping my mouth shut...
... is that it's never a mistake to censor anything that doesn't deserve it.
Those who fight for censorship ultimately claim that it's for the good of society to prevent certain information from seeing the light of day. The main fallacy behind that line of thinking is the idea that information can harm people, directly or indirectly - when in truth, information is just the composition of ideas and thoughts, while it's MOTIVATION and FEELINGS that actually cause harm and discomfort.
Anyway, you could reason that censorship advocates hold no value for the information that they want to be censored. This means that there IS a set of information that they consider to have value, because they at the very least have to have thoughts and ideas that motivate them to feel that other thoughts and ideas are bad.
One ugly result of this logic is that censorship advocates are motivated to tell you what you can't have available, but are equally motivated to have control over information and communication systems so that what you ONLY see is the information that they consider valuable. Not all censorship advocates directly feel this way, but if they thought this deep about it, they'd come to this conclusion. Luckily, the Internet is under no such threat of control overall...
My main point: With this logic, if non-offensive information is censored unfairly, that's okay. Why? Censorship advocates discriminately consider a certain set of information valuable. By definition, it has to be in the set of information that they know and have learned already. So the set of information that they consider as value-less includes the entire set of information that they are unfamiliar with. Therefore anything they don't know about is worthy of censorship. If a website that they do not know about happens to be censored, there is absolutely no problem in that; strangely, if information that they value happens to be censored, they're enraged when they find out - but until they find out, or if they don't find out, then it's not possible for it to be a problem, because what they don't know has no value to them.
On the other hand, if you don't selectively discriminate among groupings of ideas and thoughts, then all information possibly holds some value - and none of it should be censored. This is what we like to call freedom...
This you should not forget, however: You can't control or affect other people's motivation and feelings without altering their frame of reference - their entire collection of knowledge and information. And you can't control or affect other people's actions without imprisoning them or altering their motivations and feelings. If you do not pay attention to the spread of information, you leave everything to chaos theory. Sanity issues aside, people in general will not infringe on the basic civil rights of others if they are correctly guided through our collection of human knowledge. In the end, we do need to make sure that information is presented properly for all human beings to maintain order on this planet... otherwise you WILL have suicide bombings and 4-year olds getting upset at pictures of naked women. It's just that discriminately preventing information from being presented to certain people is not fair to those people, not the proper way to share information, and certainly not a foolproof way to prevent anyone from having misguided ideas, thoughts, motivations, feelings, and actions. (Columbine HS being the most tragic and convincing argument of this)
This isn't a duplicate story... granted, a lot of it may be old news, but it's not a dupe.
That said, I think they should have a checkbox in the user settings called "Repeat Stories" that we can uncheck if we so choose...
(for that matter, we should have a new Dialectizer that transforms Slashdot Grammar into correct grammar...)
I thought it was highly interesting when AOL bought Nullsoft. I equated it to their purchase of Netscape... even though some people might have a problem with that analogy, I'd say that the amount of people using Winamp at the time was probably about equal to the number of people using Netscape. (Market share aside... although Sonique wasn't as popular and there were no other decent MP3 players for Windows at the time)
Netscape withered and died, though. A lot of good talent left the company. But with Nullsoft, the whole team went over... and they're still there.
Now, it's only a matter of "When's Justin Frankel gonna get fired?" Don't get me wrong, he's a genius and a hero in a lot of respects (Shawn Fanning doesn't hold a candle to him, IMO) but he has a knack for doing things to piss off the big corporations... including those that are in the same company as his now. This is a GOOD thing... generally, the stuff that he has made has went pretty far (Winamp, Shoutcast, Gnutella... that's one hell of a resume) but one day someone in another branch of that giant media conglomerate is going to overreact and demand Justin's termination.
It's not as if that would matter, though. So far, anything of his that AOL has shot down made it into the public domain, anyway. He's smart enough to know how to get things out there too, under the radar of AOL until it's too late.
Nullsoft is proof that good things can come out of corporate America, that large corporations don't always go for the loot at the expense of innovation. I'm not saying that AOL actively supports Nullsoft, but their general hands-off approach is almost surprising, considering since they own the company, they can just send a few managers in there to look over everyone's shoulder and make sure that they're not writing the Next Big Thing in Copyright Violations...
I believe you, except that I think that the company might not release actual hardware-specific drivers for it under Linux, and if no one can write a GPL driver then all the Linux people using it will be SOL.
Then again, who's gonna have one anyway? I'd rather get one very nice regular-sized flat screen display and a sports car for the money...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
I prefer CRT based monitors anyway. They are more fun to drop out of a window when they get old or break. Find a local high school that's upgrading to new Windows machines (high school can be a dreadful place) and get some of their old Apple IIe's, and let the mayhem begin!
Oh one more thing: this thing is a beauty. Too bad it probably won't have Linux drivers! You'll have to dual boot into Win2K to use it! *snicker* Somebody prove me wrong and write an open source driver as a side project, please.
Wow, you must have them all listed in that news "blurb". Can we have the Reader's Digest version next time, please?
Hold on a second... I'm absolutely sure that Win95 and OS/2 were both in the works at the same time, regardless of who may have started "first". Remember, IBM and MS were in bed together for a long time, and OS/2, NT were the children for whom each took custody. I'm sure that MS already had something like Win95 in the works as soon as they parted ways with IBM, partly because they had been working on that kind of product for a while, partly because they didn't want to lose out to IBM with their own tech.
If my memory serves me right, OS/2 came out first, with a huge lead over Win95. But the day Win95 came out, no matter how big, bloated, or buggy it was, that was the day OS/2 died. And to blame that on MS is like blaming MS for Netscape's fall, too... if someone gets punched in the face by another person, and then they stab themselves to death, can't really accuse the other person of murder, right?
I see your point. You think that if you pay for the service, you shouldn't be entitled to share your files and your computer/network resources to "help" them.
You're actually not entitled to share anything right now, either. Yet many people do. Why is that?
Simply put, I believe that people are glad to help out the Napster network as long as it's worth something to them. It's kind of both generous and selfish at the same time, but the net effect is that everyone gets what they want... the world gets your help through shared files and bandwidth, and you get to choose among millions of songs to download.
Add money into the equation, and I don't think things are affected much. I think most people like Napster enough that the subscription fee in itself is an acceptable tradeoff for keeping the service available. I think that people won't see their bandwidth as being worth as much as the subscription fee, which is why Napster has been a roaring sucess so far - no one had to share anything at first, but they did, and in tremendous numbers. So if there is a fee, I don't think people will close off their file lists.
I think the only thing that WOULD provoke people to unshare their files would be if their quality of service to Napster or the Internet as a whole was affected by people downloading. In other words, if too many people are downloading from you, and it's slowing down your computer or Internet connection, you will be inclined to lock people out of your files. I've already run into that situation, and I only share a small download directory of files on Napster when I do use it - as opposed to all of my 10,000 mp3s. Sure, I could also limit the number of people allowed to download at once, but I find that ineffective because then you just have less people saturating the same quantity bandwidth/processor time at once (and the rest of world will patiently wait for their turn anyway).
I do figure that if I did pay for Napster, I'd probably be using it more to download songs just to increase the overall value of my money... which, for me, would mean that I would have more files in my download directory to share, and therefore I'd be sharing more files anyway. And just out of laziness, that's how things would work for most people. Considering that, perhaps a subscription fee would make it GROW FASTER...
Think about that.
Hey, look at it this way... if you're lucky enough to keep an IT job for 10 years, forget promotion after that... the people with college degrees, even if they are idiots, are going to rise to the top while you stay shackled to your post.
I like the idea of meritocracies, because that means that people earn their positions. But you have to admit, sticking through college and getting your degree is the tried and true way to earn higher positions... otherwise, you start out pushing against the tide when the shit hits the fan in the IT industry...
Couldn't have said it better myself...
Although I'm now stuck in CS (hey, only one year to go, rather than switch majors and have 3 more years) earlier on I should have switched to something else. Why? CS bores me, and I'm not going into the field (most of the industry nauseates me, I need some time outdoors in my career) so I would have rather had some breadth in another field. There are a lot of sciences and disciplines I would have liked to take more than an elective class in.
Two insights: To redeem myself, I'm minoring in MIS, which gives me business courses to complement my CS education (this along with taking serious elective courses in other fields). Also, since I'm not going into IT, then my CS degree gives me breadth for whatever field I DO go into... and no matter what I do for a living, I can also be the indispensable "office tech guy" on the side...
$2200 a semester? Do they have transfer papers on the web? :)
See my other two replies to the replies for this message and see me being idiotically apolegetic. (the original act, not the apologies, are the idiotic part) Although what you did for college requires a lot of dedication, it makes a CS degree look very possible with zero funding.
That said, when I was 18, I wouldn't have been able to handle that kind of responsibility. Then again, having the money for a high-priced college got me out of that problem. And one would argue greatly over which is preferrable - a college education, or a solid brain with the ability to maturely handle a lot of responsibility. (usually the second isn't necessarily included with the first)
Sorry, this is a subject I'm sore about... mostly because most people in CS that I know are DEFINITELY arrogant about what it takes to know as much as they do (which is, a combination of brains, effort/dedication, and fortunate living)...
/. that got posted after this). I already did an internship (for free) for a major media company for a whole summer, and since then the only decent job I've gotten was delivering chicken. I'm too focused on school (as I do struggle a lot with keeping focused and organized, as opposed to understanding or learning anything) to become distracted with a professional job DURING school, I have inconvenient circumstances that have prevented me from finding a decent internship in my home area for the past few years (quitting school nor permanently choosing to live near school are acceptable choices to me), and AFAIK this school has no co-op opportunities. Furthermore, from what I know of the tech industry and tech jobs, it's all unappealing enough to turn me off entirely, no matter how skilled or interested I am in the material. 70 hour workweeks, cubicles, and flourescent lights are all horrifying to me. The point? It'll be a sorely missed $80k I spent on college, even though that sheepskin will probably help me out wherever I go.
I do agree, mostly. My nitpicks (and they are minor) are:
Between Pell grants and working through college, neither of these ways are easy, guaranteed ways to get the money to make it through a good CS program. I can't speak for Pell grants other than I know a lot of PRISONERS get them here, but I do know that pulling off a full-time job before/during college requires a lot of stamina. Again, easier said than done.
Also, internship/co-op programs are getting very competitive... to the point where it's like trying to get into an Ivy League school. Especially for internships, since companies are not interested in employing a programmer for just 3 summer months. It's much easier to score a f/t job outside of school or training, yet much harder to keep up with both school and a f/t job at the same time.
-UNNECESSARY RANT-
I suppose, in the end, I'm speaking out of jealousy. Right now I'm taking a full load senior year at my university, looking to graduate in May, and I'll be happy to be out of CS forever once I get my degree. I've seen none of the riches, fame, or opportunities that they speak of in the news a lot (see the other NYT article on
-END RANT-
Anyway, yes it is possible for a lot of people to afford college in the US, but there are no guarantees... and hard work does not equal success all the time. And remember the main topic of this discussion... that if these companies need tech workers so badly, why aren't they training them and hiring them from THIS country?
To your credit, they do hire lots of people without college degrees, and it is possible to just take it the long way around (although that's admittedly very difficult to pull off, wouldn't you agree) to get the college degree... but my personal bias is that it's bad enough to spend 4 years and $80k schooling for a field I won't want to work for... but even worse to have a job you don't want AND a degree you don't need, and to spend 8 years and $80k doing both at the same time.
I dunno. Perhaps CS programs just suck lately.
That's true, and I apologize for a hasty response.
But you're right, there are more issues attached to getting the money for college, even if it isn't exactly $30k/year, which is the point I was trying to make.
Don't you think there's something wrong in an industry where you can spend $20k/yr for four years preparing for a career, only to find some dropout is making a lot more money?
I'm not saying that the situation you describe is unfair or unbalanced... in all probability, you are all being paid accordingly to skill. However, it makes me sick that I'm gonna have a hard time looking for a job next June, as good as I am, because companies hired lots of dropouts like you... knowing full well that they'll never have to promote you or give you a raise because, hey, you don't have a college degree!
I'm sorry... but we all just got fucked in the ass. At least don't be a smart alec about it, saying that you like it.
Awww Jesus Christ, this is arrogance at it's best...
First off, let me say that if you can afford college AT ALL in this country (yes even the $5k/yr variety), you're kinda lucky. Even if it is commonplace to be able to afford that, a lot of people CAN'T, having other priorities to take care of. Specifically, a lot of kids have cheap ass parents that won't pay a cent for school, and the kids can't work while taking classes (see the reply in the main thread about the practice of "weeding out") hence they're stuck in a Catch-22 when it comes to finding a decent career... can't get a job until they finish college, can't get into college without getting a job to make money first. So, it's really easy for them to get a low-wage job, just barely make ends meet, and make excruciatingly slow (if any) progress toward saving up enough for college. Sometimes it's just practially impossible, considering that starting college late is a huge pain in the ass and that you will STILL have expenses but no more full-time job to pay for them. Easier to stick with that low-wage job indefinitely.
Let's move to spoiled white kids, though, one of which I am...
State school tuition is cheap, but you're forgetting that room and board is expensive too, which usually ups the total package to around $10k/yr. Go out of state or to a private school, $20k/yr. Go to a really prestigious school/Ivy League/big-time enginnering school (MIT, CalTech, Georgia Tech, etc.) and you're paying $30k/yr. Let's leave alone the third option, since you either get a HUGE scholarship, assume HUGE debt, or get Mommy and Daddy to pitch in usually with that. (Three scenarios that usually don't happen with the average American) Starting with community college and jumping to a university is possible, however it takes a lot of focus and effort, and usually it requires that you live near a decent community college. That will put you on a route that will have you spending, with $3k/yr CC and $10k/yr Uni. ed, something like $30k total. Not bad, but it doesn't get you an education with any kind of prestige or breadth. Plus, some twerp who went to a trade school will know more about current technology than you will after 4 years of college. And, more importantly, you have to get $30k somehow. It's not THAT hard though.
The $20k/yr route will cost you $80k total. Your blind arrogance forgot that a lot of states have policies that don't allow students to move into a state just for the tuition discount... that is, you have to have lived in the state for at least X number of years for that to take effect. And, it's not easy for an 18 year old to step out of his cap and gown from HS and move to another state, alone, after having lived home their entire lives. Aside from that, $80k is a LOT of money. And sometimes that's what you wind up paying to get into a decent school with a good program... especially in specialty fields (occupational therapy, flight/aeronautical school, hotel and restaurant management, etc.) where there are a handful of schools on one side of the country that have respectable programs in those fields.
In total, yes a lot of US schools are cheaper than $30k/year. But remember that the money has to come from somewhere, and nowadays your average 16 year old working at McDonalds barely can save up for a used car that runs okay. I know a lot of kids who didn't go to college because no money was there. In total, it's NOT as easy as it looks, unless someone is spoiled rotten...
Dude, I'm like 20 years old myself, so I AM counterculture... actually, I'm part of mainstream culture with the tongue piercing since that's actually the big thing right now...
:)
The whole computer thing is facetious. Frankly, a girl doesn't have to know about me and computers because I don't spend that much time on them anyway. (And I'm a Slashdot reader on a modem, and I don't spend much time on computers at all, which gives you an indication that I'm not the typical geek...)
Oh, and I've never been to a wedding... but I'm trying to get to one somehow someday
Mirrored copy: http://www.nols.com/hemos/DSCN0542.JPG
Who is that girl? How old is she? And is she spoken for?
I don't have any stock options but I can cook and do laundry. Plus, I have a tongue piercing. And I have a Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive to compensate for the tinyness of my bandwidth (56K).
Oh, and I like to cuddle.