At the end of the day the United States is a tremendous meritocracy. On Slashdot (and it seems everywhere these days), self-deprecation is the order of the day. Yet, the very free-wheeling aspect of American culture that tends to suppress 'academic achievement' is the same force that keeps us at the fore of innovation.
I've made a very nice career for myself, without a college degree. I've been judged more or less solely on my merits, and in that light I've been able to advance throughout my career. In a more structured society, that's not always the case. For example, my wife is an academic (PhD). She is judged not so much on her merits.. but rather on where she went to school, who she studied with, and a whole host of other factors that have very little to do with her proficiency in her chosen path of study. To the point that someone who went to a certain 'tier' of school has no hope of being published in the top journals, no matter how profound their research.
I've been fortunate to live and do business in several other countries. My experience is that many of those places look much more like my wifes Academic world, than the merit-based world that I've been in. They all have been wonderful places, and in many aspects better places than in the U.S. But the reward systems have always fallen short of what I have experienced here in the U.S. Some places values age above all else, some value paper-achievement (test scores, degrees, etc..), but very few places value results the way we do. For better or worse, that leads to the highly innovative and resilient economy we have.
I didn't visit the library one single time in 2007.. and the same goes for 2006. Hell I haven't stepped foot in a library since college.
I guess I'm a knuckle dragging idiot. Or, I use a much easier resource (the Internet) for my research. I buy books instead of borrowing them. So ya, I'm not terribly surprised that there are a bunch of other Americans just like me.
I'm not at all... they've thus far done the easy part.
Now the individual OEM's/ODP's have to A) integrate telephony (and work out the large number of issues with integrating the Android stuff with that), B) Create the mechnicals, C) Test and certify the phones for a number of different groups (OMA, FCC, etc..), D) Negotiate distribution and availability with carriers, etc... etc... etc...
Building a phone is non-trivial and involves a LOT of 3rd parties. They're on step 1a right now. I'll be duly impressed if they get a phone out before November of 2008.
Wikipedia itself can hardly be considered 'reliable.' However, it's the single best starting point for almost anything I've needed to research recently. Most articles are decently cited, providing direct links to sources that ARE considered to reliable. For that, it's invaluable.
I actually think the whole thing is quite awesome. It's a fun way to commemorate a movie I enjoyed quite a bit. This isn't a sign of the imminent fall of civilization, it's a silly movie tie-in drink.
By that logic Accounting Professors shouldn't be (largely) making more the $100k...yet they are ($150k and above at top tier schools). After all, they hardly affect people EVERY DAY.
The amount paid to these researchers is more about market economics than anything else. There are a lot of talented researchers (more supply) driving their salaries down. The same is not true for Accountants, as very few of them go on to get doctoral degrees (and fewer still choose to stay in academia). Their salaries are not AT ALL a reflection of how much people care about what they do.
The battery indicator on your screen is passive. It just sits there (largely unnoticed) until your critically low on battery and then it beeps at you incessantly. By adding a physical element to the indicator you provide an ongoing battery status (in a very easy to understand metaphor no less) that is much more difficult to ignore.
It is a very similar concept to the gestures used to control the iPhone. The trend in computing right now is to create interfaces that much more closely mimic physical experience. This has proven to greatly increase our ability to interact in meaningful ways with our machines. This is just another example of that.
Really it wins on two points: 1) It's a useful piece of tech. and 2) it's an insanely cool hack.
I seriously doubt that they haven't put this on hardware yet. The entire system is a fairly standard set of components...you could flash it onto a number of different reference boards. I would be shocked if they didn't do just that.
Symbian did 34.6 million units in Q2 2007 (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/5812_346_million_Symbian_OS_handset.php).I beleive they have estimated better than 20 million in Q3 and have done more than 100 million units in aggregate.
That's just Symbian. Throw in the iPhone which Apple expects to surpass 10 million units in 2008. Windows Mobile has done better than 30 million units (I'm having trouble tracking down the exact number right now).
The point being that there are hundreds of millions of smart phone users in the world. That sure sounds like a flock to me.
That definitely runs counter to my experience. We've had several intermittent google outages over the last 2 weeks or so (a big issue since we use Google apps for our business e-mail). No amount of rebooting will bring it back..
I've been wondering why Google was having so much trouble latey... now I know why. As a Comcast business user it's incredibly annoying.
On the flip side they are going to be doing 'express signing' soon which significantly reduces the cost of signing. You still need a publisher ID (if I understand it correctly), but the cost of each signing event will be more like EUR 20 instead of EUR 185 (through the cheapest testing house) as it is now.
I am not a father, but if some company plastered my 16 y.o. daughter's picture all over TV, billboards, newspapers and the internet with a caption "Free Text Virgin to Virgin," there would be no end to my wrath.
Clearly, if you are truly interested in protecting the privacy of your daughter, you should engage in a very public lawsuit calling further attention to her. Particularly when the ad campaign ran on the other side of the world. This is about money, not privacy.
This study (such as it is) focuses merely on the ability of cameras to aid in solving crimes that actually occur. Isn't the purpose of these cameras REALLY to prevent crimes from actually occurring? Wouldn't it make sense for these areas to have more trouble solving crimes because they are preventing the more basic (and more easily solved) street crimes in the first place?
I'm not making a judgment about the morality of using these cameras in the first place, but I do think the study leaves a lot to be desired.
Just bought the new HD Tivo, and had comcast out here to install the cablecards a few days ago. It was... fun.
The tech who came out had never done an install before. He got the cards in, and then called in the numbers to Comcast. Nothing happened. It took a bit of internet searching on my part to find the diagnostic information needed for me to know that the card was working (it tuned properly), but that something was wrong on their end since it didn't succesfully pair. I walked him through the process of getting things fixed, he re-read the numbers to Comcast central, and then magically everything just sort of worked.
It took 1 trip and about an hour and a half. I think the system itself looks like it's working ok. But the training for the technicians...s*u*c*k*s. Which isn't suprising, Comcast invested huge amounts of energy in talking me out of my decision to go the cablecard route. I only did it because the quality of their PVR's was absolutely laughable. We went through 3 boxes in 5 months.. and the last one didn't actually function as a PVR (changing tuners or rewinding/skipping caused the thing to freeze). I tried to get the entirety of the PVR service refunded for the last 6 months... was able to only get a month out of them. Screw Comcast.
I've spent the last 5 years working in the office software space (mobile phones). From what our customers tell us, Microsoft's dominance of the office market is still incredibly strong. We've toyed with ODF support, but customer demand simply doesn't exist. At the end of the day our customers (many many millions) have expressed very little enthusiasm for anything but the Microsoft formats.
In reality (at least as I see it) Microsoft has pushed their XML format not to maintain market share, but rather to give them a foothold in web services. They see their productivity suite as a broad authoring tool for not just documents, but all kinds of data. The closed formats where a major roadblock for them, because their customers could not use the data produced by the suite to actually do anything useful with it in a web 2.0 sense. A open, standardized format gives Microsoft the ability to pursue this "software as a service" model in a much more meaningful way.
It's interesting, since there are several companies (most of which have been rolled up in one way or another now) that where doing exactly what Microsoft wants to be doing. They had reverse engineered the binary office file formats, and where using that knowledge to provide data processing for various companies wanting to use the suite as an authoring tool for their internal services. I think Microsoft looked at that (along with what Google and the like have been doing) and simply saw a really good opportunity to extend their near monopoly on productivity into an entirely new business. I really do believe it is nothing more evil than that.
Isn't that the problem with the GPL? It's not a 'free' license anymore than the most restrictive RIAA EULA. The GPL attempts to maximize the benefits of source for the community, the RIAA attempts to maximize benefits for it's member companies. At the end of the day, neither are particularly free.
It's also important to note that as an executive order it has no weight of law behind it. It's essentially an executive statement declaring how the executive branch will be enforcing law. A position statement of sorts. It is HIGHLY likely that if they attempt to actually utilize this order, that the act (the seizure itself) will be struck down in court. That's how checks and balances work.
Of course, since it doesn't bear the weight of law, there is nothing keeping them from attempting further seizures for as long as they like. Which means the whole drama gets to play out again and again.
1. Twips are anything but an arbitrary unit. There are 20 twips to a point. 72 points to 1 inch.
2. The reason for the differences is the fact that very little in a document is stored in absolute positions. Almost everything is stored relative to other things in the document. Images are generally stored as some offset from a text anchor, for example. This allows you to make broad sweeping changes to the document easily as you can add text or other elements and the rest of the document will re-flow (since everything is stored relatively) nicely. The downside is that you are now dependent on the layout engine to ensure integrity between devices, and differences in layout in one portion of the document effect the rest of the document being positioned relatively to it. This is why word processor documents can be subtly (or sometimes hugely) different when viewed on different machines.
This differs from a absolute positioning view of the document (think publishing software) where everything in the document is positioned in absolute terms (more or less). This makes the editing process more difficult, since adding big content pieces often means you have to revisit the various document elements and reposition them accordingly.
At the end of the day, your word processor and your publishing tool are really solving different problems. Your word processor document isn't meant for distribution, it's meant for revision. Your PDF file is difficult to revise, but the layout is more or less guaranteed on every machine.
Not true. An unlocked phone is simply one that allows the operation (phone side) given any standard IMSI. The operators, however, require any phone on their network to be certified by the carrier. They will not allow a 'rogue' (their words not mine) phone onto their networks. Most carriers will allow any GSM Forum Certified phone to work... but the phone has to formally achieve certification to do that.
I have no idea how the project in the article intends to do that, or if the telephony side is based on already certified hardware/sofwtare. Just clarifying that simply having a GSM implementation, however, is not enough.
I actually agree with the author that for a great many CS disciplines advanced math is largely unnecessary. One of the more important skills in actually developing software is the ability to synthesize complex requirements into a workable system. This isn't mathematical, it's structural.. and in my experience it's the hardest thing to find in hiring developers (of which I've done my fair share).
That distinction is important. While I took the requisite computer science math courses, I hardly consider myself proficient in math. That's because in my career I've very rarely had to write raw algorithms. I've found that most of my time has been spent in designing systems and utilizing other peoples mathematical prowess to implement them. I'm heavily reliant on the STL and Boost, whose authors I have no doubt are great mathematicians. Their work allows me to focus on what I do well.
There are domains (increasingly becoming smaller) that are heavily reliant on mathematics. Image processing, cryptography, and a host of others spring to mind. However, the majority of programmers in the world aren't inventing algorithms themselves. They're building useful and interesting things out of the work that others have done.
I would argue that the two are unique disciplines (with information systems another in the computer world). Maybe the time has come to begin introducing degree programs that focus on system design (ie: architect) in addition to the more mathematical computer science disciplines?
Since we're off on a tangent, I have... (http://www.quickoffice.com).
Symbian is definitely...uhm.. quirky. Modern Symbian development, however, can be made quite bearable. They do support 'real' exceptions (just not exception objects). You can get most of the STL up and running (sans iostreams, although that should be doable with OpenC on Series 60 at least). With a little bit of discipline you can turn the whole thing into a pretty standard, and even portable platform.
So while it's not easy to write for Symbian, it's certainly possible to do it quite well. There are thousands of native applications at this point, so I do take exception to your assertion that most apps are written in Java. It's just not true.
Slashdot Mirror
Spot on.
At the end of the day the United States is a tremendous meritocracy. On Slashdot (and it seems everywhere these days), self-deprecation is the order of the day. Yet, the very free-wheeling aspect of American culture that tends to suppress 'academic achievement' is the same force that keeps us at the fore of innovation.
I've made a very nice career for myself, without a college degree. I've been judged more or less solely on my merits, and in that light I've been able to advance throughout my career. In a more structured society, that's not always the case. For example, my wife is an academic (PhD). She is judged not so much on her merits.. but rather on where she went to school, who she studied with, and a whole host of other factors that have very little to do with her proficiency in her chosen path of study. To the point that someone who went to a certain 'tier' of school has no hope of being published in the top journals, no matter how profound their research.
I've been fortunate to live and do business in several other countries. My experience is that many of those places look much more like my wifes Academic world, than the merit-based world that I've been in. They all have been wonderful places, and in many aspects better places than in the U.S. But the reward systems have always fallen short of what I have experienced here in the U.S. Some places values age above all else, some value paper-achievement (test scores, degrees, etc..), but very few places value results the way we do. For better or worse, that leads to the highly innovative and resilient economy we have.
I didn't visit the library one single time in 2007.. and the same goes for 2006. Hell I haven't stepped foot in a library since college.
I guess I'm a knuckle dragging idiot. Or, I use a much easier resource (the Internet) for my research. I buy books instead of borrowing them. So ya, I'm not terribly surprised that there are a bunch of other Americans just like me.
I'm not at all... they've thus far done the easy part.
Now the individual OEM's/ODP's have to A) integrate telephony (and work out the large number of issues with integrating the Android stuff with that), B) Create the mechnicals, C) Test and certify the phones for a number of different groups (OMA, FCC, etc..), D) Negotiate distribution and availability with carriers, etc... etc... etc...
Building a phone is non-trivial and involves a LOT of 3rd parties. They're on step 1a right now. I'll be duly impressed if they get a phone out before November of 2008.
Wikipedia itself can hardly be considered 'reliable.' However, it's the single best starting point for almost anything I've needed to research recently. Most articles are decently cited, providing direct links to sources that ARE considered to reliable. For that, it's invaluable.
I actually think the whole thing is quite awesome. It's a fun way to commemorate a movie I enjoyed quite a bit. This isn't a sign of the imminent fall of civilization, it's a silly movie tie-in drink.
Christ, get some perspective.
By that logic Accounting Professors shouldn't be (largely) making more the $100k...yet they are ($150k and above at top tier schools). After all, they hardly affect people EVERY DAY.
The amount paid to these researchers is more about market economics than anything else. There are a lot of talented researchers (more supply) driving their salaries down. The same is not true for Accountants, as very few of them go on to get doctoral degrees (and fewer still choose to stay in academia). Their salaries are not AT ALL a reflection of how much people care about what they do.
It's incredibly useful really.
The battery indicator on your screen is passive. It just sits there (largely unnoticed) until your critically low on battery and then it beeps at you incessantly. By adding a physical element to the indicator you provide an ongoing battery status (in a very easy to understand metaphor no less) that is much more difficult to ignore.
It is a very similar concept to the gestures used to control the iPhone. The trend in computing right now is to create interfaces that much more closely mimic physical experience. This has proven to greatly increase our ability to interact in meaningful ways with our machines. This is just another example of that.
Really it wins on two points: 1) It's a useful piece of tech. and 2) it's an insanely cool hack.
This ?
Not to get to off topic, but Symbian sold more than 20 million units in that same quarter. Just sayin.
I seriously doubt that they haven't put this on hardware yet. The entire system is a fairly standard set of components...you could flash it onto a number of different reference boards. I would be shocked if they didn't do just that.
Symbian did 34.6 million units in Q2 2007 (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/5812_346_million_Symbian_OS_handset.php).I beleive they have estimated better than 20 million in Q3 and have done more than 100 million units in aggregate.
That's just Symbian. Throw in the iPhone which Apple expects to surpass 10 million units in 2008. Windows Mobile has done better than 30 million units (I'm having trouble tracking down the exact number right now).
The point being that there are hundreds of millions of smart phone users in the world. That sure sounds like a flock to me.
That definitely runs counter to my experience. We've had several intermittent google outages over the last 2 weeks or so (a big issue since we use Google apps for our business e-mail). No amount of rebooting will bring it back..
I've been wondering why Google was having so much trouble latey... now I know why. As a Comcast business user it's incredibly annoying.
You'd be looking for William Jefferson Clinton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton
Grew up quite modestly in Arkansas before breaking into higher education with earned scholarships.
On the flip side they are going to be doing 'express signing' soon which significantly reduces the cost of signing. You still need a publisher ID (if I understand it correctly), but the cost of each signing event will be more like EUR 20 instead of EUR 185 (through the cheapest testing house) as it is now.
I am not a father, but if some company plastered my 16 y.o. daughter's picture all over TV, billboards, newspapers and the internet with a caption "Free Text Virgin to Virgin," there would be no end to my wrath.
Clearly, if you are truly interested in protecting the privacy of your daughter, you should engage in a very public lawsuit calling further attention to her. Particularly when the ad campaign ran on the other side of the world. This is about money, not privacy.
This study (such as it is) focuses merely on the ability of cameras to aid in solving crimes that actually occur. Isn't the purpose of these cameras REALLY to prevent crimes from actually occurring? Wouldn't it make sense for these areas to have more trouble solving crimes because they are preventing the more basic (and more easily solved) street crimes in the first place?
I'm not making a judgment about the morality of using these cameras in the first place, but I do think the study leaves a lot to be desired.
Just bought the new HD Tivo, and had comcast out here to install the cablecards a few days ago. It was... fun.
The tech who came out had never done an install before. He got the cards in, and then called in the numbers to Comcast. Nothing happened. It took a bit of internet searching on my part to find the diagnostic information needed for me to know that the card was working (it tuned properly), but that something was wrong on their end since it didn't succesfully pair. I walked him through the process of getting things fixed, he re-read the numbers to Comcast central, and then magically everything just sort of worked.
It took 1 trip and about an hour and a half. I think the system itself looks like it's working ok. But the training for the technicians...s*u*c*k*s. Which isn't suprising, Comcast invested huge amounts of energy in talking me out of my decision to go the cablecard route. I only did it because the quality of their PVR's was absolutely laughable. We went through 3 boxes in 5 months.. and the last one didn't actually function as a PVR (changing tuners or rewinding/skipping caused the thing to freeze). I tried to get the entirety of the PVR service refunded for the last 6 months... was able to only get a month out of them. Screw Comcast.
I've spent the last 5 years working in the office software space (mobile phones). From what our customers tell us, Microsoft's dominance of the office market is still incredibly strong. We've toyed with ODF support, but customer demand simply doesn't exist. At the end of the day our customers (many many millions) have expressed very little enthusiasm for anything but the Microsoft formats.
In reality (at least as I see it) Microsoft has pushed their XML format not to maintain market share, but rather to give them a foothold in web services. They see their productivity suite as a broad authoring tool for not just documents, but all kinds of data. The closed formats where a major roadblock for them, because their customers could not use the data produced by the suite to actually do anything useful with it in a web 2.0 sense. A open, standardized format gives Microsoft the ability to pursue this "software as a service" model in a much more meaningful way.
It's interesting, since there are several companies (most of which have been rolled up in one way or another now) that where doing exactly what Microsoft wants to be doing. They had reverse engineered the binary office file formats, and where using that knowledge to provide data processing for various companies wanting to use the suite as an authoring tool for their internal services. I think Microsoft looked at that (along with what Google and the like have been doing) and simply saw a really good opportunity to extend their near monopoly on productivity into an entirely new business. I really do believe it is nothing more evil than that.
Isn't that the problem with the GPL? It's not a 'free' license anymore than the most restrictive RIAA EULA. The GPL attempts to maximize the benefits of source for the community, the RIAA attempts to maximize benefits for it's member companies. At the end of the day, neither are particularly free.
It's also important to note that as an executive order it has no weight of law behind it. It's essentially an executive statement declaring how the executive branch will be enforcing law. A position statement of sorts. It is HIGHLY likely that if they attempt to actually utilize this order, that the act (the seizure itself) will be struck down in court. That's how checks and balances work.
Of course, since it doesn't bear the weight of law, there is nothing keeping them from attempting further seizures for as long as they like. Which means the whole drama gets to play out again and again.
1. Twips are anything but an arbitrary unit. There are 20 twips to a point. 72 points to 1 inch.
2. The reason for the differences is the fact that very little in a document is stored in absolute positions. Almost everything is stored relative to other things in the document. Images are generally stored as some offset from a text anchor, for example. This allows you to make broad sweeping changes to the document easily as you can add text or other elements and the rest of the document will re-flow (since everything is stored relatively) nicely. The downside is that you are now dependent on the layout engine to ensure integrity between devices, and differences in layout in one portion of the document effect the rest of the document being positioned relatively to it. This is why word processor documents can be subtly (or sometimes hugely) different when viewed on different machines.
This differs from a absolute positioning view of the document (think publishing software) where everything in the document is positioned in absolute terms (more or less). This makes the editing process more difficult, since adding big content pieces often means you have to revisit the various document elements and reposition them accordingly.
At the end of the day, your word processor and your publishing tool are really solving different problems. Your word processor document isn't meant for distribution, it's meant for revision. Your PDF file is difficult to revise, but the layout is more or less guaranteed on every machine.
Not true. An unlocked phone is simply one that allows the operation (phone side) given any standard IMSI. The operators, however, require any phone on their network to be certified by the carrier. They will not allow a 'rogue' (their words not mine) phone onto their networks. Most carriers will allow any GSM Forum Certified phone to work... but the phone has to formally achieve certification to do that.
I have no idea how the project in the article intends to do that, or if the telephony side is based on already certified hardware/sofwtare. Just clarifying that simply having a GSM implementation, however, is not enough.
I actually agree with the author that for a great many CS disciplines advanced math is largely unnecessary. One of the more important skills in actually developing software is the ability to synthesize complex requirements into a workable system. This isn't mathematical, it's structural.. and in my experience it's the hardest thing to find in hiring developers (of which I've done my fair share).
That distinction is important. While I took the requisite computer science math courses, I hardly consider myself proficient in math. That's because in my career I've very rarely had to write raw algorithms. I've found that most of my time has been spent in designing systems and utilizing other peoples mathematical prowess to implement them. I'm heavily reliant on the STL and Boost, whose authors I have no doubt are great mathematicians. Their work allows me to focus on what I do well.
There are domains (increasingly becoming smaller) that are heavily reliant on mathematics. Image processing, cryptography, and a host of others spring to mind. However, the majority of programmers in the world aren't inventing algorithms themselves. They're building useful and interesting things out of the work that others have done.
I would argue that the two are unique disciplines (with information systems another in the computer world). Maybe the time has come to begin introducing degree programs that focus on system design (ie: architect) in addition to the more mathematical computer science disciplines?
Although it would seem to represent a good portion (probably a majority) of America who does fall into that conservative camp. Welcome to democracy.
Since we're off on a tangent, I have... (http://www.quickoffice.com).
Symbian is definitely...uhm.. quirky. Modern Symbian development, however, can be made quite bearable. They do support 'real' exceptions (just not exception objects). You can get most of the STL up and running (sans iostreams, although that should be doable with OpenC on Series 60 at least). With a little bit of discipline you can turn the whole thing into a pretty standard, and even portable platform.
So while it's not easy to write for Symbian, it's certainly possible to do it quite well. There are thousands of native applications at this point, so I do take exception to your assertion that most apps are written in Java. It's just not true.