No, this is not sarcasm or irony. The software that runs the Space Shuttles, to this day, was written in the early 70s. The computers they're running on, IBM AP-101s, were designed in the 60s. There have been a few upgrades over the years but nothing major, e.g. in 1992 they went from magnetic disks to solid state storage. The guts of the system, 400,000 lines of HAL/S, remain the same. NASA has no plans to change that, either; the software just works too well. The difference being able to read gyro data at 1000 times a second with 1960s hardware, versus 10,000,000 a second with today's, is meaningless. Statistically, the software has <1 bug, and none that impact the performance. Basically, it's perfect, and it will continue to exist as long as the shuttles themselves do. (Speaking of outlasting your design, NASA recently decided that the shuttles wouldn't be replaced until 2020, meaning that they could theoretically be launching a 40-year airframe some day. That's older than any school bus you ever rode on, and your school bus wasn't being frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs, and torched to 2500 degrees, six times a year, either.)
I think they need to better refine the metric by which they measure "success". If guess if you're in a public school, at least in California (and maybe Maine too), higher attendence would be considered a success since schools are essentially paid for every individual day that each individual student comes to class. As to whether or not the kids are actually learning more, the article is tellingly vague.
I think the answer is probably no. We had an almost identical program at my high school when I was there, except this was during the peak of the bubble when everything Internet was A Good Thing. Thus, the district had no problems or detractors when it decided to drop a couple of million on a program to give laptops to freshmen. Fancy IR-based networks were installed in the classrooms, teachers went off to some training program to learn how to harness the Internet in education, and 550 shiny new laptops got distributed to the incoming freshmen.
I should add that part of that cash-laden spending spree created a bunch of new opportunities that I and some nerd friends were able to take advantage of. We got jobs which paid the cushy-for-high-school rate of like $12/hr fixing the laptops as the idiot freshmen (why on Earth they gave them to the freshmen as opposed to the seniors, e.g. us at the time, I don't know) broke them. And boy did they ever. There's no way to quite describe the pained look my face acquire as I walked down the halls and saw the short freshmen who were unlucky enough to have score a high locker, turning the damn computer on its side and using it as a stepping stool. One time we got one that had been microwaved; the kid swore up and down that it was an accident. I swapped out screens that had been shot with BBs, I replaced keyboards where the keycaps had been rearranged to say "FUCKWHORE69". If my nose was not deceiving me, one time a kid shorted out his motherboard by spilling bong water on the laptop. This is to say nothing of the hours spent reimaging porn-, mp3- and virus-laden harddrives. Laptops that had been bad or karmically deficient in a previous life, they got sent to my high school the next time around.
Anyways, so I became pretty familiar with what these kids were doing with them. And I'll be damned if they were studying or learning anything. If attendence improved, it was only because kids were coming in to download more Kid Rock and nude J-Lo cutouts off our 3 T1s. The teachers didn't really use them, thought it was a waste of money that should have gone into their anemic salaries, and said so. In fact the only times I ever heard the word success used in conjunction with the program were at the same School Board meetings where the whole affair was conceived in the first place.
As a final thought, I ask you, when was the last time you really learned something on the Internet anyways? I'm not talking about delving into source code that you wgetted or reading math PDFs, but just plain old high school grammar, geography, history, etc.? Quality sources of that are few and far between, and many of them are of the "The Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy" variety. In other words, worthless crap. If you're like me, all my friends, my family, all their friends, and, I think, about 99% of the surfers out there, you spend your time on the internet in a sort of subdued mental haze, not really thinking, not really learning, just being, possibly being entertained. Really, it's just like marijuana, or television. Now imagine what would happen if Maine gave 7th graders $37 million worth of Trinitrons and pot:) One wonders if the NY Times would be as effusive.
Even someone like me with a pathetic knowledge of number theory and crypto can see what huge ramifications this would have if the proof is true. OTOH I don't get why a genuine proof would "turn the encryption/security industry on its ear" as some have said. The hypothesis has already been shown true analytically for the first 2 billion primes or something. Everyone "believes" it to be true. So haven't people already tried various crypto attacks of the form "Assume the Riemann Hypothesis is true, and use this much faster way to find numbers which are very likely prime"? I mean, the formula's right there in the theorem...
Sorry, but that's nonsense. CDROM drives have an installed base of probably half a billion units worldwide. That's orders of magnitude higher than any of the DVD writable standards--which aren't even cross compatible--can claim. CD readers are dirt cheap and ubiquitous. The overwhelming majority of all media is distributed on CD today, and will continue to be for probably the next decade. Case in point: Sony invented the 3.5" floppy drive in 1980 and codeveloped (with Philips) the CD drive two years later. Just off the top of my head, I can recall software packages being distributed as late as 1998 that were still on 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. So it took nearly a decade and a half for that change to occur. We're in year 4 of DVD.
Re:64bit matters, for Google, too
on
Forget Moore's Law?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Right, thank you, glad someone else got that. No one is saying that Google has abandoned Itanium and 64-bit-ness for good. Read that question in the context of the article and what Schmidt is really being asked is how will the arrival of Itanium affect Google. And of course the answer is that it won't, since as we all know Google has chosen the route of 10000 (or whatever) cheap Linux-based Pentium boxes in place of, well, an E10000 (or ten). But that sure doesn't mean Google is swearing off 64-bit for good--just that it has no intention of buying the "superchip." But bet your ass that when Itanium becomes more readily available and cheap, a la the P4 today, when Itanium has turned from "superchip" to "standardchip," Google will be buying them just as voraciously as everyone else. So for me these doomsday prognostications that Malone flings about don't seem that foreboding to me--Itanium will sell well, just not as long as it's considered a high-end niche item. But that never lasts long anyways. One-year-ago's high-end niche processor comes standard on every PC at CompUSA today.
I had the opportunity to meet and interview Clarke when he came to my school last year to give a speech as part of a post-9/11 outreach program to CS faculties around the nation. (In fact, I wrote an article about it for our school newspaper, if you're interested.) He really handled himself well. The crowd was more or less 100% engineering and CS faculty, grad students, and the type of smart undergrads that would actually care about such a thing, in other words a tough crowd to play to. And I think everyone was a pretty skeptical at the outset that any government official would know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to IT policy, so-called "cybersecurity" (blech), and such. But he did! After he spoke he gave about a 40 minute Q&A where people asked him all sorts of tough and sometimes really esoteric questions concerning software patents, the DMCA, network security, hell, something about quantum computing even came up. His knowledge was impressive and, even more heartening, when he didn't know the answer he just said so rather than bullshitting. All in all I left with a good feeling that this guy was the White House's go-to man for IT policy and would be protecting our computers from the terrorists. Now it sounds like he got fired because he wasn't quite fascist enough for the Bushies, which is really depressing. Guess I should have seen it coming all along.
Weezer could have been reasonably called guitar driven for the Blue Album and maybe parts of Pinkerton. The riffs were quirky and inventive and they had some good, expressive solo work. They were never tone monsters but they had a nice mellow tone that suited their style. And what were they playing with? Why, Fender and Mesa Boogie, of course. Analog, it need not be said.
God knows what they playing with now, and honestly, who cares. Its all 5 chords and ditzy little arpeggios, boring. At the last two shows I saw them at, both in arenas at SF, it looked like they were playing big tube stacks and good old analog, but who cares. Their music had turned into mindless, distortion-filled droning for me. Maybe I just got outta high school and left them at the gates...
The only thing they're trying to soften is Kazaa. Rosen said "resigned" to spend more time with her family. Meaning she was fired. And why not? She's the figurehead of an huge, costly, and utterly failing war effort (e.g. Napster/Kazaa/whatever users doubling every year) against Internet audio sharing. After 4+ years in this position someone at the top finally woke up and smolt the Folger's; voila, no more Rosen. The bitch should feel lucky, she got about 3.5 more years at the helm than if she put in this type of performance at a major corporation and maybe a year longer than if she was in the United States armed services:) You can bet the next capo RIAA foists up to lead the charge will be every bit as arrogant, clueless and dishonest. If anyone deserves our sympathy today it's the those poor Rosen kids, who face the prospect of hours more daily "quality time" with their whore of a mother. Haha!
I'm glad someone else remembered that name. Here's a little more info on this son of a bitch. For fuck's sake--you could not find a man more ill-suited for this job if you tried.
Oh come on EPIC, let's call a spade a spade. "Fundamentally incompatible with the mission of educational institutions to foster critical thinking and exploration?" I am a third year college student, and I have never, not once in my entire life, met a fellow college student who used peer-to-peer filesharing to do anything but a) view pornography, b) steal music, or c) download copyrighted software. This is not so say that there aren't any college students out there using P2P to explore and think critically. But the vast majority--like, probably in the high 90s--aren't. Ditto the "potentially harming overall network integrity and performance" trope in terms of overall bullshit-level. Having personally witnessed a 45mbps connection being brought to a literal standstill at the height of Napster as 5000 college freshmen set out to download the latest Eminem single, I can say that the RIAA is clearly correct about P2P apps' consumption of campus bandwidth. It's hard to imagine network integrity and performance getting much worse in the absence of a cap or limiter.
And philosophically I'm actually aligned with EPIC on this one; I am completely opposed to RIAA because I know that when they try to stop users from "stealing IP from artists," what they are really concerned with is preserving their own distributional monopoly over music in the United States and not with the individual artists at all. But EPIC engages in the exact same type of doublespeak when they advance claims like a few contained in this letter, thus lowering themselves to the level of that which they are opposing. And that doesn't help us--me--those opposed to RIAA--at all.
Not only because (duh) India is the 2nd most populated country in the world, but they also can lay claim to easily one of the finest/most rigorous engineering and computer science schools in the world, if not the best. IIT grads almost invariably turn out to be big movers & shakers in the IT world, or scary-smart geniouses, and usually both. Thus, good allies to have in your camp. To the extent that their government is telling them to move towards Linux, thus weaning a whole new generation from MS dependence, that's fine news indeed.
Yeah my jaw about hit the floor when I read that. Wired says the piece is excerpted from the author's forthcoming book, so I assume he must have been working on it and taken this trip well over a year ago. If you'll excuse the pun, no way that sort of thing would fly after 9/11.
Re: washing dishes for the local college: don't knock it `till you've tried it. I think my biggest mistake in high school was never getting a "normal teenage job," even just for one summer. Instead I always took on air-conditioned office jobs coding, database programming, configuring routers, whatever. My friends all went to work waiting tables or selling movie tickets. My jobs always paid great and my friends were jealous that I was making about five times as much as them, even though they had no idea what the hell I was doing. But I was always kind of jealous of them, too. While I was pounding out C++ and SQL, they were having all the fun. All my co-workers, if you could call them that, were old enough to be my parents, and the offices were all boring and full of stuffed shirts and altogether the completely wrong place for a teenage kid to be spending his beautiful Southern California summers. My friends got paid shit, but they got paid shit to basically fuck around with a bunch of their peers on the clock, hit on girls (who, believe it or not, show up much more frequently at Subway and General Cinema than at an insurance clearinghouse), meet new people, make new friends. Hell, they even got high on a few occasions, at work. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, that's fine--at the time I didn't think it was mine either. But with a few years of hindsight to benefit me, let me give you this advice: there's going to be a dauntingly huge chunk of your life where all you'll be expected to do is make money and ply your trade. So big that you can't even comprehend it, because it's, like, three times as long as you've been on this Earth. And I don't care how much you like IT, computers, programming, whatever--after about year, uhh, 5, it's going to get really old. Right around the time that the years you've spent making good money and being a professional nerd start blurring together into that big, depressing blob called "middle age," you're going to wish that you availed yourself of the opportunity to spend your preciously short youth working shitty jobs, wasting time, getting laid, going to concerts, and putting toxic substances into your body.
Re:Apples and oranges....
on
Men vs. Machines
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That is a popular myth that is usually not true. While I have no doubt that any human on this planet who has attained the level of grandmaster can see 10 moves out, most of them aren't wasting the brainpower to do so. Not until at least well into the midgame when things are opening up and combinations are starting to emerge. By and large, great chess players rely on their superior knowledge of positional play and tactics to win games. This is how great players can often look at a board and instantly tell you who has the upper hand and what the correct move is. If you've ever seen an master play 20 games at once--circling around the room, staring at each board for a few seconds, then moving--it's obvious that he's relying on tactical & positional intuition, not brute-force analysis. As if to drive home this point, American GM Koltanowski famously played 56 games at once while blindfolded in 1960 and still managed to win almost all of them.
Well young Timmy, a long time ago Slashdot was completely anonymized, there were no users, and karma did not exist. You know what happened? Slashdot grew and grew and grew. And the posts were probably longer three years ago on Slashdot than they are today. And of a much higher quality, too. Explain that.
Here's my explanation: the site's quality and popularity are inversely related. I can grant you that much of what goes on here today is ego-driven without conceding that the site would just keel over and die if you took out that ego drive. In fact, Slashdot was a much better website before its creators gave users a yardstick (karma) to measure themselves by. Discussions were educational because people actually knew what they were talking about, or they were entertaining because everyone was pretty smart. By participating we were all rational actors maximizing our utility, be it through leisure or and time investment spent learning about something new with the hope of a future payoff. And that's just basic econ 101 for you, sans all the normative psychoanalytic babble.
That is exactly right. I can't even begin to put a dollar amount on how much the Google cache has saved me by coughing up old articles & columns from the NY Times and LA Times archives that I'd otherwise have to pay about $2 a pop for. This is one of those "too good to be true" features that, when I first discovered it, I was positive would be going the way of the dodo RSN--and that was probably 2 years ago. The papers and others in the same situation simply must know what's going on here and choose to ignore it (no one's made a stink about the Google cache to my knowledge.) My only guess is that the journos cranking out said papers have for once prevailed over the bean counters--as a reporter (at an NYT Co. paper, no less, and I still have to pay for their archives!), I'd sooner lose a kidney than Google & the Google cache. It's simply the most invaluable single source of data on the planet, there's no other way to describe it. Most other reporters in the newsroom use it as religiously as I do. Maybe NYT doesn't want to kill everyone's fun.
My inner chef geek has to correct you: "julienne" is a verb. "Julienned" fries, maybe.
What about for high quality?
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
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· Score: 2
I have not been following the development of this project but I seem to recall a time when it was touted as an audiophile-quality, free replacement for MP3. Now, from their benchmarks, then seem to be targeting the low-bitrate segment of the market. Has anyone done any technical comparisons with LAME (the undisputed king of HQ mp3 encoding) at higher bitrates? I'm ripping basically every DVD I rent at Blockbuster to DivX nowadays, and I'd love to start doing the soundtracks in.ogg if I wouldn't have to sacrifice quality or space. One step closer to freedom.
"
On July 4, Southwest Airlines staff prevented Gilmore from boarding a pre-paid flight from Oakland to Washington, D.C, where he intended to petition the government to alter the ID check."
Employee #5 at Sun flies SouthWest?! Gosh... I guess the stock market really is down.
Well, how dare they try to recoup some of the incredible expense that they incur providing you with millions of hours of free entertainment. If the realities of, you know, capitalism conflict with your apparently formidable geek-TiVo pride, well my friend, that's just a pill you're going to have to swallow. You can either go the HBO route or watch some commercials. Either way, stop whining to/., and by extension, me, about it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is not sarcasm or irony. The software that runs the Space Shuttles, to this day, was written in the early 70s. The computers they're running on, IBM AP-101s, were designed in the 60s. There have been a few upgrades over the years but nothing major, e.g. in 1992 they went from magnetic disks to solid state storage. The guts of the system, 400,000 lines of HAL/S, remain the same. NASA has no plans to change that, either; the software just works too well. The difference being able to read gyro data at 1000 times a second with 1960s hardware, versus 10,000,000 a second with today's, is meaningless. Statistically, the software has <1 bug, and none that impact the performance. Basically, it's perfect, and it will continue to exist as long as the shuttles themselves do. (Speaking of outlasting your design, NASA recently decided that the shuttles wouldn't be replaced until 2020, meaning that they could theoretically be launching a 40-year airframe some day. That's older than any school bus you ever rode on, and your school bus wasn't being frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs, and torched to 2500 degrees, six times a year, either.)
I think they need to better refine the metric by which they measure "success". If guess if you're in a public school, at least in California (and maybe Maine too), higher attendence would be considered a success since schools are essentially paid for every individual day that each individual student comes to class. As to whether or not the kids are actually learning more, the article is tellingly vague.
:) One wonders if the NY Times would be as effusive.
I think the answer is probably no. We had an almost identical program at my high school when I was there, except this was during the peak of the bubble when everything Internet was A Good Thing. Thus, the district had no problems or detractors when it decided to drop a couple of million on a program to give laptops to freshmen. Fancy IR-based networks were installed in the classrooms, teachers went off to some training program to learn how to harness the Internet in education, and 550 shiny new laptops got distributed to the incoming freshmen.
I should add that part of that cash-laden spending spree created a bunch of new opportunities that I and some nerd friends were able to take advantage of. We got jobs which paid the cushy-for-high-school rate of like $12/hr fixing the laptops as the idiot freshmen (why on Earth they gave them to the freshmen as opposed to the seniors, e.g. us at the time, I don't know) broke them. And boy did they ever. There's no way to quite describe the pained look my face acquire as I walked down the halls and saw the short freshmen who were unlucky enough to have score a high locker, turning the damn computer on its side and using it as a stepping stool. One time we got one that had been microwaved; the kid swore up and down that it was an accident. I swapped out screens that had been shot with BBs, I replaced keyboards where the keycaps had been rearranged to say "FUCKWHORE69". If my nose was not deceiving me, one time a kid shorted out his motherboard by spilling bong water on the laptop. This is to say nothing of the hours spent reimaging porn-, mp3- and virus-laden harddrives. Laptops that had been bad or karmically deficient in a previous life, they got sent to my high school the next time around.
Anyways, so I became pretty familiar with what these kids were doing with them. And I'll be damned if they were studying or learning anything. If attendence improved, it was only because kids were coming in to download more Kid Rock and nude J-Lo cutouts off our 3 T1s. The teachers didn't really use them, thought it was a waste of money that should have gone into their anemic salaries, and said so. In fact the only times I ever heard the word success used in conjunction with the program were at the same School Board meetings where the whole affair was conceived in the first place.
As a final thought, I ask you, when was the last time you really learned something on the Internet anyways? I'm not talking about delving into source code that you wgetted or reading math PDFs, but just plain old high school grammar, geography, history, etc.? Quality sources of that are few and far between, and many of them are of the "The Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy" variety. In other words, worthless crap. If you're like me, all my friends, my family, all their friends, and, I think, about 99% of the surfers out there, you spend your time on the internet in a sort of subdued mental haze, not really thinking, not really learning, just being, possibly being entertained. Really, it's just like marijuana, or television. Now imagine what would happen if Maine gave 7th graders $37 million worth of Trinitrons and pot
Even someone like me with a pathetic knowledge of number theory and crypto can see what huge ramifications this would have if the proof is true. OTOH I don't get why a genuine proof would "turn the encryption/security industry on its ear" as some have said. The hypothesis has already been shown true analytically for the first 2 billion primes or something. Everyone "believes" it to be true. So haven't people already tried various crypto attacks of the form "Assume the Riemann Hypothesis is true, and use this much faster way to find numbers which are very likely prime"? I mean, the formula's right there in the theorem...
Sorry, but that's nonsense. CDROM drives have an installed base of probably half a billion units worldwide. That's orders of magnitude higher than any of the DVD writable standards--which aren't even cross compatible--can claim. CD readers are dirt cheap and ubiquitous. The overwhelming majority of all media is distributed on CD today, and will continue to be for probably the next decade. Case in point: Sony invented the 3.5" floppy drive in 1980 and codeveloped (with Philips) the CD drive two years later. Just off the top of my head, I can recall software packages being distributed as late as 1998 that were still on 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. So it took nearly a decade and a half for that change to occur. We're in year 4 of DVD.
Right, thank you, glad someone else got that. No one is saying that Google has abandoned Itanium and 64-bit-ness for good. Read that question in the context of the article and what Schmidt is really being asked is how will the arrival of Itanium affect Google. And of course the answer is that it won't, since as we all know Google has chosen the route of 10000 (or whatever) cheap Linux-based Pentium boxes in place of, well, an E10000 (or ten). But that sure doesn't mean Google is swearing off 64-bit for good--just that it has no intention of buying the "superchip." But bet your ass that when Itanium becomes more readily available and cheap, a la the P4 today, when Itanium has turned from "superchip" to "standardchip," Google will be buying them just as voraciously as everyone else. So for me these doomsday prognostications that Malone flings about don't seem that foreboding to me--Itanium will sell well, just not as long as it's considered a high-end niche item. But that never lasts long anyways. One-year-ago's high-end niche processor comes standard on every PC at CompUSA today.
A distinction without a difference, as the academics say.
I had the opportunity to meet and interview Clarke when he came to my school last year to give a speech as part of a post-9/11 outreach program to CS faculties around the nation. (In fact, I wrote an article about it for our school newspaper, if you're interested.) He really handled himself well. The crowd was more or less 100% engineering and CS faculty, grad students, and the type of smart undergrads that would actually care about such a thing, in other words a tough crowd to play to. And I think everyone was a pretty skeptical at the outset that any government official would know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to IT policy, so-called "cybersecurity" (blech), and such. But he did! After he spoke he gave about a 40 minute Q&A where people asked him all sorts of tough and sometimes really esoteric questions concerning software patents, the DMCA, network security, hell, something about quantum computing even came up. His knowledge was impressive and, even more heartening, when he didn't know the answer he just said so rather than bullshitting. All in all I left with a good feeling that this guy was the White House's go-to man for IT policy and would be protecting our computers from the terrorists. Now it sounds like he got fired because he wasn't quite fascist enough for the Bushies, which is really depressing. Guess I should have seen it coming all along.
Weezer could have been reasonably called guitar driven for the Blue Album and maybe parts of Pinkerton. The riffs were quirky and inventive and they had some good, expressive solo work. They were never tone monsters but they had a nice mellow tone that suited their style. And what were they playing with? Why, Fender and Mesa Boogie, of course. Analog, it need not be said.
God knows what they playing with now, and honestly, who cares. Its all 5 chords and ditzy little arpeggios, boring. At the last two shows I saw them at, both in arenas at SF, it looked like they were playing big tube stacks and good old analog, but who cares. Their music had turned into mindless, distortion-filled droning for me. Maybe I just got outta high school and left them at the gates...
"This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections."
+1, Insightful, anyone?
The only thing they're trying to soften is Kazaa. Rosen said "resigned" to spend more time with her family. Meaning she was fired. And why not? She's the figurehead of an huge, costly, and utterly failing war effort (e.g. Napster/Kazaa/whatever users doubling every year) against Internet audio sharing. After 4+ years in this position someone at the top finally woke up and smolt the Folger's; voila, no more Rosen. The bitch should feel lucky, she got about 3.5 more years at the helm than if she put in this type of performance at a major corporation and maybe a year longer than if she was in the United States armed services :) You can bet the next capo RIAA foists up to lead the charge will be every bit as arrogant, clueless and dishonest. If anyone deserves our sympathy today it's the those poor Rosen kids, who face the prospect of hours more daily "quality time" with their whore of a mother. Haha!
I'm glad someone else remembered that name. Here's a little more info on this son of a bitch. For fuck's sake--you could not find a man more ill-suited for this job if you tried.
Oh come on EPIC, let's call a spade a spade. "Fundamentally incompatible with the mission of educational institutions to foster critical thinking and exploration?" I am a third year college student, and I have never, not once in my entire life, met a fellow college student who used peer-to-peer filesharing to do anything but a) view pornography, b) steal music, or c) download copyrighted software. This is not so say that there aren't any college students out there using P2P to explore and think critically. But the vast majority--like, probably in the high 90s--aren't. Ditto the "potentially harming overall network integrity and performance" trope in terms of overall bullshit-level. Having personally witnessed a 45mbps connection being brought to a literal standstill at the height of Napster as 5000 college freshmen set out to download the latest Eminem single, I can say that the RIAA is clearly correct about P2P apps' consumption of campus bandwidth. It's hard to imagine network integrity and performance getting much worse in the absence of a cap or limiter.
And philosophically I'm actually aligned with EPIC on this one; I am completely opposed to RIAA because I know that when they try to stop users from "stealing IP from artists," what they are really concerned with is preserving their own distributional monopoly over music in the United States and not with the individual artists at all. But EPIC engages in the exact same type of doublespeak when they advance claims like a few contained in this letter, thus lowering themselves to the level of that which they are opposing. And that doesn't help us--me--those opposed to RIAA--at all.
Not only because (duh) India is the 2nd most populated country in the world, but they also can lay claim to easily one of the finest/most rigorous engineering and computer science schools in the world, if not the best. IIT grads almost invariably turn out to be big movers & shakers in the IT world, or scary-smart geniouses, and usually both. Thus, good allies to have in your camp. To the extent that their government is telling them to move towards Linux, thus weaning a whole new generation from MS dependence, that's fine news indeed.
Yeah my jaw about hit the floor when I read that. Wired says the piece is excerpted from the author's forthcoming book, so I assume he must have been working on it and taken this trip well over a year ago. If you'll excuse the pun, no way that sort of thing would fly after 9/11.
Be your own judge.
Re: washing dishes for the local college: don't knock it `till you've tried it. I think my biggest mistake in high school was never getting a "normal teenage job," even just for one summer. Instead I always took on air-conditioned office jobs coding, database programming, configuring routers, whatever. My friends all went to work waiting tables or selling movie tickets. My jobs always paid great and my friends were jealous that I was making about five times as much as them, even though they had no idea what the hell I was doing. But I was always kind of jealous of them, too. While I was pounding out C++ and SQL, they were having all the fun. All my co-workers, if you could call them that, were old enough to be my parents, and the offices were all boring and full of stuffed shirts and altogether the completely wrong place for a teenage kid to be spending his beautiful Southern California summers. My friends got paid shit, but they got paid shit to basically fuck around with a bunch of their peers on the clock, hit on girls (who, believe it or not, show up much more frequently at Subway and General Cinema than at an insurance clearinghouse), meet new people, make new friends. Hell, they even got high on a few occasions, at work. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, that's fine--at the time I didn't think it was mine either. But with a few years of hindsight to benefit me, let me give you this advice: there's going to be a dauntingly huge chunk of your life where all you'll be expected to do is make money and ply your trade. So big that you can't even comprehend it, because it's, like, three times as long as you've been on this Earth. And I don't care how much you like IT, computers, programming, whatever--after about year, uhh, 5, it's going to get really old. Right around the time that the years you've spent making good money and being a professional nerd start blurring together into that big, depressing blob called "middle age," you're going to wish that you availed yourself of the opportunity to spend your preciously short youth working shitty jobs, wasting time, getting laid, going to concerts, and putting toxic substances into your body.
That is a popular myth that is usually not true. While I have no doubt that any human on this planet who has attained the level of grandmaster can see 10 moves out, most of them aren't wasting the brainpower to do so. Not until at least well into the midgame when things are opening up and combinations are starting to emerge. By and large, great chess players rely on their superior knowledge of positional play and tactics to win games. This is how great players can often look at a board and instantly tell you who has the upper hand and what the correct move is. If you've ever seen an master play 20 games at once--circling around the room, staring at each board for a few seconds, then moving--it's obvious that he's relying on tactical & positional intuition, not brute-force analysis. As if to drive home this point, American GM Koltanowski famously played 56 games at once while blindfolded in 1960 and still managed to win almost all of them.
Well young Timmy, a long time ago Slashdot was completely anonymized, there were no users, and karma did not exist. You know what happened? Slashdot grew and grew and grew. And the posts were probably longer three years ago on Slashdot than they are today. And of a much higher quality, too. Explain that.
Here's my explanation: the site's quality and popularity are inversely related. I can grant you that much of what goes on here today is ego-driven without conceding that the site would just keel over and die if you took out that ego drive. In fact, Slashdot was a much better website before its creators gave users a yardstick (karma) to measure themselves by. Discussions were educational because people actually knew what they were talking about, or they were entertaining because everyone was pretty smart. By participating we were all rational actors maximizing our utility, be it through leisure or and time investment spent learning about something new with the hope of a future payoff. And that's just basic econ 101 for you, sans all the normative psychoanalytic babble.
That is exactly right. I can't even begin to put a dollar amount on how much the Google cache has saved me by coughing up old articles & columns from the NY Times and LA Times archives that I'd otherwise have to pay about $2 a pop for. This is one of those "too good to be true" features that, when I first discovered it, I was positive would be going the way of the dodo RSN--and that was probably 2 years ago. The papers and others in the same situation simply must know what's going on here and choose to ignore it (no one's made a stink about the Google cache to my knowledge.) My only guess is that the journos cranking out said papers have for once prevailed over the bean counters--as a reporter (at an NYT Co. paper, no less, and I still have to pay for their archives!), I'd sooner lose a kidney than Google & the Google cache. It's simply the most invaluable single source of data on the planet, there's no other way to describe it. Most other reporters in the newsroom use it as religiously as I do. Maybe NYT doesn't want to kill everyone's fun.
My God. Sound economic theory being posted to Slashdot. Now I have seen it all.
My inner chef geek has to correct you: "julienne" is a verb. "Julienned" fries, maybe.
I have not been following the development of this project but I seem to recall a time when it was touted as an audiophile-quality, free replacement for MP3. Now, from their benchmarks, then seem to be targeting the low-bitrate segment of the market. Has anyone done any technical comparisons with LAME (the undisputed king of HQ mp3 encoding) at higher bitrates? I'm ripping basically every DVD I rent at Blockbuster to DivX nowadays, and I'd love to start doing the soundtracks in .ogg if I wouldn't have to sacrifice quality or space. One step closer to freedom.
Heh, you clearly were not here during the golden days of yore. You're more or less correct now, I suppose. How depressing.
Well, how dare they try to recoup some of the incredible expense that they incur providing you with millions of hours of free entertainment. If the realities of, you know, capitalism conflict with your apparently formidable geek-TiVo pride, well my friend, that's just a pill you're going to have to swallow. You can either go the HBO route or watch some commercials. Either way, stop whining to /., and by extension, me, about it.