Having spent plenty of times in libraries, I'm fairly confident that the librarians make the libraries. A stack a books people can take home is an ok thing. What makes a library good is having those people gifted at finding the resources people need, or reccommending a book that someone might like.
Most of the librarians I've encountered are great folks who have varying degrees of talent. Now, I know I'm responding to a troll but...
1) They like food, they just don't like cleaning up after slobs. 2) Most good public libraries have vibrant and noisy areas that are welcomed by the librarians. Most often these areas are for youths. Noise, being detrimental to serious reading, should be minimized near people trying to seriously read. Duh. This is what we call, "enhancing the user experiance." 3) "They hate sunlight." Wha? Huh? you're nuts. 4) Why do you think they distrust new stuff? True, they are cautious with their budget and adding a collection in a new technology is expensive, but I don't see their distrust. Heck, public libraries are where many Americans get their internet access. 5) I think they do buy resources the general user wants to use. They might not buy things you want to use though. 6) Some are!
My fiance says she lost interest in gaming when things went 3d. It's just too hard for her to visualize and control. I pretty much just thought of her as someone who didn't play any games until we went on a trip and played Pac-Man at the hotel arcade for hours on end. It was a total blast. I picked up Namco's classic game pack for the Cube and although she doesn't game nearly as much as I do, she's able to share in one of my hobbies.
Now only if i can convice her to like Soul Calibur...
It's interesting that the technique they describe as adaptive machine learning which is being developed at Microsoft Research, sounds pretty much like what Mozilla is trying to achieve. MS may get more sophisticated, which wouldn't be bad. I've managed to train my Mozilla to be pretty darn accurate with the mail it receives, but it could use some competition and improvement.
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, the general idea is that as you recieve mail, you flag it as spam or not spam. By examining the patterns that occur within legit emails and bogus emails, the machine gets better at guessing which emails are good and which are bad. For me, some of the filters must be easy for it. Every email I get with the word "porn" in it is spam. However, unlike many other people, I get lots of email with the word "debt" which is legitimate. So, it is built based on the profile of email I recieve. I would mention though, that most of the "get out of debt" emails I recieve are nicely filtered out based on some other criteria the program has figured out.
If you haven't tried a recent mozilla for mail, it's a pretty good program with a fun solution to spam. Give it a shot.
It's neccassary because the two largest gaming markets in the world are the US and Japan, followed by the EU. If you are selling a gaming platform you sure want to do well in the top two markets. If you kick butt in one but fail in another you don't make the kind of money that you, your shareholders and your developers are expecting. Start losing out in the realm of mindshare and you could find yourself kicked out of the console market.
"I've noticed that the best way to capture a reader's attention (and explain the most) is to start off with PRINT, INPUT, IF...THEN and GOTO"
What? Why would you be reccomending the teaching of Goto? Teach Sub routines or functions. They aren't much more complicated and get you closer to better programming. We've known that GOTO was a bad idea for over 25 years. Yikes!
I don't want to hear about Knuth supporting GOTO. It was a specialized case and still questionable.
A couple friends of mine who are games are admittedly a bit chunky have really benifitted from the advent of Dance Dance Revolution. It might be the only way some people will get regular exercise. I think in the future we'll see an increasing number of these sorts of games.
If ever there was an easy question asked on Slashdot... Yes. They should be held responsible. When you are peddling in porn you have a responsibility to not advertise it to kids or give it to them.
Spamming using dictionary methods is beyond inappropriate for porn vendors. If Abercrombie and Fitch can get sued for sending their questionable catalogs through the mail to under-age people, porn vendors are in no better position.
Some of you have said, "But there's no way to know the age of the kid." No, but you make a reasonable effort. If you or one of your trusted partners has thier credit card number, either the email address is legit or you have been the victim of fraud. Heck, if someone has simply clicked, "Sure, I'm 18" on your website, you have at least done some filtering. There are ways of at least trying to determine the age of the people attached to the email address. People who deal in porn are responsible for taking those simple steps.
The problem is with dictionary spammers and those who buy the generic large lists. They are advertising porn to children and many are sending them samples. I have to believe this is illegal and if it isn't it damn well should be.
Finally I have to say that I hope this is in the YRO catagory because the rights of kids are being violated. If there is serious concern about the rights of pornographers to spam us, we have real problems and need to look inward.
Famous professors isn't automatically worthless. Being famous does not keep them from being poor teachers. That's very true. But when the professor is a good teacher and in the back of your mind you're thinking "wow, this guy won a Nobel Prize." you may pay slightly better attention.
On the other hand lots of these guys are so full of themselves that they don't care to teach undergrads and only view grad students as cheap labor.
I just graduated and my brother is currently a college student. Here's my thoughts:
First, laptops are cool. I own one. I wouldn't make it my machine for school though. The interface of a desktop is just that much nicer for something I'd be dealing with all the time.
The real reason for not getting a laptop is simpler though. A dorm is not a place I'd leave several thousand dollars sitting on my desk. That is excactly what you are doing when you leave your laptop there when you go to the bathroom. The other option, locking your door all the time or securing the laptop while out is plausible although unlikely. My freshmen year, our door didn't get quite shut before we went to sleep and in the middle of the night someone came in and swiped my roomate's CDs. Better CDs than a computer!
Space, the big consideration! I didn't do this, but my brother did and I think it's great. Shift some of your cash away from a beefy computer and get a nice flat panel monitor. Your desk will be too small. Save space on it with a flat monitor while still having a large enough monitor to manage projects that have data/essay pages/drawings on in differant windows and simultaneously viewable.
Taking notes: Laptops generally suck at note taking. If you're gonna type in everything that's said you might as well bring a tape recording to class. I never did that but it isn't a bad idea. Lot's of the most interesting things you'll be discussing will involve diagrams or graphs or other hard to type items. Notebooks and pen and paper are simply the best for this. Someone will say something about Palms here, but I firmly believe the Palm type interface is too slow for notetaking. With the added keyboard you might have success but I doubt it.
A few things could reverse my position on laptops. One would be if you had no interest in games. The second would be if you had the cash or insurance to replace a stolen laptop and consistently moved your files elsewhere. Remember that when your laptop is stolen, your 20 page paper is stolen along with it. Third would be prolific presence and use of ethernet jacks in the classroom. With these, professors can push you notes and examples while lecturing. This is likely a common model for a future classroom but was far from full implementation at my university (University of Colorado - Boulder School of Engineering and Applied Sciences). Fourth would be the advent of really awesome tablet Pcs.
We know that this will be used beyond it's original purpose of tracking terrorism. Once you get a database that does such 'cool' things, it's going to be used in increasingly creative ways. The advantage of the soft peddling is that when that happens it will be more clearly an offense. The question, "How does that involve Terrorism?" is easy. Stretching Total Information Awareness to help in other 'noble' causes, would be harder to question. That said, I find the whole ordeal somewhat comical. Sad, but comical.
Just give them the options. On the one hand, they can choose a proprietary option that does is expensive but has lots of support. They can also choose an Open option that while unlikely to break, is unsupported. Leave it there. It may be that they are perfectly comfortable spending too much money in order to ensure that they have a throat to choke if something goes wrong. Don't be deceptive about that. They might have that kind of cash and a matching lack of on staff technical talent.
The overriding belief that is in both his and your arguement is that the government is out to screw us and is evil. The people in power have been elected by us and poor choices they make are to be somewhat expected. Also, at a societal level we have a real bad habit of electing lawyers and business people. This is natural because lawyers should understand writing laws and business people are thought to be good at running large organizations, like a government. We're bad at hiring (electing) representitives with engineering or academic backgrounds who might be better suited to look at the failings of laws covering technical subjects. Collectively, we are at fault for this. We wouldn't have to do a much better job to make a differance. The one doctor in the Senate is heavily consulted on any change related to medicine and we'd expect an elected computer nerd to be consulted when computer regulations came up. We've failed to elect one. Maybe we should look at our primary canidates a bit better and see what we can do.
I'm responding to this article as much to all the others. I'm sick and tired of reading "must scale linearly." When you have many processors (or even two) there is a need for some processing to be devoted to deciding where to do what jobs. This makes absolute linear scaling impossible. The more processors, the more time must be spent managing them. That said, Linux does need to get closer to linear. Sun/Solaris has demonstrated that on some benchmarks having 128 processors results in a machine 127 times as fast. That's damn close to linear. In most other applications even Sun won't hit near those numbers, but they will outscale most of their competition particularly Linux and Windows systems.
Sun is trying to go from being a hardware vendor to a solutions provider. For solutions that need many of processors, they'll still put the Ultra SPARC to use. If you need a blade system that really works well, they'd like to provide that as well. You have a bunch of data on those Solaris boxes you need to save somewhere? Sun is increasingly competitive in the Network Storage market. You want a data center to work well? That's where they have Sun ONE. They really aren't trying to be the absolute fastest, at most of these things. Instead their vision (which you claim they need) is to be the most trustworthy high quality supplier of solutions for large corporations. Their dream is for you to run a datacenter using lots and lots of Sun hardware and software.
That said, the UltraSPARC is still probably a weakness and so are JVMs (although the are getting better). To provide the solutions people really need, they need to get better at offering cheap x86 Linux that are well tested, Sun solid and integrate into their other systems well. Sun's on the edge, but be prepared for a strong recovery when corporate spending rises and IT guys get what they need instead of having to buy the cheapest thing that could possibly work.
Actually it's not that hot. They chose AMD's Mobile processor for their Blade systems because the mobile gave of relatively little heat. I believe the number was around 30 watts. Granted, the blades will also be offered using Sun's own Ultra Sparcs which give off only 18 watts, but compared to other AMD and Intel offerings, the Atholon-Ms are pretty reasonable.
This really isn't a fair comparison. GM's engineers make releases every year at the same time. They tend to make only incremental changes to their previous designs. Because of this, they can only react to changing customer\marketting requests at these intervals. Also, there is little room for manevour after release so things pretty much have to be right before wide release. Patches are expensive, difficult and their need may have killed people. Therefore, serious testing has to have happened before a true release.
Wait a sec....
Incremental and regular releases, insulation from changing requirements, lots of testing... kinda sounds like what the XP guys want us to do with software. We just have to have much tighter iteration periods.
Seriously though. We are talking about differant engineering tasks. Some methodologies might transfer with only a little modification, but most won't.
Those are the right questions. Is he capable? and What are his ideas, where does he want to take us? He should be judged on those answers not attacked for a background which included a stint at MS.
First, just because the guy once worked for Microsoft does not mean that he is stilled owned by Microsoft and only sees their side of things. He may or may not be a fan of open source and he may or may not be a fan of his former employer. I have former employers I would probably be prejudice against if in a gov't position.
Second, if he was ever head of MS security, he is used to dealing with extremely difficult situations and has handled his share of disasters. Overall, that job would provide great experiance understanding the tradeoffs made between functionality, ease of use and security. Also, a good understanding of how some software companies resolve security issues and how to lead an effort to address security flaws in software. Probably an ideal background overall.
I fell for this. Totally and completely. It was early, I wasn't paying attention. I wrote a fairly long and thought out email to these people asking for more information and politely attacking their ideas. Now.. I pretty much feel like an ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the librarians I've encountered are great folks who have varying degrees of talent. Now, I know I'm responding to a troll but...
1) They like food, they just don't like cleaning up after slobs.
2) Most good public libraries have vibrant and noisy areas that are welcomed by the librarians. Most often these areas are for youths. Noise, being detrimental to serious reading, should be minimized near people trying to seriously read. Duh. This is what we call, "enhancing the user experiance."
3) "They hate sunlight." Wha? Huh? you're nuts.
4) Why do you think they distrust new stuff? True, they are cautious with their budget and adding a collection in a new technology is expensive, but I don't see their distrust. Heck, public libraries are where many Americans get their internet access.
5) I think they do buy resources the general user wants to use. They might not buy things you want to use though.
6) Some are!
Now only if i can convice her to like Soul Calibur...
It's interesting that the technique they describe as adaptive machine learning which is being developed at Microsoft Research, sounds pretty much like what Mozilla is trying to achieve. MS may get more sophisticated, which wouldn't be bad. I've managed to train my Mozilla to be pretty darn accurate with the mail it receives, but it could use some competition and improvement.
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, the general idea is that as you recieve mail, you flag it as spam or not spam. By examining the patterns that occur within legit emails and bogus emails, the machine gets better at guessing which emails are good and which are bad. For me, some of the filters must be easy for it. Every email I get with the word "porn" in it is spam. However, unlike many other people, I get lots of email with the word "debt" which is legitimate. So, it is built based on the profile of email I recieve. I would mention though, that most of the "get out of debt" emails I recieve are nicely filtered out based on some other criteria the program has figured out.
If you haven't tried a recent mozilla for mail, it's a pretty good program with a fun solution to spam. Give it a shot.
It's neccassary because the two largest gaming markets in the world are the US and Japan, followed by the EU. If you are selling a gaming platform you sure want to do well in the top two markets. If you kick butt in one but fail in another you don't make the kind of money that you, your shareholders and your developers are expecting. Start losing out in the realm of mindshare and you could find yourself kicked out of the console market.
What? Why would you be reccomending the teaching of Goto? Teach Sub routines or functions. They aren't much more complicated and get you closer to better programming. We've known that GOTO was a bad idea for over 25 years. Yikes!
I don't want to hear about Knuth supporting GOTO. It was a specialized case and still questionable.
A couple friends of mine who are games are admittedly a bit chunky have really benifitted from the advent of Dance Dance Revolution. It might be the only way some people will get regular exercise. I think in the future we'll see an increasing number of these sorts of games.
Spamming using dictionary methods is beyond inappropriate for porn vendors. If Abercrombie and Fitch can get sued for sending their questionable catalogs through the mail to under-age people, porn vendors are in no better position.
Some of you have said, "But there's no way to know the age of the kid." No, but you make a reasonable effort. If you or one of your trusted partners has thier credit card number, either the email address is legit or you have been the victim of fraud. Heck, if someone has simply clicked, "Sure, I'm 18" on your website, you have at least done some filtering. There are ways of at least trying to determine the age of the people attached to the email address. People who deal in porn are responsible for taking those simple steps.
The problem is with dictionary spammers and those who buy the generic large lists. They are advertising porn to children and many are sending them samples. I have to believe this is illegal and if it isn't it damn well should be.
Finally I have to say that I hope this is in the YRO catagory because the rights of kids are being violated. If there is serious concern about the rights of pornographers to spam us, we have real problems and need to look inward.
Idiot maybe, but GameTime isn't a bad name for a system.
On the other hand lots of these guys are so full of themselves that they don't care to teach undergrads and only view grad students as cheap labor.
First, laptops are cool. I own one. I wouldn't make it my machine for school though. The interface of a desktop is just that much nicer for something I'd be dealing with all the time.
The real reason for not getting a laptop is simpler though. A dorm is not a place I'd leave several thousand dollars sitting on my desk. That is excactly what you are doing when you leave your laptop there when you go to the bathroom. The other option, locking your door all the time or securing the laptop while out is plausible although unlikely. My freshmen year, our door didn't get quite shut before we went to sleep and in the middle of the night someone came in and swiped my roomate's CDs. Better CDs than a computer!
Space, the big consideration! I didn't do this, but my brother did and I think it's great. Shift some of your cash away from a beefy computer and get a nice flat panel monitor. Your desk will be too small. Save space on it with a flat monitor while still having a large enough monitor to manage projects that have data/essay pages/drawings on in differant windows and simultaneously viewable.
Taking notes: Laptops generally suck at note taking. If you're gonna type in everything that's said you might as well bring a tape recording to class. I never did that but it isn't a bad idea. Lot's of the most interesting things you'll be discussing will involve diagrams or graphs or other hard to type items. Notebooks and pen and paper are simply the best for this. Someone will say something about Palms here, but I firmly believe the Palm type interface is too slow for notetaking. With the added keyboard you might have success but I doubt it.
A few things could reverse my position on laptops. One would be if you had no interest in games. The second would be if you had the cash or insurance to replace a stolen laptop and consistently moved your files elsewhere. Remember that when your laptop is stolen, your 20 page paper is stolen along with it. Third would be prolific presence and use of ethernet jacks in the classroom. With these, professors can push you notes and examples while lecturing. This is likely a common model for a future classroom but was far from full implementation at my university (University of Colorado - Boulder School of Engineering and Applied Sciences). Fourth would be the advent of really awesome tablet Pcs.
We know that this will be used beyond it's original purpose of tracking terrorism. Once you get a database that does such 'cool' things, it's going to be used in increasingly creative ways. The advantage of the soft peddling is that when that happens it will be more clearly an offense. The question, "How does that involve Terrorism?" is easy. Stretching Total Information Awareness to help in other 'noble' causes, would be harder to question. That said, I find the whole ordeal somewhat comical. Sad, but comical.
Just give them the options. On the one hand, they can choose a proprietary option that does is expensive but has lots of support. They can also choose an Open option that while unlikely to break, is unsupported. Leave it there. It may be that they are perfectly comfortable spending too much money in order to ensure that they have a throat to choke if something goes wrong. Don't be deceptive about that. They might have that kind of cash and a matching lack of on staff technical talent.
The overriding belief that is in both his and your arguement is that the government is out to screw us and is evil. The people in power have been elected by us and poor choices they make are to be somewhat expected. Also, at a societal level we have a real bad habit of electing lawyers and business people. This is natural because lawyers should understand writing laws and business people are thought to be good at running large organizations, like a government. We're bad at hiring (electing) representitives with engineering or academic backgrounds who might be better suited to look at the failings of laws covering technical subjects. Collectively, we are at fault for this. We wouldn't have to do a much better job to make a differance. The one doctor in the Senate is heavily consulted on any change related to medicine and we'd expect an elected computer nerd to be consulted when computer regulations came up. We've failed to elect one. Maybe we should look at our primary canidates a bit better and see what we can do.
New Def: Users of the internet.
I'm responding to this article as much to all the others. I'm sick and tired of reading "must scale linearly." When you have many processors (or even two) there is a need for some processing to be devoted to deciding where to do what jobs. This makes absolute linear scaling impossible. The more processors, the more time must be spent managing them. That said, Linux does need to get closer to linear. Sun/Solaris has demonstrated that on some benchmarks having 128 processors results in a machine 127 times as fast. That's damn close to linear. In most other applications even Sun won't hit near those numbers, but they will outscale most of their competition particularly Linux and Windows systems.
Sun has a similar feature as well. I believe that seriour partioning is still the domain of the big iron servers of IBM and Sun.
That said, the UltraSPARC is still probably a weakness and so are JVMs (although the are getting better). To provide the solutions people really need, they need to get better at offering cheap x86 Linux that are well tested, Sun solid and integrate into their other systems well. Sun's on the edge, but be prepared for a strong recovery when corporate spending rises and IT guys get what they need instead of having to buy the cheapest thing that could possibly work.
The market was down 2.7% that day. Both stocks outperformed the market.
Actually it's not that hot. They chose AMD's Mobile processor for their Blade systems because the mobile gave of relatively little heat. I believe the number was around 30 watts. Granted, the blades will also be offered using Sun's own Ultra Sparcs which give off only 18 watts, but compared to other AMD and Intel offerings, the Atholon-Ms are pretty reasonable.
There's a differance between a "team-player" in corporate speak and a team-player who is someone who actually helps out a team.
Wait a sec....
Incremental and regular releases, insulation from changing requirements, lots of testing... kinda sounds like what the XP guys want us to do with software. We just have to have much tighter iteration periods.
Seriously though. We are talking about differant engineering tasks. Some methodologies might transfer with only a little modification, but most won't.
Exactly. If a member of your "team" isn't a team player, it becomes very difficult to justify paying his or her salary. Well said
.
Those are the right questions. Is he capable? and What are his ideas, where does he want to take us? He should be judged on those answers not attacked for a background which included a stint at MS.
Second, if he was ever head of MS security, he is used to dealing with extremely difficult situations and has handled his share of disasters. Overall, that job would provide great experiance understanding the tradeoffs made between functionality, ease of use and security. Also, a good understanding of how some software companies resolve security issues and how to lead an effort to address security flaws in software. Probably an ideal background overall.
I fell for this. Totally and completely. It was early, I wasn't paying attention. I wrote a fairly long and thought out email to these people asking for more information and politely attacking their ideas. Now.. I pretty much feel like an ass.