Something I noticed over here in the west: respect for techies has been dropping. Now I don't mean respect in the workplace, but respect from society at large... Engineering used to be a very respectable profession, but these days it's seen as something strictly for oddball nerds. That overused line from the movies has come back to haunt those that enroll into a technical university: "Son, you could have been a doctor or a lawyer".
What's it like in India? Apart from making a decent wage, do people look up to engineers, or are they dismissed as nerds?
A good list... I'd like to add:
Good ones:
5. Kick-off or alignment meetings. Basically just information exchange "So what is it we're going to do in this project?", and getting to know all key people involved. Very helpful, and doesn't need to be more than a quick rundown of the project and people introducing themselves in a few sentences. Go have a few beers afterwards with the group.
Bad ones:
3. Any meeting without an agenda. This applies to any type of meeting: whether you are discussing progress, issues, or just brainstorming, you still need an agenda.
The article goes on about how you're supposed to ferret out the agenda of a meeting, and how meetings often don't have one. Personally I have found the following method to be very effective: when the meeting starts, ask "What is the agenda? We don't have one? Lets make one first!". Jot down the agenda on a flipover.
I'm not a 'process' guy, really, but this particular method has won me over. It's a much more positive approach than determining which meetings you should get out of; instead, it will help you bring structure to otherwise hopeless and pointless meetings. The simple act of writing down the agenda for all to see, can turn a meeting destined for suckiness into a productive session.
D you not realize how idiotic your reply is? You are actually begging them to regulate it, if you think out-loud that it should be a haven for criminal content. You do accept that child abuse is criminal, don't you?
Uh... So they should keep criminal content off the 'net, because else they will have an excuse to regulate it. But how do you propose to keep criminal content off, except by... regulation?
And please don't say 'Oh but I only want to keep off the criminal stuff'. As soon as you allow others to decide what you can and cannot publish, it will almost not certainly end where you want it to. They might decide to only keep off kiddie porn, but then Christians will lobby for all porn to be removed. Pro-lifers will demand all references to abortion be outlawed. The current administration might decide to ban opposing viewpoints because they 'cloud the issue' or 'are unconstructive'. Sure, it might not come to all that... but it will not be up to you, it will be up to the censors, all the way.
Whether it's the UN, the US government, certain companies, or even the Slashdot membership controlling the Internet, there is always the possibility of abuse. That's why we need a constitution of sorts. Just as with the constitutions of nations, if there is a clear set of rules about what those in power can do and especially what they cannot do, then I for one would have a lot less issues with handing over control to a government or even a company.
The question then becomes: who will write this constitution? There's no easy answer, but at least the rules and limitations will be out in the open and up for criticism up front. Much better than just putting someone in charge, who might then feel within his rights to, say, point all unresolved DNS lookups at their own registrar service page.
Using IM is more similar to speaking than to writing. Writing involves thinking, analysing, perhaps brainstorming, putting words to paper, and it often involves re-thinking or re-writing those words. Speaking (and IM) require a rather fast response, leaving you little time to ponder your words. Indeed, how often in a normal conversation have you paused to think, or carefully picked your words? Not often probably... such pauses aren't called 'uncomfortable silences' for nothing. Also... the next time you're speaking with someone, try and pay attention to grammar and pronunciation: you will notice that everyday spoken language is very rarely gramatically correct.
Proper writing and IM are so dissimilar in nature that I doubt that children will pick up good or bad habits by using the 'broken' language of IM. Let your kids use IM all they want; just make sure they do some 'proper' reading and writing as well sometimes.
The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.
I disagree. The study of another language will draw attention to the difference between that language and your own, and it may help you appreciate the structure of your own language. But to understand that structure, you have to study the language itself. It seems like people who have studied other languages generally do better with their own, but I think that is because they have an interest in languages or an aptitude for learning them, not because of their study of foreign languages.
English isn't that weird. It has its irregularities, especially in pronunciation, but it has a structure that can be learned. I had 6 years of English in high school, including grammar. If English class in English-speaking countries is anything like Dutch class in the Netherlands, then I can understand why my English co-workers ask me to correct their documents (written in English). These classes are more about literature than grammar.
However, it could be suggested that they have made corporations and governments aware of many intrinsic insecurities in certain popular operating systems which may have prevented some larger potential catastrophe.
Sure sure, and I need punks who sneak into my house and raid the fridge, to remind me to lock the doors against thieves who will take stuff of more value. Your initial reaction was the right one.
Re:What does 'different mathmetics' mean?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
Why do countries that have such dissimilar languages (the US and China or Russia for example) all use the same roman numeral numbers?
They are 'arabic' numberals, not Roman ones, though for some reason arabs are one of the few people to use different symbols for numbers than the ones we use.
I don't know for sure, but my guess is that the arabic system of numbering was so much easier to use than any other system around (because of the use of the number zero), that it rather quickly replaced all other numbering systems.
but why don't they just give you two extra copies of album instead of CD-Rs?
It's a symbolic gesture. Call it a gimmick if you want:-) They specifically want to make a statement 'not all copying is evil', and make the news with it. Giving away 2 extra prerecorded discs would not make as strong a statement, nor would simply issuing a press statement stating that they endorse copying of their music.
This is a nice way of saying "Giving away copies of our work can be good for us, too".
You know, we're moving towards a world in which computer users and computers themselves are licensed, much as drivers and their cars are licensed. Is that a good or bad thing? It has its drawbacks, but on the whole I would say good.
Bad, bad, bad! Your car may not directly help you exercise your civic rights, but your computer can be used for that. Reading and publishing information that the government does not want people to read, for example. If a license scheme is introduced for computer use (or rather Internet use, I imagine), your government will have an effective way to censor you without appearing to be doing so. They can then state "Sure we took down his site, but we are not censoring him, we just revoked his Internet license since he's got a few too many worms on his system".
We already have a similar thing going in the Netherlands. The mayor of a city has the power to forbid any planned public protest, if he fears a "disturbance of the peace" (ie. a riot). This law has been used to prevent pretty much every march or protest by extreme right-wing protesters. They were banned because of their ideas or beliefs, but the stated reason was that a "disturbance of the peace" was expected.
Laws that will allow a government to limit your basic rights are bad, but laws that allow them to do so in the name of some other pretext are worse.
I don't know how well it would work, but if you put a promiscuous woman astronaut on that mission, the bidding war for the show would be insane.
What, like Big Brother in space? Does the audience get to vote an astronaut off every week?
But seriously, I for one would pay to watch a live feed from a Mars mission... good-looking women astronauts would be a nice bonus, but no more than that.
This of course causes some problems using the Word spell checker (which in norwegian is one word;-P) on norwegian texts.
It does? The Dutch version of Word has no problems with compound words like 'arbeidsvoorwaardenbeleidsmedewerker' (Policy maker for working conditions & benefits). Of course, it gets some of the rules for making compound words wrong, but it is designed to deal with them.
Scott Richter is not your classic computer geek. He never got near a computer until a few years ago, and it took him some time to grasp the machine's true potential.
What I find amazing, or maybe not so amazing after all, is that most of these spammers aren't very computer-savvy, but they all sem to have a history of fraud-related felony convictions
One major requirement for this sort of thing, or any 'appliance'-like PC, should be that it is (nearly) instantly ready for use when you switch it on. That means you shouldn't have to wait for it to boot, nor have to select fuctions (playing dvd's, playing a file from disk) using a mouse/keyboard in an awkward position. If it's to be a true appliance, it should
- boot instantly
- be fully controllable using a remote control
Are there any good solutions that will let you boot a PC instantly? (from flash, perhaps).
What's the incentive for Microsoft to stop their abuse?
The fines are only part of the (purported) action taken against Microsoft. They will also be forced to stop bundling Media Player with Windows, and more importantly, they will be forced to disclose information on Windows (possibly, hopefully also Office) internals and formats, allowing other companies to compete more effectively with Microsoft when developing software to run on Windows.
My fear is that MS will fight this decision tooth and nail, and that in the end the EU will take the easy way out, settling for just the cash. The EU will have their 'win'; MS can proceed with business as usual after ponying up some chump change.
I'd rather see MS keep their money but made tot comply with the other demands.
"He explained the concept behind FOSS. The word "free'' did not mean giving the software gratis.
Rather, it denoted the freedom to control the computer because the seller of FOSS also provided the source code or the manner in which a particular software was constructed. "
The problem is that we are fearful and refuse to take the idea seriously enough to put real effort into it. This is largely due to people (like the idiot BBC commentator this morning) who see Mars as a sideshow or even an immoral waste of resources.
The real problem, of course, is money. Politicians aren't keen on spending billions on science projects that are perceived to be risky, and that will only come to results after their own term in office has ended. The politicians in my own country especially concern themselves mostly with practical matters (which are important enough, sure), but hardly ever with visionary stuff such as a mission to Mars... there is always some practical problem to fix first: health care, unemployment, lack of yellow-striped seabass in the North Sea, whatever.
Gah, we should go already... We, as a tiny country, didn't balk at wasting $10 billion on two utterly useless railroads. I really, really wish that we would give the same $10 billion to a mission that may well be the hardest thing we as a species have ever done. A mission that, one century from now, may be seen as the most significant endeavour of our age. People living in space and on Mars will remember this and say "that is when it all began". And we can be a part of all that! We may yet live to see it happen!
Yeah, I'm a dreamer. But it's dreams like this that make us a great species, despite our many problems.
Oh come on you guys, I'm sure Portland must be ground zero for more than a few nuclear missiles in the USS... er, nevermind that either...
What would be worse: knowing that somewhere in Siberia a missile is pointed at your city, or learning that the Soviets didn't think your city mattered enough to waste a missile on?
30% tax on $20/hr? even here in "socialist" canada it's more like 16%. i think you have a "fact problem"
Is 30% so unbelievable? I wish... Dutch income tax starts at 32%, and it's progressive, so anything over 20.000 Euro is taxed at 42% The highest rate is 52%... at some point, our state will let you keep less than half of what you earn.. Oh, we have VAT too: 19.5%
Of course we get many goodies for all that money, like healthcare.... wait a minute. Then what is that 150 Euro health care insurance bill I pay every month?! We get roads... but I pay 50 Euro a month road tax, 70 cents tax on every liter of petrol, and 45% on a new vehicle!. I shit you not, look here if you don't believe me. Oh... The 19.5% VAT comes on top of that. More than half of what I paid for my new car went to taxes.
i assume you think that your taxes just evaporate or something.
How about writing letters, sending nice postcards, and an occasional phone call..
Well, I don't see gaming as a substitute for these, but... Playing an online game is a nice activity that you can do together with your sweetheart, like going on a walk together and talking all the while.
Some online games are good enough to get to know new people. I've made a few good friends through Ultima Online, and there are couples that ended up getting married after meeting in-game and playing together for a while. So I don't see why it wouldn't work for couples who are already together, but (temporarily) living apart.
If I could pick the lock or steal a key to the paper ballot box, I could tamper with the votes too.
The difference is this: it is rather hard to tamper with paper ballots and cover your tracks well. You need to get your hands on the physical ballots, which are under other watchful eyes most of the time. Even if you manage to rig the tally, a recount or inspection is likely to reveal the tampering.
In contrast, tampering with these electronic voting machines might be done remotely without anyone seeing (on a wireless LAN, for crying out loud...). Changing the software or the voting results is much more likely to go unnoticed. There are few, if any, double checks or other mechanisms to ensure data integrity in place, in these machines.
In addition, machine voting opens up the possibility of mass fraud. If one single hacker gets into the central server, he can change the outcome of the election. If you would want to do the same in a paper-based election, you'd have to have hundreds of henchmen infiltrating the poll organisation, or bribe hundreds of people, all without anyone else finding out about it.
Toy Story and Finding Nemo are among the very few Disney offerings that aren't blatant rip-offs of off-copyright "classics".
Actually, there's a French writer claiming that 'Finding Nemo' is a rip-off of his work. I have no idea how true his claim is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that Disney blatantly stole this one too, like they did with the Lion King.
Slashdot Mirror
Something I noticed over here in the west: respect for techies has been dropping. Now I don't mean respect in the workplace, but respect from society at large... Engineering used to be a very respectable profession, but these days it's seen as something strictly for oddball nerds. That overused line from the movies has come back to haunt those that enroll into a technical university: "Son, you could have been a doctor or a lawyer".
What's it like in India? Apart from making a decent wage, do people look up to engineers, or are they dismissed as nerds?
A good list... I'd like to add:
Good ones:
5. Kick-off or alignment meetings. Basically just information exchange "So what is it we're going to do in this project?", and getting to know all key people involved. Very helpful, and doesn't need to be more than a quick rundown of the project and people introducing themselves in a few sentences. Go have a few beers afterwards with the group.
Bad ones:
3. Any meeting without an agenda. This applies to any type of meeting: whether you are discussing progress, issues, or just brainstorming, you still need an agenda.
The article goes on about how you're supposed to ferret out the agenda of a meeting, and how meetings often don't have one. Personally I have found the following method to be very effective: when the meeting starts, ask "What is the agenda? We don't have one? Lets make one first!". Jot down the agenda on a flipover.
I'm not a 'process' guy, really, but this particular method has won me over. It's a much more positive approach than determining which meetings you should get out of; instead, it will help you bring structure to otherwise hopeless and pointless meetings. The simple act of writing down the agenda for all to see, can turn a meeting destined for suckiness into a productive session.
And please don't say 'Oh but I only want to keep off the criminal stuff'. As soon as you allow others to decide what you can and cannot publish, it will almost not certainly end where you want it to. They might decide to only keep off kiddie porn, but then Christians will lobby for all porn to be removed. Pro-lifers will demand all references to abortion be outlawed. The current administration might decide to ban opposing viewpoints because they 'cloud the issue' or 'are unconstructive'. Sure, it might not come to all that... but it will not be up to you, it will be up to the censors, all the way.
Whether it's the UN, the US government, certain companies, or even the Slashdot membership controlling the Internet, there is always the possibility of abuse. That's why we need a constitution of sorts. Just as with the constitutions of nations, if there is a clear set of rules about what those in power can do and especially what they cannot do, then I for one would have a lot less issues with handing over control to a government or even a company.
The question then becomes: who will write this constitution? There's no easy answer, but at least the rules and limitations will be out in the open and up for criticism up front. Much better than just putting someone in charge, who might then feel within his rights to, say, point all unresolved DNS lookups at their own registrar service page.
Using IM is more similar to speaking than to writing. Writing involves thinking, analysing, perhaps brainstorming, putting words to paper, and it often involves re-thinking or re-writing those words. Speaking (and IM) require a rather fast response, leaving you little time to ponder your words. Indeed, how often in a normal conversation have you paused to think, or carefully picked your words? Not often probably... such pauses aren't called 'uncomfortable silences' for nothing. Also... the next time you're speaking with someone, try and pay attention to grammar and pronunciation: you will notice that everyday spoken language is very rarely gramatically correct.
Proper writing and IM are so dissimilar in nature that I doubt that children will pick up good or bad habits by using the 'broken' language of IM. Let your kids use IM all they want; just make sure they do some 'proper' reading and writing as well sometimes.
English isn't that weird. It has its irregularities, especially in pronunciation, but it has a structure that can be learned. I had 6 years of English in high school, including grammar. If English class in English-speaking countries is anything like Dutch class in the Netherlands, then I can understand why my English co-workers ask me to correct their documents (written in English). These classes are more about literature than grammar.
I don't know for sure, but my guess is that the arabic system of numbering was so much easier to use than any other system around (because of the use of the number zero), that it rather quickly replaced all other numbering systems.
This is a nice way of saying "Giving away copies of our work can be good for us, too".
We already have a similar thing going in the Netherlands. The mayor of a city has the power to forbid any planned public protest, if he fears a "disturbance of the peace" (ie. a riot). This law has been used to prevent pretty much every march or protest by extreme right-wing protesters. They were banned because of their ideas or beliefs, but the stated reason was that a "disturbance of the peace" was expected.
Laws that will allow a government to limit your basic rights are bad, but laws that allow them to do so in the name of some other pretext are worse.
But seriously, I for one would pay to watch a live feed from a Mars mission... good-looking women astronauts would be a nice bonus, but no more than that.
One major requirement for this sort of thing, or any 'appliance'-like PC, should be that it is (nearly) instantly ready for use when you switch it on. That means you shouldn't have to wait for it to boot, nor have to select fuctions (playing dvd's, playing a file from disk) using a mouse/keyboard in an awkward position. If it's to be a true appliance, it should
- boot instantly
- be fully controllable using a remote control
Are there any good solutions that will let you boot a PC instantly? (from flash, perhaps).
My fear is that MS will fight this decision tooth and nail, and that in the end the EU will take the easy way out, settling for just the cash. The EU will have their 'win'; MS can proceed with business as usual after ponying up some chump change.
I'd rather see MS keep their money but made tot comply with the other demands.
From the article:
"He explained the concept behind FOSS. The word "free'' did not mean giving the software gratis.
Rather, it denoted the freedom to control the computer because the seller of FOSS also provided the source code or the manner in which a particular software was constructed. "
Gah, we should go already... We, as a tiny country, didn't balk at wasting $10 billion on two utterly useless railroads. I really, really wish that we would give the same $10 billion to a mission that may well be the hardest thing we as a species have ever done. A mission that, one century from now, may be seen as the most significant endeavour of our age. People living in space and on Mars will remember this and say "that is when it all began". And we can be a part of all that! We may yet live to see it happen!
Yeah, I'm a dreamer. But it's dreams like this that make us a great species, despite our many problems.
Of course we get many goodies for all that money, like healthcare.... wait a minute. Then what is that 150 Euro health care insurance bill I pay every month?! We get roads... but I pay 50 Euro a month road tax, 70 cents tax on every liter of petrol, and 45% on a new vehicle!. I shit you not, look here if you don't believe me. Oh... The 19.5% VAT comes on top of that. More than half of what I paid for my new car went to taxes. Well, I am starting to believe it...
Some online games are good enough to get to know new people. I've made a few good friends through Ultima Online, and there are couples that ended up getting married after meeting in-game and playing together for a while. So I don't see why it wouldn't work for couples who are already together, but (temporarily) living apart.
In contrast, tampering with these electronic voting machines might be done remotely without anyone seeing (on a wireless LAN, for crying out loud...). Changing the software or the voting results is much more likely to go unnoticed. There are few, if any, double checks or other mechanisms to ensure data integrity in place, in these machines.
In addition, machine voting opens up the possibility of mass fraud. If one single hacker gets into the central server, he can change the outcome of the election. If you would want to do the same in a paper-based election, you'd have to have hundreds of henchmen infiltrating the poll organisation, or bribe hundreds of people, all without anyone else finding out about it.