Regarding your example, England and the US South wanted free trade with each other, with the backwards South supplying raw cotton material to industrialized England for processing, while the US North wanted "laws and regulations, imposed sanctions, taxes and duties" to protect its growing industrial base. The result of this was a civil war in which the industrialized north beat the rural south (a south which couldn't trust a quarter of its population). Afterward, the sanctions and duties only increased. What was the result of this? Today the GDP of the US is five times that of the UK.
I've played lots of games such as WoW, but Age of Empires is probably the one I dedicated most time to.
in AoE, there were 12 choices, but the Assyrians and the Yamato had an initial speed advantage, to the point where they became the only teams played, particularly the Assyrians. A 3v3 match usually had both sides with 2 Assyrians and 1 Yamato. The Assyrians were so favored, sometimes all 3 would be Assyrians. For Deathmatch, the Choson and Hittites were the favored choices. Usual 3v3 teams would be 2 Choson and 1 Hittite.
In MMOG's you have larger parties, so more of a mix is OK. I am usually a mage, but mages want to be with a tank (like a warrior) at lower levels...and even higher levels. But having a priest to heal people is helpful to.
I think its natural in these games to have two main classes, a third class which is somewhat popular, and then a bunch of more minor classes for people who like to try different things. I think there's probably some mental thing where people can't handle more than three types of warriors. Look at the armed forces - army, navy, and due to technology, air force. Before the airplane, there were two divisions of service. Then within these were sub-divisions - infantry, cavalry, artillery. This just seems to be the way these things go.
Java is used for some of the most heavyweight web applications. My first experience with this was when I set up a Broadvision Java application server in 1997 which acted as an e-commerce portal, and I've been working with Java application servers since then, some on massively complex and trafficked sites. So we know Java application servers can handle the biggest and most complex of web projects, or at least, aside from C# (also mentioned) not much else comes close to being able to. So what about the small scale? Well, for someone like me who has a $10-20 a month web hosting account with one of the major vendors for such things like Bluehost, Dreamhost etc., they do not support any Java application servers, not even free and well-tested ones like Tomcat. If I could throw a Tomcat application server up on my Dreamhost account I'd do it in a second. Can you use Ruby on Rails for Dreamhost or Bluehost? Yes. Python via Django on Dreamhost? Yes. Python/Django on Bluehost? It's a convoluted process I've heard, but yes. Due to this, my sites right now are mostly PHP-based, and sometimes PERL-based. I personally would have more fun doing stuff in Java than PHP, but they don't offer Java Tomcat so I wind up doing stuff in PERL and PHP. I use them instead of Java because of that limitation, not because one is more fun than another.
Before getting a New York Times column Krugman was not overtly political, and used to praise some of the ideas Milton Friedman came up with, while also praising Keynes's ideas. Another thing is prior to the NY Times column, very importantly, Krugman was a mainstream, well respected economist. Not that I think that means much, but he was not some hack with no economic background like so many people spouting op-eds in the Wall Street Journal or CNBC.
Once he got the Times column, he began analyzing Bush's budgets and saying the numbers did not add up because they were wildly over-optimistic. This brought him into the political arena more.
Also - what mainstream economist does NOT argue for intervention in the economy? Milton Friedman who is supposed to be the free market guru supported a government/Fed run expansionary money policy. This is a capitalist economy, do the capitalists who run it and own it pay attention to any economists who don't advocate government control over at least money? The answer is no. In fact, the capitalists who run this capitalist economy were who advocated the bailout of the banks and all of this.
What? Krugman wrote "The Return of Depression Economics" in 2000. He has been saying something is fundamentally wrong with the world economy since then, while the median response by economists is that everything is fine, the free market has to take its course etc. Krugman has been throwing closer to the bullseye than most other mainstream economists.
"20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent." is an over-simplification that means nothing. In 1980 most IT guys were working on mainframes, did they see this sweetness from 1980 to 2000? Not really, they saw a decline in that period. The chart also shows a dip in 1991, 1992 and 1993 where IT growth was less than 5 percent - I remember that period very well, and it was not the go-go period that one would think.
Also, these things also follow R&D results - the 1961 peak which fell to 1969 was due to all the technology that enabled IBM to push out machines businesses could use, the 1982-1983 growth of 28-30% each year was due to the PC, and the 1994 to 2000 growth was pushed by the Internet being rolled out.
I deal with a lot of distributors and resellers and they are always trying to FAX me things, today in 2009. I don't want to spend a dime on a separate fax line, but I don't want to admit to these companies that I don't have a fax line either, so I list my land line as the fax line and my cell phone as the company number. Their websites are backwards, one of them is down almost every weekend, they are totally backwards. With all the open source stuff out there, netbooks going for $300-400, I see a lot of cheap stuff that can be done IT-wise to lower the costs of these and a lot of other businesses.
It is true that there was a go-go era when the Internet was rolled out (money-wise, from 1994 on), and when PCs were rolled out (moneywise, 1981-1983), and when IBM 360s were rolled out (moneywise 1964-1969). It is also true that the ups and downs of the larger economy play into this. Unemployment in the US is over 9% right now, Citigroup is being bailed out by the government and its stock is less than $4 and the like - the larger economy is not growing much so why would IT be growing at 17% a year? The real question to me is now how fast IT is going to grow but how fast it will grow compared to the rest of the economy. I can't see much that is going to grow faster than the rest of the economy, other than a handful of things like biotechnology. And Celera made leaps and bounds in biotechnology due to information technology, he had the computers figure out the genes instead of counting each gene nucleotide by nucleotide, codon by codon. Computer Science is still one of the best paying majors out of college, which may be why I am one of the only white faces in class - most of the people in CS classes throughout my life have usually been people who are from or whose parents are from Asia. So even in the US, Shanghai dominates.
First of all, this "ask the questions they'll like the best" thing to me is for the birds. I don't ask questions that will make them have second thoughts about me, but I ask questions to know if I'll be happy there. Usually I am interviewed by a number of people, maybe a manager I will ask the kind of things he might want to have asked, but from everyone else I am seeking information. Secondly, some questions how many hours do you work overtime, do you get the support you need and so on are easy to fudge so I ask questions which are not fudgeable.
My main question is what is the structure of my team. How many people are doing the same job I do in my team. Is there a lead? Is there a manager? Who is the manager managing, just our group or others as well? I have enough experience that I don't want to be in a team which has a lead in it. When I have a manager who is not involved in day to day IT work that is ideal as he wants me to succeed. Leads always want to make sure you are not doing better than them as that is a threat to their position and job. On the other hand, doing a good job is something a manager wants you to do. If they say there is no lead I ask if anyone aside from my manager inside the team will be responsible for assigning me work and that sort of thing - digging out if there is some covert lead. I make sure this is straight with my manager.
I once wrote a patch for a program on Sourceforge that was only a few lines but had taken weeks to figure out, and it definitely improved the package. I wouldn't call the maintainer reclusive, he was more like a cuckoo clock who would show up once a year, work like crazy on the program, then disappear again. After I wrote the patch he disappeared. A few months later, I was busy myself and forgot about it. Two and a half years later I started getting e-mails from his projects mailing list again where he was saying he was putting out the new version. He had already updated a bunch of files in the CVS, so I redid my patch against the latest CVS and made noise about my patch again. Well, he included most of it in his next release. Until then, it was sitting in the patches part of Sourceforge for anyone who would be very serious about the program to see.
People get busy in their real lives, and open source projects are usually a low priority next to putting food on the table, trying to get laid etc. Another problem is the paucity of good developers involved in open source projects relative to the number of people using them. There is a definite learning curve in these languages. I have been working with C language for 20 years now (initially making small programs to make C programs compile on my particular OS) and on some level I still don't really understand pointers and memory - in fact I know I don't because I missed those questions on a recent examination.
Some people have been saying to fork it, but then you have to take on the burden of all of that. I would say definitely think before doing a fork, are there enough developer man-hours (person-hours) out there, including myself, over the next several years that will work on this project that will make a fork necessary? You don't want to fork a dead-end project into something that's just going to become another dead-end project. On the other hand, if there's a multi-year commitment from yourself (and maybe others) and the maintainer has disappeared completely for weeks and months on end, then maybe a fork is in order.
The local loop in the United States was dominated by Bell for decades. They used to shut down the lines of people who used non-Western Electric phones (which were owned by Bell, not the person whose home they were in), sued MCI for patching calls from one Bell location to another and the like. In the end, MCI won in the early 1980s.
But for how long? The Bells were broken up, but now Verizon controls most of the Northeast, Qwest controls the West, and AT&T controls the rest of the country. The seven baby Bells are now three - with one of them being AT&T, who was not supposed to be in the local loop business.
Or how about Standard Oil. In 1911 it was supposed to be split up, the biggest of the monopoly ending bust of the trusts. In 1999, the two biggest of those companies remerged and became ExxonMobil, making it the #1 company on the Fortune 500, with over $400 billion in revenue a year. The government tried to break it up a century ago, but the tendency to monopoly still overtakes things.
You also say - "Firstly there are monopolies which have been artificially supported by an industry structure imposed by government (e.g. BT in the UK), in other words they are not a failure of the free market, they are a failure caused by government subverting the free market." It would take a while to begin to disentangle this sentence. Firstly, the phrase "free market" is not the kind of thing someone seriously engaged in social science would (or should rather) use. It is like saying a free country, or the political party in the US that supports freedom or the like. It is just entering these propaganda phrases into the discussion, which serves no purpose. I am not sure what a free market is - in the USSR, the way a market appeared to a customer was they walked in with rubles and walked out with a hat or shirt or whatever. In the US, people walk into a store and buy shirts and hats with dollars. Why is one transaction free and the other not? It really makes no sense. Those are marketplace transactions. People say "free market" although the concept has nothing to do with either freedom or markets.
As a former Debian user, current Ubuntu (and Gnewsense) user, I say this is completely ridiculous.
I was one of those unfortunate users of Debian 3.0 stable (woody). It was released in July 2002. The next release was (two week shy of) three years after that. Way, way too long. You think a *two year* cycle is too short? Your philosophy leads down the Duke Nukem Forever, Gnu Hurd path. Yes, there is plenty of crap that gets rushed out too fast due to deadlines that make no sense, but on the other end of that is development that goes nowhere and never releases anything. You have to find a happy medium.
Python 2.2 was released in December of 2001. Woody was released in July 2002 and used Python 2.2. Python had released Python 2.3 in July 2003, Python 2.4 in November of 2004, and Python 2.4.1 in March of 2005 - and Debian stable was still Woody, running Python 2.2. From March to June of 2005, you were, aside from security updates, running the 2001 version of Python on your current Debian stable box. It is ridiculous. I was trying to run Python scripts written in 2004 and 2005 and couldn't because they were all based on Python 2.3+, if not 2.4.
One of the reasons Ubuntu got off the ground is because people were tired of stuff like this. I like Debian's commitment to free software, but if you don't deliver a product people will look elsewhere. I can't imagine switching back, I am happier with Gnewsense - Ubuntu with all binary blobs and junk ripped out.
Capitalism has a tendency towards monopoly. This was pointed out by Marx in the 19th century, and expanded upon by Lenin 95 years ago. The Monthly Review crowd and others have written about this tendency in the modern day - nowadays finance capital is a big thing, but according to Marxist theory is very volatile. You can look at the markets nowadays, with Citigroup staying solvent only due to government subsidies to decide on the truth of this.
Of course people can say Marxist theory is insane, but the predominant economic theory is that everything is fine, markets correct themselves and all of that nonsense. So what is really more off-the-wall, the Marxists or the Panglossian head-in-the-sand economists of today who say everything is fine? This is from someone who has seen the US economy stagnating since 2000 (other than some slight growth in the mid-decade with the real estate bubble, which is currently popping).
The paper says "hash distribution - Bittorrent, SHA hashing at piece (256 KB) level; Gnutella, SHA hashing applied to entire file". Actually, you can tell how little they dealt with Gnutella since they call Bearshare "Bareshare" repeatedly.
The Gnutella community began discussing the use of Tiger Tree Hashes over eight years ago, and I can't think of a major Gnutella "servant" that does not have tiger tree hashing - Limewire has it, Bearshare has it, Shareaza has it, Gnucleus has it, and GTK-Gnutella has some support for it.
While this paper says it was revised in April 2008, it seems to have been completed in September 2007. In their references, only one paper referenced is from 2007, while they have several references to papers, articles and events in 2006. Thus, it is likely a lot of this work was done in 2006 or before (three years ago), with a little brushing up before it was submitted, accepted and published in a journal.
I am not much interested in the legal aspects of someone sharing a Jonas Brothers or Britney Spears mp3, although of course I think it is absurd that p2p developers are being sued by the RIAA/MPAA mafiaa, because among other things, if they're law-breakers, then people who develop ftp servers, or web servers or IRC clients with DCC file sending could be charged as criminals as well. I have spent a lot of time looking at RIAA/MPAA organizations, and am fully convinced they are not after just pirates, but anyone that threatens their profits, including independent labels and artists who might circumvent their monopoly on the commissar-like monopoly of the marketplace of ideas and art. The excellent documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated" shows how the MPAA not only imposes de facto censorship, but how it uses its power to shut out players outside of the major studios. We don't even know what a network of free citizens using peer to peer to share files, videos, music, web pages and the like would be like, since developers are all legally threatened and stopped before the technology can even get off the ground.
Putting that aside, I do not think these poisoning attempts are all bad because they allow for a more robust p2p (and Gnutella) protocol. People are poisoning file chunks? Gnutella puts in full file SHA hashing, and later partial chunk tiger tree hashing. People are using misleading file names so that people will download junk instead of what they want? Gnutella servants implement file ratings, allow junk files and junk serving hosts to be marked as sources of junk and so forth. Everything the p2p well poisoners have come up with has resulted in a counter-foil which strengthens Gnutella and p2p. The structure is already in these programs to foil all of this, if it is not up to the 99% or so level its just because the poisoning has not been at a level to up it to that much robustness, the structure and classes are already there in the programs, and the methodology is already within the protocol, so if the mafiaa goes all out on this path, it can be countered. But of course, it is necessary to the RIAA/MPAA mafiaa on the legal/political front as well, that they can go after p2p developers is ridiculous - if we're liable, who is next? It's one step from legal mandates for DRM in all devices so some corporation is the one who controls your machine, not you, and all of that garbage.
The original message says the bible has major discrepancies and is fallible. You say you think for the work of copying done, the errors that creep in are not a big deal and that the PARENT is making too much of the bible's fallibility and errors.
The problem is, polls in the USA show a very large percentage of people believe every word in the bible is literally true. So if there are different versions of the bible, this causes problems. The original bible texts probably said "It is easier to get a rope through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to attain salvation". In the modern bible, the word rope has been changed to camel - which makes absolutely no sense, yet is still widely quoted. Small religious phrases have contributed to major rifts and even wars between Christians ("and the son..."). YES, to any sensible person these minor discrepancies mean little, but when you act like a Christian and throw all logic and reason out the door and start dealing with faith, divine authority and divine revelation, then these little phrases mean a lot. The parent is dealing with Christians on there own terms, and you seem not to understand this and are blaming the quite reasonable parent poster for the insanity of Christians.
The whole genius of Google is that it is NOT "rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world". Search engines prior to Google would classify a searched for word or phrase by how many times it was mentioned in a page, if the word/phrase was in the page's title, or in the beginning of the page, perhaps in a header, and so forth. Google's algorithm was to do those rankings, but then to give enormous weight to what pages of that type linked to another page. So if a large majority of baseball web sites linked to the MLB's web site, MLB's website would be on top for a Google search for baseball (as indeed it is). This is not a dispassionate equation, but one utilizing human cognitive skills and social connections via the web to give you what you want. Google's surge over search engines like Opentext, Webcrawler, Excite and Altavista was precisely that it began concentrating on social connections on the web.
And insofar as non-search services - Google has Orkut, on Google Mail one could only get an account originally through an acquaintance, Google Earth has a Web 2.0 collaborative piece to highlight places in a local area, Google sponsors the Summer of Code and so forth. Facebook may be taking the social component even farther, but Google has never been just an icy monolith of sleek computers and dispassionate equations.
I was talking about North Korea with someone and he said every time the American news discusses North Korea, they show a North Korean military parade with pictures of tanks rolling by. Sure enough, the next time North Korea was on the news, they showed a picture of tanks rolling by. Nowadays, they sometimes show missiles being fired instead.
Of course, that North Korean media is totalitarian and always shows an image of the USA as about to attack them is how the US media portrays the North Korean media. What is not mentioned is how our media does the exact same thing. For the average uneducated American, North Korea equals rolling tanks and missiles, if Pavlov and B.F. Skinner were right.
Of course the North Korean media has much more of a reason to portray the US as being a military aggressor. There are tens of thousands of US soldiers in South Korea. Until 1994, a US general was the commander of the Combined Force, in other words, an American was in charge of South Korea's military. The border is the most heavily militarized border in the world. Why does America have tens of thousands of troops in this country, then say they are part of an axis of evil, then invading one of the "axis of evil" countries. This after playing chicken with and killing a Chinese pilot in early 2001, something most Americans have forgotten about already. And so on.
And of course people forget that North Korea is whose economy was booming in the 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, when South Korea finally surpassed the North. The North was also a more free place than the south which had its military run by the USA, and was under a series of dictators who stamped out the nationalist movement as well as any labor unions and the like, often engaging in massacres like at Gwangju. North Korea's military on the other hand was under the Koreans. Having to keep up it defenses against the American foreigners are what eventually killed the North Koreans economy. That, and a series of other misfortunes for North Korea led things to what is admittedly a sad state. I can say one thing for North Korea though - it does not have military bases with white foreigner soldiers wandering around raping their women.
I just finished a course in psychology at school. Psychologists say the optimum state for something like this is a moderate state of arousal. Too laid-back and nothing will get done, too amped up and you won't get much done, the middle course of aroused, but not too much so, is the best for quality output. That's why breaks are important - your quality goes down after sitting too long at the keyboard (i.e. becomes too laid back).
An NGO like Freedom House, which gets about 80% of its money from the US government, rates Guatemala 3.5 of 7 in freedom, with 1 being the most free (United States) and 7 being the least free (Somalia).
I find the list rather ridiculous. Cuba is rated 7. Why? I presume because it locked up a bunch of independent journalists, many of whom had contact with the US mission in Cuba. So why is Cuba 7, but Guatemala 3.5? This journalist was KILLED - in Cuba they arrest, but do not kill journalists. So why are they rated so much lower? Also, Saudi Arabia is rated 6.5, as is China. So Saudi Arabia is more free than Cuba? That is completely ridiculous.
My first web page was on Geocities - http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/1928
. Page info says it was last modified 10/17/1995 10:29:40 PM - over 13 years ago. It's a page of links to other pages on Noam Chomsky, because the main page out on the net at that time was down at that time. Every link is now broken (except perhaps the Usenet one). I even have gopher links in there. Can't say the net has improved much since then - the level of intelligent discussion has lessened, so in most ways it is worse.
People in Québec speak French. The only reason Québec is part of Canada is because they lost the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (as well as that England engaged in some divide et impera to keep Canada in its orbit).
Most of Canada is just an extension of the United States. Québec is one of the few gems in this vast wasteland of North America. Companies come in and try to push their products on the Québecois, and they don't even respect them enough to do it in their language. They want all of North America to be this lame, SUV-driving, English-speaking, mall, chain store, suburban sprawl polyglot of crap. I am glad the Québecois are resisting this.
The important thing is passing the interview, not being ready for the job. If you get in the door, you can always spend extra hours at night doing assignments if you don't know what you're doing. You also need to have the technical skill to answer job interview questions. Go to Joel on Software or other sites which have sample interview questions on what some basic questions you may be asked are. If I were you, I would do C on my own time, and concentrate on one language. You say Java and C++. Being 2009, I would focus on Java. But if you're more comfortable with C++, that makes a fine second choice. C# is another possibility. I would focus on just one though. Even people with years of so-called experience often miss simple questions about their primary language, so learn it, and learn it well. Also learn how to do algorithms as people will ask you for samples during interviews, especially if you just got out of school.
I would also check out a few projects on Slashdot, play around with a few and start contributing to them. Some project leaders are out to sea, so do one where you can contribute and the team leaders appreciate help. Put it on your resume. You'll learn a lot.
First of all, the writer talks about how the coder was not "businesslike", but then goes on to describe him and others as "quirky...weirdest...weird...quirky...prima donna...he was truly crazy...his appearance was like Pig Pen...smells...'offensive' t-shirts...inappropriate...dark, cave office...quirky, crazy, irrational". Now how "businesslike" is it to describe someone like this? He is just slinging mud trying to bias me against this person instead of giving examples of what he has done. So what if his office is darker than the rest of the floor, it's his office, I've had to sit in cubicles where we are practically blinded by the light. And it's his private office, this guy seems to think he's a big boss and can tell people what the lighting level of their own private office is. If he is offended by someone not having a global warming causing office, I wonder what he finds offensive on a T-shirt, "Vote Obama"?
Amidst all of this mud-slinging, we hear some actual examples of what Josh's supposed failings are. The first one is a developer on his team, who is responsible for implementing and patching version 1.0 of the code, decides to not do his work, and goes to Josh, who is writing version 2.0 of the code, and sounds like the head developer on that, and have Josh do his work for him. Josh tells him to fuck off as he is busy, on a deadline to write 2.0. Then Spiegel walks in. Spiegel is there to reprimand Josh for not pulling off his tight developed schedule, and deal immediately (without scheduling it) with a problem that his own incompetent developer can't deal with. Spiegel is shocked Josh isn't obsequious in the face of this demand. Josh's paycheck is dependent on him getting version 2.0 on time, why should he spend more than the 50, 60, 70 hours a week than he's currently working to dump everything immediately and go deal with a problem due to an incompetent developer who can't handle the work?
So the story is Spiegel has an incompetent developer on his team who can't figure out code and how to do his job, so the bad guy is the coder who everyone including his manager says is the best, most brilliant coder, who won't drop everything immediately and go work on Spiegel's problem. After which Josh will either miss his deadline or have to work even more hours than he has to, and Spiegel looks like a star for fixing his problem. As far as curtness, I wonder if Josh worked 40 hour weeks, had things scheduled far ahead with reasonable deadlines and a full and competent support staff in place? Why do I have a feeling that was not the case? Spiegel had a developer on his team and mentions the 2.0 team Josh is on. So why didn't his own developer or someone else on the 2.0 team look at it? Because Spiegel wants the star of the 2.0 team to drop everything and fix his problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding your example, England and the US South wanted free trade with each other, with the backwards South supplying raw cotton material to industrialized England for processing, while the US North wanted "laws and regulations, imposed sanctions, taxes and duties" to protect its growing industrial base. The result of this was a civil war in which the industrialized north beat the rural south (a south which couldn't trust a quarter of its population). Afterward, the sanctions and duties only increased. What was the result of this? Today the GDP of the US is five times that of the UK.
in AoE, there were 12 choices, but the Assyrians and the Yamato had an initial speed advantage, to the point where they became the only teams played, particularly the Assyrians. A 3v3 match usually had both sides with 2 Assyrians and 1 Yamato. The Assyrians were so favored, sometimes all 3 would be Assyrians. For Deathmatch, the Choson and Hittites were the favored choices. Usual 3v3 teams would be 2 Choson and 1 Hittite.
In MMOG's you have larger parties, so more of a mix is OK. I am usually a mage, but mages want to be with a tank (like a warrior) at lower levels...and even higher levels. But having a priest to heal people is helpful to.
I think its natural in these games to have two main classes, a third class which is somewhat popular, and then a bunch of more minor classes for people who like to try different things. I think there's probably some mental thing where people can't handle more than three types of warriors. Look at the armed forces - army, navy, and due to technology, air force. Before the airplane, there were two divisions of service. Then within these were sub-divisions - infantry, cavalry, artillery. This just seems to be the way these things go.
Java is used for some of the most heavyweight web applications. My first experience with this was when I set up a Broadvision Java application server in 1997 which acted as an e-commerce portal, and I've been working with Java application servers since then, some on massively complex and trafficked sites. So we know Java application servers can handle the biggest and most complex of web projects, or at least, aside from C# (also mentioned) not much else comes close to being able to. So what about the small scale? Well, for someone like me who has a $10-20 a month web hosting account with one of the major vendors for such things like Bluehost, Dreamhost etc., they do not support any Java application servers, not even free and well-tested ones like Tomcat. If I could throw a Tomcat application server up on my Dreamhost account I'd do it in a second. Can you use Ruby on Rails for Dreamhost or Bluehost? Yes. Python via Django on Dreamhost? Yes. Python/Django on Bluehost? It's a convoluted process I've heard, but yes. Due to this, my sites right now are mostly PHP-based, and sometimes PERL-based. I personally would have more fun doing stuff in Java than PHP, but they don't offer Java Tomcat so I wind up doing stuff in PERL and PHP. I use them instead of Java because of that limitation, not because one is more fun than another.
Once he got the Times column, he began analyzing Bush's budgets and saying the numbers did not add up because they were wildly over-optimistic. This brought him into the political arena more.
Also - what mainstream economist does NOT argue for intervention in the economy? Milton Friedman who is supposed to be the free market guru supported a government/Fed run expansionary money policy. This is a capitalist economy, do the capitalists who run it and own it pay attention to any economists who don't advocate government control over at least money? The answer is no. In fact, the capitalists who run this capitalist economy were who advocated the bailout of the banks and all of this.
What? Krugman wrote "The Return of Depression Economics" in 2000. He has been saying something is fundamentally wrong with the world economy since then, while the median response by economists is that everything is fine, the free market has to take its course etc. Krugman has been throwing closer to the bullseye than most other mainstream economists.
Also, these things also follow R&D results - the 1961 peak which fell to 1969 was due to all the technology that enabled IBM to push out machines businesses could use, the 1982-1983 growth of 28-30% each year was due to the PC, and the 1994 to 2000 growth was pushed by the Internet being rolled out.
I deal with a lot of distributors and resellers and they are always trying to FAX me things, today in 2009. I don't want to spend a dime on a separate fax line, but I don't want to admit to these companies that I don't have a fax line either, so I list my land line as the fax line and my cell phone as the company number. Their websites are backwards, one of them is down almost every weekend, they are totally backwards. With all the open source stuff out there, netbooks going for $300-400, I see a lot of cheap stuff that can be done IT-wise to lower the costs of these and a lot of other businesses.
It is true that there was a go-go era when the Internet was rolled out (money-wise, from 1994 on), and when PCs were rolled out (moneywise, 1981-1983), and when IBM 360s were rolled out (moneywise 1964-1969). It is also true that the ups and downs of the larger economy play into this. Unemployment in the US is over 9% right now, Citigroup is being bailed out by the government and its stock is less than $4 and the like - the larger economy is not growing much so why would IT be growing at 17% a year? The real question to me is now how fast IT is going to grow but how fast it will grow compared to the rest of the economy. I can't see much that is going to grow faster than the rest of the economy, other than a handful of things like biotechnology. And Celera made leaps and bounds in biotechnology due to information technology, he had the computers figure out the genes instead of counting each gene nucleotide by nucleotide, codon by codon. Computer Science is still one of the best paying majors out of college, which may be why I am one of the only white faces in class - most of the people in CS classes throughout my life have usually been people who are from or whose parents are from Asia. So even in the US, Shanghai dominates.
My main question is what is the structure of my team. How many people are doing the same job I do in my team. Is there a lead? Is there a manager? Who is the manager managing, just our group or others as well? I have enough experience that I don't want to be in a team which has a lead in it. When I have a manager who is not involved in day to day IT work that is ideal as he wants me to succeed. Leads always want to make sure you are not doing better than them as that is a threat to their position and job. On the other hand, doing a good job is something a manager wants you to do. If they say there is no lead I ask if anyone aside from my manager inside the team will be responsible for assigning me work and that sort of thing - digging out if there is some covert lead. I make sure this is straight with my manager.
People get busy in their real lives, and open source projects are usually a low priority next to putting food on the table, trying to get laid etc. Another problem is the paucity of good developers involved in open source projects relative to the number of people using them. There is a definite learning curve in these languages. I have been working with C language for 20 years now (initially making small programs to make C programs compile on my particular OS) and on some level I still don't really understand pointers and memory - in fact I know I don't because I missed those questions on a recent examination.
Some people have been saying to fork it, but then you have to take on the burden of all of that. I would say definitely think before doing a fork, are there enough developer man-hours (person-hours) out there, including myself, over the next several years that will work on this project that will make a fork necessary? You don't want to fork a dead-end project into something that's just going to become another dead-end project. On the other hand, if there's a multi-year commitment from yourself (and maybe others) and the maintainer has disappeared completely for weeks and months on end, then maybe a fork is in order.
But for how long? The Bells were broken up, but now Verizon controls most of the Northeast, Qwest controls the West, and AT&T controls the rest of the country. The seven baby Bells are now three - with one of them being AT&T, who was not supposed to be in the local loop business.
Or how about Standard Oil. In 1911 it was supposed to be split up, the biggest of the monopoly ending bust of the trusts. In 1999, the two biggest of those companies remerged and became ExxonMobil, making it the #1 company on the Fortune 500, with over $400 billion in revenue a year. The government tried to break it up a century ago, but the tendency to monopoly still overtakes things.
You also say - "Firstly there are monopolies which have been artificially supported by an industry structure imposed by government (e.g. BT in the UK), in other words they are not a failure of the free market, they are a failure caused by government subverting the free market." It would take a while to begin to disentangle this sentence. Firstly, the phrase "free market" is not the kind of thing someone seriously engaged in social science would (or should rather) use. It is like saying a free country, or the political party in the US that supports freedom or the like. It is just entering these propaganda phrases into the discussion, which serves no purpose. I am not sure what a free market is - in the USSR, the way a market appeared to a customer was they walked in with rubles and walked out with a hat or shirt or whatever. In the US, people walk into a store and buy shirts and hats with dollars. Why is one transaction free and the other not? It really makes no sense. Those are marketplace transactions. People say "free market" although the concept has nothing to do with either freedom or markets.
Correct? Yes
I was one of those unfortunate users of Debian 3.0 stable (woody). It was released in July 2002. The next release was (two week shy of) three years after that. Way, way too long. You think a *two year* cycle is too short? Your philosophy leads down the Duke Nukem Forever, Gnu Hurd path. Yes, there is plenty of crap that gets rushed out too fast due to deadlines that make no sense, but on the other end of that is development that goes nowhere and never releases anything. You have to find a happy medium.
Python 2.2 was released in December of 2001. Woody was released in July 2002 and used Python 2.2. Python had released Python 2.3 in July 2003, Python 2.4 in November of 2004, and Python 2.4.1 in March of 2005 - and Debian stable was still Woody, running Python 2.2. From March to June of 2005, you were, aside from security updates, running the 2001 version of Python on your current Debian stable box. It is ridiculous. I was trying to run Python scripts written in 2004 and 2005 and couldn't because they were all based on Python 2.3+, if not 2.4.
One of the reasons Ubuntu got off the ground is because people were tired of stuff like this. I like Debian's commitment to free software, but if you don't deliver a product people will look elsewhere. I can't imagine switching back, I am happier with Gnewsense - Ubuntu with all binary blobs and junk ripped out.
Of course people can say Marxist theory is insane, but the predominant economic theory is that everything is fine, markets correct themselves and all of that nonsense. So what is really more off-the-wall, the Marxists or the Panglossian head-in-the-sand economists of today who say everything is fine? This is from someone who has seen the US economy stagnating since 2000 (other than some slight growth in the mid-decade with the real estate bubble, which is currently popping).
The Gnutella community began discussing the use of Tiger Tree Hashes over eight years ago, and I can't think of a major Gnutella "servant" that does not have tiger tree hashing - Limewire has it, Bearshare has it, Shareaza has it, Gnucleus has it, and GTK-Gnutella has some support for it.
While this paper says it was revised in April 2008, it seems to have been completed in September 2007. In their references, only one paper referenced is from 2007, while they have several references to papers, articles and events in 2006. Thus, it is likely a lot of this work was done in 2006 or before (three years ago), with a little brushing up before it was submitted, accepted and published in a journal.
I am not much interested in the legal aspects of someone sharing a Jonas Brothers or Britney Spears mp3, although of course I think it is absurd that p2p developers are being sued by the RIAA/MPAA mafiaa, because among other things, if they're law-breakers, then people who develop ftp servers, or web servers or IRC clients with DCC file sending could be charged as criminals as well. I have spent a lot of time looking at RIAA/MPAA organizations, and am fully convinced they are not after just pirates, but anyone that threatens their profits, including independent labels and artists who might circumvent their monopoly on the commissar-like monopoly of the marketplace of ideas and art. The excellent documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated" shows how the MPAA not only imposes de facto censorship, but how it uses its power to shut out players outside of the major studios. We don't even know what a network of free citizens using peer to peer to share files, videos, music, web pages and the like would be like, since developers are all legally threatened and stopped before the technology can even get off the ground.
Putting that aside, I do not think these poisoning attempts are all bad because they allow for a more robust p2p (and Gnutella) protocol. People are poisoning file chunks? Gnutella puts in full file SHA hashing, and later partial chunk tiger tree hashing. People are using misleading file names so that people will download junk instead of what they want? Gnutella servants implement file ratings, allow junk files and junk serving hosts to be marked as sources of junk and so forth. Everything the p2p well poisoners have come up with has resulted in a counter-foil which strengthens Gnutella and p2p. The structure is already in these programs to foil all of this, if it is not up to the 99% or so level its just because the poisoning has not been at a level to up it to that much robustness, the structure and classes are already there in the programs, and the methodology is already within the protocol, so if the mafiaa goes all out on this path, it can be countered. But of course, it is necessary to the RIAA/MPAA mafiaa on the legal/political front as well, that they can go after p2p developers is ridiculous - if we're liable, who is next? It's one step from legal mandates for DRM in all devices so some corporation is the one who controls your machine, not you, and all of that garbage.
The problem is, polls in the USA show a very large percentage of people believe every word in the bible is literally true. So if there are different versions of the bible, this causes problems. The original bible texts probably said "It is easier to get a rope through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to attain salvation". In the modern bible, the word rope has been changed to camel - which makes absolutely no sense, yet is still widely quoted. Small religious phrases have contributed to major rifts and even wars between Christians ("and the son..."). YES, to any sensible person these minor discrepancies mean little, but when you act like a Christian and throw all logic and reason out the door and start dealing with faith, divine authority and divine revelation, then these little phrases mean a lot. The parent is dealing with Christians on there own terms, and you seem not to understand this and are blaming the quite reasonable parent poster for the insanity of Christians.
The whole genius of Google is that it is NOT "rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world". Search engines prior to Google would classify a searched for word or phrase by how many times it was mentioned in a page, if the word/phrase was in the page's title, or in the beginning of the page, perhaps in a header, and so forth. Google's algorithm was to do those rankings, but then to give enormous weight to what pages of that type linked to another page. So if a large majority of baseball web sites linked to the MLB's web site, MLB's website would be on top for a Google search for baseball (as indeed it is). This is not a dispassionate equation, but one utilizing human cognitive skills and social connections via the web to give you what you want. Google's surge over search engines like Opentext, Webcrawler, Excite and Altavista was precisely that it began concentrating on social connections on the web.
And insofar as non-search services - Google has Orkut, on Google Mail one could only get an account originally through an acquaintance, Google Earth has a Web 2.0 collaborative piece to highlight places in a local area, Google sponsors the Summer of Code and so forth. Facebook may be taking the social component even farther, but Google has never been just an icy monolith of sleek computers and dispassionate equations.
In case anyone is wondering what the mysterious "NJ2" data center in Weehawken, New Jersey is, it is Savvis's Weehawken data center.
Of course, that North Korean media is totalitarian and always shows an image of the USA as about to attack them is how the US media portrays the North Korean media. What is not mentioned is how our media does the exact same thing. For the average uneducated American, North Korea equals rolling tanks and missiles, if Pavlov and B.F. Skinner were right.
Of course the North Korean media has much more of a reason to portray the US as being a military aggressor. There are tens of thousands of US soldiers in South Korea. Until 1994, a US general was the commander of the Combined Force, in other words, an American was in charge of South Korea's military. The border is the most heavily militarized border in the world. Why does America have tens of thousands of troops in this country, then say they are part of an axis of evil, then invading one of the "axis of evil" countries. This after playing chicken with and killing a Chinese pilot in early 2001, something most Americans have forgotten about already. And so on.
And of course people forget that North Korea is whose economy was booming in the 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, when South Korea finally surpassed the North. The North was also a more free place than the south which had its military run by the USA, and was under a series of dictators who stamped out the nationalist movement as well as any labor unions and the like, often engaging in massacres like at Gwangju. North Korea's military on the other hand was under the Koreans. Having to keep up it defenses against the American foreigners are what eventually killed the North Koreans economy. That, and a series of other misfortunes for North Korea led things to what is admittedly a sad state. I can say one thing for North Korea though - it does not have military bases with white foreigner soldiers wandering around raping their women.
I just finished a course in psychology at school. Psychologists say the optimum state for something like this is a moderate state of arousal. Too laid-back and nothing will get done, too amped up and you won't get much done, the middle course of aroused, but not too much so, is the best for quality output. That's why breaks are important - your quality goes down after sitting too long at the keyboard (i.e. becomes too laid back).
I find the list rather ridiculous. Cuba is rated 7. Why? I presume because it locked up a bunch of independent journalists, many of whom had contact with the US mission in Cuba. So why is Cuba 7, but Guatemala 3.5? This journalist was KILLED - in Cuba they arrest, but do not kill journalists. So why are they rated so much lower? Also, Saudi Arabia is rated 6.5, as is China. So Saudi Arabia is more free than Cuba? That is completely ridiculous.
My first web page was on Geocities - http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/1928 . Page info says it was last modified 10/17/1995 10:29:40 PM - over 13 years ago. It's a page of links to other pages on Noam Chomsky, because the main page out on the net at that time was down at that time. Every link is now broken (except perhaps the Usenet one). I even have gopher links in there. Can't say the net has improved much since then - the level of intelligent discussion has lessened, so in most ways it is worse.
Most of Canada is just an extension of the United States. Québec is one of the few gems in this vast wasteland of North America. Companies come in and try to push their products on the Québecois, and they don't even respect them enough to do it in their language. They want all of North America to be this lame, SUV-driving, English-speaking, mall, chain store, suburban sprawl polyglot of crap. I am glad the Québecois are resisting this.
Vive le Québec!
Vive le Québec libre!
Vive le FLQ!
...do you have black, tarry bowel movements?
I would also check out a few projects on Slashdot, play around with a few and start contributing to them. Some project leaders are out to sea, so do one where you can contribute and the team leaders appreciate help. Put it on your resume. You'll learn a lot.
Amidst all of this mud-slinging, we hear some actual examples of what Josh's supposed failings are. The first one is a developer on his team, who is responsible for implementing and patching version 1.0 of the code, decides to not do his work, and goes to Josh, who is writing version 2.0 of the code, and sounds like the head developer on that, and have Josh do his work for him. Josh tells him to fuck off as he is busy, on a deadline to write 2.0. Then Spiegel walks in. Spiegel is there to reprimand Josh for not pulling off his tight developed schedule, and deal immediately (without scheduling it) with a problem that his own incompetent developer can't deal with. Spiegel is shocked Josh isn't obsequious in the face of this demand. Josh's paycheck is dependent on him getting version 2.0 on time, why should he spend more than the 50, 60, 70 hours a week than he's currently working to dump everything immediately and go deal with a problem due to an incompetent developer who can't handle the work?
So the story is Spiegel has an incompetent developer on his team who can't figure out code and how to do his job, so the bad guy is the coder who everyone including his manager says is the best, most brilliant coder, who won't drop everything immediately and go work on Spiegel's problem. After which Josh will either miss his deadline or have to work even more hours than he has to, and Spiegel looks like a star for fixing his problem. As far as curtness, I wonder if Josh worked 40 hour weeks, had things scheduled far ahead with reasonable deadlines and a full and competent support staff in place? Why do I have a feeling that was not the case? Spiegel had a developer on his team and mentions the 2.0 team Josh is on. So why didn't his own developer or someone else on the 2.0 team look at it? Because Spiegel wants the star of the 2.0 team to drop everything and fix his problem.
The code IS the documentation.