When we started on databases in college, we learned all about SQL, triggers, transactions, etc, before being set loose on a "real world" db.
Funnily enough, after this brief intro course on db concepts, most of our class chose to work wiht Postgres/MySQL rather than Access, despite our college being mostly an MS-shop....
Here in Ireland, we run a system called Proportional Representation (or IRV, as the parent link calls it...), and it works pretty well. You rank all N candidates in order of preference, and as soon as your favourite is eliminated, your highest remaining vote becomes your no. 1. (i.e, if you vote Bob #1 and Joe #2, if Bob gets about 5 votes in round one and is elminated, Joe gets your #1 vote.)
This seems to have the desired effect of the more popular parties winning, so you rarely end up with a case of a "vote-split", where two fairly well-regarded candidates take votes from one another.
AFAIK, they are also beginning to experiment with this system in the UK, at the behest of smaller parties, like the Liberal Democarats (basically the 3rd party in a two-party system...:) )
In 2055 the nation hit a big milestone -- over half of the American workforce was unemployed, and the number was still rising. Nearly every "normal" job that had been filled by a human being in 2001 was filled by a robot instead. At restaurants, robots did all the cooking, cleaning and order taking. At construction sites, robots did everything
I agree with the author that robots will play an incresing part in our lives, particularly in the services sector (fast food, etc). But I don't think it will be as dire as he states (>50% unemployed). If the majority of these robots are being used in places like McDonald's, they will need people to come in and actually use the stores. If over half the work force (and rising...) is unemployed, fewer people will have the money to spend on these services, so they won't be as wildly successful in the long term as the aouthor suggests.
Any technological advances like this would also create many new jobs in fields that don't currently exist. Robot repairman? Aesthetic design for the robots would also be a very hard thing to automate.
So there will be a whole new load of specialised jobs created. Until machines are made which can do those jobs, of course. And then they'll all move to 01, and, well, we all know how that's going to end...:p
"The web-form system appears to be a bit overloaded at the moment."
In other news today, OSDN joined North Korea and Iran in the Axis of Evil, as popular internet site^H^H^H^terrorist meeting group Slashdot.org launched a cyber-attack, temporarily disbaling the White House comments form.
"This senseless destruction of government property will not go unpunished. An open, communicative government is good. These "hack-ors" stopped this, therefore they are bad. Terrorists are also bad. Therefore, Slashdot is obviously a terrorist training camp and must be dealt with accordingly," said the Government Minister for Fear-Infliction earlier today.
AOL's customers are paying for the extra "content experience" that AOL provides, e.g. the whole environment when you log on, and are taken to the AOL-specific content.
I don't think AOL will be overly concerned by these sort of operations, particularly if 20 (20%?) of them go bust a year. The typical AOL customer is willing to pay for the extras AOL provides on top of basic connection. If you use the UK as an example, with a number of free ISPs around, AOL still has one of the highest market shares. This may also have something to do with anti-competitive pricing and the like, but that's a rant for another day...:)
Yes. It's a way of measuring wealth relatively, so if you claim to be a billionaire with 100 billion foodollars in the bank, if there are are 100 million foodollars to 1 USD, then you would have $1000, whereas a dollar billionaire has, well, a billion USD, so you can compare who is richer in real terms.
I agree with your "shining grail", but part of the reason that Cletus and Grandma even bought a PC in the first place is the ability to walk into PC World, (or Circuit City or wherehaveyou,) buy the PC, plug in a few wires at home, sit back and enjoy the spam-flood..:)
If you tell them they need to take a class to own one, there'll be a lot fewer casual users (lusers?) bothered to start with a PC. Which means that a lot more kids won't grow up with early access to a PC at home, for messing around on, and in turn don't develop the interest at an early age.
I know the parent is a joke, but this type of excuse was recently used in a court case by a guy who claimed that all of the kiddie porn on his machine was put there by some "insidious hacker type" who had broken into his machine and planted it there.
I'm not sure if the verdict on that case has been released yet, I know the trial was mentioned somewhere here on/.
Anybody with a better memory than mine know how this turned out?
Oldest Planet Is Revealed, Challenging Old Theories
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In new observations of a distant region of primitive stars, astronomers have found the oldest known planet, a huge gaseous object almost three times as old as Earth and nearly as old as the universe itself.
The discovery, based on measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, challenged scientists to rethink theories of how, when and where planets form. It is tantalizing evidence, astronomers said, that planets began appearing billions of years earlier than previously thought and so may be more abundant.
Astronomers reported yesterday that the planet is more than twice as massive as Jupiter and is orbiting a pair of burned-out stars. It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang.
"What we think we have found is an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe," Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University announced at a news conference at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington.
A detailed report by Dr. Sigurdsson and his colleagues is being published today in the journal Science.
Dr. Alan P. Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, who was not involved in the research, called the discovery a "stunning revelation" that will force scientists to revise their ideas of planetary formation.
The discovery challenged a widely held view among astrophysicists that planets could not have originated so early because the universe had yet to generate enough of the heavy elements needed to make them.
Planet-making ingredients include iron, silicon and other elements heavier than helium and hydrogen. These so-called metallic elements are cooked in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and accumulate from the ashes of dying stars, which are recycled in new stars and their families of planets.
The planet was found in the heart of a group of extremely ancient stars, known as a globular star cluster. This cluster, M4, is 7,200 light-years from Earth in the summer constellation Scorpius. The stars there are estimated to have formed almost 13 billion years ago, so early that the region is deficient in heavy elements.
Astronomers had assumed that such primitive stars could not have planets, and observations of other globular clusters seemed to support that view until the detection of the "Methuselah planet," in Dr. Boss's phrase.
The Sun and its planetary system are about 4.6 billion years old, products of what astronomers call the third generation of stars. By that time, the gas and dust of interstellar space was richer in heavy elements. In less than a decade, astronomers have discovered planets around more than 100 Sun-like stars in the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy.
The research began in 1988 when a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar remnant, was discovered in the M4 cluster. Further observations revealed that the pulsar was linked gravitationally with a white dwarf star, an object that has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Later, astronomers noticed irregularities in the pulsar signals, betraying the presence of a third object, which was orbiting the other two.
The recent Hubble telescope examination determined the mass and other properties of the object. It cannot be seen, only inferred from its effects on the pulsar's motions. And the neighborhood is an unlikely place for a planet. It is almost surely a planet, astronomers said, but not one that is likely to be hospitable to life.
The research team also reported that the distant planet probably has had a tempestuous life, surviving the shock waves of stars aborning and dying explosively all around. The small star and its planet probably formed in the suburbs of the star cluster, then migrated toward the center and came too close to the ancient pulsar, which captured them. The three objects together were themselves flu
I think Dijkstra's significance wasn't so much his implementations in c++, but as the article says, he taught people how to think, as well as the implementation, which just happened to be C++.
So while Dijkstra's work in C++ might not be as relevant today as it once was, the abstract, or idea behind it, is still relevant, not the implementation.
Hmm, bit garbled, too much coffee too early. Back to bed, methinks!
There was a story a couple of days back (link escapes me... ) about Barbra Streisand giving out about her ocean-front home being photographed and thus her privacy invaded.
I think that's what it refers to, but I've been wrong before..
Over here in Europe, there seems to be a couple of different mindsets about paying interns.
In the UK and Ireland, interns (especially tech ones) are usually paid quite well, though this is in part due to colleges having arrangements with businesses and placiong conditions (pay, etc) on the job placements for students.
On the continent, however, the managerial attitude is quite different. The general perception is that the company is doing you a favour by hiring you and taking a risk on an as-yet-unqualified person, so they are less inclined to reward you for potentially destroying their organisation...
There are exceptions to this, but in general continental European internships are low-to-no pay, whereas the UK and Ireland seem to be relatively happy to pamper their summer "pets" with the mindset of instilling some sort of loyalty, so that in a year or two, the newly-qualified engineer/programmer/Anonymous Coward will return looking for a permanent job for them.
So basically, in the British Isles, paying internships are seen as investments by the companies, and in continental Europe as a risk.
IANAL and whatnot, but surely this would be leveraging a near-monopoly in one (or more...) markets (Multimedia production, distribution and software to organise same) to gain one in another (PVRs).
I think they're banking on the same idea Microsoft had with IE in Windows, i.e, if it's already there (embedded in set-top boxes) and convenient to use (at the press of a button, no less..) then people will use it rather than seeking out a rival product, which may or may not be superior. And i hate to say it, but with advertiser - and thus network - backing, it would be hard to bet against them winning.
But then again, we all remember how DiVX was going to kill DVDs, so who knows....
As with Lord of The Rings, this film is also coming out in many parts of Europe on the same day as in the States.
I know here in Dublin there is a local cinema showiong it at midnight.
Too many characters in this movie were anonymous and interchangeable. With the exception of Josh Hartnet, (who was always centre screen and on his own in his shots) the other soldiers were practically indistinguishable from each other.
You had the group of 3/4 soldiers pinned down, being chased by 100's of gun-toting Somalis, quick cut to the group of 4/5 Americans pinned down by a group of 100-odd gun-toting Somalis, and so on.
As there was no real character introduction or development before the battle scene, the only way of really telling each man apart was by how he looked, but once the helmet went on, you could only tell them apart by the various amounts of powder burns/blood on their face.
Not really getting to know the characters means that you have little to nothing emotionally vested in their fate above and beyond the usual "gung-ho USA, there go our boys" sort of thing, which means that by the time you figure out exactly who that was that was shot, it really is no more or less significant than any other random civilian being shot on the street.
If you read the book on which the film is based, it manages to define each character, and thus gives much more emotional weight to them during the battle. Granted, you do not have the same time available in a movie, but it seemed that this movie was pitched like "think Saving Private Ryan, without the quiet, boring parts (i.e, story)"
I know Ridley Scott keeps saying that he wanted to drop the audience "right into the action, as the men saw it", but for me, if I go to see a movie, I want to see a story AIDED by a battle scene, not a scrap of a story used as an excuse for a long and bloody battle scene.
Tonight on Jackass:
Watch as Johnny tries to upgrade the RAM on his new MTVBox using only his teeth! (subtle plug) Then watch in amazement as wee man spends hours playing MTV Solitaire (on his new MTVBox, of course...) - ON HIS OWN!!!. Dave tried to upgrade the HD without a static guard. Laugh at his misery as he lives in a world without his MTVBox!!! Imagine, a world without the MTVBox!! What will his friends say?!?!? Don't let this happen to you! Get mom to buy three today! (less subtle plug...)
Please do not submit video tapes of yourself doing the same, as they are not funny. Now buy the damn thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Claim all other, well-written text books as "derivatives" and charge $699 for each book?
</random_SCO_comment>
Are we even allowed to have fun anymore? :)
No. Next question. (or next Lingerie bowl even, either way...
Lingerie Bowl 2004
Relax dude...
:)
Remember, if you post it, they will spam..
</fieldofdreams>
Couldn't agree more.
When we started on databases in college, we learned all about SQL, triggers, transactions, etc, before being set loose on a "real world" db.
Funnily enough, after this brief intro course on db concepts, most of our class chose to work wiht Postgres/MySQL rather than Access, despite our college being mostly an MS-shop....
Here in Ireland, we run a system called Proportional Representation (or IRV, as the parent link calls it...), and it works pretty well. You rank all N candidates in order of preference, and as soon as your favourite is eliminated, your highest remaining vote becomes your no. 1. (i.e, if you vote Bob #1 and Joe #2, if Bob gets about 5 votes in round one and is elminated, Joe gets your #1 vote.)
:) )
This seems to have the desired effect of the more popular parties winning, so you rarely end up with a case of a "vote-split", where two fairly well-regarded candidates take votes from one another.
AFAIK, they are also beginning to experiment with this system in the UK, at the behest of smaller parties, like the Liberal Democarats (basically the 3rd party in a two-party system...
I support Cowboy "Missing Poll Option" Neal, you insensitive clod!!
In 2055 the nation hit a big milestone -- over half of the American workforce was unemployed, and the number was still rising. Nearly every "normal" job that had been filled by a human being in 2001 was filled by a robot instead. At restaurants, robots did all the cooking, cleaning and order taking. At construction sites, robots did everything
:p
I agree with the author that robots will play an incresing part in our lives, particularly in the services sector (fast food, etc). But I don't think it will be as dire as he states (>50% unemployed). If the majority of these robots are being used in places like McDonald's, they will need people to come in and actually use the stores. If over half the work force (and rising...) is unemployed, fewer people will have the money to spend on these services, so they won't be as wildly successful in the long term as the aouthor suggests.
Any technological advances like this would also create many new jobs in fields that don't currently exist. Robot repairman? Aesthetic design for the robots would also be a very hard thing to automate.
So there will be a whole new load of specialised jobs created. Until machines are made which can do those jobs, of course. And then they'll all move to 01, and, well, we all know how that's going to end...
"The web-form system appears to be a bit overloaded at the moment."
In other news today, OSDN joined North Korea and Iran in the Axis of Evil, as popular internet site^H^H^H^terrorist meeting group Slashdot.org launched a cyber-attack, temporarily disbaling the White House comments form.
"This senseless destruction of government property will not go unpunished. An open, communicative government is good. These "hack-ors" stopped this, therefore they are bad. Terrorists are also bad. Therefore, Slashdot is obviously a terrorist training camp and must be dealt with accordingly," said the Government Minister for Fear-Infliction earlier today.
AOL's customers are paying for the extra "content experience" that AOL provides, e.g. the whole environment when you log on, and are taken to the AOL-specific content.
:)
I don't think AOL will be overly concerned by these sort of operations, particularly if 20 (20%?) of them go bust a year. The typical AOL customer is willing to pay for the extras AOL provides on top of basic connection. If you use the UK as an example, with a number of free ISPs around, AOL still has one of the highest market shares. This may also have something to do with anti-competitive pricing and the like, but that's a rant for another day...
"Ever been out in the field and wanted to make a quick wireless link calculation"
Nope. Next question.
Yes. It's a way of measuring wealth relatively, so if you claim to be a billionaire with 100 billion foodollars in the bank, if there are are 100 million foodollars to 1 USD, then you would have $1000, whereas a dollar billionaire has, well, a billion USD, so you can compare who is richer in real terms.
I agree with your "shining grail", but part of the reason that Cletus and Grandma even bought a PC in the first place is the ability to walk into PC World, (or Circuit City or wherehaveyou,) buy the PC, plug in a few wires at home, sit back and enjoy the spam-flood.. :)
If you tell them they need to take a class to own one, there'll be a lot fewer casual users (lusers?) bothered to start with a PC. Which means that a lot more kids won't grow up with early access to a PC at home, for messing around on, and in turn don't develop the interest at an early age.
I know the parent is a joke, but this type of excuse was recently used in a court case by a guy who claimed that all of the kiddie porn on his machine was put there by some "insidious hacker type" who had broken into his machine and planted it there. /.
I'm not sure if the verdict on that case has been released yet, I know the trial was mentioned somewhere here on
Anybody with a better memory than mine know how this turned out?
you forgot one other preceding law
-1. ????
Oldest Planet Is Revealed, Challenging Old Theories By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In new observations of a distant region of primitive stars, astronomers have found the oldest known planet, a huge gaseous object almost three times as old as Earth and nearly as old as the universe itself.
The discovery, based on measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, challenged scientists to rethink theories of how, when and where planets form. It is tantalizing evidence, astronomers said, that planets began appearing billions of years earlier than previously thought and so may be more abundant.
Astronomers reported yesterday that the planet is more than twice as massive as Jupiter and is orbiting a pair of burned-out stars. It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang.
"What we think we have found is an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe," Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University announced at a news conference at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington.
A detailed report by Dr. Sigurdsson and his colleagues is being published today in the journal Science.
Dr. Alan P. Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, who was not involved in the research, called the discovery a "stunning revelation" that will force scientists to revise their ideas of planetary formation.
The discovery challenged a widely held view among astrophysicists that planets could not have originated so early because the universe had yet to generate enough of the heavy elements needed to make them.
Planet-making ingredients include iron, silicon and other elements heavier than helium and hydrogen. These so-called metallic elements are cooked in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and accumulate from the ashes of dying stars, which are recycled in new stars and their families of planets.
The planet was found in the heart of a group of extremely ancient stars, known as a globular star cluster. This cluster, M4, is 7,200 light-years from Earth in the summer constellation Scorpius. The stars there are estimated to have formed almost 13 billion years ago, so early that the region is deficient in heavy elements.
Astronomers had assumed that such primitive stars could not have planets, and observations of other globular clusters seemed to support that view until the detection of the "Methuselah planet," in Dr. Boss's phrase.
The Sun and its planetary system are about 4.6 billion years old, products of what astronomers call the third generation of stars. By that time, the gas and dust of interstellar space was richer in heavy elements. In less than a decade, astronomers have discovered planets around more than 100 Sun-like stars in the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy.
The research began in 1988 when a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar remnant, was discovered in the M4 cluster. Further observations revealed that the pulsar was linked gravitationally with a white dwarf star, an object that has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Later, astronomers noticed irregularities in the pulsar signals, betraying the presence of a third object, which was orbiting the other two.
The recent Hubble telescope examination determined the mass and other properties of the object. It cannot be seen, only inferred from its effects on the pulsar's motions. And the neighborhood is an unlikely place for a planet. It is almost surely a planet, astronomers said, but not one that is likely to be hospitable to life.
The research team also reported that the distant planet probably has had a tempestuous life, surviving the shock waves of stars aborning and dying explosively all around. The small star and its planet probably formed in the suburbs of the star cluster, then migrated toward the center and came too close to the ancient pulsar, which captured them. The three objects together were themselves flu
I think Dijkstra's significance wasn't so much his implementations in c++, but as the article says, he taught people how to think, as well as the implementation, which just happened to be C++.
So while Dijkstra's work in C++ might not be as relevant today as it once was, the abstract, or idea behind it, is still relevant, not the implementation.
Hmm, bit garbled, too much coffee too early. Back to bed, methinks!
There was a story a couple of days back (link escapes me ... ) about Barbra Streisand giving out about her ocean-front home being photographed and thus her privacy invaded.
I think that's what it refers to, but I've been wrong before..
Over here in Europe, there seems to be a couple of different mindsets about paying interns.
In the UK and Ireland, interns (especially tech ones) are usually paid quite well, though this is in part due to colleges having arrangements with businesses and placiong conditions (pay, etc) on the job placements for students.
On the continent, however, the managerial attitude is quite different. The general perception is that the company is doing you a favour by hiring you and taking a risk on an as-yet-unqualified person, so they are less inclined to reward you for potentially destroying their organisation...
There are exceptions to this, but in general continental European internships are low-to-no pay, whereas the UK and Ireland seem to be relatively happy to pamper their summer "pets" with the mindset of instilling some sort of loyalty, so that in a year or two, the newly-qualified engineer/programmer/Anonymous Coward will return looking for a permanent job for them.
So basically, in the British Isles, paying internships are seen as investments by the companies, and in continental Europe as a risk.
IANAL and whatnot, but surely this would be leveraging a near-monopoly in one (or more...) markets (Multimedia production, distribution and software to organise same) to gain one in another (PVRs).
I think they're banking on the same idea Microsoft had with IE in Windows, i.e, if it's already there (embedded in set-top boxes) and convenient to use (at the press of a button, no less..) then people will use it rather than seeking out a rival product, which may or may not be superior. And i hate to say it, but with advertiser - and thus network - backing, it would be hard to bet against them winning.
But then again, we all remember how DiVX was going to kill DVDs, so who knows....
As with Lord of The Rings, this film is also coming out in many parts of Europe on the same day as in the States. I know here in Dublin there is a local cinema showiong it at midnight.
...a Beowolf cluster of those.... Sorry. I really, truly am.......
Can't imagine Larry Ellison being too happy with this. Can't be much of a market for his all-singing, all-dancing ID card, can there?
Too many characters in this movie were anonymous and interchangeable. With the exception of Josh Hartnet, (who was always centre screen and on his own in his shots) the other soldiers were practically indistinguishable from each other. You had the group of 3/4 soldiers pinned down, being chased by 100's of gun-toting Somalis, quick cut to the group of 4/5 Americans pinned down by a group of 100-odd gun-toting Somalis, and so on. As there was no real character introduction or development before the battle scene, the only way of really telling each man apart was by how he looked, but once the helmet went on, you could only tell them apart by the various amounts of powder burns/blood on their face. Not really getting to know the characters means that you have little to nothing emotionally vested in their fate above and beyond the usual "gung-ho USA, there go our boys" sort of thing, which means that by the time you figure out exactly who that was that was shot, it really is no more or less significant than any other random civilian being shot on the street. If you read the book on which the film is based, it manages to define each character, and thus gives much more emotional weight to them during the battle. Granted, you do not have the same time available in a movie, but it seemed that this movie was pitched like "think Saving Private Ryan, without the quiet, boring parts (i.e, story)" I know Ridley Scott keeps saying that he wanted to drop the audience "right into the action, as the men saw it", but for me, if I go to see a movie, I want to see a story AIDED by a battle scene, not a scrap of a story used as an excuse for a long and bloody battle scene.
Tonight on Jackass: Watch as Johnny tries to upgrade the RAM on his new MTVBox using only his teeth! (subtle plug) Then watch in amazement as wee man spends hours playing MTV Solitaire (on his new MTVBox, of course...) - ON HIS OWN!!!. Dave tried to upgrade the HD without a static guard. Laugh at his misery as he lives in a world without his MTVBox!!! Imagine, a world without the MTVBox!! What will his friends say?!?!? Don't let this happen to you! Get mom to buy three today! (less subtle plug...) Please do not submit video tapes of yourself doing the same, as they are not funny. Now buy the damn thing.