but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts. If you can do math and "show your work", or punch numbers in a calculator, you're 2/3 of the way to a FORTRAN command line program.
I don't think it's a useful first language anymore. Something like Python would be more useful "out of college". FORTRAN is really easy to pick up later anyway as it's "old fashioned" and line numbered based. I'd think the biggest problem teaching the class now would be getting students to take it seriously because it's a much older way of thinking about programs from our modern OOP languages.
The only reason to BUY new textbooks is to update learning styles and integration of classes that varies (i.e. making math and physics books "match" topics)
but that's the very same thing you can do MORE easily with e-textbooks. In fact you could pay the state-funded universities to keep the facts straight and let teachers reformat the actual books as needed.. after all, it's all just pages in a database pushed to a "book", right, just like Wikipedia.
How about a Kindle! It's exactly the kind of thing schools should be looking into. It would be trivial to build tests that could include nice buttons and text entries. It's low power, locked down, and simple. They could make a school version that used a private radio channel rather than the phone network so updates could be pushed by the school directly.
Actually, I'd say that's backwards. Most old-school Apple users I see have macs in use for years beyond what PC users do. It's the CPU/GPU twitch crowd that upgrade $1000 CPUs and $500 Graphics cards every 12-18 months that are having a problem adapting to the Apple idea of paying more money less often and just being happy with it.
it's been said at least 1000 times on the interweb so far... the original iPhone had the customer paying FULL price and AT&T PAYING Apple to have the phone. So when you all ran to get the new phone AT&T used you to change the deal so they didn't have to pay Apple and you got a new phone.
This time the money is all from AT&T's pocket, so they're not letting people off so easily.
The problem is that the current US practice of protecting the sites... by not GOING there is about to be threatened by other countries that might want to bring home a piece of history.
you're paid by how much "responsibility" you manage. The way MBA's keep score is Dollars. If you buy stuff, you have a bigger budget. If you pay certified workers they make more money than "generalists" that know a little of everything... Just like Doctors and pharma companies, OEMs like Dell and Microsoft are "too big to fail" so even though they ignore YOU they can't ignore wide-scale problems and you get extra score for managing "big" vendors instead of Free Software nerfs.
10.4 to 10.5 was better than XP to Vista.... I look at it this way, Apple's stuff is good enough they CAN charge for it while Microsoft has so much inertia they can only force people to buy upgrades with new computers by leveraging OEMS. Apple on the other hand had close to 50% of Tiger users upgraded in 6 months... that means a lot of people WANTED to pay for it.
There won't ever be an "OS 11" it would lose the pretty "X" logo that makes marketing so cool. It will always be "X" probably until 10.23 in 2025. Along the same lines XP is really Windows 5.1 so they duped everybody into paying for an upgrade to Win 2000 like your complaining about Apple doing.
it's technically only cybersquatting when they take trademarked names of others. I think it's more like ticket scalping. The counter will sell tickets to anybody, that doesn't mean it's "sporting" for the first guy with a fat wallet to buy 100 extra tickets only to sell them back to the other people in line.
Just like buying tickets for events, technically it's your money to spend and "capitalism" is all about "snooze and loose" but we treat things like that differently because somebody is abusing it.
I agree we don't want to get into business of what a "useful" website is. On the other hand, "scalping" is a pretty well known thing even though somebody with 8 kids might by 10 tickets we let them as long as they don't scalp.
That's what a big name server company still does with their midrange and Unix servers. They primarily "lease" them for the standard 3 years with a cheap buyout if you want... but they'll always offer a "trade-in" 6 months before your due to keep the used machines off the market. They take the machines back to the warranty department and part them out to the service as replacement parts, never to be seen again.
That's the really funny thing, is that for durable goods there are very clear laws that car manufacturers can't interfere with resale or used car markets and have to honor warranties and such. It seems that "copyright" related iterms keep grabbing more and more power when the power for actual manufacturers is consistantly kept in check.
Automakers tie diagnostic tools and engine codes to "IP" rules all the time even using the DMCA and Congress routinely takes that away from them when they try to hide behind the "weenie" IP laws that game publishers are trying to hide behind.
game publishers sell a product too... a shiny disc. The oppressive DRM on most console games makes reproduction by average people not very likely. How is a video game any different from a cookbook publisher...why shouldn't a cookbook or home repair publisher get money for each item you cook/repair too.
Let's not get started on games like Monpooly! You could have bought that game once in 1935 and still be playing the same copy!!!!
but once you kill the social aspect of going to the store to try out games, then you start losing the "small" sales. Right now the only games selling at stores are top 25, big stores don't want to sell the #26 game even if it's something like "world of goo" from a small studio that's all profit for the store. There's no competition for new (cheaper) developers at the stores so they can keep their profit margin.
Thinking about it, the domain name problem is more like Ticket Scalping than squatting. In this case, it's not "cybersquatting" because the poster is trying to pick out a name... on the other hand the meaningful names are all taken by somebody who happened to be in line first and bought a bunch of stuff they didn't need.. like a ticket scalper does. Rules are pretty harsh against ticket scalpers, even though they generally paid their cash up front to get the tickets fair and square. The question is how to get the public to view it like scalping and not "real estate".
As the original question is about purchasing a name for a company he hasn't started yet. That's not technically "cybersquatting", they got his name first. I agree, this is more of a "gold rush" issue where people stake claims on a bunch of land they don't intend to work, just in case somebody else might make money off "their" domain idea. The way the government dealt with it was requiring presence and requiring taxes be paid to keep physical land based on it's value, if you can't afford the property tax, then the land gets redistributed to somebody that can make enough money from the property to pay it.... There used to be a time "real" land was just as plentiful as domain names.. and we did just fine.
I think the solution was ICANN's idea to make the 20 cent fee non refundable, or to force registrars to actually take the money and stop "tasting" periods. Most of the professionals aren't paying, they just keep "tasting" names between shell companies. If there was a little bit of "treading water" added it would be more costly. It would still happen, but people would have to pay the $10 so they'd be "stuck" with it... for 10 or even 100 names that's not much money, but for the 10,000 these guys are running it would at least tie up their wallets.
I call FUD. According to Wikipedia 10.2 was released in 2002 (dropped in 2003), 10.3 was 2003 (dropped in 2005) and 10.5 was released in 2005 (dropped in 2007).
For comparison IE7 and IE8 won't run on the 2002 non-SP versions of Windows XP either. A $129 upgrade in 7 years isn't unrealistic.
Re:O'Reilly is the Microsoft of book publishers.
on
SQL in a Nutshell
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· Score: 1
I find across the board the O'Reilly books are usually pretty good. There are some that are "regurgitated" manpages. Many are "gold standards" in their topic... I'd say they have more "gold standards" than any other publisher. I've seen individual books from other publishers that have very good individual authors but not consistently good across the whole lineup. I guess I feel more comfortable "buying blind" on a topic I don't know with the O'Reilly brand than any other.
The real problem is that most IT departments are "cost centers" now. Every hour you spend not working on a "billable" project to another department is "waste". When accounting sees that you spend 2 workdays a month writing OSS documentation or answering FAQs (because you're giving back solutions to things you've learned how to fix, or cleaning up documentation to match your company's standards.. all good things) Accounting will see that as "wasted" time and prefer you just spent the $2500 on a package so that you can "call somebody" and have them do the work. Also, many department managers are paid by the "value" of their departments. If you manage a department running free software with few license fees and only 2-3 "reporting" workers then you're not taken as seriously as the manager that has a $100k sunk investment in IBM or Microsoft tools per year and 5-6 reports... because the later "must do more work". When the 2-3 reports are spending time writing documentation (because it works!) and not doing "billable" fixing management wonders why you can't have one less person.
making a computer synth sound is different than making the instrument. The physical form of the instrument adds much to how it was played. In many instruments from that time the flaws and human errors were as much part of the performance as the the tone or clarity of the instrument.
Look at a standard guitar. in addition to plucking the strings you can make a dozen other sounds with the instrument not specifically "playing" it, but they're key to live performance. You wouldn't know that unless you had one in your hands to play.
the software was designed to improve real instruments and match them to their players better to produce the sound and style of music the player wanted. They used the software "backwards" rather than analyze an existing instrument for flaws or tuning they took a set of parameters like the scale and size and tried to predict how a real instrument that had those specs would be made. I'd say that's the peak of analytical software to recreate what you have no way of knowing for sure convincingly.
CAN the instrument do it, or can they play it? It sounds like these were built strictly to the plans provided by the computer and not "polished" by a craftsman. A few revisions from practiced craftsmen would probably improve the scale and playability of the horn without changing its sound too much. I'd think that would be an interesting lesson in polishing their software with how real-world craftsmen tweak and build instruments.
People probably learned how to mass-produce the "coiled" version of bass instruments about that time. Trumpets, Trombones, Tubas, etc are all 6,12, 20 foot of brass tubing wound up with buttons added to make playing easier. At the time people probably turned in their 8 foot straight horns to have the metal reused in smaller, more versatile instruments. Raw metal was rather valuable so I'd expect horns were recycled into other objects as well.
The PhD thesis was the horn profiling software. It's quite a technological advance in music. We went from hand made horns individuals figured out to play, to mass produced horns designed to a specification of brass and wood everybody learned to play exactly the same way. Now we've come full circle, the purpose of the software was to aid manufacturing of an individual instrument to their style of play. and physical ability.. that's actually a huge accomplishment in the history of music. It's the same type of advance made in sports so Tiger Woods can be digitally analyzed and have golf clubs made specifically for the mechanics of his swing based on scientific data.
I think the lituus was sort of a "parlor trick" use of the software. They had a piece of music, so sound patterns it was supposed to play, and they had written accounts of it's length, material, and basic appearance. They were able to plug that in and get a pattern for a real instrument out.
To complete the technology circle, these plans need to be given to real antique instrument re-creators to improve the playability and quality of the horn. Building a horn to a computer spec is way different than a craftsman building one by hand. They could improve their software if they had a craftsman "fix" their design to smooth out the rough patches and properly match the technology of the time, which would introduce "errors" that make the instrument more unique than one made by CNC machine.
You are exactly correct. Hand made "impractical" instruments fell out of fashion in the mid 1700's en masse for the beginnings of mass manufactured instruments. People would have replaced this with trumpets or coronets. Which were newer and more standard. What you see is a trend from 4-6 piece "chamber" or "folk" music to something that looks like the modern orchestra. In folk music handmade instruments and the "flaws" of instrument and player are features that make live performances better. In large groups you want to minimize individual players to have the group play as one "instrument".
I'm getting into middle ages instruments [a good guide is here: http://www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/instrumt.html%5D And most of the list is woodwind or string. You can see the take over of strings because they are compact, portable (like another poster below mentions) and they are easily tuned to match each other. About the time the time lituus was lost brass instruments became affordable to produce nearly identical copies of and could be played in tune like Trombones, or tuned with sliders like trumpets and tubas. Why keep a single purpose non-tunable horn?
There's nothing like hearing music played on the instruments it was written to be played on. When listening to old music it helps put you in the mood the people then would have been in. It may not be the best thing now, but it was the best they had then.
Of course, the most popular music now is the 4-6 piece "rock" band. Drums, keyboard, and some number of guitars is the "standard" pop music right now. [much like violin, viola, cello, and bass in the 1600's] The core needed instruments of even the Rolling Stones fit in the back of Mom's minivan. We (ok not slashdotters, but other we) go to rock concerts because they play to the audience, even though their CDs are technically better and more polished we like to be there to watch and the artists do different things depending on the crowd.
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but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts. If you can do math and "show your work", or punch numbers in a calculator, you're 2/3 of the way to a FORTRAN command line program.
I don't think it's a useful first language anymore. Something like Python would be more useful "out of college". FORTRAN is really easy to pick up later anyway as it's "old fashioned" and line numbered based. I'd think the biggest problem teaching the class now would be getting students to take it seriously because it's a much older way of thinking about programs from our modern OOP languages.
The only reason to BUY new textbooks is to update learning styles and integration of classes that varies (i.e. making math and physics books "match" topics)
but that's the very same thing you can do MORE easily with e-textbooks. In fact you could pay the state-funded universities to keep the facts straight and let teachers reformat the actual books as needed.. after all, it's all just pages in a database pushed to a "book", right, just like Wikipedia.
How about a Kindle! It's exactly the kind of thing schools should be looking into. It would be trivial to build tests that could include nice buttons and text entries. It's low power, locked down, and simple. They could make a school version that used a private radio channel rather than the phone network so updates could be pushed by the school directly.
Actually, I'd say that's backwards. Most old-school Apple users I see have macs in use for years beyond what PC users do. It's the CPU/GPU twitch crowd that upgrade $1000 CPUs and $500 Graphics cards every 12-18 months that are having a problem adapting to the Apple idea of paying more money less often and just being happy with it.
noob!
WWDC has been on the blogs for 6 months guessing a new iPhone was coming... just like the two years before had new iphone announcements....
it's not rocket science.
it's been said at least 1000 times on the interweb so far... the original iPhone had the customer paying FULL price and AT&T PAYING Apple to have the phone. So when you all ran to get the new phone AT&T used you to change the deal so they didn't have to pay Apple and you got a new phone.
This time the money is all from AT&T's pocket, so they're not letting people off so easily.
The problem is that the current US practice of protecting the sites... by not GOING there is about to be threatened by other countries that might want to bring home a piece of history.
you're paid by how much "responsibility" you manage. The way MBA's keep score is Dollars. If you buy stuff, you have a bigger budget. If you pay certified workers they make more money than "generalists" that know a little of everything... Just like Doctors and pharma companies, OEMs like Dell and Microsoft are "too big to fail" so even though they ignore YOU they can't ignore wide-scale problems and you get extra score for managing "big" vendors instead of Free Software nerfs.
10.4 to 10.5 was better than XP to Vista.... I look at it this way, Apple's stuff is good enough they CAN charge for it while Microsoft has so much inertia they can only force people to buy upgrades with new computers by leveraging OEMS. Apple on the other hand had close to 50% of Tiger users upgraded in 6 months... that means a lot of people WANTED to pay for it.
There won't ever be an "OS 11" it would lose the pretty "X" logo that makes marketing so cool. It will always be "X" probably until 10.23 in 2025. Along the same lines XP is really Windows 5.1 so they duped everybody into paying for an upgrade to Win 2000 like your complaining about Apple doing.
it's technically only cybersquatting when they take trademarked names of others. I think it's more like ticket scalping. The counter will sell tickets to anybody, that doesn't mean it's "sporting" for the first guy with a fat wallet to buy 100 extra tickets only to sell them back to the other people in line.
Just like buying tickets for events, technically it's your money to spend and "capitalism" is all about "snooze and loose" but we treat things like that differently because somebody is abusing it.
I agree we don't want to get into business of what a "useful" website is. On the other hand, "scalping" is a pretty well known thing even though somebody with 8 kids might by 10 tickets we let them as long as they don't scalp.
That's what a big name server company still does with their midrange and Unix servers. They primarily "lease" them for the standard 3 years with a cheap buyout if you want... but they'll always offer a "trade-in" 6 months before your due to keep the used machines off the market. They take the machines back to the warranty department and part them out to the service as replacement parts, never to be seen again.
That's the really funny thing, is that for durable goods there are very clear laws that car manufacturers can't interfere with resale or used car markets and have to honor warranties and such. It seems that "copyright" related iterms keep grabbing more and more power when the power for actual manufacturers is consistantly kept in check.
Automakers tie diagnostic tools and engine codes to "IP" rules all the time even using the DMCA and Congress routinely takes that away from them when they try to hide behind the "weenie" IP laws that game publishers are trying to hide behind.
game publishers sell a product too... a shiny disc. The oppressive DRM on most console games makes reproduction by average people not very likely. How is a video game any different from a cookbook publisher...why shouldn't a cookbook or home repair publisher get money for each item you cook/repair too.
Let's not get started on games like Monpooly! You could have bought that game once in 1935 and still be playing the same copy!!!!
but once you kill the social aspect of going to the store to try out games, then you start losing the "small" sales. Right now the only games selling at stores are top 25, big stores don't want to sell the #26 game even if it's something like "world of goo" from a small studio that's all profit for the store. There's no competition for new (cheaper) developers at the stores so they can keep their profit margin.
That's like what Ticketmaster does.
Thinking about it, the domain name problem is more like Ticket Scalping than squatting. In this case, it's not "cybersquatting" because the poster is trying to pick out a name... on the other hand the meaningful names are all taken by somebody who happened to be in line first and bought a bunch of stuff they didn't need.. like a ticket scalper does. Rules are pretty harsh against ticket scalpers, even though they generally paid their cash up front to get the tickets fair and square. The question is how to get the public to view it like scalping and not "real estate".
As the original question is about purchasing a name for a company he hasn't started yet. That's not technically "cybersquatting", they got his name first. I agree, this is more of a "gold rush" issue where people stake claims on a bunch of land they don't intend to work, just in case somebody else might make money off "their" domain idea. The way the government dealt with it was requiring presence and requiring taxes be paid to keep physical land based on it's value, if you can't afford the property tax, then the land gets redistributed to somebody that can make enough money from the property to pay it.... There used to be a time "real" land was just as plentiful as domain names.. and we did just fine.
I think the solution was ICANN's idea to make the 20 cent fee non refundable, or to force registrars to actually take the money and stop "tasting" periods. Most of the professionals aren't paying, they just keep "tasting" names between shell companies. If there was a little bit of "treading water" added it would be more costly. It would still happen, but people would have to pay the $10 so they'd be "stuck" with it... for 10 or even 100 names that's not much money, but for the 10,000 these guys are running it would at least tie up their wallets.
I call FUD. According to Wikipedia 10.2 was released in 2002 (dropped in 2003), 10.3 was 2003 (dropped in 2005) and 10.5 was released in 2005 (dropped in 2007).
For comparison IE7 and IE8 won't run on the 2002 non-SP versions of Windows XP either. A $129 upgrade in 7 years isn't unrealistic.
I find across the board the O'Reilly books are usually pretty good. There are some that are "regurgitated" manpages. Many are "gold standards" in their topic... I'd say they have more "gold standards" than any other publisher. I've seen individual books from other publishers that have very good individual authors but not consistently good across the whole lineup. I guess I feel more comfortable "buying blind" on a topic I don't know with the O'Reilly brand than any other.
The real problem is that most IT departments are "cost centers" now. Every hour you spend not working on a "billable" project to another department is "waste". When accounting sees that you spend 2 workdays a month writing OSS documentation or answering FAQs (because you're giving back solutions to things you've learned how to fix, or cleaning up documentation to match your company's standards.. all good things) Accounting will see that as "wasted" time and prefer you just spent the $2500 on a package so that you can "call somebody" and have them do the work. Also, many department managers are paid by the "value" of their departments. If you manage a department running free software with few license fees and only 2-3 "reporting" workers then you're not taken as seriously as the manager that has a $100k sunk investment in IBM or Microsoft tools per year and 5-6 reports... because the later "must do more work". When the 2-3 reports are spending time writing documentation (because it works!) and not doing "billable" fixing management wonders why you can't have one less person.
making a computer synth sound is different than making the instrument. The physical form of the instrument adds much to how it was played. In many instruments from that time the flaws and human errors were as much part of the performance as the the tone or clarity of the instrument.
Look at a standard guitar. in addition to plucking the strings you can make a dozen other sounds with the instrument not specifically "playing" it, but they're key to live performance. You wouldn't know that unless you had one in your hands to play.
the software was designed to improve real instruments and match them to their players better to produce the sound and style of music the player wanted. They used the software "backwards" rather than analyze an existing instrument for flaws or tuning they took a set of parameters like the scale and size and tried to predict how a real instrument that had those specs would be made. I'd say that's the peak of analytical software to recreate what you have no way of knowing for sure convincingly.
CAN the instrument do it, or can they play it? It sounds like these were built strictly to the plans provided by the computer and not "polished" by a craftsman. A few revisions from practiced craftsmen would probably improve the scale and playability of the horn without changing its sound too much. I'd think that would be an interesting lesson in polishing their software with how real-world craftsmen tweak and build instruments.
People probably learned how to mass-produce the "coiled" version of bass instruments about that time. Trumpets, Trombones, Tubas, etc are all 6,12, 20 foot of brass tubing wound up with buttons added to make playing easier. At the time people probably turned in their 8 foot straight horns to have the metal reused in smaller, more versatile instruments. Raw metal was rather valuable so I'd expect horns were recycled into other objects as well.
The PhD thesis was the horn profiling software. It's quite a technological advance in music. We went from hand made horns individuals figured out to play, to mass produced horns designed to a specification of brass and wood everybody learned to play exactly the same way. Now we've come full circle, the purpose of the software was to aid manufacturing of an individual instrument to their style of play. and physical ability.. that's actually a huge accomplishment in the history of music. It's the same type of advance made in sports so Tiger Woods can be digitally analyzed and have golf clubs made specifically for the mechanics of his swing based on scientific data.
I think the lituus was sort of a "parlor trick" use of the software. They had a piece of music, so sound patterns it was supposed to play, and they had written accounts of it's length, material, and basic appearance. They were able to plug that in and get a pattern for a real instrument out.
To complete the technology circle, these plans need to be given to real antique instrument re-creators to improve the playability and quality of the horn. Building a horn to a computer spec is way different than a craftsman building one by hand. They could improve their software if they had a craftsman "fix" their design to smooth out the rough patches and properly match the technology of the time, which would introduce "errors" that make the instrument more unique than one made by CNC machine.
You are exactly correct. Hand made "impractical" instruments fell out of fashion in the mid 1700's en masse for the beginnings of mass manufactured instruments. People would have replaced this with trumpets or coronets. Which were newer and more standard. What you see is a trend from 4-6 piece "chamber" or "folk" music to something that looks like the modern orchestra. In folk music handmade instruments and the "flaws" of instrument and player are features that make live performances better. In large groups you want to minimize individual players to have the group play as one "instrument".
I'm getting into middle ages instruments [a good guide is here: http://www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/instrumt.html%5D And most of the list is woodwind or string. You can see the take over of strings because they are compact, portable (like another poster below mentions) and they are easily tuned to match each other. About the time the time lituus was lost brass instruments became affordable to produce nearly identical copies of and could be played in tune like Trombones, or tuned with sliders like trumpets and tubas. Why keep a single purpose non-tunable horn?
There's nothing like hearing music played on the instruments it was written to be played on. When listening to old music it helps put you in the mood the people then would have been in. It may not be the best thing now, but it was the best they had then.
Of course, the most popular music now is the 4-6 piece "rock" band. Drums, keyboard, and some number of guitars is the "standard" pop music right now. [much like violin, viola, cello, and bass in the 1600's] The core needed instruments of even the Rolling Stones fit in the back of Mom's minivan. We (ok not slashdotters, but other we) go to rock concerts because they play to the audience, even though their CDs are technically better and more polished we like to be there to watch and the artists do different things depending on the crowd.