It seems he has a smal business or is a self emplyed developer. You are tellling him to quit it and instead get a job at a company and become an employee (like a journalist) or become a freelancer for companies or individuals (like a plumber).
Im am not sure if these are valid options for this guy: he wants to keep his small business, and asks if he can develop free software instead of closed softare – and still make a living.
Engineers could benefit enormously with one semester or two of humanities. A little knowledge of sociology, anthropology, psychology or economics can open the minds of engineers. And, let`s be honest, engineers are very intelligent, but could go farther on their careers and theirs lifes with better inter-personal skills.
For myself, I am doing the other inverse route. I have always been a nerd, but made a very unwise decision to go for a major on Communication studies, to become a journalist. I began using Linux during college, around 1998, as a hobby. When I started working, I wrote for a newspaper about (surprise!) computers and the interwebs. That was when I met Slashdot.
Unhappy with my career choice, I pursued another major, on Economics, and my favorite courses were calculus and econometrics. Now I work on the financial department of an engineer firm, and spend much of my time analyzing data and writing small VBS scripts (we use Oracle Hyperion to retrieve data from a database to MS Excel).
And for the title of the post... yes, 80% the parties on humanities majors are better than the parties on technological courses. (I have just created this statistic, of course)
It is not illegal. But the Intelligence Agencies are monitoring these types of communication because they need to know the itinerary of the riot, to prevent looting of shops and banks, burning of public and private buildings and aggressions against policemen. On Tuesday on Rio de Janeiro there were more policemen wounded than protesters. On Thursday the police of Rio de Janeiro had to use all its force to prevent the invasion of the City Hall, the working place of the mayor, but there were 37 shops os buildings looted - in only one avenue!
This is NOT like "Occupy Wall Street". It is violent. Ugly.
Contrary to what some might expect, not everycompany in the oil industry is making a lot of money these days. With the spike in the Brent crude price, the refineries have, in fact, seen their margins getting thinner every day. As some refineries are in the brink of losing money, dont expext much investment on security or enviroment from them.
The only possible solution? The regulator could tighten security requirements, forcing the bad refineries out of business and making the others have a better security performance. The downside? Gasoline prices will go out, as the gasoline from the old refineries will no longer go to the market. I don't know if the american government is willing to pay this price.
Pardon me, marriages of adult with 9 year old girls are NOT something that has occurred "in the past". If the man in question lives in Saudi Arabia, it is PERFECTLY LEGAL for him to marry such a young girl.
In fact, muslims are NOT ashamed of their prophet has been married to a girl. If you don`t believe, just read the wikipedia entry about Aisha, or the one about child marriage.
Truth is, many more child marriages occur in India, but there the government is trying to stop it. On Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, it is considered absolutely normal and holy to marry a child. A movie depicting the relationship of Muhammad and Aisha would be considered disgusting in the west, and would not raise much controversy on the islamic countries.
Every time I learn a little more about Saudi Arabia or the Islam, I get a little more nauseated.
Syria has been a de facto "gun-included" country for the past months. Everybody, and their brother, carries a weapon there, and on June more than 2,5 thousand people died there (an average of more than 90 people per day). To put things in perspective: for every fatal victim of this shooting, 7 syrians died EVERY DAY. And this was repeated for several months, and the killings there are still happening.
Sorry, but this teorethical cenario is not convincing to me, considering current events and historical examples, on United States and other countries.
Are you sure that european companies are benefiting from the current economic downturn? Companies are selling less, and earnings are going downhill.
It will take some times for european companies to benefit from the depreciation of the euro against the dollar (with an increase in exports), but the negative effects are felt immediatly: suplies get more expensive, and the purchasing power of consumers diminish.
Nokia has been taking a hard hit, mostly because of its management. But the bad economic climate in the world, specially in Europe, is not helping any european company.
That is exactly what Marshall McLuhan wrote about in the seventies, but people didn't understand then. The "global village" is like a village where you find only people that think like you, but are dispersed around the globe. In fact, there are thousands of global villages, with populations that can from 10 (you obscure blog of choice) to hundred thousands (Slashdot or Facebook), and all these villages have little connections between them.
If you can out for too much time in one particular village, chances are that your views will become increasingly extreme and diverge from the “mainstream”.
You need 500.000 experiments toverify that a number is random? Do you need to interview 500.000 people to know who will be elected president?
Seriously, where have you studied Statistics? It seems it was not your favorite subject.
He was not exactly a scientist, but was very close to what you would call a "science hero". He helped to improve the aqualung, used by every diver (including for scientific research), and did a pretty good job of science communication for a broad audience. Much before Myth Busters, Costeau was making nature documentaries that were broadcasted on National TV. He also raised public awareness of human impacts on the sea, and of the ecology in general.
That is a hero!
Re:It's for 'Statistical' computing
on
R In a Nutshell
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· Score: 1
I have used two programs for Statistical Analysis that have one advantage of R: both are free, nad part of the GNU project. Of course, both have disadvantages.
1) PSPP - a free alternative to SPSS. It does not have every option as SPSS, but in my opinion is fairly complete and has a lot of power. It is just like "click click. There is the average, the median, the standard deviaton, my null hypothesis cannot be rejected, let`s go back to work".
2) Gretl - Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library - a great tool for econometric analysis. If you are interested only in econometrics, I find it much more powerful than PSPP. If you are an R guru, you can use Gretl (which can be operated from a GUI or a CLI) for most calculations and, whenever you find a dead end, send the data to R.
For me, R is an incredible beast that I would like to tame. But programs like PSPP or Gretl (and SPSS, eViews, etc) can help me in so many situations that I don`t find myself needing R that much.
You are right, is not freedom of speech, but of press. And to have a "legal" newspaper you should have at least one person with a journalism registry in the Labor Ministry, and you should send one copy of the newspaper to the National Library. There are not much safeguards to freedom of speech online, if a dictator get the presidency.
But foreigners, don’t be alarmed. No one follow these laws in Brasil nowadays. No one follow any law in Brazil anyway, and that’s why this country is not in the position it should be.
You will probably read some comments bellow “defending” Brazil against an “offense” made by an American. As a brazilian, this sort of attitude only embarrass me.
Brazilian libel and slander laws suck. Period. As a country, we don’t value that much freedom of speech (although we speak on the contrary). When you read the brazilian constitution you can find an article that states: “Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our country”. With an addendum: “But anonymity is forbidden”.
The decision of the judge only reflects this doctrine that bans anonymity and makes difficult the job of whistleblowers.
This has some interesting consequences. For instance, brazilian companies that have stock options in the NY Stock Exchange have great difficulties to comply to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sox). Sox says the company MUST have procedures to allow anonymous complaints, but brazilian laws says that you are NOW ALLOWED to make anonymous complaints. Talk about Cath 66, he?
They use less resources in part because they have a smaller income (use of energy is a a positive function of the income). But it is not evident that they are more efficient (from the article - "In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day).
A positive side of most slums is that the streets are so narrow that you cannot drive a car through them, only walk, ride a bike or a motorcycle. The streets are narrow because it was a more efficient use of the land, but now the resident druglords like this “feature” because it makes some areas of the slum inaccessible to police cars. And crime is a big problem in slums, and it spreads to the streets surrounding it.
If more crime is a trade-off to a little less of CO2 emission of cars, I choose more emissions and less crime. But this is only my personal preference.
Models are created not to be exact replicas of the realities, but because they are easier to understand and manipulate than the reality - think of a car model, opposed to a car. From these models, we derive logic conclusions that are valid in reality . Eg: ceteris paribus, a reduction in the quantity of a good suplied to a market will make the price increase, for any quantity demanded.
I would say that most microeconomic models I have studied are consistent and "good enough". If you study most modern management theories, microeconomics is a very important foundation.
Macroeconomy, on the other hand, is still a field where the models are still not good enough, an there are a lot of changes in each decade or so. For instance, the Nobel Award for Stiglitz et ali, for the models that take in account Information asymmetry, was awarded in 2001!
Think of economic models as "physics", and applied economics (what the Fed or the government does) as "engineering". If an engineer builds a bridge and it colapses, nobody would claim that Newton or the gravity theory was wrong.
Apple is a great company, that makes great products. In the personal computer market, it is the underdog, and leaves the system pretty open for the user. Apple has developed Mobile Me, but it is not a vital part of the operating system, and I don't need to pay a monthly fee to Apple just to use my computer. The iPod is also pretty cool, because, back in the day, Apple had to compete in a crowded market to sell it.
However, when it comes to the iPhone and now, the iPad, things are different. The iPhone is not the dominant player in the smartphone market (Nokia still is), but Apple is the company that is growing at (much) bigger rates than the rest of the market, and is on the way to become the predominant player. With such a loyal following in the smartphone market, Apple is locking the iPhone to milk more money from its costumers.
I am out of this game. For S$ 30 I bought from my local carrier a Nokia phone with a System 60 3rd Edition, while the iPhone 3GS would cost me S$ 900 (most people prefer to switch to a more expensive monthly plan, and pay a fraction of this price). To compete with locked down device with a price of S$ 50, I would pay more for an open system, not for a locked-down iPhone. And the same reasoning goes for the comparison between the Kindle and the iPad.
You should a thing or two about Maltus, whose ideas are very similar to yours.
Human population will someday peak (we are not growing as fast as we have grown in the past), but starvation or war won`t necessarily be the cause. The productivity on agriculture is rising day after day, and I believe people in China (or India, or whatever) are rational, and will not have as many children as our parents or grandparents.
And to think only of the United States, the growth rate of the population is 0,9% per year, but the natural growth (which don`t consider migration) is only 0,6%.
It was pretty scaring in Rio de Janeiro. Traffic lights were gonne, and today I learned that the police had some work to do in a couple neighbourhoods. Subway and trains stopped.
I was at home, but suddenly all my food in the refrigerator could spoil, and I had no air conditioning in a freaking hot night. Landline phones were gone, too.
The mobile phone from TIM network was not working, but I could make some calls from a phone from Claro (after some atempts). Surprinsingly, I could use use a HSDPA modem and a notebook to have access to the internet. Then I realized it was not happening only in Rio or other cities, but the lights had gone out in half of the country.
Actually, I believe on nVidia headquarters there was some celebration. ATI, their direct oponent, no longer exists - it was bought by another company. AMD might be bigger than Nvidia, but they don't have the same focus and business strategy.
If it is sooo easy to port a software from Mac/Power PC to Mactel, and if Rosetta is sooo fast, why did Apple broke the news one year before the release? Just to lose sales?
I don't buy it. And I think Apple should offer some help to Neo Office J or OpenOffice. At least for now, the only complete office suite for the Mac is MS Office.
The architecture change made me postpone the acquisition of a Mac Mini. The change might be beneficial in the long run, but on the short term we will have lack of software available for the "Mactel" platform.
I hope Apple at least send a Mactel workstation for the NeoOffice J team for free. These guys have been working for free, to the benefit of the community of users of the Macintosh. I hope Apple acknowledges the effort, and that, in the day the Apple Intel computer is released, the port of NeoOffice J is finished.
The hell has REALLY frozen. Last week we saw Apple saying they will migrate to Intel and Debian releasing Sarge.
And now... an argentinian stooding up for the brazilians!
Jokes aside, if you are lucky enough to have at least a bachelor degree, Brazil is a great place to live. Warm weather, hot women, good surf. Like California, but with high crime rates.
And yes, computers here are expensive. A low-end Dell costs as much as US$ 1.000.
If you live in a house with 3 or 4 people using the computer, a Mac Mini is a very good option for a second computer. Or maybe you want a computer that "just works", for internet, e-mail, word processing, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Im am not sure if these are valid options for this guy: he wants to keep his small business, and asks if he can develop free software instead of closed softare – and still make a living.
Engineers could benefit enormously with one semester or two of humanities. A little knowledge of sociology, anthropology, psychology or economics can open the minds of engineers. And, let`s be honest, engineers are very intelligent, but could go farther on their careers and theirs lifes with better inter-personal skills.
For myself, I am doing the other inverse route. I have always been a nerd, but made a very unwise decision to go for a major on Communication studies, to become a journalist. I began using Linux during college, around 1998, as a hobby. When I started working, I wrote for a newspaper about (surprise!) computers and the interwebs. That was when I met Slashdot.
Unhappy with my career choice, I pursued another major, on Economics, and my favorite courses were calculus and econometrics. Now I work on the financial department of an engineer firm, and spend much of my time analyzing data and writing small VBS scripts (we use Oracle Hyperion to retrieve data from a database to MS Excel).
And for the title of the post... yes, 80% the parties on humanities majors are better than the parties on technological courses. (I have just created this statistic, of course)
It is not illegal. But the Intelligence Agencies are monitoring these types of communication because they need to know the itinerary of the riot, to prevent looting of shops and banks, burning of public and private buildings and aggressions against policemen. On Tuesday on Rio de Janeiro there were more policemen wounded than protesters. On Thursday the police of Rio de Janeiro had to use all its force to prevent the invasion of the City Hall, the working place of the mayor, but there were 37 shops os buildings looted - in only one avenue! This is NOT like "Occupy Wall Street". It is violent. Ugly.
Contrary to what some might expect, not everycompany in the oil industry is making a lot of money these days. With the spike in the Brent crude price, the refineries have, in fact, seen their margins getting thinner every day. As some refineries are in the brink of losing money, dont expext much investment on security or enviroment from them. The only possible solution? The regulator could tighten security requirements, forcing the bad refineries out of business and making the others have a better security performance. The downside? Gasoline prices will go out, as the gasoline from the old refineries will no longer go to the market. I don't know if the american government is willing to pay this price.
In fact, muslims are NOT ashamed of their prophet has been married to a girl. If you don`t believe, just read the wikipedia entry about Aisha, or the one about child marriage.
Truth is, many more child marriages occur in India, but there the government is trying to stop it. On Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, it is considered absolutely normal and holy to marry a child. A movie depicting the relationship of Muhammad and Aisha would be considered disgusting in the west, and would not raise much controversy on the islamic countries.
Every time I learn a little more about Saudi Arabia or the Islam, I get a little more nauseated.
Syria has been a de facto "gun-included" country for the past months. Everybody, and their brother, carries a weapon there, and on June more than 2,5 thousand people died there (an average of more than 90 people per day). To put things in perspective: for every fatal victim of this shooting, 7 syrians died EVERY DAY. And this was repeated for several months, and the killings there are still happening. Sorry, but this teorethical cenario is not convincing to me, considering current events and historical examples, on United States and other countries.
Are you sure that european companies are benefiting from the current economic downturn? Companies are selling less, and earnings are going downhill. It will take some times for european companies to benefit from the depreciation of the euro against the dollar (with an increase in exports), but the negative effects are felt immediatly: suplies get more expensive, and the purchasing power of consumers diminish.
Nokia has been taking a hard hit, mostly because of its management. But the bad economic climate in the world, specially in Europe, is not helping any european company.
That is exactly what Marshall McLuhan wrote about in the seventies, but people didn't understand then. The "global village" is like a village where you find only people that think like you, but are dispersed around the globe. In fact, there are thousands of global villages, with populations that can from 10 (you obscure blog of choice) to hundred thousands (Slashdot or Facebook), and all these villages have little connections between them. If you can out for too much time in one particular village, chances are that your views will become increasingly extreme and diverge from the “mainstream”.
You need 500.000 experiments toverify that a number is random? Do you need to interview 500.000 people to know who will be elected president? Seriously, where have you studied Statistics? It seems it was not your favorite subject.
He was not exactly a scientist, but was very close to what you would call a "science hero". He helped to improve the aqualung, used by every diver (including for scientific research), and did a pretty good job of science communication for a broad audience. Much before Myth Busters, Costeau was making nature documentaries that were broadcasted on National TV. He also raised public awareness of human impacts on the sea, and of the ecology in general. That is a hero!
I have used two programs for Statistical Analysis that have one advantage of R: both are free, nad part of the GNU project. Of course, both have disadvantages.
1) PSPP - a free alternative to SPSS. It does not have every option as SPSS, but in my opinion is fairly complete and has a lot of power. It is just like "click click. There is the average, the median, the standard deviaton, my null hypothesis cannot be rejected, let`s go back to work".
2) Gretl - Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library - a great tool for econometric analysis. If you are interested only in econometrics, I find it much more powerful than PSPP. If you are an R guru, you can use Gretl (which can be operated from a GUI or a CLI) for most calculations and, whenever you find a dead end, send the data to R.
For me, R is an incredible beast that I would like to tame. But programs like PSPP or Gretl (and SPSS, eViews, etc) can help me in so many situations that I don`t find myself needing R that much.
You are right, is not freedom of speech, but of press. And to have a "legal" newspaper you should have at least one person with a journalism registry in the Labor Ministry, and you should send one copy of the newspaper to the National Library. There are not much safeguards to freedom of speech online, if a dictator get the presidency.
But foreigners, don’t be alarmed. No one follow these laws in Brasil nowadays. No one follow any law in Brazil anyway, and that’s why this country is not in the position it should be.
You will probably read some comments bellow “defending” Brazil against an “offense” made by an American. As a brazilian, this sort of attitude only embarrass me.
Brazilian libel and slander laws suck. Period. As a country, we don’t value that much freedom of speech (although we speak on the contrary). When you read the brazilian constitution you can find an article that states: “Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our country”. With an addendum: “But anonymity is forbidden”.
The decision of the judge only reflects this doctrine that bans anonymity and makes difficult the job of whistleblowers.
This has some interesting consequences. For instance, brazilian companies that have stock options in the NY Stock Exchange have great difficulties to comply to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sox). Sox says the company MUST have procedures to allow anonymous complaints, but brazilian laws says that you are NOW ALLOWED to make anonymous complaints. Talk about Cath 66, he?
They use less resources in part because they have a smaller income (use of energy is a a positive function of the income). But it is not evident that they are more efficient (from the article - "In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day).
A positive side of most slums is that the streets are so narrow that you cannot drive a car through them, only walk, ride a bike or a motorcycle. The streets are narrow because it was a more efficient use of the land, but now the resident druglords like this “feature” because it makes some areas of the slum inaccessible to police cars. And crime is a big problem in slums, and it spreads to the streets surrounding it.
If more crime is a trade-off to a little less of CO2 emission of cars, I choose more emissions and less crime. But this is only my personal preference.
Models are created not to be exact replicas of the realities, but because they are easier to understand and manipulate than the reality - think of a car model, opposed to a car. From these models, we derive logic conclusions that are valid in reality . Eg: ceteris paribus, a reduction in the quantity of a good suplied to a market will make the price increase, for any quantity demanded.
I would say that most microeconomic models I have studied are consistent and "good enough". If you study most modern management theories, microeconomics is a very important foundation.
Macroeconomy, on the other hand, is still a field where the models are still not good enough, an there are a lot of changes in each decade or so. For instance, the Nobel Award for Stiglitz et ali, for the models that take in account Information asymmetry, was awarded in 2001!
Think of economic models as "physics", and applied economics (what the Fed or the government does) as "engineering". If an engineer builds a bridge and it colapses, nobody would claim that Newton or the gravity theory was wrong.
Apple is a great company, that makes great products. In the personal computer market, it is the underdog, and leaves the system pretty open for the user. Apple has developed Mobile Me, but it is not a vital part of the operating system, and I don't need to pay a monthly fee to Apple just to use my computer. The iPod is also pretty cool, because, back in the day, Apple had to compete in a crowded market to sell it.
However, when it comes to the iPhone and now, the iPad, things are different. The iPhone is not the dominant player in the smartphone market (Nokia still is), but Apple is the company that is growing at (much) bigger rates than the rest of the market, and is on the way to become the predominant player. With such a loyal following in the smartphone market, Apple is locking the iPhone to milk more money from its costumers.
I am out of this game. For S$ 30 I bought from my local carrier a Nokia phone with a System 60 3rd Edition, while the iPhone 3GS would cost me S$ 900 (most people prefer to switch to a more expensive monthly plan, and pay a fraction of this price). To compete with locked down device with a price of S$ 50, I would pay more for an open system, not for a locked-down iPhone. And the same reasoning goes for the comparison between the Kindle and the iPad.
Human population will someday peak (we are not growing as fast as we have grown in the past), but starvation or war won`t necessarily be the cause. The productivity on agriculture is rising day after day, and I believe people in China (or India, or whatever) are rational, and will not have as many children as our parents or grandparents.
And to think only of the United States, the growth rate of the population is 0,9% per year, but the natural growth (which don`t consider migration) is only 0,6%.
It was pretty scaring in Rio de Janeiro. Traffic lights were gonne, and today I learned that the police had some work to do in a couple neighbourhoods. Subway and trains stopped. I was at home, but suddenly all my food in the refrigerator could spoil, and I had no air conditioning in a freaking hot night. Landline phones were gone, too. The mobile phone from TIM network was not working, but I could make some calls from a phone from Claro (after some atempts). Surprinsingly, I could use use a HSDPA modem and a notebook to have access to the internet. Then I realized it was not happening only in Rio or other cities, but the lights had gone out in half of the country.
Actually a lot of population of Iran is well educated and some what more liberal than a lot of Arab nations.
Iran is not an Arab nation. They are persians.
Actually, I believe on nVidia headquarters there was some celebration. ATI, their direct oponent, no longer exists - it was bought by another company. AMD might be bigger than Nvidia, but they don't have the same focus and business strategy.
I don't buy it. And I think Apple should offer some help to Neo Office J or OpenOffice. At least for now, the only complete office suite for the Mac is MS Office.
I hope Apple at least send a Mactel workstation for the NeoOffice J team for free. These guys have been working for free, to the benefit of the community of users of the Macintosh. I hope Apple acknowledges the effort, and that, in the day the Apple Intel computer is released, the port of NeoOffice J is finished.
And now... an argentinian stooding up for the brazilians!
Jokes aside, if you are lucky enough to have at least a bachelor degree, Brazil is a great place to live. Warm weather, hot women, good surf. Like California, but with high crime rates.
And yes, computers here are expensive. A low-end Dell costs as much as US$ 1.000.
If you live in a house with 3 or 4 people using the computer, a Mac Mini is a very good option for a second computer. Or maybe you want a computer that "just works", for internet, e-mail, word processing, etc.