The problem is, all you guys who posted above me aren't thinking inside the box.
Rather than looking at individual dots, group them together into 3x3 matrices. On the paper you are talking about, at 300dpi resolution, there are 85,000 such boxes.
Each matrix can hold an image painted in one of 256 colors on a background painted in one of 255 remaining colors. We've now got 55,488,000,000 bits of storage, or 6,615 MB.
We'll sacrifice the first 256 boxes as a registration area that displays the 256 unique colors as they appear on that particular paper. We'll sacrifice the rest of the top two rows for similar registrations showing matrix boundaries, etc, all done in triple redundancy (and repeated a couple of times, too). I won't bother adjusting the calculations that follow though: as far as the math is concerned, this is an insignificant overhead.
Now consider the shape of the image. If we use an "L" shape of the left column and bottom row of the matrix, we can rotate that into 4 distinct positions, increasing our storage to 26,460 MB.
By dropping the top cell from our original "L", we've got a new figure that can be taken through the same transforms, and we've doubled our storage again. By adding the center dot to all the figures we have made so far, we double the storage yet again. We've now got more than 103 GB of data on that sheet of paper.
And we don't have to be confined to "L" based images, either.
I expect something a bit more sophisticated than this is being done. A bigger matrix would allow more distinctive shapes and probably be more robust against dust motes, etc. I have no doubt that the technique can be made to work, and it is really appealing! It sounds like the software being developed will work with many of the printers and scanners that are already in common use. And we've got centuries of experience in handling paper. A four drawer filing cabinet could be tomorrow's petabyte archival storage.
One thing I'll miss when Ballmer is gone from the scene is his colorful contributions to the high tech business scene. He has given us monkey dancing, chair throwing, potty-mouthed threats of murdering competitors, and now squirting. Oh, (I almost forgot) the undisclosed threat to the balance sheet. Or maybe that's squirting again.
Heh.
The world's business community will be more stable but much less interesting when Microsoft gets a real CEO.
I bought 3 SanDisk Cruzer 512 MB flash drives not long ago (evaluating them for a project: don't ask). The "U3 launchpad" software they put on these is crap. But there is a de-installer available from the SanDisk web site that scrapes it off easily in a 5 minute operation.
My impression: the SanDisk Cruzer is a good buy when you can find it at a deep discount, as I did (about $21 / GB). But you can't get them in quantity at that price and they aren't worth paying SRP for (or even 15% off SRP). We've gone with a different brand.
Would someone with mod points please mod parent as "+1 insightful" to balance out the "-1 troll" so others can get on with modding it appropriately as "funny"?
And thus I summarize the Slashdot Way to Enlightenment.
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm a recent grad-ewe-et of the American school system so I don't know any better. I mean, I know what it's like to be in a "no child left behind" school system: it means that all of us were better than average when we grad-ewe-etted. My math teacher explained this to us in a really neat way in between his lectures on Intelligent Design: he drew something he called the Gaussian Distribution on a sheet of clear plastic, then folded it in the middle so it had two right hand tails and nothing on the left side of the midpoint. Neat, huh? Isn't topological statistics wunnerfull?
So anyway, here is my question:
Who is a Vell, and why shouldn't some of them be left behind?
This appears to be the equivalent of Microsoft joining forces with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to attempt to assimilate the Navaho by messing with their language. The Navaho Nation would not approve. It seems the Mapuche do not approve, either.
The Mapuche (People of the Land) Nation successfully resisted incursions by the Incas and then the Spanish for well over 500 years, and whether they have finally been subjugated by the current governments of Chile and Argentina remains an open question. At the moment, they are not at war with either government. But they are not assimilated, either: while their numbers are down they are still the largest group in their ancestral lands and their governance and traditions remain intact. This includes the affiliation of Elders who govern the relationships between villages and preserve the cultural and religious oral traditions. And who, surprisingly, are currently involved in developing of a written form of the language.
Would it not be absurd for Microsoft to create a Basque language edition with the assistance of Spanish academicians and government and with no involvement of the Basque themselves? This is would seem to be the european equivalent of the Mapuche Elders' complaint.
However, in this scenario (even if I could be traced) its arguable that *I* never attacked a site, all I did was to place a tool that could be used in that way in a public location.
IANAL, but it seems to me that there is a long history of "public nuisance" and "reckless endangerment" in common law that could be applied here (at least in countries like the UK and the USA whose legal systems are grounded on common law).
At present, if you created such a link and I discovered your link was accessable from within my municipality, I could petition my local court to fine you rather heavily for creating a public nuisance that recklessly endangers the legitimate business interests of the city, and require you to fix the site. This is commonly used for controlling things like uncapped wells that put toddlers at risk, fire hazards of various kinds, and so on, and is usually one of the more easily accessable court actions.
So far as I know, this use of municiple courts to control internet misbehavior has not yet been attempted, but I don't think there is anything to prevent that. It might take a while to find judges with the vision to understand the issues and the gumption to take on these cases, but there are a lot of different jurisdictions where these complaints could be filed. I'm not sure how issues of jurisdiction and the effects of negative publicity would play out, but it would be interesting to see what might happen. In essence, rather than trying to create a new big club to beat the intarweb miscreants into line, we'd be protecting our tubes with the threat of being nibbled to death by ducks.
Between 1972 and 2004, dropout rates have fallen drastically. For all ethnicities, they are now almost half what the rates were 30 years ago (note: the full article that references this table can be found here)
The table that parent references describes the population of 16 to 24 year olds who are not in high school and have neither a HS diploma or the equivalent certificate. That is not the same population described in TFA. TFA is talking about persons who had entered the school system and then withdrawn before graduation.
This refutes the argument that TFA is "Media spin". It may or may not be. But a rather reckless comparison of apples to oranges won't demonstrate that it is.
...hot air spit out by someone who's job is to spew hot air.
WTF???
You, sir, are confusing the role of the Chief Executive Officer with that of a dispensible shill.
CEOs should be rarely seen, and heard even less often. Any CIO should seriously question the stability of a possible vendor when that vendor's CEO is acting out of character. It raises serious questions about whether the vendor is making sound strategic decisions, and will be able to support its product throughout its expected service life.
While all my knowledge of balmer is superficial, he just scares me.
Well, he is the only CEO of a major company who is also a potty-mouthed chair-throwing monkey dancer who threatens to kill his business opponents.
Other than that, he might be mostly harmless.
On a more serious vein: isn't it about time for the Microsoft Corporation to evaluate whether their current CEO might be a hindrance to continued profitability, rather than some kind of weird unmeasurable asset?
I've thought about it, and I doubt we could get him to run.
I think democratically elected office would cramp Bill's style. There isn't much room in the presidency for embrace and extend. So even though his skills in the manipulation of vaporware would
be a perfect fit for elected office, I just can't see him being interested.
However I would like to see him get more involved in politics. I think if he started a new software company with the express purpose of embracing and extending Diebold's work, we'd see some interesting times.
If we rely on courtesy to dictate our traffic patterns, we'll be victim to those who have no qualms with putting others lives and vehicles at risk. The U.S. has far too many people that fall into this category for the strategy to be effective.
On a daily basis, I risk my life on the good technical judgment of dozens of strangers as we hurtle by each other at closing speeds approaching 90 mph and offsets of about 4 feet. It takes less than 250 milliseconds for a thousand pounds or more of hard steel to cross that small distance.
So parent post is telling me that while I rely on the cooperation of all these "strangers" to survive my daily commute, I cannot rely on whether they would be courteous if given the chance???
Hey, let me clue parent poster in to something. The reason why any of us survived yesterday's traffic is because somehow all those strangers manage to cooperate with each other, and with us, at lethal speeds. Yeah, they'd be courteous at slower speeds, if given the chance.
By the time I had gotten to the end of the article, it was no surprise to find John C. Dvorak was the author. The man made some useful contributions to connectivity technology in the late '80s and early '90s. In the last ten years or so, he has been demonstrating that he can make a good money by being a highly visible troll. I cannot imagine that he actually believes half the stuff he writes; mostly he just seems to like to keep the pot boiling.
His argument against OLPC is basically a recycling of the old "White Man's Burden" argument, which was used to justify european colonialism in the late 1800s and neo-colonialism in the middle 1900s. In its current form it strongly implies that individuals who grew up in third world cultures are incapable of managing new technologies or making decisions about implementing these technologies in their native lands. It is up to us, who were fortunate enough to be born into the high tech cultures, to develop a Gantt chart for bringing these poor peoples up to speed (and we can do so without regard to cultural or logistic issues we know nothing about). And we should raise our voices in protest against anyone who suggests that there might be another way of doing things.
I also have some serious concerns about the "facts" presented in this product of Dvorak's imagination. He keeps referring to Africa for his examples. Since when are Brazil, Argentina, or Thailand in Africa? Yet these are the three nations that have expressed the most serious interest in deploying OLPCs.
I suggest that when you see Dvorak's name in the byline, you should use all your critical reading skills when absorbing his words. And since the man has a sizeable ego, this is even more important when he buries his name at the end, as he did in this article.
No risk of meltdown, china syndrome, or other runaway problems. The worst case would be a conventional explosion.
and 4) is any plutonium (or other weapons-grade material) produced?
No.
He talks a good physics snow job; glibly spicing his words with equations that provide a certain kind of high energy ambience without actually conveying any information to his audience. In his own way, he is quite the showman.
However it did seem to me that he is saying that the theory behind his fusor engines has been proven, and that he is staking his reputation on that. I'm also pretty sure he is saying that the remaining problems are in the engineering, not the physics. So its like rocketships: we know it can be done but we don't yet know how to do it well enough to be really useful.
A search of Dice shows a lot more.NET jobs. Would taking the Perl job hurt my prospects in the future?
Let's just focus on this. And sum your current professional coding experience as X years. Then in two years
If you go with the MS shop your resume can say "X+2 years experience coding in a Microsoft shop using.Net, C#, yaddayadda"
If you go with the small shop your resume can say "X+2 years experience coding in a range of environments including.Net, Perl, etc; AND 2 years of increasing responsibility in managing web coding projects including working directly with clients, and contributing to modifying specifications and contracts to meet changing requirements, yaddayadda"
For several years I chaired the LPN Board for a large hospital, which screened applicants for hire and promotions. A big chunk of our work could be summed up with this question: "Is this a nurse with five years of experience, or a nurse with one year of experience repeated five times?" The same thing applies here. I don't think your decision is about money. I think it is about whether you want to take the red pill or the blue pill.
Very little impact for what they provide me. Which is the point of FF: a relatively small core that can be extended in a customized way (something like 2,000 different add-ons now) to meet individual needs. I'm getting what I need without carrying the weight of a lot of features I don't want.
There are more compact browsers, and there are probably some that are more efficient in their use of memory. But Firefox is the most compact, extensible browser that has a broad support group behind it. v2.0 has gotten rid of the pesky memory leak problems. It's now all good.
Astroturfers and the like really need to find some other points to criticize FF about. The arguments about inefficient use of resources fail it, and they are beginning to reduce the credibility of those who push them.
For me, Firefox 2.0 is worthless; bloathed, crashes constantly, and is just not workable anymore.
What is this "bloathedness" of which you speak?
I've been running FFv2.0 on my home machine for 5 days with my usual full complement of 25+ extensions[*], sessions longer than 24 hours, usually 8-12 tabs open, often using OOo and the GIMP concurrently (under WinXP at 1.6 GHz with 768 MB ram). For the enriched experience and development tools that FF offers, it isn't bloated. It is more stable in this development environment than FFv1.5 was.
[*]Manifest of add-ons:
1-Click-Weather
AdBlock Filterset G Updater
AdBlock Plus
Answers
Calculator
ChromeEditPlus
ColorZilla
CustomizeGoogle
DomInspector
eQuake
Firebug
FlashBlock
FoxNotes
GetMail
GMail Space
HTML Validator
IE View
Image Zoom
MeasureIt
Nuke Anything Enhanced
Pearl Crescent Page Server Basic
Performancing
SpiderZilla
Sun Cult
Tabbrowser Preferences
Talkback
Web Developer
Wikipedia Lookup Extension
I will add Blockfall and Colorful Tabs, and possibly Blogger Bar, to this when these become available on v2.0
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
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Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
I'm pretty sure that modern web crawlers in the real world are designed to cope with just about anything. I know that if I wrote one, that's what I would do.
If you create a web crawler that only accepts valid markup, the only pages it will crawl successfully are the ones about creating valid markup!
Since both you and I have to guess at how a modern web crawler (or browser!) is going to deal with the ambiguities inherent in bad markup, I'm pretty sure that it is a far better thing to simply use valid markup, and know for sure how that will be interpreted.
I'm pretty sure that if I when I've expanded to where I need to hire someone to write my web pages, I'll want someone who writes valid markup. It's not that high a bar. If his pages don't validate, why should I hire him? I wouldn't hire a carpenter who doesn't know how to meet the building codes.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
One good reason is because it means your web pages are more likely to be in compliance with XML (XHTML). That allows modern modern web crawlers to process your content more accurately, which in turn means that many more people will be able to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom you have put on your pages.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...the point is that HTML is not a programming language and as someone who has been using HTML since 1994 I don't see why it should be thought of one now.
Actually, HTML IS a programming language: it is one of the semantic mark-up languages of the SGML family, designed for computerized implementation. I think what you meant is that HTML is not an imperative language like Fortran, Cobol,..., Perl, or Python. HTML is instead a declarative language, like most other markup languages, or the regex language embedded in Perl. These state what should be done (while an imperative language defines how a procedure is to be done).
I have been working with HTML since 1995, so you have a year more experience than I do.
Perhaps because I have less experience, I have had no difficulty with adjusting to the more rigorous requirements of HTML 4.01 Strict, and I very much appreciate the greater power that is now available to me in using CSS and DHTML techniques on my pages. I am currently very interested in the subset of possibilities that are now available with "Ajax" or "Web 2.0" techniques, and I think the need to be a little fussier in using the HTML language correctly is a small price to pay for things like Google Maps and other interactive web pages.
If its not science then it shouldn't be considered academic.
That statement strongly implies that there was no such thing as academia prior to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. I believe that there are a lot of scientists and a huge number of scholars who would disagree with you.
There are also a number of subjects of scholarly study where the scientific method cannot be applied. One that comes to mind is history. Another is mathematics(!) Yet another is logic(!!) That's interesting-- if logic is not academic, and if what we are having here is an academic discussion, then it doesn't matter whether any assertion either of us make is logical.
But enough of this.
Core aspects of traditional scholarship involve finding authorities and understanding the credentialing processes that make certain persons and works authoritative in different fields, and using proven scholastic methods to derive new contexts from comparisons between authorities. Often enough, new insights come from these new contexts.
Wikipedia turns this all on its head. I don't give a hoot about whether a Wikipedia article was written by an authority. Instead I simply check the facts that I plan to rely on against the rest of this intarweb thang, by using Google. I've got another way to validate things; I don't need the cumbersome authoritarian approach any more.
This means that I'm increasingly working in a world of truths that are provisional and mutable: at any time anything that I accept as true from Wikipedia-Google I may learn is actually not correct. So I've got to allow for that. I can't be as sure of myself as I could if I relied on authoritative truths.
I think that is actually a Good Thing, since an awful lot of the word's violence comes out of an excessive reliance on certain authorities. If everyone was a little less sure about their beliefs, then I believe that we would all get along much better. We've all been dancing on quicksand ever since our ancestors started to substitute words for direct experiences; it probably is not a bad thing to recognize that more often.
Back to the scholars: the universe of discourse has suddenly changed in the last 10 years. The skills needed in developing, identifying, and credentialing authorities are less important to the general populace since the Wikipedia-Google approach allows an alternative way of cross-checking salient facts. I have had to teach physicians who had spent decades honing their skills in finding pertinent details in a patient's thick chart that all those best practice techniques they had worked to develop were now useless; they've got to learn new computerized ways. And they should really learn how to type on a keyboard, too. Now it seems like the scholars are facing a similar crisis, where new methods have made big portions of established best practices obsolete.
So yeah, let's continue to replace authoritative truths with provisional truthiness. And let's be sure to celebrate those scholars who are helping to shape how we use this new Wikipedia-Google approach. Theirs is a tradition of truth-seeking with more than a millenium of experience behind it; some of the trappings of that tradition should be shelved, but the living core of it can be adapted to the new ways.
We don' need no steenking standards...
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· Score: 3, Funny
Irrespective of the gender confusion of parent, or the relative merits of using Vastu Shasta in preference to Feng Shui or one of the western astrological website balancing methods, this website designer needs some serious help:
2 CSS errors, such that some elements of the design will not render the way intended
over 70 CSS warnings— enough to discourage anyone from taking this website as a serious authority on website implementation
total failure to validate under W3C standards-- since the website is not written in standard HTML but in a bastardized variant of HTML issued by HoTMetaL in 1997.
A website designer needs to be held to a very high standard of compliance. This website designer fails it.
This post deserves to be modded as very, very funny...
The long guns the RAF used in WWII were descendants of the.303 Lee Enfield, not the.30-06 Garand. Very different designs with different strengths and weaknesses-- I'd expect a difference in the standard operating procedure. The Lee Enfield guns were designed around working the bolt action quickly without taking your eye off the target and they excel at rapid fire accuracy. The.30-06 semi-automatics were designed for good accuracy with less training and less field maintenance.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, all you guys who posted above me aren't thinking inside the box.
I expect something a bit more sophisticated than this is being done. A bigger matrix would allow more distinctive shapes and probably be more robust against dust motes, etc. I have no doubt that the technique can be made to work, and it is really appealing! It sounds like the software being developed will work with many of the printers and scanners that are already in common use. And we've got centuries of experience in handling paper. A four drawer filing cabinet could be tomorrow's petabyte archival storage.
One thing I'll miss when Ballmer is gone from the scene is his colorful contributions to the high tech business scene. He has given us monkey dancing, chair throwing, potty-mouthed threats of murdering competitors, and now squirting. Oh, (I almost forgot) the undisclosed threat to the balance sheet. Or maybe that's squirting again.
Heh.
The world's business community will be more stable but much less interesting when Microsoft gets a real CEO.
I bought 3 SanDisk Cruzer 512 MB flash drives not long ago (evaluating them for a project: don't ask). The "U3 launchpad" software they put on these is crap. But there is a de-installer available from the SanDisk web site that scrapes it off easily in a 5 minute operation.
My impression: the SanDisk Cruzer is a good buy when you can find it at a deep discount, as I did (about $21 / GB). But you can't get them in quantity at that price and they aren't worth paying SRP for (or even 15% off SRP). We've gone with a different brand.
Would someone with mod points please mod parent as "+1 insightful" to balance out the "-1 troll" so others can get on with modding it appropriately as "funny"?
And thus I summarize the Slashdot Way to Enlightenment.
I didn't have mod points for a year or so, and only recently started getting them again.
Wow! You mean there's hope?
I haven't had mod points for more than 36 months, but I've maintained excellent karma and I metamod daily.
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm a recent grad-ewe-et of the American school system so I don't know any better. I mean, I know what it's like to be in a "no child left behind" school system: it means that all of us were better than average when we grad-ewe-etted. My math teacher explained this to us in a really neat way in between his lectures on Intelligent Design: he drew something he called the Gaussian Distribution on a sheet of clear plastic, then folded it in the middle so it had two right hand tails and nothing on the left side of the midpoint. Neat, huh? Isn't topological statistics wunnerfull?
So anyway, here is my question:
Who is a Vell, and why shouldn't some of them be left behind?
This appears to be the equivalent of Microsoft joining forces with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to attempt to assimilate the Navaho by messing with their language. The Navaho Nation would not approve. It seems the Mapuche do not approve, either.
The Mapuche (People of the Land) Nation successfully resisted incursions by the Incas and then the Spanish for well over 500 years, and whether they have finally been subjugated by the current governments of Chile and Argentina remains an open question. At the moment, they are not at war with either government. But they are not assimilated, either: while their numbers are down they are still the largest group in their ancestral lands and their governance and traditions remain intact. This includes the affiliation of Elders who govern the relationships between villages and preserve the cultural and religious oral traditions. And who, surprisingly, are currently involved in developing of a written form of the language.
Would it not be absurd for Microsoft to create a Basque language edition with the assistance of Spanish academicians and government and with no involvement of the Basque themselves? This is would seem to be the european equivalent of the Mapuche Elders' complaint.
However, in this scenario (even if I could be traced) its arguable that *I* never attacked a site, all I did was to place a tool that could be used in that way in a public location.
IANAL, but it seems to me that there is a long history of "public nuisance" and "reckless endangerment" in common law that could be applied here (at least in countries like the UK and the USA whose legal systems are grounded on common law).
At present, if you created such a link and I discovered your link was accessable from within my municipality, I could petition my local court to fine you rather heavily for creating a public nuisance that recklessly endangers the legitimate business interests of the city, and require you to fix the site. This is commonly used for controlling things like uncapped wells that put toddlers at risk, fire hazards of various kinds, and so on, and is usually one of the more easily accessable court actions.
So far as I know, this use of municiple courts to control internet misbehavior has not yet been attempted, but I don't think there is anything to prevent that. It might take a while to find judges with the vision to understand the issues and the gumption to take on these cases, but there are a lot of different jurisdictions where these complaints could be filed. I'm not sure how issues of jurisdiction and the effects of negative publicity would play out, but it would be interesting to see what might happen. In essence, rather than trying to create a new big club to beat the intarweb miscreants into line, we'd be protecting our tubes with the threat of being nibbled to death by ducks.
Between 1972 and 2004, dropout rates have fallen drastically. For all ethnicities, they are now almost half what the rates were 30 years ago (note: the full article that references this table can be found here)
The table that parent references describes the population of 16 to 24 year olds who are not in high school and have neither a HS diploma or the equivalent certificate. That is not the same population described in TFA. TFA is talking about persons who had entered the school system and then withdrawn before graduation.
This refutes the argument that TFA is "Media spin". It may or may not be. But a rather reckless comparison of apples to oranges won't demonstrate that it is.
WTF???
You, sir, are confusing the role of the Chief Executive Officer with that of a dispensible shill.
CEOs should be rarely seen, and heard even less often. Any CIO should seriously question the stability of a possible vendor when that vendor's CEO is acting out of character. It raises serious questions about whether the vendor is making sound strategic decisions, and will be able to support its product throughout its expected service life.
Should someone who makes technology decisions based on his emotional reaction to Steve Balmer's FUD really be a CIO?
Should someone as fucking emotionally reactive (and foul-mouthed) as Steve Ballmer really be a CEO?
Microsoft is in need of some big changes if it is going to survive the transition to Vista.
While all my knowledge of balmer is superficial, he just scares me.
Well, he is the only CEO of a major company who is also a potty-mouthed chair-throwing monkey dancer who threatens to kill his business opponents.
Other than that, he might be mostly harmless.
On a more serious vein: isn't it about time for the Microsoft Corporation to evaluate whether their current CEO might be a hindrance to continued profitability, rather than some kind of weird unmeasurable asset?
I've thought about it, and I doubt we could get him to run.
I think democratically elected office would cramp Bill's style. There isn't much room in the presidency for embrace and extend. So even though his skills in the manipulation of vaporware would be a perfect fit for elected office, I just can't see him being interested.
However I would like to see him get more involved in politics. I think if he started a new software company with the express purpose of embracing and extending Diebold's work, we'd see some interesting times.
If we rely on courtesy to dictate our traffic patterns, we'll be victim to those who have no qualms with putting others lives and vehicles at risk. The U.S. has far too many people that fall into this category for the strategy to be effective.
On a daily basis, I risk my life on the good technical judgment of dozens of strangers as we hurtle by each other at closing speeds approaching 90 mph and offsets of about 4 feet. It takes less than 250 milliseconds for a thousand pounds or more of hard steel to cross that small distance.
So parent post is telling me that while I rely on the cooperation of all these "strangers" to survive my daily commute, I cannot rely on whether they would be courteous if given the chance???
Hey, let me clue parent poster in to something. The reason why any of us survived yesterday's traffic is because somehow all those strangers manage to cooperate with each other, and with us, at lethal speeds. Yeah, they'd be courteous at slower speeds, if given the chance.
I'd bet my life on it.
By the time I had gotten to the end of the article, it was no surprise to find John C. Dvorak was the author. The man made some useful contributions to connectivity technology in the late '80s and early '90s. In the last ten years or so, he has been demonstrating that he can make a good money by being a highly visible troll. I cannot imagine that he actually believes half the stuff he writes; mostly he just seems to like to keep the pot boiling.
His argument against OLPC is basically a recycling of the old "White Man's Burden" argument, which was used to justify european colonialism in the late 1800s and neo-colonialism in the middle 1900s. In its current form it strongly implies that individuals who grew up in third world cultures are incapable of managing new technologies or making decisions about implementing these technologies in their native lands. It is up to us, who were fortunate enough to be born into the high tech cultures, to develop a Gantt chart for bringing these poor peoples up to speed (and we can do so without regard to cultural or logistic issues we know nothing about). And we should raise our voices in protest against anyone who suggests that there might be another way of doing things.
I also have some serious concerns about the "facts" presented in this product of Dvorak's imagination. He keeps referring to Africa for his examples. Since when are Brazil, Argentina, or Thailand in Africa? Yet these are the three nations that have expressed the most serious interest in deploying OLPCs.
I suggest that when you see Dvorak's name in the byline, you should use all your critical reading skills when absorbing his words. And since the man has a sizeable ego, this is even more important when he buries his name at the end, as he did in this article.
So 1) what's the fuel,
Boron.
2) what's the waste,
Carbon and helium.
3) what's the risk of a meltdown,
No risk of meltdown, china syndrome, or other runaway problems. The worst case would be a conventional explosion.
and 4) is any plutonium (or other weapons-grade material) produced?
No.
He talks a good physics snow job; glibly spicing his words with equations that provide a certain kind of high energy ambience without actually conveying any information to his audience. In his own way, he is quite the showman.
However it did seem to me that he is saying that the theory behind his fusor engines has been proven, and that he is staking his reputation on that. I'm also pretty sure he is saying that the remaining problems are in the engineering, not the physics. So its like rocketships: we know it can be done but we don't yet know how to do it well enough to be really useful.
A search of Dice shows a lot more .NET jobs. Would taking the Perl job hurt my prospects in the future?
Let's just focus on this. And sum your current professional coding experience as X years. Then in two years
For several years I chaired the LPN Board for a large hospital, which screened applicants for hire and promotions. A big chunk of our work could be summed up with this question: "Is this a nurse with five years of experience, or a nurse with one year of experience repeated five times?" The same thing applies here. I don't think your decision is about money. I think it is about whether you want to take the red pill or the blue pill.
and how much memory are all these goodies using??
Very little impact for what they provide me. Which is the point of FF: a relatively small core that can be extended in a customized way (something like 2,000 different add-ons now) to meet individual needs. I'm getting what I need without carrying the weight of a lot of features I don't want.
There are more compact browsers, and there are probably some that are more efficient in their use of memory. But Firefox is the most compact, extensible browser that has a broad support group behind it. v2.0 has gotten rid of the pesky memory leak problems. It's now all good.
Astroturfers and the like really need to find some other points to criticize FF about. The arguments about inefficient use of resources fail it, and they are beginning to reduce the credibility of those who push them.
For me, Firefox 2.0 is worthless; bloathed, crashes constantly, and is just not workable anymore.
What is this "bloathedness" of which you speak?
I've been running FFv2.0 on my home machine for 5 days with my usual full complement of 25+ extensions[*], sessions longer than 24 hours, usually 8-12 tabs open, often using OOo and the GIMP concurrently (under WinXP at 1.6 GHz with 768 MB ram). For the enriched experience and development tools that FF offers, it isn't bloated. It is more stable in this development environment than FFv1.5 was.
[*]Manifest of add-ons:
- 1-Click-Weather
- AdBlock Filterset G Updater
- AdBlock Plus
- Answers
- Calculator
- ChromeEditPlus
- ColorZilla
- CustomizeGoogle
- DomInspector
- eQuake
- Firebug
- FlashBlock
- FoxNotes
- GetMail
- GMail Space
- HTML Validator
- IE View
- Image Zoom
- MeasureIt
- Nuke Anything Enhanced
- Pearl Crescent Page Server Basic
- Performancing
- SpiderZilla
- Sun Cult
- Tabbrowser Preferences
- Talkback
- Web Developer
- Wikipedia Lookup Extension
I will add Blockfall and Colorful Tabs, and possibly Blogger Bar, to this when these become available on v2.0I'm pretty sure that modern web crawlers in the real world are designed to cope with just about anything. I know that if I wrote one, that's what I would do.
If you create a web crawler that only accepts valid markup, the only pages it will crawl successfully are the ones about creating valid markup!
Since both you and I have to guess at how a modern web crawler (or browser!) is going to deal with the ambiguities inherent in bad markup, I'm pretty sure that it is a far better thing to simply use valid markup, and know for sure how that will be interpreted.
I'm pretty sure that if I when I've expanded to where I need to hire someone to write my web pages, I'll want someone who writes valid markup. It's not that high a bar. If his pages don't validate, why should I hire him? I wouldn't hire a carpenter who doesn't know how to meet the building codes.
One good reason is because it means your web pages are more likely to be in compliance with XML (XHTML). That allows modern modern web crawlers to process your content more accurately, which in turn means that many more people will be able to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom you have put on your pages.
Actually, HTML IS a programming language: it is one of the semantic mark-up languages of the SGML family, designed for computerized implementation. I think what you meant is that HTML is not an imperative language like Fortran, Cobol, ..., Perl, or Python. HTML is instead a declarative language, like most other markup languages, or the regex language embedded in Perl. These state what should be done (while an imperative language defines how a procedure is to be done).
I have been working with HTML since 1995, so you have a year more experience than I do.
Perhaps because I have less experience, I have had no difficulty with adjusting to the more rigorous requirements of HTML 4.01 Strict, and I very much appreciate the greater power that is now available to me in using CSS and DHTML techniques on my pages. I am currently very interested in the subset of possibilities that are now available with "Ajax" or "Web 2.0" techniques, and I think the need to be a little fussier in using the HTML language correctly is a small price to pay for things like Google Maps and other interactive web pages.
If its not science then it shouldn't be considered academic.
That statement strongly implies that there was no such thing as academia prior to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. I believe that there are a lot of scientists and a huge number of scholars who would disagree with you.
There are also a number of subjects of scholarly study where the scientific method cannot be applied. One that comes to mind is history. Another is mathematics(!) Yet another is logic(!!) That's interesting-- if logic is not academic, and if what we are having here is an academic discussion, then it doesn't matter whether any assertion either of us make is logical.
But enough of this.
Core aspects of traditional scholarship involve finding authorities and understanding the credentialing processes that make certain persons and works authoritative in different fields, and using proven scholastic methods to derive new contexts from comparisons between authorities. Often enough, new insights come from these new contexts.
Wikipedia turns this all on its head. I don't give a hoot about whether a Wikipedia article was written by an authority. Instead I simply check the facts that I plan to rely on against the rest of this intarweb thang, by using Google. I've got another way to validate things; I don't need the cumbersome authoritarian approach any more.
This means that I'm increasingly working in a world of truths that are provisional and mutable: at any time anything that I accept as true from Wikipedia-Google I may learn is actually not correct. So I've got to allow for that. I can't be as sure of myself as I could if I relied on authoritative truths.
I think that is actually a Good Thing, since an awful lot of the word's violence comes out of an excessive reliance on certain authorities. If everyone was a little less sure about their beliefs, then I believe that we would all get along much better. We've all been dancing on quicksand ever since our ancestors started to substitute words for direct experiences; it probably is not a bad thing to recognize that more often.
Back to the scholars: the universe of discourse has suddenly changed in the last 10 years. The skills needed in developing, identifying, and credentialing authorities are less important to the general populace since the Wikipedia-Google approach allows an alternative way of cross-checking salient facts. I have had to teach physicians who had spent decades honing their skills in finding pertinent details in a patient's thick chart that all those best practice techniques they had worked to develop were now useless; they've got to learn new computerized ways. And they should really learn how to type on a keyboard, too. Now it seems like the scholars are facing a similar crisis, where new methods have made big portions of established best practices obsolete.
So yeah, let's continue to replace authoritative truths with provisional truthiness. And let's be sure to celebrate those scholars who are helping to shape how we use this new Wikipedia-Google approach. Theirs is a tradition of truth-seeking with more than a millenium of experience behind it; some of the trappings of that tradition should be shelved, but the living core of it can be adapted to the new ways.
Irrespective of the gender confusion of parent, or the relative merits of using Vastu Shasta in preference to Feng Shui or one of the western astrological website balancing methods, this website designer needs some serious help:
A website designer needs to be held to a very high standard of compliance. This website designer fails it.
This post deserves to be modded as very, very funny...
The long guns the RAF used in WWII were descendants of the .303 Lee Enfield, not the .30-06 Garand. Very different designs with different strengths and weaknesses-- I'd expect a difference in the standard operating procedure. The Lee Enfield guns were designed around working the bolt action quickly without taking your eye off the target and they excel at rapid fire accuracy. The .30-06 semi-automatics were designed for good accuracy with less training and less field maintenance.