It is an intresting dilemma, but lest we all forget:
Jobs didn't apply at his own company.
If you feel that you have the skill to go out and make money, there's basically two routes:
1. Convince someone else that you are worth what you desire to earn. 2. Start a company.
Jobs picked #2. To start a company, you need no credentials, but the list of required skills vary dramatically. You don't need to graduate to start a company, but you need to keep the company alive. Usually keeping the company viable is much more effort than getting a degree.
Now if you're running a successful company, you want to hire people with degrees. In part because people with companies are already working for themselves. In part because you can't run a company where everyone is seriously about to jump ship to set up their own shop.
Work based approaches to rounding out your education are a lot more focused, but that is not always good.
Too much focus can omit different approaches. Enough of this and you will become an expert in your (tiny) domain of computing, but may lack fundamental knowledge in other domains. Too much focus at a university and you may pick overly complicated techniques to solve your problems.
There are challenges everywhere, and they extend into learning. If you care about your education, take the same approache that people take when dealing with a large uncertain market; diversify.
Diversity in education is key to mastery of the field. Jobs was being stifled in his university setting, so he left for a real world education in his garage. But don't compare your career to Jobs', as that would be as silly as comparing your basketball skill to that of a Michael Jordan.
The field of computing is in constant flux. Be prepared to relearn and retool throughout your life, but the fundamental base knowledge remains suprisingly the same. Universities can be great for getting that base knowledge, don't pass it up in favor of the programming language of this decade.
Worse yet, people will be watched and harrased by this technology, but never brought to court over it.
In a court, you can question the evidence used against you. Considering that the creator of this evidence indicated that he didn't need to know how it works, it's highly likely that you could get this evidence thrown out because it fails the test of provablility.
So this technology will "flag" people, and they will be watched "just in case". However, there's not going to be a court case, just continued monitoring until the budget to watch this person dries up. And it's very easy to get a bigger budget because you can argue, "We are watching 400,000 people who have been flagged as possible terrorists, we can't keep up. We need more money." Even when your flagging system has worse odds of finding a terrorist than the Lottery.
I've left my university years ago but have recently come in contact with a few people who are still in school.
One was very excited about all of the presentational gadgetry at her community college. Luckily she had some very good professors, but sometimes the gadgetry failed at inopportune times. Othertimes the gadegtry took over the presentation (think of slide shows / powerpoint presentations where you stop listening to the orator because the slides compete).
A month ago, she started taking classes at my alma mater. She was very happy to find that the professors didn't seem to be harder than those of her community college, but a bit worried that there was almost no special presentational hardware. For those who wonder, the material was primarialy displayed on an array of sliding chalkboards. Interestingly enough, her grasp of the material improved.
Now there's at least a million reasons why her understanding of the material may have nothing to do with the presentational medium; however, those who took (or were forced to take) a speech class can understand immediately why low tech often makes the best presentation: You don't compete against your material for the audience's attention.
With a chalkboard, there's not enough time to lay out every detail, so the presentation focuses on big ideas, drilling down into details where necessary, tied together with occasional diagrams. This puts the burdeon of explaining the material on the orator, who is likely well versed in the material. Basically you are getting the information from the expert.
With presentation mediums of higher fidelity, the medium presents so many details that the orator (if one is even present) a distraction. The downside is that you have to personally discover the pitfalls of what's not spelled out in the medium, and you fail to get feedback on ideas that you might believe plausible, but are poorly founded due to conditions outside of the scope of the studied material.
At one end of the spectrum you have professors, at the other you have books. I wouldn't want to read a text while someone was talking to me, nor would I want to listen to a professor while I am busy watching a movie / reading a book. High content presentational medium has its place, but without personal feedback, correction mental misperceptions cannot be made as they form which can be equally destructive to understanding. Oddly enough, the same high content presentation competes with the person most likely to be trying to teach us something.
It's an overreaction, but for all the wrong reasons.
I never had a math teacher that I respected who didn't ask his class to, "Show all of your work" for any given problem.
If the "work" seems to consist of writing the question, and then writing the answer, you failed. In this case, it's a simple matter of the teachers not wanting to have to grade appropriately, or failure of them to test approprately.
Market demographics changed. I'm sorry to hear about your personal loss, but any extension of copyright isn't going to reclaim store traffic.
I mean, if someone is willing to break a copyright that lasts for 50 years withing hours of purchasing a CD, do you think that they will be more respectful of one that lasts 100 years?
The real failure of the music industry is that they did not nurture its market. They've been selling us a package that costs less than a dollar to make for $16 for far too long. Even now with the recent drop in CD prices, I can easily find DVD movies for less than the price of a CD.
RIAA will not help you, they are interested in keeping the system alive in its most profitable form ($16 CDs), they brag and boast about how they killed other medium (DAT tapes), but switching medium every five years would have helped them more than they know. During their most profitable years, there were vinyl singles, LPs, eight track, and cassette tapes. People often bought their favorites a few times because of wear on the medium (which eventually would disappear) and incompatibilites in the delivery medium (can't play that cassette on my record player).
Now with the advertisements about the "takedowns" of juveniles and copyright infringers, I feel sorry that you are on the receiving end of what is likely to be the most widespread act of civil disobediance this decade. But realize that citizens aren't disobediant in these numbers unless they are truly being abused.
Perhaps you can salvage your store by going back to indie labels. Anime held some facination for a year or two (until it demanded it's own isle in Fry's). Maybe it's time to overhaul your store or change businesses altogether, all I can say is that right now, I'm pulling in a higher salary than ever, but I don't have a budget for CDs. Actually, I don't download either (but that's besides the point), as I haven't heard anything on the radio in the last 10 years that made me feel like I had to have a copy of it.
And yes, my Mother's business went through a similar shift in demand during the 80's. Her support of laws that were meant to protect her business didn't stop bad publicity of the industry, and eventually those laws just came back against her. Supporting regulators (of any kind) just drives the overall price of a product up.
Please don't suggest this, someone might be listening:)
Seriously, if a tax was added, it woudn't reduce the controls on copyrighted materials, nor would the executives decide to lower thier price points due to the tax. Instead, the government would collect a portion of your quickly dwindling paycheck to distribute to the major record labels, most likely through the hands of the major music associations.
By the time the money passes through the hands of the government, the music association, the record label, and into the artist's pocket (assuming he didn't have to sign this away to get recored in the first place) it will be a pittance. We already have some of the richest corporations in the United States, let's not try to prop them up by taxing the lifeblood out of the citizenry.
A good company should find ways of supporting itself. If technology changes cripple an industry, it really does suck for the established players, but we don't want to be keeping these large corporations alive by governmental life-support.
Consider how many telephone switchboard operators the government would have on its payroll if a telephone tax was implemented to support them after mechanical switching systems came along? What would be the justification of governmental support for employment agencies that supply said operators? How many governmental officials would it take to oversee such an operation, and how long could you trust them to not seek increases in their budgets? Technology can kill sectors of business, but don't cry for the rich because they have the money to shift business strategies.
It's more of a tragedy with the telephone operators, because those laid off didn't have a few billion in the bank to open up new avenues of opportunity.
Google came up with the idea that popularity (in terms of links) makes a good algorithim to index the Internet, also they came up with the idea that you could serve such an index on a large cluster of cheap machines, instead of a few big expensive ones.
All the other stuff they came up with afterwards wasn't very revolutionary. Web mail? Weather service? Statistic / Index pages? Educational indexes? Specific domain searches? Good services, but not revolutionary.
Bell labs came up with a lot of theory. They created programming languages (B anyone?), operating systems (UNIX and Plan9), compilers, tools, and much, much more, like:
# The first synchronous-sound motion pictures # Stereophonic sound # Speech synthesis # The cathode-ray tube # The radio altimeter # Radio astronomy # The laser # Solar cells # Coaxial cable # Radiotelescopes # Radar systems
And that's not counting the nearly 25000 patents (most filed way before the great US patent give-away). They've made significant contributions to the fields of Physics, Mathematics, Communications, Computer Science, Astronomy, Aviation, Military Defense, and Power Generation, just to name a few.
Google's got some good stuff, don't get me wrong, but they need to expand thier scope, double thier output, and hang around for another 80 years if they want to top the accolades Bell Labs has accquired.
--- Yes, yes, we all know who invented the transistor.
Well, I hope that enough of the ideals of the United States still exist that you are allowed to try to prove yourself innocent during a trial.
That's really what it is all about. Some guy trying to prove himself innocent, and the police saying that he can't be allowed to understand how the device works, he just has to trust in the "secret" design that he's guilty.
I sincerely hope that you change your mind and back this person, even if he was really drunk; because, I'd hate for you and I to live with a court system where questioning the evidence against you isn't allowed. It would be tantamount to the police having supreme control over your life, because they could (possibly) fabricate evidence that you could not question.
Note that fabrication of evidence isn't about "conspiracy", it is usually about somebody trying to cover up that they made a mistake on the job, or built a product that only partially delivers on its promise.
There's nothing to debunk, because there's no news to report. This is still (until Apple says something) not much more than wild speculation. It's a shame that it has become the primary hardware news story at Slashdot since the weekend, but so far, there's been nothing to back it up.
It's like saying, "Of course I don't believe in chain letters, but I've sent it off to 20 of my friends, and I'd like you to distribute it too; just in case."
Transmeta has enough cash to sustain itself for at least a year. I doubt that they will just sit around and watch it disappear.
The headline was irresponsible. It implied that Transmeta was shutting down today. A lot of good and bad things can happen in a year, but that's future stuff, and as such is undecided.
Transmeta can restructure, find VC funding, be bought up by another company, license it's technology to a deep pocketed partner, release a new product and watch it take off (or fail), perform massive layoffs, cutbacks, etc. Headlining that they are closing fails to take into account the money they have and the time they have.
There's a lot to be said for getting any kind of job. Office politics exist even where there are no physical buildings, and you need to learn to navigate these waters. Also, you'll have to learn what employers like and dislike in an employee, which might (at times) run against your pesonal subset of common sense. Such differing points of view of basically similar people have been the fuel for billiant workplace commentary like the comic strip Dilbert.
Funny thing is that it doesn't matter how much (or little) you earn, the politics is there just the same. The sooner you expose yourself, the sooner you can make the mistakes you will learn from. Better to do it now while you can excuse yourself by way of youth, than do it later and be perceived as a ~25 year old that never grew up and throws temper tantrums or is naive about the workplace.
Companies don't offer internships to high-school students, unless they are blood relatives of rather powerful upper management or somehow "connected" in a way that doesn't account for skill. Worse yet, if you do get a job (and prove yourself to your employer skillwise) they will love you.
At first it doesn't sound like a bad thing, but when they pile on the work, it tends to get in the way of college. And they'll pay you like you don't have a college degree, even if your coworker is doing the same job, you will earn half of what he makes because he has a degree. Still you'll be making much more than a Mickey D's burger flipper, and you'll get used to the money.
The companies that shop around for someone who is so easily exploitable (in this manner), are generally the same companies that will exploit you and your coworkers in other manners. Sadly, I know of a few very bright minds that have become so co-dependant on their companies that they cannot leave and cannot properly invest the time to finish their eduction.
Having a degree, or more properly, a good Computer Science eduction, helps in subtle ways outside of your paycheck. It can assist you in avoiding pitfalls when writing programs. A skilled programmer may skillfully build bridges over these traps, but an educated one often finds ways to walk around them. You could theoretically get that education outside of school, but schools provide a wonderful support net of people who organize, plan, and analyze your progress in becoming a better programmer.
If you must get some sort of computer job, start off easy. Learn to administer some of the simple server babysetting for small businesses, and work your personal contacts to find a position. Expect to be paid almost nothing, as the field is flooded with people of dubious credentials, and the reason you might be able to get a job is because your competeing with the least qualified computer "people" for the bottom-of-the-barrel types of jobs. Consider it a resume building experience, and not a money generating venture. When you do graduate, you will be noticed above the others that did nothing but go to school.
I mean, the RIAA/MPAA are a bunch of rough guys, but I never called them terrorists before. I mean, it's not like they throw their millions of dollars of legal weight around roughing up underage kids. It's not like they threaten, bully, and bribe politicans into passing laws that give them legal powers. It's not like they have an international presence which puts pressure on other governments to conform to thier wishes.
If this was the Comp Sci department's web server, then you'll bet that the Dean of that department would have somebody's azz in a satchel. And that person wouldn't be a student, it would be another member of the faculty, a systems adminstrator, or a software vendor.
Odds are the poor decisions were made by an administrator who doesn't understand the technologies involved and made public statements which Stanford now believes cannot be retracted without losing face.
Lose face Stanford, and do it quickly. It's hard to shame a University which admits wrong and then apologizes and admits those who were going to Stanford anyway. You can't argue with a man that's trying to agree with you; however, if Stanford wishes to become the laughing stock of Computer Science, then, by all means, insist that publishing something on a website isn't grounds for having it read.
Funny, some would indicate that if you place your information on a server DESIGNED to publish it through the internet, you have already published that information.
Hence, even if you fail to adequately advertise that the information is available till a later date, the information is published and available to anyone who does enough diligence in the researching of it.
By the same reasoning as Stanford would like you to believe, you cannot "find" a book and start reading it, you must first be given the book by it's publisher. Basically Stanford is indicating that if there's not a URL on thier web page pointing to another web page their server is offering, then the server isn't really offering the unreferenced web page. It's a non-sequiter, and Stanford will likely get sued over it, which is why it is so important to demonize the students and mold public opinion before they have a few hundered lawsuits on thier hand.
And if you don't think it won't go to court, consider this. Stanford ACCEPTED these students, which is part of a contract that indicates should the students decide to pay Stanford and perform well in classes, Stanford will provide them with an education at their facilities. Now Stanford is claiming that viewing certain web pages they publish violates this contract. And instead of a person making this blunder on Stanford's part privately (where it is unlikely to cause big problems) he made the statement in the media.
Stanford is in for some hard education, but I hope that there's not too much Alma Mater out there in the legal field to prevent it from being properly spanked on this one.
You read this article, did you "Do the right thing?" How do you know that it isn't meant to be public knowledge? Read your argument more carefully, if you concede that "I'm allowed to read it.", then you're allowed. Period. End of story. It's not breaking in if your allowed. If someone made the mistaked of allowing it, they can't call you a criminal afterwards for doing what you were allowed to do.
This was available in FORTRAN, but soon people quickly realized that it didn't benefit them as much as it hurt maintainability.
That's why C required variable declarations / definitions prior to use. The simple scenario is when you are dealing with a code block where you accidentally reuse a variable that exists in the same block but just off of the viewable screen. In such cases you can interrupt a count, change a looping order, or generally cause a big mess. With explicit declaration / definition, the compiler complains that you defined the same variable twice.
Different languages are, well DIFFERENT. In C#, you wouldn't want me resetting your loop counter because both you and I like to use the letter 'i' or the variable 'count'.
The pipe can't act as a siphon, because there is not a pressure differential within a closed loop.
Siphons work because the end result is that the water being transported has less potential energy. So you can use a siphon to raise the water over something, but only provided that it falls back down below the container you are siphoning out of. With a close loop, you are effectively asking the water to raise up to fall back down in exactly the same place, ie. this will not work.
Once the water is moving in a close loop it will have momentum which could keep it moving for some time without additional power; however, the pipe will not be moving, so there will be frictional forces between the water and the pipe eventually requiring a pumping system. These frictional forces are not trivial, and for a idea of what you are up against, try drinking a very large drink through a coffee stirrer. You'll soon be exhausted.
Ground has a rather high heat carrying capacity; however, this system is still flawed because heat in ground isn't really very conductive.
Eventually you'll freeze the ground near the pipe, and then the ice barrier will cause the effiency of your system to drop dramatically. My father-in-law tried this with a few hundred feet of copper line, a compressor and an idea that he could use the land nearby to provide heating for his home. It worked beautifully, with minimal damage (ie. none detectable) to suface plant life (after it had been installed). However, after two days of use, the ground around the pipe would freeze and it would be back to more expensive heating methods.
Believing that the heat would transfer efficently enough to cause water to condense on the ground would mean a severe drop in temperature at the surface, likely killing or damaging most plant life, and certainly requiring the temperature around the pipe to go far below freezing. Also plants enjoy watered roots, but drops in humidity will only require even more water to keep plants alive because the high surface area of the leaves will work harder in drying the plant out.
It's a shame that they put all this empahsis on checking passports when really they should be strictly regulating the importation and past flight history of airplanes allwoed into the US.:)
Well, putting Dovorak up as an example of infighting is like putting Napoleon up as an example of fighting. Dovorak couldn't even resist the urge to change the keyboard.
Personally, I applaud his zest for new ideas, and his drive to implement them. But it's not like you're picking an average example. Of all people, I'd expect Dovorak to have many different ideas from the typical manager who is impartial to using Linux.
Linux is so good that it shocks people into a state of confusion. They cannot imagine how it is possible that something so techincally wonderful can be unsurped by something so technically botched (Windows). They are appealing to the only tool they have which might change another's mind, logic; unfortunately, they often fail to really study what they are promoting, so they cannot describe the exact essence of why it's so good.
So you get rehashed arguments of rehashed arguments that rely on basic gut instinct. It's an attempt to market a product without understanding how marketing works.
The one key reason that Linux will succeed isn't GIMP or any applicaiton. It's not any particular distro. It is becuase when something is broken, you have the option of fixing it, the option of paying someone other than the manufacturer to fix it, and the option of paying the manufacturer to fix it.
If you had to fix your dryer, all these avenues are available to you. But when you dryer becomes so "locked down" that these options don't exist, you become dependant on you're dryer manufacturer.
In such a world, the diagnosis quickly becomes "you need a new dryer" or "you need a new (expensive) dryer part than can only be obtained from the manufacturer". It has nothing to do with whether or not the dryer really needs replaced, but has everything to do with the technician needing to generate revenue for the manufacturer. And don't expect any renegade techs out there, because they will soon find themselves cut off from the super-secret manuals and diagnostic pass-codes on self-destroying control chips.
I used dryers as a product-neutral example, but if you wish, you can see some of this typical, yet abusive corporate behavior happening with cars.
Amazingly enough, notepad is not a service of the operating system. Even if it were, it is not a standard service of all operating systems.
There are at least a dozen ways to provide notepad "work-alike" functionality in whatever Linux you pick, but that is beside the point.
The point is you just authorized a zero dollar migration plan, and then got upset when it didn't work. Even if you were migrating to the next version of Windows you would have spent something, and you would have tried it out on a few machines for a few weeks before deploying company wide.
Just because you now drive a new car doesn't mean that its newness will save you when you decide to stop using seatbelts and to disobey traffic rules.
Exactly. Unfortuanetly this is an entertainment site with the byline "News for Nerds." However, people who notice this oddity shouldn't be harrased.
So it's an entertainment site that pretends to be a news site. With enough time, you'll understand that the title of "editor" in this context is meant to convey that the person is responsible for putting "spin" on the article to make it appeal to the pre-existing beliefs of the editors, or to contrast those beliefs in a subtle act of trolling for more posts.
The byline here is not much more than an backhanded attack. First indicate that nobody really believes TigerDirect, then indicate that the maximum number of people that ever did believe them is two. It is close to the truth to state few people believed TigerDirect was right, but the complete lack of hard evidence that there were only two people makes the final editorial comment a joke akin to calling TigerDirect "Nazis" or MOG a "journalist".
Some could liken this spin and false fact finding to articles from MOG, except in this case, the spin is at least in the neighborhood of liklihood, and may be excused somewhat by some as an attempt at humor. It's like hearing an offensive joke, but one that's mostly funny. Such fine balancing acts are very dependent on the audience, and Slashdot has done a lot to galvanize and polarize their audience.
For many years, there has been some desire in the readership for the editors to actually provide editorial comment resembling that of more traditional news publications. Usually these people go far out of their way to indicate how broken this system is. Others rally to the aid of Slashdot indicating that old-fashioned ideals slow the stream of news that is presented at the site.
I believe that Slashdot is an extreme case of the Good - Fast - Cheap triumverate. Slashdot does not literally pay to link to articles, so the equation becomes oddly balanced. In other words, it becomes a competition between (Good) and (Fast / Cheap). With two strikes against good, you can't expect too much.
Slashdot Mirror
It is an intresting dilemma, but lest we all forget:
Jobs didn't apply at his own company.
If you feel that you have the skill to go out and make money, there's basically two routes:
1. Convince someone else that you are worth what you desire to earn.
2. Start a company.
Jobs picked #2. To start a company, you need no credentials, but the list of required skills vary dramatically. You don't need to graduate to start a company, but you need to keep the company alive. Usually keeping the company viable is much more effort than getting a degree.
Now if you're running a successful company, you want to hire people with degrees. In part because people with companies are already working for themselves. In part because you can't run a company where everyone is seriously about to jump ship to set up their own shop.
Work based approaches to rounding out your education are a lot more focused, but that is not always good.
Too much focus can omit different approaches. Enough of this and you will become an expert in your (tiny) domain of computing, but may lack fundamental knowledge in other domains. Too much focus at a university and you may pick overly complicated techniques to solve your problems.
There are challenges everywhere, and they extend into learning. If you care about your education, take the same approache that people take when dealing with a large uncertain market; diversify.
Diversity in education is key to mastery of the field. Jobs was being stifled in his university setting, so he left for a real world education in his garage. But don't compare your career to Jobs', as that would be as silly as comparing your basketball skill to that of a Michael Jordan.
The field of computing is in constant flux. Be prepared to relearn and retool throughout your life, but the fundamental base knowledge remains suprisingly the same. Universities can be great for getting that base knowledge, don't pass it up in favor of the programming language of this decade.
Worse yet, people will be watched and harrased by this technology, but never brought to court over it.
In a court, you can question the evidence used against you. Considering that the creator of this evidence indicated that he didn't need to know how it works, it's highly likely that you could get this evidence thrown out because it fails the test of provablility.
So this technology will "flag" people, and they will be watched "just in case". However, there's not going to be a court case, just continued monitoring until the budget to watch this person dries up. And it's very easy to get a bigger budget because you can argue, "We are watching 400,000 people who have been flagged as possible terrorists, we can't keep up. We need more money." Even when your flagging system has worse odds of finding a terrorist than the Lottery.
I've left my university years ago but have recently come in contact with a few people who are still in school.
One was very excited about all of the presentational gadgetry at her community college. Luckily she had some very good professors, but sometimes the gadgetry failed at inopportune times. Othertimes the gadegtry took over the presentation (think of slide shows / powerpoint presentations where you stop listening to the orator because the slides compete).
A month ago, she started taking classes at my alma mater. She was very happy to find that the professors didn't seem to be harder than those of her community college, but a bit worried that there was almost no special presentational hardware. For those who wonder, the material was primarialy displayed on an array of sliding chalkboards. Interestingly enough, her grasp of the material improved.
Now there's at least a million reasons why her understanding of the material may have nothing to do with the presentational medium; however, those who took (or were forced to take) a speech class can understand immediately why low tech often makes the best presentation: You don't compete against your material for the audience's attention.
With a chalkboard, there's not enough time to lay out every detail, so the presentation focuses on big ideas, drilling down into details where necessary, tied together with occasional diagrams. This puts the burdeon of explaining the material on the orator, who is likely well versed in the material. Basically you are getting the information from the expert.
With presentation mediums of higher fidelity, the medium presents so many details that the orator (if one is even present) a distraction. The downside is that you have to personally discover the pitfalls of what's not spelled out in the medium, and you fail to get feedback on ideas that you might believe plausible, but are poorly founded due to conditions outside of the scope of the studied material.
At one end of the spectrum you have professors, at the other you have books. I wouldn't want to read a text while someone was talking to me, nor would I want to listen to a professor while I am busy watching a movie / reading a book. High content presentational medium has its place, but without personal feedback, correction mental misperceptions cannot be made as they form which can be equally destructive to understanding. Oddly enough, the same high content presentation competes with the person most likely to be trying to teach us something.
It's an overreaction, but for all the wrong reasons.
I never had a math teacher that I respected who didn't ask his class to, "Show all of your work" for any given problem.
If the "work" seems to consist of writing the question, and then writing the answer, you failed. In this case, it's a simple matter of the teachers not wanting to have to grade appropriately, or failure of them to test approprately.
Market demographics changed. I'm sorry to hear about your personal loss, but any extension of copyright isn't going to reclaim store traffic.
I mean, if someone is willing to break a copyright that lasts for 50 years withing hours of purchasing a CD, do you think that they will be more respectful of one that lasts 100 years?
The real failure of the music industry is that they did not nurture its market. They've been selling us a package that costs less than a dollar to make for $16 for far too long. Even now with the recent drop in CD prices, I can easily find DVD movies for less than the price of a CD.
RIAA will not help you, they are interested in keeping the system alive in its most profitable form ($16 CDs), they brag and boast about how they killed other medium (DAT tapes), but switching medium every five years would have helped them more than they know. During their most profitable years, there were vinyl singles, LPs, eight track, and cassette tapes. People often bought their favorites a few times because of wear on the medium (which eventually would disappear) and incompatibilites in the delivery medium (can't play that cassette on my record player).
Now with the advertisements about the "takedowns" of juveniles and copyright infringers, I feel sorry that you are on the receiving end of what is likely to be the most widespread act of civil disobediance this decade. But realize that citizens aren't disobediant in these numbers unless they are truly being abused.
Perhaps you can salvage your store by going back to indie labels. Anime held some facination for a year or two (until it demanded it's own isle in Fry's). Maybe it's time to overhaul your store or change businesses altogether, all I can say is that right now, I'm pulling in a higher salary than ever, but I don't have a budget for CDs. Actually, I don't download either (but that's besides the point), as I haven't heard anything on the radio in the last 10 years that made me feel like I had to have a copy of it.
And yes, my Mother's business went through a similar shift in demand during the 80's. Her support of laws that were meant to protect her business didn't stop bad publicity of the industry, and eventually those laws just came back against her. Supporting regulators (of any kind) just drives the overall price of a product up.
Please don't suggest this, someone might be listening :)
Seriously, if a tax was added, it woudn't reduce the controls on copyrighted materials, nor would the executives decide to lower thier price points due to the tax. Instead, the government would collect a portion of your quickly dwindling paycheck to distribute to the major record labels, most likely through the hands of the major music associations.
By the time the money passes through the hands of the government, the music association, the record label, and into the artist's pocket (assuming he didn't have to sign this away to get recored in the first place) it will be a pittance. We already have some of the richest corporations in the United States, let's not try to prop them up by taxing the lifeblood out of the citizenry.
A good company should find ways of supporting itself. If technology changes cripple an industry, it really does suck for the established players, but we don't want to be keeping these large corporations alive by governmental life-support.
Consider how many telephone switchboard operators the government would have on its payroll if a telephone tax was implemented to support them after mechanical switching systems came along? What would be the justification of governmental support for employment agencies that supply said operators? How many governmental officials would it take to oversee such an operation, and how long could you trust them to not seek increases in their budgets? Technology can kill sectors of business, but don't cry for the rich because they have the money to shift business strategies.
It's more of a tragedy with the telephone operators, because those laid off didn't have a few billion in the bank to open up new avenues of opportunity.
I agree.
Google came up with the idea that popularity (in terms of links) makes a good algorithim to index the Internet, also they came up with the idea that you could serve such an index on a large cluster of cheap machines, instead of a few big expensive ones.
All the other stuff they came up with afterwards wasn't very revolutionary. Web mail? Weather service? Statistic / Index pages? Educational indexes? Specific domain searches? Good services, but not revolutionary.
Bell labs came up with a lot of theory. They created programming languages (B anyone?), operating systems (UNIX and Plan9), compilers, tools, and much, much more, like:
# The first synchronous-sound motion pictures
# Stereophonic sound
# Speech synthesis
# The cathode-ray tube
# The radio altimeter
# Radio astronomy
# The laser
# Solar cells
# Coaxial cable
# Radiotelescopes
# Radar systems
And that's not counting the nearly 25000 patents (most filed way before the great US patent give-away). They've made significant contributions to the fields of Physics, Mathematics, Communications, Computer Science, Astronomy, Aviation, Military Defense, and Power Generation, just to name a few.
Google's got some good stuff, don't get me wrong, but they need to expand thier scope, double thier output, and hang around for another 80 years if they want to top the accolades Bell Labs has accquired.
---
Yes, yes, we all know who invented the transistor.
Well, I hope that enough of the ideals of the United States still exist that you are allowed to try to prove yourself innocent during a trial.
That's really what it is all about. Some guy trying to prove himself innocent, and the police saying that he can't be allowed to understand how the device works, he just has to trust in the "secret" design that he's guilty.
I sincerely hope that you change your mind and back this person, even if he was really drunk; because, I'd hate for you and I to live with a court system where questioning the evidence against you isn't allowed. It would be tantamount to the police having supreme control over your life, because they could (possibly) fabricate evidence that you could not question.
Note that fabrication of evidence isn't about "conspiracy", it is usually about somebody trying to cover up that they made a mistake on the job, or built a product that only partially delivers on its promise.
Debunking, my foot.
There's nothing to debunk, because there's no news to report. This is still (until Apple says something) not much more than wild speculation. It's a shame that it has become the primary hardware news story at Slashdot since the weekend, but so far, there's been nothing to back it up.
It's like saying, "Of course I don't believe in chain letters, but I've sent it off to 20 of my friends, and I'd like you to distribute it too; just in case."
Transmeta has enough cash to sustain itself for at least a year. I doubt that they will just sit around and watch it disappear.
The headline was irresponsible. It implied that Transmeta was shutting down today. A lot of good and bad things can happen in a year, but that's future stuff, and as such is undecided.
Transmeta can restructure, find VC funding, be bought up by another company, license it's technology to a deep pocketed partner, release a new product and watch it take off (or fail), perform massive layoffs, cutbacks, etc. Headlining that they are closing fails to take into account the money they have and the time they have.
Working in itself is a skill.
There's a lot to be said for getting any kind of job. Office politics exist even where there are no physical buildings, and you need to learn to navigate these waters. Also, you'll have to learn what employers like and dislike in an employee, which might (at times) run against your pesonal subset of common sense. Such differing points of view of basically similar people have been the fuel for billiant workplace commentary like the comic strip Dilbert.
Funny thing is that it doesn't matter how much (or little) you earn, the politics is there just the same. The sooner you expose yourself, the sooner you can make the mistakes you will learn from. Better to do it now while you can excuse yourself by way of youth, than do it later and be perceived as a ~25 year old that never grew up and throws temper tantrums or is naive about the workplace.
Companies don't offer internships to high-school students, unless they are blood relatives of rather powerful upper management or somehow "connected" in a way that doesn't account for skill. Worse yet, if you do get a job (and prove yourself to your employer skillwise) they will love you.
At first it doesn't sound like a bad thing, but when they pile on the work, it tends to get in the way of college. And they'll pay you like you don't have a college degree, even if your coworker is doing the same job, you will earn half of what he makes because he has a degree. Still you'll be making much more than a Mickey D's burger flipper, and you'll get used to the money.
The companies that shop around for someone who is so easily exploitable (in this manner), are generally the same companies that will exploit you and your coworkers in other manners. Sadly, I know of a few very bright minds that have become so co-dependant on their companies that they cannot leave and cannot properly invest the time to finish their eduction.
Having a degree, or more properly, a good Computer Science eduction, helps in subtle ways outside of your paycheck. It can assist you in avoiding pitfalls when writing programs. A skilled programmer may skillfully build bridges over these traps, but an educated one often finds ways to walk around them. You could theoretically get that education outside of school, but schools provide a wonderful support net of people who organize, plan, and analyze your progress in becoming a better programmer.
If you must get some sort of computer job, start off easy. Learn to administer some of the simple server babysetting for small businesses, and work your personal contacts to find a position. Expect to be paid almost nothing, as the field is flooded with people of dubious credentials, and the reason you might be able to get a job is because your competeing with the least qualified computer "people" for the bottom-of-the-barrel types of jobs. Consider it a resume building experience, and not a money generating venture. When you do graduate, you will be noticed above the others that did nothing but go to school.
Dude, you're really pushing it.
I mean, the RIAA/MPAA are a bunch of rough guys, but I never called them terrorists before. I mean, it's not like they throw their millions of dollars of legal weight around roughing up underage kids. It's not like they threaten, bully, and bribe politicans into passing laws that give them legal powers. It's not like they have an international presence which puts pressure on other governments to conform to thier wishes.
Oh wait, they do.
If this was the Comp Sci department's web server, then you'll bet that the Dean of that department would have somebody's azz in a satchel. And that person wouldn't be a student, it would be another member of the faculty, a systems adminstrator, or a software vendor.
Odds are the poor decisions were made by an administrator who doesn't understand the technologies involved and made public statements which Stanford now believes cannot be retracted without losing face.
Lose face Stanford, and do it quickly. It's hard to shame a University which admits wrong and then apologizes and admits those who were going to Stanford anyway. You can't argue with a man that's trying to agree with you; however, if Stanford wishes to become the laughing stock of Computer Science, then, by all means, insist that publishing something on a website isn't grounds for having it read.
Funny, some would indicate that if you place your information on a server DESIGNED to publish it through the internet, you have already published that information.
Hence, even if you fail to adequately advertise that the information is available till a later date, the information is published and available to anyone who does enough diligence in the researching of it.
By the same reasoning as Stanford would like you to believe, you cannot "find" a book and start reading it, you must first be given the book by it's publisher. Basically Stanford is indicating that if there's not a URL on thier web page pointing to another web page their server is offering, then the server isn't really offering the unreferenced web page. It's a non-sequiter, and Stanford will likely get sued over it, which is why it is so important to demonize the students and mold public opinion before they have a few hundered lawsuits on thier hand.
And if you don't think it won't go to court, consider this. Stanford ACCEPTED these students, which is part of a contract that indicates should the students decide to pay Stanford and perform well in classes, Stanford will provide them with an education at their facilities. Now Stanford is claiming that viewing certain web pages they publish violates this contract. And instead of a person making this blunder on Stanford's part privately (where it is unlikely to cause big problems) he made the statement in the media.
Stanford is in for some hard education, but I hope that there's not too much Alma Mater out there in the legal field to prevent it from being properly spanked on this one.
You read this article, did you "Do the right thing?" How do you know that it isn't meant to be public knowledge? Read your argument more carefully, if you concede that "I'm allowed to read it.", then you're allowed. Period. End of story. It's not breaking in if your allowed. If someone made the mistaked of allowing it, they can't call you a criminal afterwards for doing what you were allowed to do.
This was available in FORTRAN, but soon people quickly realized that it didn't benefit them as much as it hurt maintainability.
That's why C required variable declarations / definitions prior to use. The simple scenario is when you are dealing with a code block where you accidentally reuse a variable that exists in the same block but just off of the viewable screen. In such cases you can interrupt a count, change a looping order, or generally cause a big mess. With explicit declaration / definition, the compiler complains that you defined the same variable twice.
Different languages are, well DIFFERENT. In C#, you wouldn't want me resetting your loop counter because both you and I like to use the letter 'i' or the variable 'count'.
A very clever play on words that seems to be something like the old "fill in the blank" stories.
Was around a few posts back, but then it was about deploying JAVA on the desktop.
The pipe can't act as a siphon, because there is not a pressure differential within a closed loop.
Siphons work because the end result is that the water being transported has less potential energy. So you can use a siphon to raise the water over something, but only provided that it falls back down below the container you are siphoning out of. With a close loop, you are effectively asking the water to raise up to fall back down in exactly the same place, ie. this will not work.
Once the water is moving in a close loop it will have momentum which could keep it moving for some time without additional power; however, the pipe will not be moving, so there will be frictional forces between the water and the pipe eventually requiring a pumping system. These frictional forces are not trivial, and for a idea of what you are up against, try drinking a very large drink through a coffee stirrer. You'll soon be exhausted.
Friends don't let friends watch Waterworld.
Ground has a rather high heat carrying capacity; however, this system is still flawed because heat in ground isn't really very conductive.
Eventually you'll freeze the ground near the pipe, and then the ice barrier will cause the effiency of your system to drop dramatically. My father-in-law tried this with a few hundred feet of copper line, a compressor and an idea that he could use the land nearby to provide heating for his home. It worked beautifully, with minimal damage (ie. none detectable) to suface plant life (after it had been installed). However, after two days of use, the ground around the pipe would freeze and it would be back to more expensive heating methods.
Believing that the heat would transfer efficently enough to cause water to condense on the ground would mean a severe drop in temperature at the surface, likely killing or damaging most plant life, and certainly requiring the temperature around the pipe to go far below freezing. Also plants enjoy watered roots, but drops in humidity will only require even more water to keep plants alive because the high surface area of the leaves will work harder in drying the plant out.
It's a shame that they put all this empahsis on checking passports when really they should be strictly regulating the importation and past flight history of airplanes allwoed into the US. :)
Well, putting Dovorak up as an example of infighting is like putting Napoleon up as an example of fighting. Dovorak couldn't even resist the urge to change the keyboard.
Personally, I applaud his zest for new ideas, and his drive to implement them. But it's not like you're picking an average example. Of all people, I'd expect Dovorak to have many different ideas from the typical manager who is impartial to using Linux.
Linux is so good that it shocks people into a state of confusion. They cannot imagine how it is possible that something so techincally wonderful can be unsurped by something so technically botched (Windows). They are appealing to the only tool they have which might change another's mind, logic; unfortunately, they often fail to really study what they are promoting, so they cannot describe the exact essence of why it's so good.
So you get rehashed arguments of rehashed arguments that rely on basic gut instinct. It's an attempt to market a product without understanding how marketing works.
The one key reason that Linux will succeed isn't GIMP or any applicaiton. It's not any particular distro. It is becuase when something is broken, you have the option of fixing it, the option of paying someone other than the manufacturer to fix it, and the option of paying the manufacturer to fix it.
If you had to fix your dryer, all these avenues are available to you. But when you dryer becomes so "locked down" that these options don't exist, you become dependant on you're dryer manufacturer.
In such a world, the diagnosis quickly becomes "you need a new dryer" or "you need a new (expensive) dryer part than can only be obtained from the manufacturer". It has nothing to do with whether or not the dryer really needs replaced, but has everything to do with the technician needing to generate revenue for the manufacturer. And don't expect any renegade techs out there, because they will soon find themselves cut off from the super-secret manuals and diagnostic pass-codes on self-destroying control chips.
I used dryers as a product-neutral example, but if you wish, you can see some of this typical, yet abusive corporate behavior happening with cars.
Amazingly enough, notepad is not a service of the operating system. Even if it were, it is not a standard service of all operating systems.
There are at least a dozen ways to provide notepad "work-alike" functionality in whatever Linux you pick, but that is beside the point.
The point is you just authorized a zero dollar migration plan, and then got upset when it didn't work. Even if you were migrating to the next version of Windows you would have spent something, and you would have tried it out on a few machines for a few weeks before deploying company wide.
Just because you now drive a new car doesn't mean that its newness will save you when you decide to stop using seatbelts and to disobey traffic rules.
Exactly. Unfortuanetly this is an entertainment site with the byline "News for Nerds." However, people who notice this oddity shouldn't be harrased.
So it's an entertainment site that pretends to be a news site. With enough time, you'll understand that the title of "editor" in this context is meant to convey that the person is responsible for putting "spin" on the article to make it appeal to the pre-existing beliefs of the editors, or to contrast those beliefs in a subtle act of trolling for more posts.
The byline here is not much more than an backhanded attack. First indicate that nobody really believes TigerDirect, then indicate that the maximum number of people that ever did believe them is two. It is close to the truth to state few people believed TigerDirect was right, but the complete lack of hard evidence that there were only two people makes the final editorial comment a joke akin to calling TigerDirect "Nazis" or MOG a "journalist".
Some could liken this spin and false fact finding to articles from MOG, except in this case, the spin is at least in the neighborhood of liklihood, and may be excused somewhat by some as an attempt at humor. It's like hearing an offensive joke, but one that's mostly funny. Such fine balancing acts are very dependent on the audience, and Slashdot has done a lot to galvanize and polarize their audience.
For many years, there has been some desire in the readership for the editors to actually provide editorial comment resembling that of more traditional news publications. Usually these people go far out of their way to indicate how broken this system is. Others rally to the aid of Slashdot indicating that old-fashioned ideals slow the stream of news that is presented at the site.
I believe that Slashdot is an extreme case of the Good - Fast - Cheap triumverate. Slashdot does not literally pay to link to articles, so the equation becomes oddly balanced. In other words, it becomes a competition between (Good) and (Fast / Cheap). With two strikes against good, you can't expect too much.