I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls. But some people seriously have that sort of knee-jerk reaction: That is, they see someone say "it's a gay disease", and they throw up their arms and declare the person a bigot. Unfortunately, it's the way things are.
If you had looked at the statistics on the page I linked, you'd notice that, through June 2001, in the U.S., of the total 807074 people reported with AIDS or HIV, 368971 of those likely were exposed under the category "men who have sex with men". That's 45%. A quarter of that were exposed through heterosexual contact.
Now, as to the credibility of those statistics, on the same page:
These HIV figures include only those states with confidential HIV reporting Source: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
AIDS isn't as big of a deal as many other diseases in America. The biggest killer in the U.S. is still heart disease. In this country, it is largely a gay male's disease (woo hoo, that'll get me flamed), and even in that demographic it hasn't caused the kind of decimation it has in demographics like, oh, the whole of South Africa.
Like it or not, the U.S. remains extremely egocentric. This is Slashdot, not the BBC.
The European Union has now banned all animal products in livestock feed, but the US FDA resists this simple and absolutely necessary step to halt the progress of the perfect pathogen throughout the United States.
Simple economics with a slightly evil twist. Cattle grow faster on a high protein diet -- bone meal -- rendered animals. You force them to eat grain and it costs a lot more money and time to get them large enough to slaughter. That's probably on the order of billions of dollars yearly. There's a lot of lobbying power in that amount of money.
if the public weren't so slow, MOST if not ALL print publications would be in financial trouble. This is the way things are heading, and publication companies are realizing that you can publish the equivelant of an online newsletter or magazine with a MUCH smaller staff and MUCH cheaper costs than a dead tree version.
And now the reader has to pay for a broadband connection as well as a subscription if he wants the ease of browsing he once enjoyed in a paper form. Oh, and a PC too, if he didn't already have that.
Do you think Martha Stewart's "Living" is going to be going all online any time soon?
I'm afraid your solution seemed promising to me at one time as well, but it doesn't work. HTML is not a WYSIWYG language, it shouldn't be, and that's what is frequently needed in papers professional enough to hand in at work/college. And RTF doesn't render many things reliable from one application to another.
Most notably, I've found very serious table issues using when saving something as RTF from Word. Different versions of Word and Wordpad rendered it differently. Ultimately, the only solution for a reliable RTF that I've found is to stick with Wordpad entirely. Afraid that doesn't cut it when I need features found in Word simultaneously such as a self-generating table of contents/index/footnotes, complex page numbering, and so on. Further, RTF doesn't appear to have the capability to generate complicated table structures I need. (This is anectdotal -- I've never saved something complicated in RTF and had it preserved. I do not know for sure whether the format supports it, but the tools I use for it do not.)
Myself, I've only recently discovered OpenOffice.org due to the large amount of talk about it on Slashdot. I haven't used it much. Almost all of the writing I've needed to do lately has been hand, plain-text, or HTML.
But my girlfriend is a chemical engineer minoring in computer science. She didn't have the least bit of trouble with data structures. But she had never heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her recently. Her computer came with Microsoft Works which has interesting problems dealing with Microsoft Office. As such, she was restricted to doing most of her reports at school because her spreadsheets and reports didn't transfer well enough to justify the time of reformating. She hadn't heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her. At present, its ability to convert Microsoft Office documents has made her life easier.
Now here we have a relatively young person who is very technically proficient who could have benefited greatly from a product, but didn't for a long time because she didn't know. Do we see an advantage in increasing the visibility of this product in any fashion possible?
Any self-respecting geek probably knows full well, but worth taking any opportunity to plug the medium. MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) are still alive and well, and MUD Connector lists about 2,000 currently active (as in, running now, have been running within the last two months).
To those unaware (for shame!), MUDs (and variations such as MUCKs, MOOs, and MUSHes) are BBS-era text-based games, the precursors to MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, Anarchy Online, and so on. There are some graphical (and freely available) MUDs out there, some listed on MUD Connector, but most are still text based. Generally, MUDs aren't completely original codebases, but derived from an open source basis, such as CircleMUD which just finally got out of 3.0 beta and released 3.1.
I administer a small MUD, passed down to me from two previous big egos, which has been up for somewhere around 1995, give or take a few months of server issues. Unfortunately, I'm too ashamed to post a link.
Woah, there. You kinda lost an important portion of that article. Notably:
which are not
authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
As Richard Nixon said, "I am...a crook."
The article recognizes the right of an author to attach a license along with her work which then must be respected as much as any other portion of her copyright. Of course, I'm pretty sure this isn't in exactly how it's implemented in the DMCA (and I have read it). But since shrink-wrapped licenses are getting increasingly more legally binding, it's effectively the same thing for digital media.
European Copyright Directive. [ukcdr.org] The directive demands that "circumvention of effective technological measures" be made illegal in a way similar to the US DMCA
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
Article 12 is also interesting, but more or less a corollary. It requires contracting parties to make it illegal to remove copy management information from a work or knowingly transmit a work which has had this done to it. I'd love to see a good page listing to what degree this treaty has been put into force of law in agreeing countries.
You know we have different power outlets here too? Another adaptor to buy.
As you well know, but our poster may not, the United Kingdom has different voltage, frequency, and outlets. Although almost all recent laptops come with switching power supplies which elegantly handle U.S. and all European voltages, it would be a bummer to blow a power supply (or a whole laptop) on such a thing. If your power supply is such a beast, it is probably labelled right on it "120-400V, 30-80Hz" or something of that sort.
As far as specifics go, for the UK, it's 50Hz, 230V AC. And Howstuffworks has a somewhat spiffy illustration of the plug appearance. Three flat prongs, two horizontal, one vertical for grounded plugs (which hopefully your laptop has). Two round prongs for non-grounded.
Liquid nitrogen is frequently made out of air. So, yeah, nitrogen can be obtained kinda cheaply. Breathe. There you go.
This is also why superconductors which could work at nitrogen's liquification temperature or above are such a potentially great thing. Otherwise, you're dealing with much more expensive cooling.
"Low-cost, passive chips like this have a range of only about 10 ft, however, so don't go too 1984."
Actually, they just have a range of 10 feet with the power supplied by, and with a receiver the sensitivity of, the default reader.
-----8
This crosses into an area beyond my knowledge, but I question how far you can do this. First of all, there is the issue with background radiation. You can only increase your sensitivity until the signal starts to equal the noise. And with the potential for a few thousand of these operating about at the same time, that's a lot of noise even neglecting that generated by other sources. Secondly, there is the question of how much power these devices can handle while still functioning properly. I imagine, if they don't want some vandal to easily destroy these devices by putting out a strong probing signal, there is a limit to the amount of power they will take in at a time. And even if they don't, the hardware itself will fail at a certain point. Therefore, you can only push the power you're throwing at these things to a certain point before it doesn't make a difference.
Given these two factors, I imagine there's a practical distance limit at which these devices will function. And considering this is the company that's found the cheapest way to make these things yet which Gillette is buying from, I'm guessing the practical limit isn't going to be terribly beyond the normal operating range.
Yes, this is a tad redundant since quite a few people have given links to FAQs which thoroughly give this information. Mod kindly.
That said, RFID = Radio Frequency IDentification. Narrowing our vision to current practical uses, RFID tags are embeded in something one wishes to scan, identify, or track. The idea with low cost RFID tags like Gillette is buying is that they are passive. Readers for the chips emit a signal which actually supplies the power for the chip. For those who haven't had physics, this is akin to how a crystal radio works (with no battery at all). Low-cost, passive chips like this have a range of only about 10 ft, however, so don't go too 1984.
Woah, are we getting offtopic. Ah well, late enough for this article not to be seen by moderators.
Why not even an enigneer? Why regard engineers as less than lawyers? Except on a solely fiscal level would you rather be someone who creates or someone who adds cost?
Not denigrating engineers. Just a matter of time. For an engineer, it's a four year degree, EIT, PE and you're an engineer. For a lawyer, it's a four year degree, LSAT, three more years of law school, and then the bar exam. There are enough people who train to be engineers and then become lawyers. Hence the 'not even an engineer'.
As a white male whose excellent test-taking abilities which have saved my grade in a few classes in which I did little else, I may be biased in making a response. Just the same.
That's very strange - surely it's also "discriminatory" to say that women and minorities aren't as good at test taking as white men?
I can't comment upon the basis of the statement since I was merely quoting the linked article, but my guess would be that studies have been done which show females and minorities tend to do worse on written tests. A quick google brings up this article which sites just such statistics for the SAT of 1995. And then there's this article on women and minorities in science with relevant data from 1999.
I've seen otherwise very competent people, both male and female, crumble in tests here at college. Heck, I've watched my sisters and mother have the same problems. Generally, the factor seems to be a matter of believing in one's own ability. People who know what they're doing overlook simple details because they're nervous or are worried that they don't understand a problem when they actually do (Why would they give me this piece of data if I didn't need it?). Myself, I was exposed to tests frequently when young which helped me learn the habit of confidence.
Now, I can't comment on any tendancy of females or minorities to be more timid than males or whites respectively. Statistical studies could quite possibly do that.
And isn't it strange that they could potentially be worse at test-taking, but not worse at job-doing? A well designed test will be statistically well correlated with job ability. If it's not, then we might as well not bother licensing surgeons!
But the thing is that two things are being tested: the ability to know the correct answer and the ability to recall and relay that answer clearly while udne pressure. It is that second matter which some might find causes a statistical discrepancy which could amount to discrimination. Like I said, though, IANAL. I'm not even an engineer, yet.
I'm not a laywer, but luckily, some lawyers write web pages.
According to "Pre-Employment Testing of Applicants", written tests can be dangerous because "A multiple choice aptitude test may discriminate against minority applicants or female applicants because it really reflects test-taking ability rather than actual job skills."
Now there's the old thorny issue: If you give a test of type A and group P has a high tendancy to do badly on a test of type A, are you discriminating against group P?
Free or free? Ah semantics. But let's put that issue aside.
Trillian Pro is an excellent client which has features that are fairly badly needed in the free version of Trillian. For instance, the ability to view HTML in profiles. Also, the ability to use video over Yahoo. And more than once already I've found I've downloaded a skin I wanted to use, but, ooops, no good in the free version.
There are free clients from AIM and Yahoo that solve these problems. And they are even less demanding on the system requirements.
Since we recently had a nearly formal debate about this matter in my operating systems class, I thought I'd post some of the information I dug up comparing Windows and Linux (specifically in the embedded environment).
WinCE.NET/WinXP Embedded XP Embedded is not practical for many applications, not the least of reasons for this being that it has no real time support and only runs on x86 processors. So if you want to go Windows and RT, you have to use WinCE
Pricing Finding information about the price for WinCE is mildly difficult. I couldn't find any rates published on the web, but instead a list of suppliers. A called one and asked. About $2,663 for the original license and developer software wuth about $14 per copy of WinCE. I honestly doubt this would significantly impact the cost of any development.
Development Code for WinCE generally has to be specially developed for WinCE; it can not be recycled from other Windows apps. Non-real time linux applications can normally be used directly in a linux RT environment.
Worst-case latency WinCE apparently had a worst case latency of 30.8 microseconds on an x86 according to a somewhat dense report listed on Microsoft's website. Granted, an x86 is a somewhat unfair platform on which to test anything's latency. According to one maker of a real time linux system, latency is about 15 microseconds. The article for this story, however, finds a worst-case latency on a PowerPC to be on the order of.48 milliseconds or 480 microseconds. Ouch. That's pretty bad.
I think there's slightly more at issue than just that. Though I'd agree that violent video games in and of themselves are highly unlikely to make a person violent, the question is whether violent video games may have a detectable effect on behavior on a significant number of people.
For instance, violent games may encourage some people to "let out their anger" rather than reason through it and learn what is making them angry. And, it has been seen that expressing anger tends to cause an increase in one's liklihood to be angry, not a decrease.
I posted about this before when GTA3 came up in a slashback. Hopefully I was clearer this time.
Ibm adds some code at this point but in the long run they will not develop software that they give way
Um? JFS? High availability linux (linked by parent)? Don't those count as software they've already given away? And I'm sure there's several more examples which I'm not familiar with.
You're either not doing your research or you're just a troll.
Pardon the tangential subject as we wander from over-managment to bad business models. Really, no amount of good management can fix a broken business model. Good management might rewrite a broken business plan and fix an ailing company, but so might bad management rewrite a perfectly function business plan. But back to the point.
We are going to spend thousands of man hours (=gigantic cost) and then give our products away for free. Dot-coms and open source development companies are examples of this. FREE DO NOT PAY THE BILLS!
Open source development frequently comes down to an issue of profit through service rather than the product itself. In the case of one kinda big company, they're spending some large money developing and integrating open source solutions to phase out some of their products. Sometimes it works better providing services rather than constantly maintaining one's own proprietary software, or at least it may become easier to maintain when your customers sometimes volunteer improvements.
The same give-away-the-product, sell-the-support system works for some smaller companies who sell to home users. Good tech support is certainly worth plenty, especially when even mature software can sometimes be confusing.
Are colleges using Microsoft software in their labs?
Are colleges teaching their students to use Microsoft products?
The first question seems to about whether colleges are getting people comfortable with Microsoft products, or accomodating them if they are already comfortable. OTOH, the second question is a matter of whether courses specifically teach skills in a Microsoft-centric fashion.
Realistically, I can't speak to a trend, but I can tell you how things are at my school. I attend an engineering college. Obviously, this makes us not big on CS; therefore, we tend to deploy Windows on most of our open labs. It's what most students and professors are comfortable with when they arrive. Therefore, a lot of non-CS students see a lot of Windows. At least at first.
But simultaneously there is an open Linux lab in which anyone can get accounts with non-too-shabby computers. Almost no one but Geophysics uses it, but they require its use for some courses. And all of the nice physics labs for 3rd year and higher physics majors run Redhat. They're set up with Linux because all junior level and above reports must be done in LaTeX.
Everyone is required to take at least one programming course, which normally winds up being Fortran or C/C++ for everyone. Chemical engineers can take VB. C/C++ is taught almost exclusively on IRIX boxes. Only recently have we had a teacher that even required any exposure to visual studio for that class -- or any low-to-mid level CS class.
As far as CS students go, all high-level CS classes tend to either be a Unix-environment or a 'use any environment available on campus'. Most teaching is mathematically and theoretically centered. I can't count how many times teachers have said in lecture that we're being taught important theory and not too much application because we might as well go to a trade school if we just want to learn current applications.
What about non-CS required courses? We're all required to take a lot of general courses, one of which (EPICS) includes required use of Microsoft Project. We're all required to take a year of calculus-based physics whose labs were taught in additional Redhat labs. They're not Windows labs.
Myself, I find this pretty mixed. There are a lot of *nix machines on campus but they're frequently not obvious until you get in a class that requires them or you simply seek them out. We more-or-less force some cross-platform experience on all majors. But if someone wants to be all Microsoft, he can probably get by like that if he doesn't mind taking alternate courses and debating with his counselor. And the same can be done for someone who wants to go all Linux.
My experience is, despite heavy Microsoft pressure, we're a rather OS-balanced school. I can only hope all schools are along the same lines.
Oh, and how do I know we have heavy Microsoft pressure?
My name is xxxxx xxxxx and I am representing Microsoft and their Student
Representative Program. We are looking for one qualified student in
good standing that will be representing Microsoft and their latest.NET
Technologies on campus. The student would be hired as a part-time
employee (10-15 hours per week) of xxxxxxxx for the fall
and spring academic year. http://www.microsoft.com/net/
Requirements include:
* Candidates that are using Microsoft technologies already, not
necessarily the new.NET technologies.
* Candidates with a "B" GPA or above.
* Experience speaking to peers and large groups
* Involved in outside activities related to their major (ideally
holding a position such as President within the club or organization)
* Need to be very dedicated, outgoing and energized
Ideally we are looking for current Junior students that could possibly
maintain the program for two years, however sophomores and graduate
would be great candidates as well. We will have phone interviews from
now until Thursday, October 10th, preferably with faculty-recommended
students that have the dedication and enthusiasm to represent the latest
Microsoft.NET technologies. The chosen student with then be flown to
the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington for the weekend of October
18th-20th for training.
I've attached a copy of the job description/posting. Please let me know
what you feel would be the best way to locate potentially qualified
candidates for the program. If you could post the job opening on the
bulletin board that would be fantastic.
<<Student Representative JD.doc>>
Thank you for your time.
Apparently, last year all Taiwan-based manufacturers lost money...
However, the article reads:
Profit margins for Taiwan display makers stood at around 20 percent in the second quarter of this year versus 25-30 percent for Korean firms
If the poster is accurate, this means that the Taiwanese profits have grown from some unknown negative to a postive 20 in less than a year. Decent gains on profits if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls. But some people seriously have that sort of knee-jerk reaction: That is, they see someone say "it's a gay disease", and they throw up their arms and declare the person a bigot. Unfortunately, it's the way things are.
If you had looked at the statistics on the page I linked, you'd notice that, through June 2001, in the U.S., of the total 807074 people reported with AIDS or HIV, 368971 of those likely were exposed under the category "men who have sex with men". That's 45%. A quarter of that were exposed through heterosexual contact.
Now, as to the credibility of those statistics, on the same page:
If you don't inject drugs and aren't a gay male, AIDS likely shouldn't be as big a worry as, say, hepatitis might be.
AIDS isn't as big of a deal as many other diseases in America. The biggest killer in the U.S. is still heart disease. In this country, it is largely a gay male's disease (woo hoo, that'll get me flamed), and even in that demographic it hasn't caused the kind of decimation it has in demographics like, oh, the whole of South Africa.
Like it or not, the U.S. remains extremely egocentric. This is Slashdot, not the BBC.
Simple economics with a slightly evil twist. Cattle grow faster on a high protein diet -- bone meal -- rendered animals. You force them to eat grain and it costs a lot more money and time to get them large enough to slaughter. That's probably on the order of billions of dollars yearly. There's a lot of lobbying power in that amount of money.
And now the reader has to pay for a broadband connection as well as a subscription if he wants the ease of browsing he once enjoyed in a paper form. Oh, and a PC too, if he didn't already have that.
Do you think Martha Stewart's "Living" is going to be going all online any time soon?
I'm afraid your solution seemed promising to me at one time as well, but it doesn't work. HTML is not a WYSIWYG language, it shouldn't be, and that's what is frequently needed in papers professional enough to hand in at work/college. And RTF doesn't render many things reliable from one application to another.
Most notably, I've found very serious table issues using when saving something as RTF from Word. Different versions of Word and Wordpad rendered it differently. Ultimately, the only solution for a reliable RTF that I've found is to stick with Wordpad entirely. Afraid that doesn't cut it when I need features found in Word simultaneously such as a self-generating table of contents/index/footnotes, complex page numbering, and so on. Further, RTF doesn't appear to have the capability to generate complicated table structures I need. (This is anectdotal -- I've never saved something complicated in RTF and had it preserved. I do not know for sure whether the format supports it, but the tools I use for it do not.)
Myself, I've only recently discovered OpenOffice.org due to the large amount of talk about it on Slashdot. I haven't used it much. Almost all of the writing I've needed to do lately has been hand, plain-text, or HTML.
But my girlfriend is a chemical engineer minoring in computer science. She didn't have the least bit of trouble with data structures. But she had never heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her recently. Her computer came with Microsoft Works which has interesting problems dealing with Microsoft Office. As such, she was restricted to doing most of her reports at school because her spreadsheets and reports didn't transfer well enough to justify the time of reformating. She hadn't heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her. At present, its ability to convert Microsoft Office documents has made her life easier.
Now here we have a relatively young person who is very technically proficient who could have benefited greatly from a product, but didn't for a long time because she didn't know. Do we see an advantage in increasing the visibility of this product in any fashion possible?
Any self-respecting geek probably knows full well, but worth taking any opportunity to plug the medium. MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) are still alive and well, and MUD Connector lists about 2,000 currently active (as in, running now, have been running within the last two months).
To those unaware (for shame!), MUDs (and variations such as MUCKs, MOOs, and MUSHes) are BBS-era text-based games, the precursors to MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, Anarchy Online, and so on. There are some graphical (and freely available) MUDs out there, some listed on MUD Connector, but most are still text based. Generally, MUDs aren't completely original codebases, but derived from an open source basis, such as CircleMUD which just finally got out of 3.0 beta and released 3.1.
I administer a small MUD, passed down to me from two previous big egos, which has been up for somewhere around 1995, give or take a few months of server issues. Unfortunately, I'm too ashamed to post a link.
Woah, there. You kinda lost an important portion of that article. Notably:
As Richard Nixon said, "I am...a crook."
The article recognizes the right of an author to attach a license along with her work which then must be respected as much as any other portion of her copyright. Of course, I'm pretty sure this isn't in exactly how it's implemented in the DMCA (and I have read it). But since shrink-wrapped licenses are getting increasingly more legally binding, it's effectively the same thing for digital media.
Realize that it isn't the DMCA where this comes from, but rather from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and a treaty agreed to by some 38 countries. Few of those countries, oddly, are in the EU, even though the treaty was signed in Geneva. Article 11 of the treaty reads:
Article 12 is also interesting, but more or less a corollary. It requires contracting parties to make it illegal to remove copy management information from a work or knowingly transmit a work which has had this done to it. I'd love to see a good page listing to what degree this treaty has been put into force of law in agreeing countries.
I've heard they did something along these lines with Tribes Flood Network.
As you well know, but our poster may not, the United Kingdom has different voltage, frequency, and outlets. Although almost all recent laptops come with switching power supplies which elegantly handle U.S. and all European voltages, it would be a bummer to blow a power supply (or a whole laptop) on such a thing. If your power supply is such a beast, it is probably labelled right on it "120-400V, 30-80Hz" or something of that sort.
As far as specifics go, for the UK, it's 50Hz, 230V AC. And Howstuffworks has a somewhat spiffy illustration of the plug appearance. Three flat prongs, two horizontal, one vertical for grounded plugs (which hopefully your laptop has). Two round prongs for non-grounded.
But, assuming you mean by an "Orinoco card", a wireless Orinoco card, you could always check for open community LANs in the areas you are travelling. At http://www.toaster.net/wireless/community.html there's a list of open wirless LANs, including four such LANs in the UK, one specifically in London.
Liquid nitrogen is frequently made out of air. So, yeah, nitrogen can be obtained kinda cheaply. Breathe. There you go.
This is also why superconductors which could work at nitrogen's liquification temperature or above are such a potentially great thing. Otherwise, you're dealing with much more expensive cooling.
Yes, this is a tad redundant since quite a few people have given links to FAQs which thoroughly give this information. Mod kindly.
That said, RFID = Radio Frequency IDentification. Narrowing our vision to current practical uses, RFID tags are embeded in something one wishes to scan, identify, or track. The idea with low cost RFID tags like Gillette is buying is that they are passive. Readers for the chips emit a signal which actually supplies the power for the chip. For those who haven't had physics, this is akin to how a crystal radio works (with no battery at all). Low-cost, passive chips like this have a range of only about 10 ft, however, so don't go too 1984.
Woah, are we getting offtopic. Ah well, late enough for this article not to be seen by moderators.
Not denigrating engineers. Just a matter of time. For an engineer, it's a four year degree, EIT, PE and you're an engineer. For a lawyer, it's a four year degree, LSAT, three more years of law school, and then the bar exam. There are enough people who train to be engineers and then become lawyers. Hence the 'not even an engineer'.
As a white male whose excellent test-taking abilities which have saved my grade in a few classes in which I did little else, I may be biased in making a response. Just the same.
I can't comment upon the basis of the statement since I was merely quoting the linked article, but my guess would be that studies have been done which show females and minorities tend to do worse on written tests. A quick google brings up this article which sites just such statistics for the SAT of 1995. And then there's this article on women and minorities in science with relevant data from 1999.
I've seen otherwise very competent people, both male and female, crumble in tests here at college. Heck, I've watched my sisters and mother have the same problems. Generally, the factor seems to be a matter of believing in one's own ability. People who know what they're doing overlook simple details because they're nervous or are worried that they don't understand a problem when they actually do (Why would they give me this piece of data if I didn't need it?). Myself, I was exposed to tests frequently when young which helped me learn the habit of confidence.
Now, I can't comment on any tendancy of females or minorities to be more timid than males or whites respectively. Statistical studies could quite possibly do that.
But the thing is that two things are being tested: the ability to know the correct answer and the ability to recall and relay that answer clearly while udne pressure. It is that second matter which some might find causes a statistical discrepancy which could amount to discrimination. Like I said, though, IANAL. I'm not even an engineer, yet.
I'm not a laywer, but luckily, some lawyers write web pages.
According to "Pre-Employment Testing of Applicants", written tests can be dangerous because "A multiple choice aptitude test may discriminate against minority applicants or female applicants because it really reflects test-taking ability rather than actual job skills."
Now there's the old thorny issue: If you give a test of type A and group P has a high tendancy to do badly on a test of type A, are you discriminating against group P?
Free or free? Ah semantics. But let's put that issue aside.
Trillian Pro is an excellent client which has features that are fairly badly needed in the free version of Trillian. For instance, the ability to view HTML in profiles. Also, the ability to use video over Yahoo. And more than once already I've found I've downloaded a skin I wanted to use, but, ooops, no good in the free version.
There are free clients from AIM and Yahoo that solve these problems. And they are even less demanding on the system requirements.
I think there's slightly more at issue than just that. Though I'd agree that violent video games in and of themselves are highly unlikely to make a person violent, the question is whether violent video games may have a detectable effect on behavior on a significant number of people. For instance, violent games may encourage some people to "let out their anger" rather than reason through it and learn what is making them angry. And, it has been seen that expressing anger tends to cause an increase in one's liklihood to be angry, not a decrease. I posted about this before when GTA3 came up in a slashback. Hopefully I was clearer this time.
Um? JFS? High availability linux (linked by parent)? Don't those count as software they've already given away? And I'm sure there's several more examples which I'm not familiar with.
You're either not doing your research or you're just a troll.
Pardon the tangential subject as we wander from over-managment to bad business models. Really, no amount of good management can fix a broken business model. Good management might rewrite a broken business plan and fix an ailing company, but so might bad management rewrite a perfectly function business plan. But back to the point.
Open source development frequently comes down to an issue of profit through service rather than the product itself. In the case of one kinda big company, they're spending some large money developing and integrating open source solutions to phase out some of their products. Sometimes it works better providing services rather than constantly maintaining one's own proprietary software, or at least it may become easier to maintain when your customers sometimes volunteer improvements.
The same give-away-the-product, sell-the-support system works for some smaller companies who sell to home users. Good tech support is certainly worth plenty, especially when even mature software can sometimes be confusing.
There are really two important questions here:
The first question seems to about whether colleges are getting people comfortable with Microsoft products, or accomodating them if they are already comfortable. OTOH, the second question is a matter of whether courses specifically teach skills in a Microsoft-centric fashion.
Realistically, I can't speak to a trend, but I can tell you how things are at my school. I attend an engineering college. Obviously, this makes us not big on CS; therefore, we tend to deploy Windows on most of our open labs. It's what most students and professors are comfortable with when they arrive. Therefore, a lot of non-CS students see a lot of Windows. At least at first.
But simultaneously there is an open Linux lab in which anyone can get accounts with non-too-shabby computers. Almost no one but Geophysics uses it, but they require its use for some courses. And all of the nice physics labs for 3rd year and higher physics majors run Redhat. They're set up with Linux because all junior level and above reports must be done in LaTeX.
Everyone is required to take at least one programming course, which normally winds up being Fortran or C/C++ for everyone. Chemical engineers can take VB. C/C++ is taught almost exclusively on IRIX boxes. Only recently have we had a teacher that even required any exposure to visual studio for that class -- or any low-to-mid level CS class.
As far as CS students go, all high-level CS classes tend to either be a Unix-environment or a 'use any environment available on campus'. Most teaching is mathematically and theoretically centered. I can't count how many times teachers have said in lecture that we're being taught important theory and not too much application because we might as well go to a trade school if we just want to learn current applications.
What about non-CS required courses? We're all required to take a lot of general courses, one of which (EPICS) includes required use of Microsoft Project. We're all required to take a year of calculus-based physics whose labs were taught in additional Redhat labs. They're not Windows labs.
Myself, I find this pretty mixed. There are a lot of *nix machines on campus but they're frequently not obvious until you get in a class that requires them or you simply seek them out. We more-or-less force some cross-platform experience on all majors. But if someone wants to be all Microsoft, he can probably get by like that if he doesn't mind taking alternate courses and debating with his counselor. And the same can be done for someone who wants to go all Linux.
My experience is, despite heavy Microsoft pressure, we're a rather OS-balanced school. I can only hope all schools are along the same lines.
Oh, and how do I know we have heavy Microsoft pressure?
Just a hunch.
Posted article reads:
However, the article reads:
If the poster is accurate, this means that the Taiwanese profits have grown from some unknown negative to a postive 20 in less than a year. Decent gains on profits if you ask me.