Hmmm, you raise some interesting points.
But you appear to have romantic notions about the role of universities.
Originally, guilds had their own schools. Skills were transmitted in secrecy.
Knowledge is power and status, power and status define success in our societies.
Universities were created by governments to take power away from the guilds.
Especially, and primarily by and for men.
(There are fundamental differences in the way men and women acquire and use status.)
Universities were created to channel, transmit, and often control essential knowledge.
Only a species on holiday can say 'unapplied education is worth something'. It is not, IMHO.
As evident from our benchmarks and the noise and heat production measurements the 80GB, Western Digital 800JB with 8MB cache and the 120GB, IBM 120GXP offer the best combination of performance, noise and heat levels. The IBM has our preference as it has the largest capacity and thus offers the best price/performance ratio.
If you're looking for a good 7200-rpm harddisk then look no further than the Western Digital WD800BB, with 2MB cache, just a tad bit slower than the WD800JB which features 8MB of cache. The surprising newcomer is the Samsung SP8004H that scores well on all fronts and certainly deserves your attention too.
Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.
If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.
All your questions are answered by the effect of the Net on communications.
Look: human society is built on communications.
Communication defines what we are, what we can do.
People hunger for ways to communicate, and the Net gives them this.
Of course, no-one knows what the actual effects will be on our societies.
So maybe a study would be interesting to some extent.
But it's not hard to make good and accurate predictions...
Just look at current barriers to communication. Then imagine them gone!
Reach anyone you want, anytime you want, for almost no cost, anywhere in the world. This is where we are heading.
:) No, I don't think I wasted my education. But perhaps IHBT.
If the sole purpose of university was to get you a good job afterward, arts majors would get good jobs too.
This would be true if universities succeeded in their purpose. Most do not. Setting exams that are easy to cheat is just one example of failure.
Human society is complex enough to warrant specialists in all fields, arts or science. Education is not supposed to be a holiday: someone always pays, either the student or the taxpayer. Arts majors going to McDos is a failure of the system.
Lastly, 'applied math' is a meaningless definition of any subject. Cooking is applied math. So is driving a car. So are all sciences. Computer Science is about understanding and developing the science of information. And maths is only part of this. Psychology is almost as important. People who forget this become disconnected from the real world. Programming is not some minor aspect of this. It is the medium of expression. It is the only way you can demonstrate and test the science in the real world.
Yes, you can learn a lot about programming without doing CompSci, the reverse does not make sense.
Ultra-wideband makes USB (and BlueTooth) irrelevant.
Check out XtremeSpectrum and Time Domain.
The FCC approved unlicensed use of the UWB spectrum (3.1 to 10.6 Ghz) earlier this year.
This allows wireless connections of up to 500Mbps between devices (less, maybe 100Mbps for battery-powered devices).
Both companies have chipsets almost ready. They were only waiting for FCC approval.
Nokia have (here in Belgium) a very good reputation.
IMHO they deserve it. Good phones, well designed.
But Europe's mobile phone market is very sick.
The operators paid heavily for near-useless licences.
They cannot get WCDMA to work (first pilot in Finland was cancelled).
They cannot change to CDMA2000 (against their license terms).
They cannot sell or trade their licenses.
Basically, Europe's telecom regulators have screwed it and lost their world lead with GSM.
For Nokia, this is very serious: Europe is their main market.
Look at Japan: CDMA2000 got 2m subscribers, WCDMA got 150,000. In the same time period.
Qualcomm is looking like a very interesting company. They will find themselves in a monopoly position.
Not because they have twisted anyone's arms. Simply because their technology is better.
Science is not just theoretical.
The true meaning of science only emerges when you get your hands dirty,
and for Computer Science this means doing hands-on work until your brain hurts.
Becoming good in anything requires long, tedious repetition combined with a forced raising of the level of abstraction.
Focussing on theory simply does not achieve this, and leaves graduates with an understanding but no feeling for their subject.
Imagine learning music by studying all about harmony, sound waves, and instrument fabrication, but never touching an instrument. Useless!!
"Good math background"?
The one subject I disliked most in my CompSci course was applied maths.
This has not stopped me from making a good career from it.
If education is not meant to provide training for a professional life (more than just a 'job', granted), what is it for?
Teaching people subjects that are vaguely aimed in some possibly useful direction is a waste.
Colleges should teach you enough short-term skills to get started in a real paying job,
and enough deep understanding to keep current over 30 years.
Surely the impact of the Net is totally obvious.
The Net lowers the cost of communication.
This lets people create much larger and more efficient network.
Activities that depend on such networks (research, digital theft, collaborative research, free software development, certain kinds of commerce) have and will continue to boom.
Activities that depend on the high cost of communications (old media, encyclopedia salesmen, and other information cartels) have and will continue to decline.
This seems to be stating the obvious... what else will a study turn up? That we are evolving resistance to RSI?
A Modest Proposal...
A school should be allowed to charge a tax on their graduate's future earnings.
Say 5% of gross income for first 5 years of employment.
This would stimulate schools to teach subjects that were actually useful,
and to select students that were really skilled.
Presenting candidates with written questions makes for a poor exam.
It is a cheap way to test people's skills and it fails in an age where information cannot be locked up.
In CompSci, particularly, there are much better ways to test a candidate: the practical application of the theory being taught.
This can be made cheat-proof simply by requiring that work be done over a period of time, and logged in (e.g.) a CVS archive.
The educational establishment should judge and score performance over this period of time.
You mock me unfairly.
My weak humour makes a serious point.
Patent reform is urgently needed... real innovation by small businesses is being jeopardised,
but how does increasing the cost of filing a patent count as reform?
Lawrence Rosen writes "Geek Law" in Linux Journal.
He has addressed the issue of software patents before.
But these two licenses are the first time I've seen an answer.
The patent clause should be included in the next GPL.
It is a significant advance in protecting free software.
And I applaud Lawrence Rosen's innitiative.
"Death of a business" is exactly the thing to avoid.
Normal liquidation means paying all creditors,
giving the employees a decent period of dismissal
and splitting the remains between the shareholders.
It's not about quitting after a "first profit"
but about applying the same rules to the future
as one hopes the founders applied at the start.
You have different costs and goals for:
- commodity products
- new inventions (R&D)
- business process automation
- technical process automation
and so on.
Most software is actually surprisingly cheap, because, like table salt, we have managed to produce it on an industrial scale.
But anything that falls outside the 'box' - and this includes the R&D that can give a business its 'edge' is costly.
It is like 'chemicals'. Sodium chloride is cheap. Anything made by a solitary lab scientist somewhere is horribly costly.
This book was written in 1995, when we were finishing the mass automation of most normal business processes.
Buying the same software today is really cheap unless you go for SAP & Co.
There is a significant gap (people selling salt as if it were gold) that is only possible because software is so hard to understand, compare, and measure.
With time, this gap will close and commodity software will go for commodity prices.
This is true.
The concept that a business stopping is 'bad' is perhaps a consequence of stock markets.
In fact it's quite natural that businesses stop being relevant and thus cease trading.
It's a shame when they actually go broke, it would be smarter to liquidate before that
and split the proceedings amongst the shareholders.
But this almost never happens, because we have come to believe that a business must succeed or die, never just quit while the going is good.
Technology does not solve social issues
and here it looks like 3dfx did not deliver the technology,
but IMHO the problem came because their product became a commodity item.
Frankly, the market for high-end graphics came and went.
Cheap on-board chips work well for 95% of users.
In such a market, only a couple of suppliers can remain
and it will be those with the lowest margins and costs,
not those with the best technology (which means creative people and higher margins).
There is no rule that says that business have to survive.
3dfx changed the graphics scene at a time when this was worth doing,
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
It's natural and normal that the market moves and the companies move with the market.
When a company is so focussed on a single segment, they usually go broke during such changes.
Sad, but presumably their excellent people will find good work elsewhere.
I have just unpacked my store of 1200 CDs,
which I painfully ripped to MP3 last year.
But Ogg Vorbis is The Codec with Most Attitude!
I'm converted. I just hope my speakers don't implode!
News for you, sir: a majority of people outside the US
blame the world's problems on the US. And sometimes they are right.
Attacking Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic.
Indeed, the behaviour of most parties in the Middle East should be stoutly attacked. Rogues the lot of them.
IndyMedia represent a moderately left-wing viewpoint, one that the world would be poorer without.
And I speak as someone who disagrees with their views.
TCP = Trusted Computing Platform.
Hacker = any person writing illegal code.
Legal code = code that observes legal requirements for security and traceability.
Requirements: a bloody huge set of rules that only very large companies will be able to observe.
Consequence: in five years' time, 'independent' software developers will go the way of independent car manufacturers.
Captain, I predict that this scenario has a 45% chance of occuring.
No, I just write what I observe.
For most people discovering the Net today
there are two interesting things...
Hotmail or Yahoo mail, and Google.
If Google can keep this up then in 5 years
they will be the Net for a large chunk
of the population, like AOL used to be.
"Google is God" is not marketing hype.
It is a prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
Curious that a P120 should withstand /. so well.
Anyone ever heard of this web server before?
Hmmm, you raise some interesting points.
But you appear to have romantic notions about the role of universities.
Originally, guilds had their own schools. Skills were transmitted in secrecy.
Knowledge is power and status, power and status define success in our societies.
Universities were created by governments to take power away from the guilds.
Especially, and primarily by and for men.
(There are fundamental differences in the way men and women acquire and use status.)
Universities were created to channel, transmit, and often control essential knowledge.
Only a species on holiday can say 'unapplied education is worth something'. It is not, IMHO.
If you're looking for a good 7200-rpm harddisk then look no further than the Western Digital WD800BB, with 2MB cache, just a tad bit slower than the WD800JB which features 8MB of cache. The surprising newcomer is the Samsung SP8004H that scores well on all fronts and certainly deserves your attention too.
Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.
If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.
All your questions are answered by the effect of the Net on communications.
Look: human society is built on communications.
Communication defines what we are, what we can do.
People hunger for ways to communicate, and the Net gives them this.
Of course, no-one knows what the actual effects will be on our societies.
So maybe a study would be interesting to some extent.
But it's not hard to make good and accurate predictions...
Just look at current barriers to communication. Then imagine them gone!
Reach anyone you want, anytime you want, for almost no cost, anywhere in the world. This is where we are heading.
This would be true if universities succeeded in their purpose. Most do not. Setting exams that are easy to cheat is just one example of failure.
Human society is complex enough to warrant specialists in all fields, arts or science. Education is not supposed to be a holiday: someone always pays, either the student or the taxpayer. Arts majors going to McDos is a failure of the system.
Lastly, 'applied math' is a meaningless definition of any subject. Cooking is applied math. So is driving a car. So are all sciences. Computer Science is about understanding and developing the science of information. And maths is only part of this. Psychology is almost as important. People who forget this become disconnected from the real world. Programming is not some minor aspect of this. It is the medium of expression. It is the only way you can demonstrate and test the science in the real world.
Yes, you can learn a lot about programming without doing CompSci, the reverse does not make sense.
Ultra-wideband makes USB (and BlueTooth) irrelevant.
Check out XtremeSpectrum
and Time Domain.
The FCC approved unlicensed use of the UWB spectrum (3.1 to 10.6 Ghz) earlier this year.
This allows wireless connections of up to 500Mbps between devices (less, maybe 100Mbps for battery-powered devices).
Both companies have chipsets almost ready. They were only waiting for FCC approval.
Nokia have (here in Belgium) a very good reputation.
IMHO they deserve it. Good phones, well designed.
But Europe's mobile phone market is very sick.
The operators paid heavily for near-useless licences.
They cannot get WCDMA to work (first pilot in Finland was cancelled).
They cannot change to CDMA2000 (against their license terms).
They cannot sell or trade their licenses.
Basically, Europe's telecom regulators have screwed it and lost their world lead with GSM.
For Nokia, this is very serious: Europe is their main market.
Look at Japan: CDMA2000 got 2m subscribers, WCDMA got 150,000. In the same time period.
Qualcomm is looking like a very interesting company. They will find themselves in a monopoly position.
Not because they have twisted anyone's arms. Simply because their technology is better.
Science is not just theoretical.
The true meaning of science only emerges when you get your hands dirty,
and for Computer Science this means doing hands-on work until your brain hurts.
Becoming good in anything requires long, tedious repetition combined with a forced raising of the level of abstraction.
Focussing on theory simply does not achieve this, and leaves graduates with an understanding but no feeling for their subject.
Imagine learning music by studying all about harmony, sound waves, and instrument fabrication, but never touching an instrument. Useless!!
"Good math background"?
The one subject I disliked most in my CompSci course was applied maths.
This has not stopped me from making a good career from it.
If education is not meant to provide training for a professional life (more than just a 'job', granted), what is it for?
Teaching people subjects that are vaguely aimed in some possibly useful direction is a waste.
Colleges should teach you enough short-term skills to get started in a real paying job,
and enough deep understanding to keep current over 30 years.
Surely the impact of the Net is totally obvious.
The Net lowers the cost of communication.
This lets people create much larger and more efficient network.
Activities that depend on such networks (research, digital theft, collaborative research, free software development, certain kinds of commerce) have and will continue to boom.
Activities that depend on the high cost of communications (old media, encyclopedia salesmen, and other information cartels) have and will continue to decline.
This seems to be stating the obvious... what else will a study turn up? That we are evolving resistance to RSI?
A Modest Proposal...
A school should be allowed to charge a tax on their graduate's future earnings.
Say 5% of gross income for first 5 years of employment.
This would stimulate schools to teach subjects that were actually useful,
and to select students that were really skilled.
Presenting candidates with written questions makes for a poor exam.
It is a cheap way to test people's skills and it fails in an age where information cannot be locked up.
In CompSci, particularly, there are much better ways to test a candidate: the practical application of the theory being taught.
This can be made cheat-proof simply by requiring that work be done over a period of time, and logged in (e.g.) a CVS archive.
The educational establishment should judge and score performance over this period of time.
You mock me unfairly.
My weak humour makes a serious point.
Patent reform is urgently needed... real innovation by small businesses is being jeopardised,
but how does increasing the cost of filing a patent count as reform?
1. Hire more patent officers, raise patent fees
2. ???
3. Patent reform!!
Lawrence Rosen writes "Geek Law" in Linux Journal.
He has addressed the issue of software patents before.
But these two licenses are the first time I've seen an answer.
The patent clause should be included in the next GPL.
It is a significant advance in protecting free software.
And I applaud Lawrence Rosen's innitiative.
"Death of a business" is exactly the thing to avoid.
Normal liquidation means paying all creditors,
giving the employees a decent period of dismissal
and splitting the remains between the shareholders.
It's not about quitting after a "first profit"
but about applying the same rules to the future
as one hopes the founders applied at the start.
You have different costs and goals for:
- commodity products
- new inventions (R&D)
- business process automation
- technical process automation
and so on.
Most software is actually surprisingly cheap, because, like table salt, we have managed to produce it on an industrial scale.
But anything that falls outside the 'box' - and this includes the R&D that can give a business its 'edge' is costly.
It is like 'chemicals'. Sodium chloride is cheap. Anything made by a solitary lab scientist somewhere is horribly costly.
This book was written in 1995, when we were finishing the mass automation of most normal business processes.
Buying the same software today is really cheap unless you go for SAP & Co.
There is a significant gap (people selling salt as if it were gold) that is only possible because software is so hard to understand, compare, and measure.
With time, this gap will close and commodity software will go for commodity prices.
This is true.
The concept that a business stopping is 'bad' is perhaps a consequence of stock markets.
In fact it's quite natural that businesses stop being relevant and thus cease trading.
It's a shame when they actually go broke, it would be smarter to liquidate before that
and split the proceedings amongst the shareholders.
But this almost never happens, because we have come to believe that a business must succeed or die, never just quit while the going is good.
Technology does not solve social issues
and here it looks like 3dfx did not deliver the technology,
but IMHO the problem came because their product became a commodity item.
Frankly, the market for high-end graphics came and went.
Cheap on-board chips work well for 95% of users.
In such a market, only a couple of suppliers can remain
and it will be those with the lowest margins and costs,
not those with the best technology (which means creative people and higher margins).
There is no rule that says that business have to survive.
3dfx changed the graphics scene at a time when this was worth doing,
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
It's natural and normal that the market moves and the companies move with the market.
When a company is so focussed on a single segment, they usually go broke during such changes.
Sad, but presumably their excellent people will find good work elsewhere.
I have just unpacked my store of 1200 CDs,
which I painfully ripped to MP3 last year.
But Ogg Vorbis is The Codec with Most Attitude!
I'm converted. I just hope my speakers don't implode!
Open source, small, light, and fast.
News for you, sir: a majority of people outside the US
blame the world's problems on the US. And sometimes they are right.
Attacking Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic.
Indeed, the behaviour of most parties in the Middle East should be stoutly attacked. Rogues the lot of them.
IndyMedia represent a moderately left-wing viewpoint, one that the world would be poorer without.
And I speak as someone who disagrees with their views.
TCP = Trusted Computing Platform.
Hacker = any person writing illegal code.
Legal code = code that observes legal requirements for security and traceability.
Requirements: a bloody huge set of rules that only very large companies will be able to observe.
Consequence: in five years' time, 'independent' software developers will go the way of independent car manufacturers.
Captain, I predict that this scenario has a 45% chance of occuring.
No, I just write what I observe.
For most people discovering the Net today
there are two interesting things...
Hotmail or Yahoo mail, and Google.
If Google can keep this up then in 5 years
they will be the Net for a large chunk
of the population, like AOL used to be.
"Google is God" is not marketing hype.
It is a prediction.