Opinions can change as we grow. But Bill had a legitimate point back in 1991. Right now, it benefits him to ignore the issues or dismiss them entirely. And since he's doing that, we should point it out, as Stallman has. What has changed and what has grown is Microsoft as a company. Their worth and their clout. And they continue to use that to the detriment of competition and the general public.
People are living longer which is not compensated for in the plan.
You lost me right here. If you RTFA, you'd notice that it's not shocking news to hear that people are living longer. And in fact, it's an opposite occurrance. The rate of longevity has slowed. So while they took into account that the general population is living longer, we're not living as long as the forecasters intended.
People talk with so much passion and ideology that when you see misinformation in someone's argument, you can't bear to read the rest of it. The signal to noise ratio is too low to warrant it.
The task is called Question Answering. Google does a lot of Information Extraction and retrieves results very well. But other parts of QA include analyzing the question as well as extracting the answer. So, assuming you get many results from your database of relevant documents, you analyze the documents and look for answers within them and then present that to the user.
What some people like to do is Information Browsing and sometimes don't have clear intent or have multiple interests. And sometimes, answering some questions lead to others and so you have Context Question Answering. Research in ongoing in these fields and Google has many highly qualified people working the Natural Language Processing field.
Ask Jeeves first tried this commercially. It's much easier to design a system if you have a given database and know the intended audience (Wall Street Journal archives and the NY Times archives are often used). I say within 5 years, the commerical consumer systems will be much better in handling NLP tasks.
It's shouldn't be the job of humans to rephrase questions, use precise terminology, learn complicated UI to use computers. The computers should know generalizations about humans and then adapt to the users and properly phrase questions in case of ambiguities. Humans can learn, but we can adapt only so much, especially if not trained at an early age. Sure you want to give children some experience with computers, but money would be better spent elsewhere in education, or in research in NLP or UI AI.
For some, cultural or racial issues may be at play. For others, it may have more to do with the greater disparity in cost of living and other factors that make it much harder for an USian to compete for a job versus an Indian or Chinese.
I was reading the Toronto Star recently and it was saying how while outsourcing was causing lost jobs for Canadians, they were also gaining US outsourced jobs. The world is getting smaller. People still haven't learne how to deal with it.
bullshit! Anyone with any knowledge of social/political dilemmas knows the difficulty of making decisions. Simple games like the prisoner's and chicken dilemma show the dangers of trying to decide the right course of action while modeling the assessments of others.
Sometimes, you have to stand your ground, or the bully/lunatic wins. Sometimes, you have to make threats, and if your "bluff" is called, you have to follow through. The UN made demands for years and the world was sure Iraq didn't comply, hence the resolution calling for Iraq to cooperate (Iraq was too stupid not to cooperate better). Anyhow, you have to follow through on the threat or your "word" and position is lessened for the future and that brings many other problems.
Situations aren't clear cut or simple. Your line you draw on when to fight might not be similar to anothers. But the decisions aren't so simple as to say, that guy was wrong and I'm right. Some decisions are a gamble, and some just can't get second guessed. It does no good. We can learn from it and analzye failed intelligence, etc. But some calls are gut calls where the right course of action isn't known.
This goes in hand with security vs liberty. Where people draw the lines differ. Some things are easier to see than others (the administration failed to plan for peace, they only listened to defectors and had 4 year old intelligence, likewise, giving up liberty for security is bound to have government abuse their power). But things aren't so clear cut (the defectors had good evidence before and Saddam could never be trusted, likewise, police have done a relatively good job and I'd prefer them to anarchy and every man for themselves).
It's just finding the line. Sometimes, the majority comes to a conclusion you don't agree with and you continue to argue your position but must give way to the majority at times.
You're right. There is always potential for problems. However, it's possible it could create a more of a meritocracy. Various people volunteer and when an opening occurs in the project, the best programmer gets a job. And you'd still have programmers who have other jobs volunteering on side projects that interest them. I think it'll be interesting and I'm optimistic about how things will turn out. Can't let fear prevent you from taking a step toward progress.
I do this as well. I used to have an email address from MailBank (later changed to NetIdentity). They buy up domains with last names so you can do firstname@lastname.com. They started off charging $5 a year for email and now it's $25/year. I got fed up with it and bought my own domain name.
Best move I did. I have greater control over it and feel more security about it as well.
There is a free DNS service held by ZoneEdit. If you only use it for one domain, it allows free email forwards, web forwards, etc. It has about all the services I could ask for (except hosting) for free (assuming you don't go over a quota).
I have emails redirected to my gmail account as well as comcast (which also hosts my personal website). I could host this on my own computer or elsewhere and I have a lot of freedom to do what I want.
And as the parent said, being able to create email addresses on the fly allows you to catch businesses that sell your email address, or find out where the spammers mostly target (and as another poster said, Slashdot is worst of all the ones I've created). It also makes it easier to filter with gmail and do searches and so forth.
I know I'm being mostly redundant as others, but I can't emphasize enough how valuable this is, especially to a computer geek. And I'm only paying $7/year for all this! I can't mod the parent up any more so I just want to re-iterate the value of catchall addresses and owning your own domain name.
Then Konqueror should have taught us otherwise. I like using "fish://username@domain" to view files in an "explorer" setting over sftp. Embeding of IE into the system as a concept is not flawed, the implementation is what's the problem. Hacking in a neat feature without security in mind and going back to try to fix what problems you didn't design to take care of is much worse than spending more time and designing more properly. Granted, the KDE group does have the mistakes of Microsoft to learn from.
There are around 6 billion people. 5% is 300 million.
First, lets start with the G8 nations. US has 300 million. Japan has 120 mil. Germany has 80 mil. UK has 60 mil. France has 60 mil. Italy has 60 mil. Canada has 30 mil. (lets exclude Russia because they're not really a rich nation). So far, that's around 700 mil.
Now, include rich and upper class people from China, India, Brazil, South Korea, etc and other nations such as Australia and those in Europe and that's easily 1 billion.
For me to be in the top 5%, I'd have to be in the top 30% out of these people!
Second, using capital to determine wealth, ignores cost of living and other issues.
I am very fortunate for what I have and I consider myself lucky in many ways. But please, the reality is bad enough as it is, we don't have to distort the facts.
Understandable gut reaction, but it flies in the face of statistics and research. People in the trenches (social workers, psychologists etc.) will tell you that a recurrent theme in criminal offenders is the failure to consider the consequences of their actions.
That is definitely part of the problem. But I doubt the US has such a higher percentange of people that are mentally challenged versus other nations that we have many more criminals than most. But regardless of the truth of the matter, your statistics supporting your truth is heavily biased that it doesn't disprove the argument that deterrence is important.
First, most statistics would be on criminals that are caught, not the many that were capable of getting away (probably the smarter ones). Also, many statistics tend to be on repeat offenders, obviously people that have a harder time learning. Deterrence AND improving capabilities of mentally challenged people are important.
Also remember that in Kholberg's theory on morality, reward and punishment is one of the early stages of morality and what helps people determine their actions. Making people think they'll be punished would have an affect on those that aren't at higher levels of moral systems.
To focus on whether they're patenting translucent windows, or time-dependent translucent windows misses the point!
It's almost like someone saying, "They're not patenting priority-queues, they're only patenting priority-queues that are sorted by integer value which holds when the job started." Oh great, that just makes it so much better. Yeah, I know there is a big difference between data-structures and specific implementation of some idea that uses multiple algorithms and data-structures. But you should still get the point.
Copyright already covers specific implementations. The patents are unnecessary.
I mean, you have DirectX and OpenGL as competing APIs and one of them gets vertex shaders, but then the other isn't allowed to. That'd just be retarded (again, even if my analogy is inaccurate, the point remains).
As a computer scientist, I read papers regarding many ideas and algorithms on how people attempted to and did solve problems. I use their knowledge and I try to work off of it. The idea that some company or person can patent such a trivial difference is absurd.
I guess I'm the only one that groups folders into a heirarchy. And with Labels, it's even more suitable. I mean, I'm working on a project so I label all emails regarding that project accordingly. But I want to make it so that everytime I label an email with that project, it also gets other labels (what organization I'm doing it for, etc). However, I have to manually do all the labels and can't do any heirarchies.
Also, gmail allowed me to do two refers. However, no one in my family or close circle of friends were interested. I finally got my dad to join (he used hotmail) but he was like, "I still want to continually delete my email since it's an important habit to form." I was trying to tell him one of the benefits is you don't have to! My second refer? Myself. So no one else can use my nick KingJoshi. I guess not everyone is as excited as the Slashdot crowd about this.
For instance, it is pretty worthless to do routing at the application layer if you are using IP, because it is already taken care of at the network layer.
Resilient Overlay Networks (RON) (going on memory of exact name) can improve transfer rates and have other advantages over using just TCP/IP.
There are many people that come here expecting major life improvement and end up working manual labor jobs. And they become too prideful to tell family back home how it really is. I had a friend who was doing post-doc and needing money also was working at Dairy Queen with me (I was 16-17). He couldn't bare to tell his parents and when his wife and kids moved to the US to be with him, he quit working (about a year working there at nights). Social stature and pride and so many things are involved.
And through it all, for many people, it's still better than what they could have at home...
I kept hearing about other distros so when I got a new HD, I created several partitions on my old hard to test several of them. While you can read about things from reviews, trying each one for a week or so does give you a feel for a difference.
The ones I tried were Redhat 9, Mandrake 9.1, Suse 8.2 and Debian Woody. Two other distros I'm curious about but won't probably ever install are slackware and gentoo. It just sounds like they like things more minimalistic than me (just get that feeling of it sounds difficult).
The install is often mentioned because unlike windows, it's not preinstalled. And if you can't install it, then you can't use it! Debian has the hardest install of them by far. I have tested the new Sarge installer and it's much better, but still more difficult than the other distros. Suse required FTP install since I didn't have the boxed set for any but I could download the latest Mandrake and Redhat ISOs.
Second main factor is default interface. Redhat uses GNOME while the other three go with KDE. While there are some things I like about gnome, I'm a KDE guy and I just feel out of place with Redhat. That's a very subjective thing. personally, I don't mind running gnome apps in KDE or vice versa, but running in KDE just feels more comfortable with me. Recently, I had to use a friend's Fedora core 1 which didn't have KDE and I felt so lost. Gnome's terminal is different enough (especially shortcuts) that I was unproductive. I couldn't figure out how to sftp folders when I'm so used to using fish and the windows explorer like interface through Konqueror. I'm sure there are equally effective methods in each interface, but I find one more comfortable than another and you can only learn your preference through experience.
The third main factor is package management. This probably may be more important than #2, but with the advancements in each system, it may be more of a wash. I used to be accustomed to Redhat's Package Manager (RPMs). I hadn't experimented too much with urpmi (in Mandrake) so I used rpms for mandrake as well. Suse has YAST (which is more of a control center as well) which was easier than both. Debian has apt-get method.
Rpms are often better than just get source and compiling but sometimes you have dependency problems and you cant find versions you're looking for or they conflict. I hear that Redhat and Mandrake have improved their handling of this and is easy as apt-get. In Debian, there are package repositories. You can tell the computer where to look (there are defaults) and it gets a list of possible applications. You can do apt-get (or use the graphical version through Synaptic) and install any app there. The program handles dependencies and tells you what else it needs and asks if it's okay to install them. Suse also uses rpms, but through YAST, it gave a synaptic like interface and allowed you to install from ftp apps. It is fairly easy to search for apps through categories or search by name/description.
Rpms have the benefit that they're popular and if you have problems, you can tend to find others that have had the problem and solved them. In Mandrake, I didn't like how it often felt that some place would allow rpm download, but sometimes there would be a conflict and I'd need to find the rpm-mdk version. I believe if you are part of Mandrak-club or whatever, you can more easily download newer apps or maybe the same with urpmi.
I started flirting with linux around Redhat 5.2. I mostly stayed testing with them until Mandrake 7.2. I decided to test the distros last fall and I'm sure my previous experiences bias my preferences somewhat. Given what I was used to with Red Hat and Mandrake, I didn't experiment with them as much as I did with SuSE and Debian and came away more impressed by the latter.
The fourth main factor is system administration. I know Mandrake as its Control Center and SuSE has YAST, but I'm not sure of anything for Debian or Redhat. Well, I used linuxconf, but I wonder if
From my understanding, it's sort of a separate network. But obviously, many routers are on both. It's just that if requests come from computers on I2, then they get I2 access. However, those not on I2 don't get the same benefits. Of course, I could be wrong.
It's still amazing the advancements. I remember several years ago when it would take up to 40 minutes to burn a CD (on my $400 CD burner). Now, I can go to the library at Michigan State (I live in university apartments without I2 access) and download an ISO from Purdue in under 4 minutes. At that, I can do everything off the network!
And at MSU, the EGR has our own Debian mirror. It's just amazing to see 5MB/s (yes, megabytes!) speeds sometimes (though it varies from 1-5). Our engineering building has two networks (Computer Science and Engineering) and while they're connected to each other at Gb/s link, all other things internal are 100Mb/s. However, I assume (as can been seen from this article) that the I2 connections from the university are much greater. 5 years from now, the students may be enjoying gigabit speeds. I wonder how much farther behind the rest of the country will be...
My point wasn't that American's aren't qualified for research or that they weren't making a financially good decision*. Moreso, even with the devaluing dollar, the stipends made are probably greater than what international students would make abroad.
However, I still think there is less appreciation for research itself and knowledge and education are not valued at much as it may be abroad. However, the students I meet from abroad are obviously a very biased sample.
*While the decision may make sense temporarily, if all the people did that and only foreigners did research, and then took their knowledge and expertise back home, the temporally local intelligent thing to do may not be in the best interest of society and indirectly the same individuals in the long run. Obviously, as you imply, this is a problem reinforced by the system. For for a corporation, why does it matter where they are located as a corporation is not really a being. However, the people in the corporation are probably doing long-term damage to themselves if they dilute their talent pool and innovation that comes from research.
What are computer science challenge competitions? I hope you mean something different from ACM programming competitions...
Second, I would assume the best benefit of MIT is the environment of other intelligent people. If you don't work hard or aren't smart, you're more likely to be left behind. However, if you go to another school, while the professors may use the same book, they may have to go slower or they may not have the same expectations out of the students, which may cause less acheivement.
Personally, I didn't go to a prestigious school nor do I understand their significance beyond what I've mentioned. So besides gauging intelligence of the students through test scores, I don't see how they can rank undergraduate CS programs.
For graduate schools, you look at funding and publications of the faculty. And you find a school that excels at the specific field you're interested in.
Modern society works partly because people can specialize. So let them do so: let the physicists hack physics, not intro courses or three class workloads, etc.
That's so misguided. I was discussing some issues with a friend and came to know he hadn't taken any courses in economics. Sure, as computer scientists and engineers, we *might* not need econ in our discipline, but we need to know the basics for our lives. When we vote on presidential candidates, we should have some idea of the soundness of their plan or what the basic foundations of their ideas are (flawed or not). Also, a lot of upper level econ is math and also deals with game theory, which may be useful for some in the discipline.
There are a lot of courses that are beneficial to the student as a person. Colleges aren't just trying to spit out researchers or workers but well-rounded individuals. The fact that half the students drink and piss their years away or go to classes, not care, do just enough to pass and not really grasp the material (much less connect it to other disciplines) is another issue. Maybe universities aren't teaching the material properly, but the intro courses in subjects outside of your discipline are important.
Especially for research. While you may think that research is getting more specialized (which is it), it's also becoming multi-disciplinary. We have a cognitive science group here that deals with linguistics, psychology, physiology, sociology, zoology, computer science, etc. It's helpful to know what tricks (if any) animals use in navigation if you're designing a vehicle navigation system.
Here's an analogy for slashdot, it's foolish to expect someone to be a great programmer if they don't understand how the OS is designed, the architecture (and reasons for the architecture) of the system, the design of the programming language, etc. While some might be competent, the great ones will understand how things connect and realize that things you may not have been interested in are needed for things you are interested in.
I mentioned this before. I came (age 5) to the US because my dad came here to study. I went through the schooling system and graduated early and finished second in the class (my sister was valedictorian), yet I couldn't get any scholarships to public undergraduate schools. Even though they happily took taxes from my parents for years, I'm still considered "international" for all fees. And due to technicalities, I can't get a Research Assistantship or Teaching Assistantship but only fellowships. But most fellowships go to US citizens and residents, of which I'm neither.
I'm just very lucky that my parents lived dirt poor and worked long hours to save money for my education. And though I've lived here for almost 20 years, I'll probably be leaving and doing my PhD in another country.
For those that are wondering, I came here on a J-2 visa (which has requirements on going back to your home country and so forth). If I had come illegally, I'd have many less legal issues. There are many well-meaning laws that have many unintended consequences...
I don't know how prevalent that is in the US either. You also have issues of selective memory. But you also have other socially frowned upon attributes (besides intelligence). I mean, if someone is intelligent and ugly, then I'm sure they'd get picked upon more.
But I always got good grades but I never had problems in school. If people picked on me, I was too oblivious to notice maybe:) Actually, I had plenty of friends on the football and basketball team and I was on the chess team and stuff. I even went to an inner city ghetto school. Maybe I'm just fortunate...
Being a "foreign" graduate student in computer science, I know this first hand. Two-third of the graduate students here (Michigan State University) are international. And when you consider the fact that they count us as "American" in the published papers metrics and so forth, then it looks even more bleak. Especialy since most of the Americans I know in grad school are only staying for the masters, and most of the internationals are interested in PhD and research.
I definitely think cultural issues are the most important. I don't know if schools have lower standards. I noticed that the stuff my brother learned in middle school (he attend the same school as me 9 yaers later) were more difficult than what I learned. And while I can't compare high schools (he is attending a much higher regarded HS), he's definitely being challenged much more than I am. So while there are many problems with schools, it starts at home and the problems permeate throughout US culture.
I think first and foremost, the value of education is not really understood by children, nor many of their parents who might not have good education in the first place. Second, it's not just standards the schools set on students in what they learn, it's the expectations the students must have themselves. Very few from my high school went on to college and I don't think many believed they could every make it so they never tried. This and expectations also goes hand in hand with role models. My father got a PhD and my mother got her masters. I expected out of myself to get a PhD (I'm currently working on my masters), while many students were just proud to graduate high school.
In line with what I said earlier, students have to believe it'll make a difference. People are short-sighted to begin with, and many people's ability to reason are flawed, so you can't expect kids to be the brightest on seeing long-term effects. That's why it has to be instilled as a core-belief, a value, from a young age that learning (not can) WILL make a difference. Yes, many students have the ability to reason by high school, but if many of the kids weren't trying hard or learning by the time they get there, it's really hard to make up some of that knowledge (especially since math is so critical for the sciences and it only builds upon itself). It's also hard to learn how to learn (learning in academics is obviously different from learning in sports, music, etc. there are nuances you have to pick up) and if they haven't learned some of those skills, it can get very frustrating.
Which leads to another problem. People give up too easily. People marry fast and devorce fast. They want instant gratification. You have lotteries everywhere and people don't want to work hard to reach success, they want it easily or want to complain about not having it.
There are a lot of societal/cultural issues and I don't know who or what organization is supposed to address them. Too many corporations think short-term that they can't see how they're hurting themselves by creating such "consumers".
A friend from Ukraine remarked to me about how she found the US system scary. She said that when she was young, she completely believed in the communist teachings. And while there was corruption and so forth, the government had a plan and many of the masses believed it and they worked toward it. Here in the US, it's aimless. Corporations use money to help themselves and you don't know how it's going to go.
However, in Japan, you also have marketing and advertising that have created mass consumers as well. Are the effects on their education of their young only to be seen later, or have the traditional values held firm?
I wish more studies would be done on this, and the media itself would present this more as a problem. If the US is losing its dominance because other countries had nowhere to go but up, then that's great news overall really. However, one would suspect that there are many other issues at lie and politicians only seem to say they'll do something but do nothing but token gestures.
The article mentioned that there has been a 25% dropoff of international students since 9/11 for graduate school. I have met people that had to wait a year(s) to get his visa. Many decide that the benefit of coming to the US is not worth the hassle.
But if you had RTA, you'd also notice that the trend had been going for many years prior to then. So you can only blame the Bush administration little (if at all, for it had been happening prior to them ever coming to office).
Slashdot Mirror
Opinions can change as we grow. But Bill had a legitimate point back in 1991. Right now, it benefits him to ignore the issues or dismiss them entirely. And since he's doing that, we should point it out, as Stallman has. What has changed and what has grown is Microsoft as a company. Their worth and their clout. And they continue to use that to the detriment of competition and the general public.
You lost me right here. If you RTFA, you'd notice that it's not shocking news to hear that people are living longer. And in fact, it's an opposite occurrance. The rate of longevity has slowed. So while they took into account that the general population is living longer, we're not living as long as the forecasters intended.
People talk with so much passion and ideology that when you see misinformation in someone's argument, you can't bear to read the rest of it. The signal to noise ratio is too low to warrant it.
The task is called Question Answering. Google does a lot of Information Extraction and retrieves results very well. But other parts of QA include analyzing the question as well as extracting the answer. So, assuming you get many results from your database of relevant documents, you analyze the documents and look for answers within them and then present that to the user.
What some people like to do is Information Browsing and sometimes don't have clear intent or have multiple interests. And sometimes, answering some questions lead to others and so you have Context Question Answering. Research in ongoing in these fields and Google has many highly qualified people working the Natural Language Processing field.
Ask Jeeves first tried this commercially. It's much easier to design a system if you have a given database and know the intended audience (Wall Street Journal archives and the NY Times archives are often used). I say within 5 years, the commerical consumer systems will be much better in handling NLP tasks.
It's shouldn't be the job of humans to rephrase questions, use precise terminology, learn complicated UI to use computers. The computers should know generalizations about humans and then adapt to the users and properly phrase questions in case of ambiguities. Humans can learn, but we can adapt only so much, especially if not trained at an early age. Sure you want to give children some experience with computers, but money would be better spent elsewhere in education, or in research in NLP or UI AI.
For some, cultural or racial issues may be at play. For others, it may have more to do with the greater disparity in cost of living and other factors that make it much harder for an USian to compete for a job versus an Indian or Chinese.
I was reading the Toronto Star recently and it was saying how while outsourcing was causing lost jobs for Canadians, they were also gaining US outsourced jobs. The world is getting smaller. People still haven't learne how to deal with it.
bullshit! Anyone with any knowledge of social/political dilemmas knows the difficulty of making decisions. Simple games like the prisoner's and chicken dilemma show the dangers of trying to decide the right course of action while modeling the assessments of others.
Sometimes, you have to stand your ground, or the bully/lunatic wins. Sometimes, you have to make threats, and if your "bluff" is called, you have to follow through. The UN made demands for years and the world was sure Iraq didn't comply, hence the resolution calling for Iraq to cooperate (Iraq was too stupid not to cooperate better). Anyhow, you have to follow through on the threat or your "word" and position is lessened for the future and that brings many other problems.
Situations aren't clear cut or simple. Your line you draw on when to fight might not be similar to anothers. But the decisions aren't so simple as to say, that guy was wrong and I'm right. Some decisions are a gamble, and some just can't get second guessed. It does no good. We can learn from it and analzye failed intelligence, etc. But some calls are gut calls where the right course of action isn't known.
This goes in hand with security vs liberty. Where people draw the lines differ. Some things are easier to see than others (the administration failed to plan for peace, they only listened to defectors and had 4 year old intelligence, likewise, giving up liberty for security is bound to have government abuse their power). But things aren't so clear cut (the defectors had good evidence before and Saddam could never be trusted, likewise, police have done a relatively good job and I'd prefer them to anarchy and every man for themselves).
It's just finding the line. Sometimes, the majority comes to a conclusion you don't agree with and you continue to argue your position but must give way to the majority at times.
You're right. There is always potential for problems. However, it's possible it could create a more of a meritocracy. Various people volunteer and when an opening occurs in the project, the best programmer gets a job. And you'd still have programmers who have other jobs volunteering on side projects that interest them. I think it'll be interesting and I'm optimistic about how things will turn out. Can't let fear prevent you from taking a step toward progress.
I do this as well. I used to have an email address from MailBank (later changed to NetIdentity). They buy up domains with last names so you can do firstname@lastname.com. They started off charging $5 a year for email and now it's $25/year. I got fed up with it and bought my own domain name.
Best move I did. I have greater control over it and feel more security about it as well.
There is a free DNS service held by ZoneEdit. If you only use it for one domain, it allows free email forwards, web forwards, etc. It has about all the services I could ask for (except hosting) for free (assuming you don't go over a quota).
I have emails redirected to my gmail account as well as comcast (which also hosts my personal website). I could host this on my own computer or elsewhere and I have a lot of freedom to do what I want.
And as the parent said, being able to create email addresses on the fly allows you to catch businesses that sell your email address, or find out where the spammers mostly target (and as another poster said, Slashdot is worst of all the ones I've created). It also makes it easier to filter with gmail and do searches and so forth.
I know I'm being mostly redundant as others, but I can't emphasize enough how valuable this is, especially to a computer geek. And I'm only paying $7/year for all this! I can't mod the parent up any more so I just want to re-iterate the value of catchall addresses and owning your own domain name.
Then Konqueror should have taught us otherwise. I like using "fish://username@domain" to view files in an "explorer" setting over sftp. Embeding of IE into the system as a concept is not flawed, the implementation is what's the problem. Hacking in a neat feature without security in mind and going back to try to fix what problems you didn't design to take care of is much worse than spending more time and designing more properly. Granted, the KDE group does have the mistakes of Microsoft to learn from.
5%? please! 20% I can believe.
There are around 6 billion people. 5% is 300 million.
First, lets start with the G8 nations.
US has 300 million.
Japan has 120 mil.
Germany has 80 mil.
UK has 60 mil.
France has 60 mil.
Italy has 60 mil.
Canada has 30 mil.
(lets exclude Russia because they're not really a rich nation).
So far, that's around 700 mil.
Now, include rich and upper class people from China, India, Brazil, South Korea, etc and other nations such as Australia and those in Europe and that's easily 1 billion.
For me to be in the top 5%, I'd have to be in the top 30% out of these people!
Second, using capital to determine wealth, ignores cost of living and other issues.
I am very fortunate for what I have and I consider myself lucky in many ways. But please, the reality is bad enough as it is, we don't have to distort the facts.
That is definitely part of the problem. But I doubt the US has such a higher percentange of people that are mentally challenged versus other nations that we have many more criminals than most. But regardless of the truth of the matter, your statistics supporting your truth is heavily biased that it doesn't disprove the argument that deterrence is important.
First, most statistics would be on criminals that are caught, not the many that were capable of getting away (probably the smarter ones). Also, many statistics tend to be on repeat offenders, obviously people that have a harder time learning. Deterrence AND improving capabilities of mentally challenged people are important.
Also remember that in Kholberg's theory on morality, reward and punishment is one of the early stages of morality and what helps people determine their actions. Making people think they'll be punished would have an affect on those that aren't at higher levels of moral systems.
To focus on whether they're patenting translucent windows, or time-dependent translucent windows misses the point!
It's almost like someone saying, "They're not patenting priority-queues, they're only patenting priority-queues that are sorted by integer value which holds when the job started." Oh great, that just makes it so much better. Yeah, I know there is a big difference between data-structures and specific implementation of some idea that uses multiple algorithms and data-structures. But you should still get the point.
Copyright already covers specific implementations. The patents are unnecessary.
I mean, you have DirectX and OpenGL as competing APIs and one of them gets vertex shaders, but then the other isn't allowed to. That'd just be retarded (again, even if my analogy is inaccurate, the point remains).
As a computer scientist, I read papers regarding many ideas and algorithms on how people attempted to and did solve problems. I use their knowledge and I try to work off of it. The idea that some company or person can patent such a trivial difference is absurd.
I guess I'm the only one that groups folders into a heirarchy. And with Labels, it's even more suitable. I mean, I'm working on a project so I label all emails regarding that project accordingly. But I want to make it so that everytime I label an email with that project, it also gets other labels (what organization I'm doing it for, etc). However, I have to manually do all the labels and can't do any heirarchies.
Also, gmail allowed me to do two refers. However, no one in my family or close circle of friends were interested. I finally got my dad to join (he used hotmail) but he was like, "I still want to continually delete my email since it's an important habit to form." I was trying to tell him one of the benefits is you don't have to! My second refer? Myself. So no one else can use my nick KingJoshi. I guess not everyone is as excited as the Slashdot crowd about this.
Resilient Overlay Networks (RON) (going on memory of exact name) can improve transfer rates and have other advantages over using just TCP/IP.
Good point, but bad example.
There are many people that come here expecting major life improvement and end up working manual labor jobs. And they become too prideful to tell family back home how it really is. I had a friend who was doing post-doc and needing money also was working at Dairy Queen with me (I was 16-17). He couldn't bare to tell his parents and when his wife and kids moved to the US to be with him, he quit working (about a year working there at nights). Social stature and pride and so many things are involved.
And through it all, for many people, it's still better than what they could have at home...
I kept hearing about other distros so when I got a new HD, I created several partitions on my old hard to test several of them. While you can read about things from reviews, trying each one for a week or so does give you a feel for a difference.
The ones I tried were Redhat 9, Mandrake 9.1, Suse 8.2 and Debian Woody. Two other distros I'm curious about but won't probably ever install are slackware and gentoo. It just sounds like they like things more minimalistic than me (just get that feeling of it sounds difficult).
The install is often mentioned because unlike windows, it's not preinstalled. And if you can't install it, then you can't use it! Debian has the hardest install of them by far. I have tested the new Sarge installer and it's much better, but still more difficult than the other distros. Suse required FTP install since I didn't have the boxed set for any but I could download the latest Mandrake and Redhat ISOs.
Second main factor is default interface. Redhat uses GNOME while the other three go with KDE. While there are some things I like about gnome, I'm a KDE guy and I just feel out of place with Redhat. That's a very subjective thing. personally, I don't mind running gnome apps in KDE or vice versa, but running in KDE just feels more comfortable with me. Recently, I had to use a friend's Fedora core 1 which didn't have KDE and I felt so lost. Gnome's terminal is different enough (especially shortcuts) that I was unproductive. I couldn't figure out how to sftp folders when I'm so used to using fish and the windows explorer like interface through Konqueror. I'm sure there are equally effective methods in each interface, but I find one more comfortable than another and you can only learn your preference through experience.
The third main factor is package management. This probably may be more important than #2, but with the advancements in each system, it may be more of a wash. I used to be accustomed to Redhat's Package Manager (RPMs). I hadn't experimented too much with urpmi (in Mandrake) so I used rpms for mandrake as well. Suse has YAST (which is more of a control center as well) which was easier than both. Debian has apt-get method.
Rpms are often better than just get source and compiling but sometimes you have dependency problems and you cant find versions you're looking for or they conflict. I hear that Redhat and Mandrake have improved their handling of this and is easy as apt-get. In Debian, there are package repositories. You can tell the computer where to look (there are defaults) and it gets a list of possible applications. You can do apt-get (or use the graphical version through Synaptic) and install any app there. The program handles dependencies and tells you what else it needs and asks if it's okay to install them. Suse also uses rpms, but through YAST, it gave a synaptic like interface and allowed you to install from ftp apps. It is fairly easy to search for apps through categories or search by name/description.
Rpms have the benefit that they're popular and if you have problems, you can tend to find others that have had the problem and solved them. In Mandrake, I didn't like how it often felt that some place would allow rpm download, but sometimes there would be a conflict and I'd need to find the rpm-mdk version. I believe if you are part of Mandrak-club or whatever, you can more easily download newer apps or maybe the same with urpmi.
I started flirting with linux around Redhat 5.2. I mostly stayed testing with them until Mandrake 7.2. I decided to test the distros last fall and I'm sure my previous experiences bias my preferences somewhat. Given what I was used to with Red Hat and Mandrake, I didn't experiment with them as much as I did with SuSE and Debian and came away more impressed by the latter.
The fourth main factor is system administration. I know Mandrake as its Control Center and SuSE has YAST, but I'm not sure of anything for Debian or Redhat. Well, I used linuxconf, but I wonder if
From my understanding, it's sort of a separate network. But obviously, many routers are on both. It's just that if requests come from computers on I2, then they get I2 access. However, those not on I2 don't get the same benefits. Of course, I could be wrong.
It's still amazing the advancements. I remember several years ago when it would take up to 40 minutes to burn a CD (on my $400 CD burner). Now, I can go to the library at Michigan State (I live in university apartments without I2 access) and download an ISO from Purdue in under 4 minutes. At that, I can do everything off the network!
And at MSU, the EGR has our own Debian mirror. It's just amazing to see 5MB/s (yes, megabytes!) speeds sometimes (though it varies from 1-5). Our engineering building has two networks (Computer Science and Engineering) and while they're connected to each other at Gb/s link, all other things internal are 100Mb/s. However, I assume (as can been seen from this article) that the I2 connections from the university are much greater. 5 years from now, the students may be enjoying gigabit speeds. I wonder how much farther behind the rest of the country will be...
My point wasn't that American's aren't qualified for research or that they weren't making a financially good decision*. Moreso, even with the devaluing dollar, the stipends made are probably greater than what international students would make abroad.
However, I still think there is less appreciation for research itself and knowledge and education are not valued at much as it may be abroad. However, the students I meet from abroad are obviously a very biased sample.
*While the decision may make sense temporarily, if all the people did that and only foreigners did research, and then took their knowledge and expertise back home, the temporally local intelligent thing to do may not be in the best interest of society and indirectly the same individuals in the long run. Obviously, as you imply, this is a problem reinforced by the system. For for a corporation, why does it matter where they are located as a corporation is not really a being. However, the people in the corporation are probably doing long-term damage to themselves if they dilute their talent pool and innovation that comes from research.
What are computer science challenge competitions? I hope you mean something different from ACM programming competitions...
Second, I would assume the best benefit of MIT is the environment of other intelligent people. If you don't work hard or aren't smart, you're more likely to be left behind. However, if you go to another school, while the professors may use the same book, they may have to go slower or they may not have the same expectations out of the students, which may cause less acheivement.
Personally, I didn't go to a prestigious school nor do I understand their significance beyond what I've mentioned. So besides gauging intelligence of the students through test scores, I don't see how they can rank undergraduate CS programs.
For graduate schools, you look at funding and publications of the faculty. And you find a school that excels at the specific field you're interested in.
That's so misguided. I was discussing some issues with a friend and came to know he hadn't taken any courses in economics. Sure, as computer scientists and engineers, we *might* not need econ in our discipline, but we need to know the basics for our lives. When we vote on presidential candidates, we should have some idea of the soundness of their plan or what the basic foundations of their ideas are (flawed or not). Also, a lot of upper level econ is math and also deals with game theory, which may be useful for some in the discipline.
There are a lot of courses that are beneficial to the student as a person. Colleges aren't just trying to spit out researchers or workers but well-rounded individuals. The fact that half the students drink and piss their years away or go to classes, not care, do just enough to pass and not really grasp the material (much less connect it to other disciplines) is another issue. Maybe universities aren't teaching the material properly, but the intro courses in subjects outside of your discipline are important.
Especially for research. While you may think that research is getting more specialized (which is it), it's also becoming multi-disciplinary. We have a cognitive science group here that deals with linguistics, psychology, physiology, sociology, zoology, computer science, etc. It's helpful to know what tricks (if any) animals use in navigation if you're designing a vehicle navigation system.
Here's an analogy for slashdot, it's foolish to expect someone to be a great programmer if they don't understand how the OS is designed, the architecture (and reasons for the architecture) of the system, the design of the programming language, etc. While some might be competent, the great ones will understand how things connect and realize that things you may not have been interested in are needed for things you are interested in.
I mentioned this before. I came (age 5) to the US because my dad came here to study. I went through the schooling system and graduated early and finished second in the class (my sister was valedictorian), yet I couldn't get any scholarships to public undergraduate schools. Even though they happily took taxes from my parents for years, I'm still considered "international" for all fees. And due to technicalities, I can't get a Research Assistantship or Teaching Assistantship but only fellowships. But most fellowships go to US citizens and residents, of which I'm neither.
I'm just very lucky that my parents lived dirt poor and worked long hours to save money for my education. And though I've lived here for almost 20 years, I'll probably be leaving and doing my PhD in another country.
For those that are wondering, I came here on a J-2 visa (which has requirements on going back to your home country and so forth). If I had come illegally, I'd have many less legal issues. There are many well-meaning laws that have many unintended consequences...
I don't know how prevalent that is in the US either. You also have issues of selective memory. But you also have other socially frowned upon attributes (besides intelligence). I mean, if someone is intelligent and ugly, then I'm sure they'd get picked upon more.
:) Actually, I had plenty of friends on the football and basketball team and I was on the chess team and stuff. I even went to an inner city ghetto school. Maybe I'm just fortunate...
But I always got good grades but I never had problems in school. If people picked on me, I was too oblivious to notice maybe
Being a "foreign" graduate student in computer science, I know this first hand. Two-third of the graduate students here (Michigan State University) are international. And when you consider the fact that they count us as "American" in the published papers metrics and so forth, then it looks even more bleak. Especialy since most of the Americans I know in grad school are only staying for the masters, and most of the internationals are interested in PhD and research.
I definitely think cultural issues are the most important. I don't know if schools have lower standards. I noticed that the stuff my brother learned in middle school (he attend the same school as me 9 yaers later) were more difficult than what I learned. And while I can't compare high schools (he is attending a much higher regarded HS), he's definitely being challenged much more than I am. So while there are many problems with schools, it starts at home and the problems permeate throughout US culture.
I think first and foremost, the value of education is not really understood by children, nor many of their parents who might not have good education in the first place. Second, it's not just standards the schools set on students in what they learn, it's the expectations the students must have themselves. Very few from my high school went on to college and I don't think many believed they could every make it so they never tried. This and expectations also goes hand in hand with role models. My father got a PhD and my mother got her masters. I expected out of myself to get a PhD (I'm currently working on my masters), while many students were just proud to graduate high school.
In line with what I said earlier, students have to believe it'll make a difference. People are short-sighted to begin with, and many people's ability to reason are flawed, so you can't expect kids to be the brightest on seeing long-term effects. That's why it has to be instilled as a core-belief, a value, from a young age that learning (not can) WILL make a difference. Yes, many students have the ability to reason by high school, but if many of the kids weren't trying hard or learning by the time they get there, it's really hard to make up some of that knowledge (especially since math is so critical for the sciences and it only builds upon itself). It's also hard to learn how to learn (learning in academics is obviously different from learning in sports, music, etc. there are nuances you have to pick up) and if they haven't learned some of those skills, it can get very frustrating.
Which leads to another problem. People give up too easily. People marry fast and devorce fast. They want instant gratification. You have lotteries everywhere and people don't want to work hard to reach success, they want it easily or want to complain about not having it.
There are a lot of societal/cultural issues and I don't know who or what organization is supposed to address them. Too many corporations think short-term that they can't see how they're hurting themselves by creating such "consumers".
A friend from Ukraine remarked to me about how she found the US system scary. She said that when she was young, she completely believed in the communist teachings. And while there was corruption and so forth, the government had a plan and many of the masses believed it and they worked toward it. Here in the US, it's aimless. Corporations use money to help themselves and you don't know how it's going to go.
However, in Japan, you also have marketing and advertising that have created mass consumers as well. Are the effects on their education of their young only to be seen later, or have the traditional values held firm?
I wish more studies would be done on this, and the media itself would present this more as a problem. If the US is losing its dominance because other countries had nowhere to go but up, then that's great news overall really. However, one would suspect that there are many other issues at lie and politicians only seem to say they'll do something but do nothing but token gestures.
The article mentioned that there has been a 25% dropoff of international students since 9/11 for graduate school. I have met people that had to wait a year(s) to get his visa. Many decide that the benefit of coming to the US is not worth the hassle.
But if you had RTA, you'd also notice that the trend had been going for many years prior to then. So you can only blame the Bush administration little (if at all, for it had been happening prior to them ever coming to office).