Unionizing doesn't even make sense. The IT industry is the one industry more than any other where market forces really are at work: you don't like your job? Go get another. There's a bajillion IT jobs across a bunch of different industries, and IT workers are very, very mobile.
You don't need a union, because the active market already protects you from bad management.
We haven't f****d anything up. Quit your bitching and get another job.
Totally right.
EEs may (and most do) understand the technical issues perfectly well (lots of non EE people do too; it's not rocket science). What electricians do is tie that to standards, building codes, local ordinances, state law, platting requirements, zoning requirements, cost, materials availability, etc, etc, etc.
Why are we still whining about license proliferation? For someone like IBM who might actually have liability issues to worry about, pay a lawyer a $(few thousand) to evaluate licenses that are acceptable to you and be done with it!
Beyond that, there really aren't that many licenses. There are basically four: GPL, BSD, Apache, and CC. Everything else is a variant of these.
All that said, Chinese fluency requires 8+ years of intensive education and immersion to develop; you will most likely never become as proficient in it as you might in a Western language.
That's just FUD. Mandarin is hard, but not that hard. Just last month I met an American in China who had only been there 8 months and was already passably fluent.
If you were to live in China for 8+ years and not be very fluent, then you're not trying.
I think with some basic instruction in pronunciation and tones and so on, a westerner immersed in China could be fluent (at least in spoken word) in a matter of months. I have studied Mandarin to some degree, but haven't had the opportunity for long-term immersion. I don't think it would take me longer than 18 months to be completely fluent (I'd probably still have an accent, but dropping an accent is a much more difficult thing to do in any language).
My suggestion to you: make it a priority to learn another widely used language. Now. It will never be easier than it is now. If you have to, take a year off of school and go teach English in another country. School will wait. You don't believe me (even if you're nodding your head you don't really believe me), but believe me - school can wait a year. It will not make any difference at all for you to not be in school for a year. Really.
Don't know what languages to choose? Make sure it's on this list (don't take a year off of school to learn Gaelic, for example):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
If you're American, I would choose Chinese and Spanish in that order, unless you have a good reason to pick another one. If you are European, I would choose Arabic and Russian.
Can I stress some more that you should not wait to go do this? Following my advice blindly would be the smartest thing you could possibly do at this point. As for me, I am going to pay for my children's education on the condition that they do the above.
The only thing I can think of is that they know if you do anything stupid...it is a major federal offense..and that that would be a deterrent? But seriously, some of these systems have MUCH more valuable and sensitive info on them....and the people leaving don't get treated like shit, like many of the posters here allude to... That's because federal contractors have to justify each billed hour (more like each half-hour, or maybe smaller, depending on exactly which customer you're dealing with), and it would be difficult to justify contract spending on a person who can't actually do any work (i.e., the government doesn't like to pay for what it sees as internal training). The other thing is that people generally don't get hired by defense contractors if there is any doubt that they can be trusted. Of course, that's not how you're treated while employed, but that's a whole other soapbox.
I agree re: backups. That's a simple solution to a whole lot of problems. The only centralized thing you gotta do is automount user directories from some central location (or at least a known location).
I would only add that rather than enforce running AV software in realtime mode(which is an utter waste of resources), just maintain a good firewall, schedule nightly scans, and train your users to not do stupid things. You can also help yourself out by not hiring people that are computer-illiterate. Hire people that already know that some things are stupid (hey, look at this dancing gopher program I got in my email! Just double click on the.exe attachment and watch the gopher!). Even better - hire only people that are comfortable in non-Windows environments.
In a small company, that would work just dandy and you get to use a lot more of your workstation. Our IT dept forces the real-time scanner to be on all the time and it makes my desktop very, very slow (i.e., I can watch the scan-lines on the monitor get updated when I click things).
I think people are irrationally hysterical about viruses. The last time I had a virus of any kind on my own computers was in college when file sharing was done over windows shares instead of bittorrent. I never run AV software (I do have a firewall).
Uh, we in Texas (and elsewhere in the U.S., no doubt) receive the same stamp booklets for vaccinations, and we still stamp our voter ID cards.
The motivation for high-tech solutions is a) high-tech is cheap enough now that at scale, it could actually be cheaper than printing booklets and buying ink and stamps
and more importantly
b) people have too much information for paper storage and organization to be as practical as it once was. It would only take a couple years to fill up an entire drawer of a filing cabinet with medical insurance paperwork and notices and statements - and that wouldn't count the things I already get electronically. Online billing alone already saves me hours each month.
I want to play with my son and daughters. I want to start a business. I want to learn more math. I want to date my wife. I want to read the Bible. I want to be involved in my community. I want to learn 4 new programming languages, and 2 new human languages.
I DON'T want to spend every evening and weekend keeping my information in order.
The tricky part is getting privacy right. Handing over all your information to the gubbmint (especially the Federal gubbmint) is the *worst* possible thing to do. The main danger of letting a private entity like Google keep your records is that the government would then be able to gain access to it via subpoenas and other legal proceedings. The upside to a Google is that $14 B can fend off an awful lot of subpoenas, if Google were inclined to fight them. There may be better solutions, especially where privacy is concerned; hopefully, those will be soon forthcoming. In the meantime, I'd rather be doing the things I want to do rather than filing away paperwork and looking up my vaccination records in a little booklet I forgot about 10 years ago.
ObiWanStevobi has elicited my response, despite the fact that I am unlikely to raise the SNR of this thread. It is ever thus, so onward, trying not to hijack this thread into Dem vs Rep...
You are thinking like a democrat. GOP factions are real, and quite possibly at times have vehement disagreements with one another, but this is expected, and we (Republicans) all agree it is healthy. The most uccessful Republican politicians are those who actively engage in real debate with the various members of the movement and persuade the most people of one of two things: (a)to support his positions, or (b)that his core positions are already ones that most of us can agree on.
The third way to get elected is to (c)win votes for fear of the alternatives. Options (a) and (b) are much preferable because they lead to real motivation and loyalty in the movement (which is currently represented to varying degrees by the GOP). President Bush won by having one foot in (b) and one foot in (c). One of the reasons Reagan was so loved was because he did both (a) and (b), despite his flaws (and notwithstanding his iconic status among conservatives, he did have flaws).
McCain is currently mostly in (c), which is not a good place to be. He is tiptoeing in (b), but some of his personal and political flaws --- from a Conservative and Republican perspective --- will keep him from breaking out of (c) very much.
Romney is in better shape by this measure. He is trying his hardest to convince him that he is squarely in (b). He wants to accomplish (a), but so far he hasn't convinced enough people of (b) to get that far.
Huckabee is, well, a mostly vapid moralist. As an evangelical Christian, I find his positions completely understandable, but also mostly incompatible with limited, republican governance. He has failed to gain real national traction because he has only partially accomplished(b), not even getting close to (a) and his attempts to that end have prevented his accomplishment of (c). He's only still in the campaign at this point to help McCain win and thereby become his VP.
So, who is the best? McCain is still alive because he is in (c) and the national polls say he is electable. Romney is still alive because he has money, despite the fact that he is probably authentically in (b) (and certainly in (c)), and has had a hard time because the national polls show him to be somewhat less electable than McCain (not by much, though). McCain has a few things going for him that increase his odds of winning the nomination. He's experienced in rough-and-tumble politics, so he knows how to kick a dude in the 'nads and get away with it. The perception of his national defense bonafides, irrespective of the reality of his positions, is his best asset, and he will beat Romney over the head with it (at the expense of all other issues). McCain's biggest challenge is basically that he's been thumbing his nose for decades at the very people from whom he is now begging for support. Conservatives believe his is more likely to deal with Democrats as president than Republicans, and that's a huge problem for us (e.g., with a McCain-ish president, the Gingrich revolution and "Contract with America" would never have happened).
I think Romney is the better candidate in the end for the conservative movement, and I think he'd be a better president. National polls are nearly meaningless at this time. Just two weeks ago, Rudy was supposed to be our savior against the Clintons. Now he has lost everything because his campaign strategy was stupid. Romney has a much more broadly conservative appeal, but he's stuck in the position of having to minimize the importance of national defense in order to make the case for that appeal, which is a difficult trick to pull with conservatives. He would be doing much, much better if Huckabee would drop out (which is exactly why Huckabee hasn't dropped out). If he can convince conservatives that he would have sufficiently steely resolve against the Islamist enemy, his appeal
I also help with a small school (300 students k-12, ballpark).
First of all, as the first comment states, if you have some machines running windows 95 or 98, they may be too old to run Windows XP anyway. Regardless, as he also pointed out, upgrading 14 PCs to Windows XP Pro would cost roughly $1400.
The time you would spend administering 14 linux PCs would dwarf the time you would spend administering 14 Windows-based PCs, particularly if they're all Windows XP Pro. I presume, if your school situation is at all like mine, that you would end up being both the administrator of this small network as well as the "help desk". Believe me; if you make a bunch of people who are familiar with Windows switch to Linux, you will get more calls than you can handle. The point is, the additional cost in time investment would be valued at *far* more than $1400.
What would you be getting for all of this? A system that very few people are interested in using (or motivated to learn how), and that's provided that everything is actually up and running. You yourself admitted that you don't have time to be a full-time admin.
More than one commenter made pie-in-the-sky platitudes about education and how it's supposed to be about experiementing, and learning, and blah blah blah. Dicking around with a Linux box that you have no idea how to use and for which there is no one to teach you is not education. For most kids, that would be the quickest way to kill any motivation for learning. We're talking about high-school students, right? Even the brightest ones still haven't really developed a passion for learning yet (with exceptions).
You would really go through all of this just to stick it to Microsoft? Sounds like you need to get a grip, and maybe even go to therapy.
But I don't see how the artists can make money from such a scheme after the labels take 90% of the profits?
Sure they can: If an artist puts 10 songs on a CD that sells for $15, it comes to $1.50 a song. The label takes its profit, and the artist takes the rest. That's the way it works now, no?
Artists have to churn out songs one after another to keep a steady income. Most just can't keep up. Result? CDs filled with crappy songs that cost way too much.
Fast-forward a bit. Now, the record labels have figured out that the internet is a useful mechanism for selling music. The difference is that now, they charge $5 per month for unlimited downloads. Since the record label is pulling in money at a regular clip just from people being subscribed, artists are under less pressure to crank out songs. They can concentrate on making good music. The ones who don't get downloaded (i.e., miss a download target some number of consecutive months in a row) get dropped from the label. Also, lets don't forget that this gives opportunities to more musicians to "make it" as the cost for producing 1 or two songs to be downloaded would be phenomenally less than the cost of making an album, not to mention an instantly broader audience.
Result? A system where good musicians get weeded out from the bad without requiring the good ones to sacrifice their reputations by writing 3 crappy songs for every 1 good one. Better music. Better prices. More profit.
This is a good point. Geographically speaking, the U.S. is huge. Only Canada and Russia and China are bigger. Of those, Canada does well with broadband, and 90% of Canada's population lives within 50 miles of its southern border, so they escape their geographical problems.
Another related issue, is geographic distribution of population. The U.S. population is still 50% rural. IIRC, all the countries on the list have population distributions that are far more urban than the US (I could be wrong about Switzerland, The Netherlands, or Iceland, but I think I'm right on the rest). This is particularly true of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea.
Also, age of infrastructure matters. The U.S. infrastructure is being built on stuff that's about 100 years old. The Asian countries on the list have the advantage that most of their telecommunications infrastructure is about half that, particularly in Korea.
Let's try to make this as apples-to-apples as we can: within this list of the top 20 economies, Canada is the only one with greater geographic area. If you only count the geographic areas that are populated, then it's much, much smaller than the U.S. The next-largest country by geography is probably France, which is about twice the size of Colorado (according to CIA Factbook --- which also indicates that the U.S. is nearly 2.5 times the size of the entire E.U.), and has less penetration than the U.S. does.
Part of the problem is that there are no apple-to-apple comparisons. The only geographically larger countries (with distributed populations) are Russia and China. China has a centrally-planned economy with little capitalist sprinkles. Russia is more market oriented, but its economy (1.4 trillion) is nowhere close to the U.S (11+ trillion). or China (7+ trillion). India is large both by geography and population and is much more market oriented, but has a much smaller economy.
WiMAX, when it is finally commercially available, will do a lot to help in the U.S. "Wireless DSL", as it's come to be called in the area I live in, is also being adopted more and more in the rural areas. A great example is that my parents didn't get broadband until a year or two ago, because it was simply not available --- it didn't have anything to do with price. Finally, someone came out to my little bitty home town and put a microwave transmitter on a tower, got a t-3, and started selling bandwidth.
Another thing to note is that certain market forces also determine the speed at which things improve. In Korea, for example, online gaming is way bigger than here in the U.S. I think the largest MMORPGs here in the U.S. have on the order of hundreds of thousands of players, but in Korea, it's more like a third of the population. In the U.S., there isn't really anything like that in the market that really creates the demand for broadband, although we're getting there with on-demand video content and such.
What I gather is that the real motivation behind all the criticism of the U.S. is "I want to get a 10Mbs synchronous connection and unlimited telephon and television for $38/mo.". Instead of bitching about how bad the U.S. is, or how the big telecom companies are screwing us for profit (which they aren't -- they'd love to be able to offer the type of service you want because they'd make *way* more money in the long run), why don't you (you, as in all Slashdot readers): a) call/write your DSL/cable company and tell them what you want b) call/write your political representatives at all levels and tell them you
want the telecommunications industry to be deregulated instead of being
choked to death or hog-tied by the FCC c) offer up intellectually serious arguments about what can be done d) start a business that offers such a service. You'd be richer than bill
gates in about 5 years. e) come up with a killer app that will suck up a large market in the U.S. (like
gaming in Korea) that depends on broadband.
Anyway, I'm getting paid, but not for posting to Slashdot...gotta stop now.
I know it's too much to expect/. readers to search the old stuff to make sure they're not posting something already discussed, but is this also something the editors aren't willing to do?
Don't you even have a spell-check you can run on stuff before you post it to the front page? If not a programmatic spell check, how about eyeballing something for about 10 seconds? Something like "siting" should stick out like a sore thumb to you. If it doesn't, maybe you should get someone else to edit...
Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1...
I disagree. I was going to try one of the Beta or Alpha releases of 2.0 a while back, but as soon as I read that it required MySQL, I turned tail and ran.
One of the beautiful things about Gallyer 1.x is that it didn't require a relational database, which IMHO is massive overkill for such a simple application from a data perspective.
I tried it for a bit, noticed the huge slowdown in startup times, the poor Unix environment which was next useless and uninstalled it. Cygwin is miles better.
What are you even talking about? What startup times? A poor Unix environment next to useless? Cygwin is better how?
What this sounds like to me is a person realizing that he's not familiar with SFU (read: BSD), says it sucks, and retreats to the nice, warm, Cygwin (read: Linux) blanky and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
SFU is a much cleaner implementation that Cygwin, and it sits directly on top of the NT kernel rather than bringing its own layer of abstraction to the party. This makes SFU perform much better than Cygwin. Also, pkgsrc has support for SFU, which means that SFU has a proper package management system and Cygwin does not.
The *only* thing lacking from SFU is a POSIX-compatible mapping from the X11 api to the DirectX api. Cygwin has this, to its credit. Everything else about SFU is superior.
The idea that the internet is somehow "optional" is seeming more and more quaint. Maybe it's time we elevated it to the status of "utility".
I don't disagree with your view on the significance of being networked. That's not really what we're talking about here. My argument was really that it doesn't make sense to accuse the Mayor of trying to get free Wi-Fi for political gain (assuming the normal rules of politics apply --- since this is about San Fransisco, they might not, as one poster pointed out) because it doesn't really gain him anything politically. He won't get more votes for it; the number of people who would be persuaded to vote for him because he made free wi-fi available would be counterbalanced by the people who would be persuaded to not vote for him because he imposed additional cost on them. This is even more true if you view wi-fi as a utility. The mayor would probably not try to impose the cost of a free electricity service on the taxpayers of a city.
There are two remaining possibilities: 1) the mayor is corrupt and is imposing a wi-fi service so that he can take overpriced bids on a contract from a tech company in silicon valley and 2) he really thinks it's a good idea.
I don't buy #1. Most importantly, such a contract wouldn't be very big. It would also be *extremely* competitve because everyone and their dogs know how to set up a wireless network, and that would make it very difficult to get overpriced bids. Also, government bidding processes have lots of restrictions and limitations on them for the express purpose of preventing graft. That doesn't necessarily mean that it can't still happen, but it does impose some diminishing returns on that kind of activity which means a government official would not likely have much incentive to be involved in that kind of thing. Even moreso for the mayor, because he wouldn't be the person responsible for handling the bids which means that he would have to bring other people into the scheme with him which raises the risk factor and lowers the potential reward factor for him which decreases his overall incentive even more.
No, I still think #2; he's not doing it as a cynical ploy for political gain. He really thinks its a good idea.
What's most curious about this is why less complex creatures have an enormous ability to regenerate but more complex ones don't.
It doesn't seem all that curious to me. Seems to me the trend in all life forms is such that simpler forms can regenerate more easily than complex ones (mice->lizards->earthworms->plants->bacteria->...) .
Besides the above, it just makes sense. The simpler something is, the easier it is to fix/rebuild. If your wreck your car, it's pretty hard to actually put it together again. If someone takes a dump out of an airplane and it hits the doghouse in your backyard and puts a hole in the roof, it's pretty easy to "regenerate".
Don't kid yourself. While internet access is the lifeblood of any geek...
geeks are a underwhelming minority of any general population, particularly among the uneducated (and one assumes that the uneducated largely have lower incomes than those who are educated and therefore concludes that low-income residents of a city would have an even smaller proportion of geeks than the city at large).
Far, far more people are interested in how much in taxes they pay each year. Offering free wifi would certainly have an impact on those figures.
How, then, does offering free wifi help him politically (other than for brownie points with an interest group here or there)?
I don't know who the mayor is or what his ideological positions are, and I also don't care. I just thought I'd point out that./ shouldn't make the mistake of thinking something is far more important than it really is.
Can the slashdot editors replace the original post with this one? What about super-modding up to about 12? It's so typically slashdot to have a misleading news posting (it's pretty bad when original poster hasn't RTFA) and a plethora of totally irrelevant and indignant comments to follow.
It's such a waste of time to find the one comment that has anything to do with anything.
Why make it free when 90% of people would pay $1/day for it?
Maybe if you have regulars, you could offer discounts, like $0.25/day, but the idea here is just like with music downloads: people will pay for it, just not a lot.
As somebody with a "real" engineering degree (MSEE)...
Translation: "Hi, I'm an asshole."
There's barely any theory...
Translation: "I somehow got [presumably] two EE degress without learning anything about computer science and probably faked/cheated my way through most of my math classes."
Basically, you're ignorant. Design can have as little or as much to do with the final product in software as it does in any other engineering discipline. Engineering software is no different than any other; design, validation, implement, test (rinse and repeat), re-validate, manufacture (release). Just because there are people who create badly designed and untested software doesn't mean that software engineering isn't engineering.
And yes, there's a difference between a "programmer" and a "software engineer".
I would say that I'm a fellow engineer, but I can't because I'm an engineer doing "real" engineering work.
Slashdot Mirror
Unionizing doesn't even make sense. The IT industry is the one industry more than any other where market forces really are at work: you don't like your job? Go get another. There's a bajillion IT jobs across a bunch of different industries, and IT workers are very, very mobile. You don't need a union, because the active market already protects you from bad management. We haven't f****d anything up. Quit your bitching and get another job.
Totally right. EEs may (and most do) understand the technical issues perfectly well (lots of non EE people do too; it's not rocket science). What electricians do is tie that to standards, building codes, local ordinances, state law, platting requirements, zoning requirements, cost, materials availability, etc, etc, etc.
Why are we still whining about license proliferation? For someone like IBM who might actually have liability issues to worry about, pay a lawyer a $(few thousand) to evaluate licenses that are acceptable to you and be done with it! Beyond that, there really aren't that many licenses. There are basically four: GPL, BSD, Apache, and CC. Everything else is a variant of these.
All that said, Chinese fluency requires 8+ years of intensive education and immersion to develop; you will most likely never become as proficient in it as you might in a Western language.
That's just FUD. Mandarin is hard, but not that hard. Just last month I met an American in China who had only been there 8 months and was already passably fluent.
If you were to live in China for 8+ years and not be very fluent, then you're not trying.
I think with some basic instruction in pronunciation and tones and so on, a westerner immersed in China could be fluent (at least in spoken word) in a matter of months. I have studied Mandarin to some degree, but haven't had the opportunity for long-term immersion. I don't think it would take me longer than 18 months to be completely fluent (I'd probably still have an accent, but dropping an accent is a much more difficult thing to do in any language).
My suggestion to you: make it a priority to learn another widely used language. Now. It will never be easier than it is now. If you have to, take a year off of school and go teach English in another country. School will wait. You don't believe me (even if you're nodding your head you don't really believe me), but believe me - school can wait a year. It will not make any difference at all for you to not be in school for a year. Really.
Don't know what languages to choose? Make sure it's on this list (don't take a year off of school to learn Gaelic, for example): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers If you're American, I would choose Chinese and Spanish in that order, unless you have a good reason to pick another one. If you are European, I would choose Arabic and Russian.
Can I stress some more that you should not wait to go do this? Following my advice blindly would be the smartest thing you could possibly do at this point. As for me, I am going to pay for my children's education on the condition that they do the above.
I agree re: backups. That's a simple solution to a whole lot of problems. The only centralized thing you gotta do is automount user directories from some central location (or at least a known location).
.exe attachment and watch the gopher!). Even better - hire only people that are comfortable in non-Windows environments.
I would only add that rather than enforce running AV software in realtime mode(which is an utter waste of resources), just maintain a good firewall, schedule nightly scans, and train your users to not do stupid things. You can also help yourself out by not hiring people that are computer-illiterate. Hire people that already know that some things are stupid (hey, look at this dancing gopher program I got in my email! Just double click on the
In a small company, that would work just dandy and you get to use a lot more of your workstation. Our IT dept forces the real-time scanner to be on all the time and it makes my desktop very, very slow (i.e., I can watch the scan-lines on the monitor get updated when I click things).
I think people are irrationally hysterical about viruses. The last time I had a virus of any kind on my own computers was in college when file sharing was done over windows shares instead of bittorrent. I never run AV software (I do have a firewall).
Uh, we in Texas (and elsewhere in the U.S., no doubt) receive the same stamp booklets for vaccinations, and we still stamp our voter ID cards.
The motivation for high-tech solutions is
a) high-tech is cheap enough now that at scale, it could actually be cheaper than printing booklets and buying ink and stamps
and more importantly
b) people have too much information for paper storage and organization to be as practical as it once was. It would only take a couple years to fill up an entire drawer of a filing cabinet with medical insurance paperwork and notices and statements - and that wouldn't count the things I already get electronically. Online billing alone already saves me hours each month.
I want to play with my son and daughters. I want to start a business. I want to learn more math. I want to date my wife. I want to read the Bible. I want to be involved in my community. I want to learn 4 new programming languages, and 2 new human languages.
I DON'T want to spend every evening and weekend keeping my information in order.
The tricky part is getting privacy right. Handing over all your information to the gubbmint (especially the Federal gubbmint) is the *worst* possible thing to do. The main danger of letting a private entity like Google keep your records is that the government would then be able to gain access to it via subpoenas and other legal proceedings. The upside to a Google is that $14 B can fend off an awful lot of subpoenas, if Google were inclined to fight them. There may be better solutions, especially where privacy is concerned; hopefully, those will be soon forthcoming. In the meantime, I'd rather be doing the things I want to do rather than filing away paperwork and looking up my vaccination records in a little booklet I forgot about 10 years ago.
Here's the more obvious solution: just don't leave feedback. Ever. I don't. It's not worth the few seconds it takes to do so.
ObiWanStevobi has elicited my response, despite the fact that I am unlikely to raise the SNR of this thread. It is ever thus, so onward, trying not to hijack this thread into Dem vs Rep...
You are thinking like a democrat. GOP factions are real, and quite possibly at times have vehement disagreements with one another, but this is expected, and we (Republicans) all agree it is healthy. The most uccessful Republican politicians are those who actively engage in real debate with the various members of the movement and persuade the most people of one of two things: (a)to support his positions, or (b)that his core positions are already ones that most of us can agree on.
The third way to get elected is to (c)win votes for fear of the alternatives. Options (a) and (b) are much preferable because they lead to real motivation and loyalty in the movement (which is currently represented to varying degrees by the GOP). President Bush won by having one foot in (b) and one foot in (c). One of the reasons Reagan was so loved was because he did both (a) and (b), despite his flaws (and notwithstanding his iconic status among conservatives, he did have flaws).
McCain is currently mostly in (c), which is not a good place to be. He is tiptoeing in (b), but some of his personal and political flaws --- from a Conservative and Republican perspective --- will keep him from breaking out of (c) very much.
Romney is in better shape by this measure. He is trying his hardest to convince him that he is squarely in (b). He wants to accomplish (a), but so far he hasn't convinced enough people of (b) to get that far.
Huckabee is, well, a mostly vapid moralist. As an evangelical Christian, I find his positions completely understandable, but also mostly incompatible with limited, republican governance. He has failed to gain real national traction because he has only partially accomplished(b), not even getting close to (a) and his attempts to that end have prevented his accomplishment of (c). He's only still in the campaign at this point to help McCain win and thereby become his VP.
So, who is the best? McCain is still alive because he is in (c) and the national polls say he is electable. Romney is still alive because he has money, despite the fact that he is probably authentically in (b) (and certainly in (c)), and has had a hard time because the national polls show him to be somewhat less electable than McCain (not by much, though). McCain has a few things going for him that increase his odds of winning the nomination. He's experienced in rough-and-tumble politics, so he knows how to kick a dude in the 'nads and get away with it. The perception of his national defense bonafides, irrespective of the reality of his positions, is his best asset, and he will beat Romney over the head with it (at the expense of all other issues). McCain's biggest challenge is basically that he's been thumbing his nose for decades at the very people from whom he is now begging for support. Conservatives believe his is more likely to deal with Democrats as president than Republicans, and that's a huge problem for us (e.g., with a McCain-ish president, the Gingrich revolution and "Contract with America" would never have happened).
I think Romney is the better candidate in the end for the conservative movement, and I think he'd be a better president. National polls are nearly meaningless at this time. Just two weeks ago, Rudy was supposed to be our savior against the Clintons. Now he has lost everything because his campaign strategy was stupid. Romney has a much more broadly conservative appeal, but he's stuck in the position of having to minimize the importance of national defense in order to make the case for that appeal, which is a difficult trick to pull with conservatives. He would be doing much, much better if Huckabee would drop out (which is exactly why Huckabee hasn't dropped out). If he can convince conservatives that he would have sufficiently steely resolve against the Islamist enemy, his appeal
I also help with a small school (300 students k-12, ballpark).
First of all, as the first comment states, if you have some machines running windows 95 or 98, they may be too old to run Windows XP anyway. Regardless, as he also pointed out, upgrading 14 PCs to Windows XP Pro would cost roughly $1400.
The time you would spend administering 14 linux PCs would dwarf the time you would spend administering 14 Windows-based PCs, particularly if they're all Windows XP Pro. I presume, if your school situation is at all like mine, that you would end up being both the administrator of this small network as well as the "help desk". Believe me; if you make a bunch of people who are familiar with Windows switch to Linux, you will get more calls than you can handle. The point is, the additional cost in time investment would be valued at *far* more than $1400.
What would you be getting for all of this? A system that very few people are interested in using (or motivated to learn how), and that's provided that everything is actually up and running. You yourself admitted that you don't have time to be a full-time admin.
More than one commenter made pie-in-the-sky platitudes about education and how it's supposed to be about experiementing, and learning, and blah blah blah. Dicking around with a Linux box that you have no idea how to use and for which there is no one to teach you is not education. For most kids, that would be the quickest way to kill any motivation for learning. We're talking about high-school students, right? Even the brightest ones still haven't really developed a passion for learning yet (with exceptions).
You would really go through all of this just to stick it to Microsoft? Sounds like you need to get a grip, and maybe even go to therapy.
But I don't see how the artists can make money from such a scheme after the labels take 90% of the profits?
Sure they can: If an artist puts 10 songs on a CD that sells for $15, it comes to $1.50 a song. The label takes its profit, and the artist takes the rest. That's the way it works now, no?
Artists have to churn out songs one after another to keep a steady income. Most just can't keep up. Result? CDs filled with crappy songs that cost way too much.
Fast-forward a bit. Now, the record labels have figured out that the internet is a useful mechanism for selling music. The difference is that now, they charge $5 per month for unlimited downloads. Since the record label is pulling in money at a regular clip just from people being subscribed, artists are under less pressure to crank out songs. They can concentrate on making good music. The ones who don't get downloaded (i.e., miss a download target some number of consecutive months in a row) get dropped from the label. Also, lets don't forget that this gives opportunities to more musicians to "make it" as the cost for producing 1 or two songs to be downloaded would be phenomenally less than the cost of making an album, not to mention an instantly broader audience.
Result? A system where good musicians get weeded out from the bad without requiring the good ones to sacrifice their reputations by writing 3 crappy songs for every 1 good one. Better music. Better prices. More profit.
This is a good point. Geographically speaking, the U.S. is huge. Only Canada and Russia and China are bigger. Of those, Canada does well with broadband, and 90% of Canada's population lives within 50 miles of its southern border, so they escape their geographical problems.
Another related issue, is geographic distribution of population. The U.S. population is still 50% rural. IIRC, all the countries on the list have population distributions that are far more urban than the US (I could be wrong about Switzerland, The Netherlands, or Iceland, but I think I'm right on the rest). This is particularly true of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea.
Also, age of infrastructure matters. The U.S. infrastructure is being built on stuff that's about 100 years old. The Asian countries on the list have the advantage that most of their telecommunications infrastructure is about half that, particularly in Korea.
Let's try to make this as apples-to-apples as we can: within this list of the top 20 economies, Canada is the only one with greater geographic area. If you only count the geographic areas that are populated, then it's much, much smaller than the U.S. The next-largest country by geography is probably France, which is about twice the size of Colorado (according to CIA Factbook --- which also indicates that the U.S. is nearly 2.5 times the size of the entire E.U.), and has less penetration than the U.S. does.
Part of the problem is that there are no apple-to-apple comparisons. The only geographically larger countries (with distributed populations) are Russia and China. China has a centrally-planned economy with little capitalist sprinkles. Russia is more market oriented, but its economy (1.4 trillion) is nowhere close to the U.S (11+ trillion). or China (7+ trillion). India is large both by geography and population and is much more market oriented, but has a much smaller economy.
WiMAX, when it is finally commercially available, will do a lot to help in the U.S. "Wireless DSL", as it's come to be called in the area I live in, is also being adopted more and more in the rural areas. A great example is that my parents didn't get broadband until a year or two ago, because it was simply not available --- it didn't have anything to do with price. Finally, someone came out to my little bitty home town and put a microwave transmitter on a tower, got a t-3, and started selling bandwidth.
Another thing to note is that certain market forces also determine the speed at which things improve. In Korea, for example, online gaming is way bigger than here in the U.S. I think the largest MMORPGs here in the U.S. have on the order of hundreds of thousands of players, but in Korea, it's more like a third of the population. In the U.S., there isn't really anything like that in the market that really creates the demand for broadband, although we're getting there with on-demand video content and such.
What I gather is that the real motivation behind all the criticism of the U.S. is "I want to get a 10Mbs synchronous connection and unlimited telephon and television for $38/mo.". Instead of bitching about how bad the U.S. is, or how the big telecom companies are screwing us for profit (which they aren't -- they'd love to be able to offer the type of service you want because they'd make *way* more money in the long run), why don't you (you, as in all Slashdot readers):
a) call/write your DSL/cable company and tell them what you want
b) call/write your political representatives at all levels and tell them you
want the telecommunications industry to be deregulated instead of being
choked to death or hog-tied by the FCC
c) offer up intellectually serious arguments about what can be done
d) start a business that offers such a service. You'd be richer than bill
gates in about 5 years.
e) come up with a killer app that will suck up a large market in the U.S. (like
gaming in Korea) that depends on broadband.
Anyway, I'm getting paid, but not for posting to Slashdot...gotta stop now.
This is a dupe. A pretty old one too.
/. readers to search the old stuff to make sure they're not posting something already discussed, but is this also something the editors aren't willing to do?
I know it's too much to expect
I know this is /., but really. "siting"?
Don't you even have a spell-check you can run on stuff before you post it to the front page? If not a programmatic spell check, how about eyeballing something for about 10 seconds? Something like "siting" should stick out like a sore thumb to you. If it doesn't, maybe you should get someone else to edit...
Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1...
I disagree. I was going to try one of the Beta or Alpha releases of 2.0 a while back, but as soon as I read that it required MySQL, I turned tail and ran.
One of the beautiful things about Gallyer 1.x is that it didn't require a relational database, which IMHO is massive overkill for such a simple application from a data perspective.
I tried it for a bit, noticed the huge slowdown in startup times, the poor Unix environment which was next useless and uninstalled it. Cygwin is miles better.
What are you even talking about? What startup times? A poor Unix environment next to useless? Cygwin is better how?
What this sounds like to me is a person realizing that he's not familiar with SFU (read: BSD), says it sucks, and retreats to the nice, warm, Cygwin (read: Linux) blanky and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
SFU is a much cleaner implementation that Cygwin, and it sits directly on top of the NT kernel rather than bringing its own layer of abstraction to the party. This makes SFU perform much better than Cygwin. Also, pkgsrc has support for SFU, which means that SFU has a proper package management system and Cygwin does not.
The *only* thing lacking from SFU is a POSIX-compatible mapping from the X11 api to the DirectX api. Cygwin has this, to its credit. Everything else about SFU is superior.
The idea that the internet is somehow "optional" is seeming more and more quaint. Maybe it's time we elevated it to the status of "utility".
I don't disagree with your view on the significance of being networked. That's not really what we're talking about here. My argument was really that it doesn't make sense to accuse the Mayor of trying to get free Wi-Fi for political gain (assuming the normal rules of politics apply --- since this is about San Fransisco, they might not, as one poster pointed out) because it doesn't really gain him anything politically. He won't get more votes for it; the number of people who would be persuaded to vote for him because he made free wi-fi available would be counterbalanced by the people who would be persuaded to not vote for him because he imposed additional cost on them. This is even more true if you view wi-fi as a utility. The mayor would probably not try to impose the cost of a free electricity service on the taxpayers of a city.
There are two remaining possibilities: 1) the mayor is corrupt and is imposing a wi-fi service so that he can take overpriced bids on a contract from a tech company in silicon valley and 2) he really thinks it's a good idea.
I don't buy #1. Most importantly, such a contract wouldn't be very big. It would also be *extremely* competitve because everyone and their dogs know how to set up a wireless network, and that would make it very difficult to get overpriced bids. Also, government bidding processes have lots of restrictions and limitations on them for the express purpose of preventing graft. That doesn't necessarily mean that it can't still happen, but it does impose some diminishing returns on that kind of activity which means a government official would not likely have much incentive to be involved in that kind of thing. Even moreso for the mayor, because he wouldn't be the person responsible for handling the bids which means that he would have to bring other people into the scheme with him which raises the risk factor and lowers the potential reward factor for him which decreases his overall incentive even more.
No, I still think #2; he's not doing it as a cynical ploy for political gain. He really thinks its a good idea.
What's most curious about this is why less complex creatures have an enormous ability to regenerate but more complex ones don't.
) .
It doesn't seem all that curious to me. Seems to me the trend in all life forms is such that simpler forms can regenerate more easily than complex ones (mice->lizards->earthworms->plants->bacteria->...
Besides the above, it just makes sense. The simpler something is, the easier it is to fix/rebuild. If your wreck your car, it's pretty hard to actually put it together again. If someone takes a dump out of an airplane and it hits the doghouse in your backyard and puts a hole in the roof, it's pretty easy to "regenerate".
Holy capitalist pigsty, Batman! A commercial company? How evil can it get?
It can't Robin. We...must...pray...that Gotham will...survive this...unthinkable scourge...
Don't kid yourself. While internet access is the lifeblood of any geek...
./ shouldn't make the mistake of thinking something is far more important than it really is.
geeks are a underwhelming minority of any general population, particularly among the uneducated (and one assumes that the uneducated largely have lower incomes than those who are educated and therefore concludes that low-income residents of a city would have an even smaller proportion of geeks than the city at large).
Far, far more people are interested in how much in taxes they pay each year. Offering free wifi would certainly have an impact on those figures.
How, then, does offering free wifi help him politically (other than for brownie points with an interest group here or there)?
I don't know who the mayor is or what his ideological positions are, and I also don't care. I just thought I'd point out that
Can the slashdot editors replace the original post with this one? What about super-modding up to about 12? It's so typically slashdot to have a misleading news posting (it's pretty bad when original poster hasn't RTFA) and a plethora of totally irrelevant and indignant comments to follow.
It's such a waste of time to find the one comment that has anything to do with anything.
My argument would be simple:
Why make it free when 90% of people would pay $1/day for it?
Maybe if you have regulars, you could offer discounts, like $0.25/day, but the idea here is just like with music downloads: people will pay for it, just not a lot.
As somebody with a "real" engineering degree (MSEE)...
Translation: "Hi, I'm an asshole."
There's barely any theory...
Translation: "I somehow got [presumably] two EE degress without learning anything about computer science and probably faked/cheated my way through most of my math classes."
Basically, you're ignorant. Design can have as little or as much to do with the final product in software as it does in any other engineering discipline. Engineering software is no different than any other; design, validation, implement, test (rinse and repeat), re-validate, manufacture (release). Just because there are people who create badly designed and untested software doesn't mean that software engineering isn't engineering.
And yes, there's a difference between a "programmer" and a "software engineer".
I would say that I'm a fellow engineer, but I can't because I'm an engineer doing "real" engineering work.