Sadly, it costs a lot of money to exercise free speech in America.
The motto of the VFW: "Freedom isn't Free."
Millions of Americans have paid with more than
money to protect this freedom. It is an absolute disgrace to those who have made the ultimate
sacrifice to allow international corporations to throw so much money and influence
at destroying the freedoms others have died to preserve.
And people worry about hurting their careers by promoting open source.
Not exactly the face of courage, is it.
Throw out anyone that uses bad grammar or misspelled words on resumes, emails, or letters.
Rank by GPA
Secondary rank by relevent work experience
actually, I'd invert that ordering, and only rank on GPA in relevant courses, or
the old GPA-in-major. School and recommendations matter most, and can trump all,
if their relevant work experience
and most enthusiastic recommendation was from working
closely with a world expert in the particular area you're hiring for.
The top three are basically a perpetual toss-up between Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with a different college (or pair) holding the top spot each year
Tee hee. At Cornell, there's a running joke: "Harvard, Princeton, Yale...and perhaps Cornell."
So in the school paper, you often see the word "perhaps" placed before Cornell, even when not in
the context of the rankings. "A University Spokesperson Announced today that perhaps Cornell would
consider the measure to..." etc.
BTW I feel these rankings should be ignored by both prospective undergraduates and graduate students.
The formula for undergrad should be first and foremost "Where can you get the best education
for what your money?" -- and this means evaluating geography, what your parents are willing to help
you out with, where you're going to fit in culturally, as well as whether you can afford it, and whether the
faculty are there primarily to teach you.
Sure you can go for broke at "the best" school, but if you have
to work 30 hours a week to afford it, your grades are going to suffer, and if you're stuck with a bunch of
snobby prep-school kids who *can* afford it, you can get blindsided by class and social issues that
you simply shouldn't have to deal with. When a graduate teaching assistant at another "top" school,
we were told on no uncertain terms that the University had just changed its acceptance policy from
needs-blind to needs-based. In other words, if your daddy's rich, you could get in more easily with
poorer grades, SATs and so forth. Specific students were pointed out to us as being ones we might
need to "go easy" on, and we were instructed to, when catching students cheating on exams, to bring the
case before the professor rather than busting them on the spot--it could humiliate a big donor's sweet
little angel, you see. As a working-class kid who'd made good by working and
paying my own way through another "top" (read: expensive) school and had suspected crap like that
was going on -- I was outraged to find that it was true. But kept my mouth shut--when the
going gets tough, the tough take notes. And used this anecdote as ammunition when Cornell started
considering the same admissions policy.
If you already live in a state with an excellent university system, take advantage of the
fact. Your parents have been paying for it your whole life, through their taxes, so, in effect,
the state university system owes you an education. If you don't, pick a state university
you'd really like to go to -- UT Austin, UC Berkeley, UCLA...apply, and then defer your
matriculation until after you've established residency. It might take a year or two of
working and paying taxes and registering your car in that state, but it could well be
an excellent investment of your time. You can get to know students, find out what
programs are the most interesting to you, suss out which teachers do a good job and
which ones are simply full of shit, and hopefully save up a bit of money for your
studies -- and save a bundle on tuition. Hey, for a year or two of working
before going to college, you can save a hundred grand in tuition over the following
four years, and have more contacts in the community as well as some real-world
work experience when you get out. Bonus!
Academics will try to hit you with their snobby attitude like you've "wasted
time" and come up with all sorts of lame patronising damning-with-faint praise excuses on
your behalf why you "had to take some time off." The sooner you learn to ignore
the bullshit attitudes of academics, and only accept from them what's useful
to you the easier it will be for you to just get on with your education
anyway. And remember. They Work For You not the other way
around. They owe you competent instruction and fair grading, not a
steaming pile of bullshit patronising attitudes . If they try their attitudes
out on you, just classify them as insecure and not worth your time -- and mo
Whats the smell? Ah Fear. Yup, you are going to get asked real world questions when you get finished with that PhD.
Nope. Coded and supported Unix systems full-time throughout my MSc and Ph.D. research,
did a three-year stint as a Unix sys admin for four separate departments between my MSc and
PhD, and finished my PhD nearly 14 years ago--and have been coding and managing Unix
and Linux systems ever since. In addition to securing over a million dollars to support and
publish my research--over half of it in the real world of technology transfer and running a
succesful business.
I'm the one that asks the questions, buddy boy -- and people with
just a pathetic little MSCE cert or DeVry training in "which button to push" just don't cut it.
They have neither the intellectual capacity nor the experience to solve real-world problems,
and certainly not the creativity to develop products for the real world.
Yes, some former academics are truly useless -- I've fired two. The lesson learned
was to do exactly what I did--keep them on contract until they prove they can adapt and
do something useful.
Agreed -- they'll probably incorrectly string up the guy at the bottom of the totem pole
-- the overworked one that they dump all the actual work
on, because "managers don't do that"-- and use the disaster as an excuse to bid for
an increased in the well-adequate funding they already have for outsourced contracts and "providor of choice"
purchases that they get kickbacks on.
One thing
they won't do is solve the problem. They will not use a more reliable system-- because
that would mean giving up their sweet little kickback deals with their "preferred vendor".
And they will definitely not
bring in knowledgable people to properly configure, recommend more staff and manage the operations
-- too big a risk that one of those people will
be knowledgable enough to detect and expose the corruption and incompetence
in IT management for what it is.
They'll keep those people who could figure it out overworked and underrecognized--best
way to do that is give them crap systems to work with, and not enough horsepower so the systems
need just constant babysitting.
And make sure these are junior people -- anybody technical should be junior
so you can dismiss their recommendations, and push them around if they get too nosey and
start pointing out that they could be doing a whole lot more for a whole lot less money.
"Or
perhaps, uh,at least not put the public at grave risk to life and limb, perhaps? This is a nuke plant,
after all..." you venture. WRONG!
That's not important, you see.
The important thing is who's got more "points" this week in the IT Status Game of
Whose Parroting Which Salesman's Patter -- Is it Larry or is it Bill that We Should Be Parroting
This Week? What New Buzzwords Can We Use To Flummox, Manipulate and Deceive?
Your problem, mate, is that you think that the important thing in this world is doing a good
job, and making sure your systems at least do no harm. And what's worse, you think that
your boss has the same goals. WRONG! The important thing to him (or her)
is STATUS, and any bullshit he (or she) can spout to get it is good, any grave danger to the public
he (or she) creates in the meantime is irelevant as long as he (or she) can find someone else to blame it
on in public, and anyone "beneath" him (or her)
whose accomplishments he (or she) can use to make himself (or herself) look good -- MUST BE
KEPT THERE. That's the way the world works. Mmmm-kay? This is what is called "management"
and it's why people have so much contempt for PHBs. It's why you overhear *real* admins use phrases
like "full of shit" and "talking out of his arsehole" when discussing their managment. It's why you
must discover your BOFH self.
Why
do you think anybody with more than 5 years technical experience an IQ over 120
and a degree from anyplace where they expect you to think for yourself is..."overqualified"?
That crap about "maybe they'll get bored" and "they'll want more money" is utter hogwash.
They just want someone who can barely do the job and not figure out that the three
layers of IT "management" above them is just a bunch of girly-boy male (or female) glorified
secretaries preening
their fucking plumage, taking kickbacks, and yah, probably handing out blow-jobs besides.
SGML/XML are not typesetting formats: they are semantic markup languages.
Read the original design and development documents for SGML. It was developed as (as I said) to be the
mother-of-all typesetting formats. The purpose of developing the markup standards in
the first place was in order to generate (i.e. mother) a variety of typesetting formats. The idea
was that you could write one document, and be able to generate PS, or TeX/LaTeX or (later) HTML or
(even later) DocBook from it.
SGML was such a great idea, and such a simple implementation, that it evolved into
what we now know as XML, which, as you point out, is used for a lot more than just a transfer format for
the consistent generation
of text+pictures documents across a variety of publication media.
However, the original goal of SGML was to have a single markup language with which
to generate and distribute documentation in a variety of typesetting
formats and on a variety of media. Looks like you might need a quick gander at the defining
document for SGML, ISO-8879 -- published in 1986.
As for the other actions (threats against people's employment, property, persons, families, etc.)... that is unacceptable whether it comes from government, business, or an individual. It makes an utter mockery of our freedoms and undermines our freedom to speak in its most fundamental form.
That's right. And when the free speech is concerned with illegal activities
of, say, an employer that then imposes sanctions against the speaker, that too is illegal.
IANAL, but it's generally called "Retaliation for Objection to an Unlawful Practice" and this
retaliation is actionable...when you can prove it. Take notes.
Just the horribly arrogant ones who feel a need to point out they have...
...have little formal education, no specialization, no research skills to speak of, unable to plan and see long-term projects
through to the end, unable to engage in respectful scholarly debate, are petty and jealous in the extreme to the point that
they actually take pleasure in "fucking with them", are so busy trying to knock people down perceived as a threat that cannot
see any creative or productive way to play to their strength? Oh, but that describes you , not the Ph.D.s being interviewed,
doesn't it. Do you have the skills to harness different kinds of skills from different kinds of
people? No, you're too busy trying to prove how much "smarter" you are than "the Mr. Smartypants Ph.D over there."
How unbelievably childish. And you want to be a manager ? Figures.
You get a D- for leadership and teamwork. This will go down on your permanent record.
Good luck. You'll need it.
SGML/XML was designed to be the mother-of-all information distribution and typesetting formats, so it
gives you considerable power and flexibility--particularly with your vector graphics query: SVG . Output to LaTeX, Docbook, PDF, HTML, PS, etc.
Read lots of papers, write some papers, get published.
You left out the most important step between "Read Lots of Papers" and "Write Lots of Papers".
It's called research .
There are a wide variety of areas in the "research" bit that can give you anywhere between ZERO coding experience,
and FULL-TIME coding experience. For example, if your research is to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of
different numerical analysis algorithms on different parallel architecture, you may well be coding in a variety of
languages on a variety of different systems, many of which you've had to build and maintain yourself. Doing
experimental or observational research you might find yourself writing device drivers for data acquisition boards
and developing systems for storing and analysing the data in a variety of operating environments (at sea, in the
lab, in space). You may find yourself writing systems control code, or developing robotics code. Even to display
the data for analysis -- think GIS database work and 3D visualisation of scientific data here -- requires the
development of specialist technical skills which are highly sought after, and can require a lot of coding
if you're doing something new Which you should be doing, in a PhD programme.
The amount of actual coding you do is entirely up to you, in your choice of topic, in your choice of
academic advisor, and in the directions you choose to take your research.
The downside of choosing this path, grasshopper, is that you don't
necessarily get the credit or recognition for this activity that the effort and experience
warrants -- from either the academy or the industry! The academy can dismiss it as "lab monkey" work,
not original research, and the industry can characterise several tens of thousands of lines of clean
running code and the development of a popular open-source systems utility as "oh, just a school project"
because it was done in an academic setting --
as if somebody else set up some set-piece for you to do, rather than the reality which is that you
came up with the idea, raised the funds to execute it, and then did the whole thing yourself or even organised
and led a team of researchers and technicians to build your apparatus.
Despite that downside, what you actually get out of it (if you choose the harder road of acting
on your own ideas and doing something new that actually requires coding) is the most valuable experience you'll ever
have -- because, if you're as smart as you think you are, you will have arranged to own the IP of
your research, and it will be incredibly valuable -- in economic terms.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to finishing your PhD than just doing the research and writing up your results
for the scholarly literature. There's project planning, leadership, public speaking, fund-raising, engaging in
scholarly debate, international contacts and mastery of foreign languages (encouraged)-- all of which
prepare you for much higher-level roles in technology development than, say, a 2-year stint at DeVry or
(gag!) passing some stupid little MSCE exam on which buttons to press.
This is analogous to the reports in the declining unemployment rate reflected in lower numbers of people collecting unemployment insurance. It doesn't count the people that have given up, or have turned to the black/gray market for a living.
Correct. It also doesn't count mothers who would like to be employed, or even need to be employed,
but are classed as "full-time homemakers" just because they happen to be female with children. The double-digit
unemployment rates in Europe, by contrast, do count these people as unemployed, because their
definition of "unemployed" is not "receiving unemployment beneifts" (as it is in the US) but rather the
far more honest definition of "not working."
By not counting unemployed mothers and underemployed mothers (i.e. the working poor), they're simply not tracking the
group of people most likely to become homeless in the near future.
Privatisation (and liberalisation) have been hugely beneficial for NZ - but the benefits are now taken for granted.
Tell that to the pensioner who can no longer afford his electricity and phone bill. Tell that to the single mother of
six small children shivering in the cold in
a garage all winter that, prior to the privatisation of the public housing system, would have been
able to rent a state house at a rate they could afford
(you know the ones they sold off). Tell that to the unemployed baker out in Huia who can no
longer get a bus into town to work because that route is not profitable enough. These people
are my neighbors.
Privatisation only helped people who were already perfectly capable of helping themselves.
Me, for instance. But just because it benefitted me doesn't mean I'm going to stand
up and say it was the right thing to do. It wasn't.
New Zealand has seen how the privatisation of public services gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.
Ultimately, the basis for this is that the private sector had to absorb the fallout from the government. Blaming this on privatization is short-sighted.
In a way, you're right -- at some point the NZ government had a choice on its hands -- raise
the money to upgrade the telephone, electrical and transportation systems, or sell 'em off
and let some other poor sucker take the blame. Spending money on bringing some of these
services into the second half of the 20th century would have meant raising taxes or raising
rates -- both of them likely to make a politician unpopular. Whereas taking the decision to
sell off these knackered assets meant they had a series of windfall surplusses with which
to fund cushy
patronage jobs in the regulatory bodies created in the process--which added another level of bureuaucracy to the equation,
in the course of privatisation, further sheilding the providors of these public services
from any and all forms of public oversight. So the blame, yes, your right, the blame lies with the people who took
the decision to privatize public services rather than upgrade them.
rather than having two different contractors, both with a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would have had basically lazy government employees that would have had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem
That's the difference between having private maintenance contracts per issue rather than an SLA. Sounds like the city got taken for a sucker.
I'd be interested to know what you think would've happened if they had a maintenance contract with a service level agreement, and the possibility to hire another group if this one didn't work out (and teeth to the contract so that if the SLA isn't met, no/little money is paid).
There's not much difference between government workers and contract workers when they're both given a cushy exclusive contract in their favor.
First of all, it wasn't the City contracting the work, it was the private lines company
So there are two significant differences. The first is public oversight
and accountability -- if this
were a government contract, rather than a private contract, it's much
easier for a NZ citizen to go into the next meeting at which these contracts are
reviewed, and raise the issue. When it's a private company, they're free to do
whatever the heck they like within the regulatory framework. So instead of saying
"hey, these guys just aren't doing a good enough job for us", we have
to figure out what kinds of modifications to the regulations need to be made in
order to get the private lines company to manage its contractors more
effectively. It's one step removed, and much slower.
The second is the use of contractors, period -- but we can't even start to have
any say over whether or not contractors are used to maintain the lines
when the transmission company that hires them is run for private profit,
rather than the public good. The transmission companies' profits are
not hurt when poor service is provided, so all they have to do (and in
fact do) when complaints come through regarding the quality of the
transmission, is complain back that they wouldn't be able to make a profit
if they spent any more on maintenance -- while who knows what kinds
of kickbacks the transmission company execs are getting in exchange
for farming out tons of ineffective work at top dollar to a variety of
contracting outfits who have no incentive to work together to actually
solve problems.
Which brings us back to the lack of
public oversight. Again, it's much easier to dig into the books of your
local governement than it is to dig into the books of a private
lines company to figure out whether there's any payola going on--
and payola is a much bigger offense for a public official (add breach of
public trust to the fraud and embezzlement issues) than it is
for a contracts manager in a private company.
SIMON: They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.
GAV: Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report.
Give it up, Gav. You're playing the same game of misdirection-at-the-details the government played.
The bottom line is, even taking your technical details into account, corners were cut on maintenance,
and as a result, most of the 1.5 million people in Auckland either had no power at work, or no power at
home -- or both . Rather than fixing the problem within a week, after a week it got much worse .
Many companies went out of business -- so even if you weren't working in head office downtown, and didn't live
in the blackout area -- if you worked for one of these businesses, you were still affected.
Furthermore, you can't compare Auckland to a city of 1.5 mil in the US, and you certainly can't compare
the Auckland CBD to a city of 300K -- Pittsburgh?. Auckland is the New York of New Zealand, and the
Auckland CBD is the MANHATTAN of New Zealand--not the Rochester or Pittsburgh.
In terms of economic impact on the whole country , the Auckland CBD is where the national offices of most
corporations and banks are located.
After the blackout, both Coca Cola corporation and IBM decided to move the bulk of their Australasian
operations to Sydney. Now how does that affect everybody purchasing IBM gear who now have to get on the
horn to OZ every time a new APAR is annouced? All the New Zealand IBM
employees? All of the New Zealand employees of Coca-Cola? These weren't the only two major corps to flee.
And then there were all the small shops in the CBD that went out of business. It was like a ghost town.
Another thing that makes it just cynical and callous in the extreme to dismiss this as "only" between
300,000 and 1.5 million people were affected is that -- this is between a tenth and nearly a
half of all the people in the country!!! So it's comparable, in terms of the percentage of
citizens affected -- to most of the US eastern seaboard going out. for months .
And involving the government would have solved any of this how?
First of all, rather than having two different contractors, both with
a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would
have had basically lazy government employees that would have
had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem --
so they wouldn't get future callouts on cold rainy days. Who the
heck wants to go out on a rainy day for n+1 emergency calls--
when they could schedule preventive maintenance requiring them
to go outdoors during the months when it doesn't rain nearly as much.
When the government was directly involved (i.e.
owned the power companies, and the telephone companies, and
the national airline), there was *one*
bureaucracy -- that was still ultimately accountable to the public.
And the quality of service was very high.
Now there are half a dozen "state owned enterprises" (SOEs) which
means the public still foots the bill, but now (being "privatised") we have
absolutely no oversight, and they are accountable to their boards to
make a profit, rather than directly to the people to provide a service.
In the case of the
lines companies and phone companies, the quality of service is
directly related to the integrity of the lines themselves -- and
without public feedback, there is no incentive to
improve service, because the lines companies still
have a monopoly. No such thing as competition there.
Yet the SOEs were set up on the pretext of "providing competition"
where no competition can possibly take place. It's
an argument that would only appeal to a neocon ideologue.
Furthermore, because it's ex-government department employees
in these SOEs that operate the SOEs but now without public
oversight -- well,
it's the same fat, lazy, corrupt, theiving do-nothing slobs
you get in government departments, but now
they can do nothing for more money and nobody but
other fat, lazy, corrupt, theiving slobs --other ex-government
bureaucrats--are looking over their shoulders. The public has
no right to even find out what's going on---because now it is a private company.
They're more organisationally inefficient and cut more corners on
service and funnel more plum contracts to their buddies
now than they did when it was a government monopoly/bureaucracy--
because at least when it was a government monopoly/bureaucracy,
we had some right to oversight. New Zealand has seen how
the privatisation of public services
gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.
Unfortunately.
(You've got a red-tape bound beuacuracy. Governments are famous for them.)
And when the NZ government-run electricity, telephone and airlines were privatised into SOEs, the
tape only got longer, redder and meaner--and more expensive.
I agree with you, macdaddy. The power failures in Auckland NZ in 1998 were caused by
deregulation. Lasted over a week. The cause was failure to properly maintain underground
mains -- lines maintenance had been farmed out to a variety of cut-rate contractors who just
didn't do a bloody thing. They had to call back in the old AEPB (Auckland Electrical Power Board)
engineers who'd been made redundant in the deregulation craze of the mid-90's. Brought
back in as contractors at top dollar, might I add.
The solution was to separate the lines companies from the generators and retailers --
i.e. re-regulation was introduced
This hasn't fixed things, really, because the lines companies now have no
incentive to invest in maintenance, and the maintenance the do do (when
there's a blackout -- we get 'em all the time where I am) is way piss-poor and the
contractors do it in such a way as to maximise their own revenue.
For example, a few weeks ago, the power went out in a big rain/windstorm like it
always does. So, Alstom (the same contracting outfit that maintains the public
telephones for NZ telecom, which is the latest spectacular privatised
public services failure story here) comes out to solve the immediate problem, which is
the fact that some wet bamboo had blown over the three main lines servicing
the whole valley, shorting us out. So they remove the one piece of bamboo
causing the short. I watched them. This bit of bamboo had come off a whole
stand of bamboo right next to the main lines, and there were over a DOZEN
other bits of bamboo in the stand that had obviously also been blown over the
same three lines -- burnt off at the same spot. I asked the Alstom guys if they
could request that the stand of bamboo could be reported as the cause of
repeated problems -- Answer? oh, no, that has to come from "head office."
Now, there was another
contractor (different company) halfway up the road cutting down some foliage
on behalf of the lines company -- foliage which had nothing to do with the
problem . Funny, that. So I went and asked the tree cutter guy, there with
all his gear and ladders, if he could please either cut down the stand of bamboo
that was the real source of the problem, or notify "head office" (the
lines company) that there was just a tad more foliage trimming that would need
to be done to solve the source of the problem . No, he couldn't do that.
He'd been sent out to cut down some tree branches, and by god that's what
he was going to do.
Now why should either of these contracting companies do anything
to solve the cause of the problem? After all, leaving the source of the problem
in place assured them of ongoing work -- at top dollar . While this ate into
any budget the lines company might have for other maintenance (like maybe uh,
moving the 40-year-old overhead lines to a safer and more modern underground
system so we don't get the spectacular exploding-transformer effect every time there's
a lighting storm maybe? DUH!)
Privatisation is the cause of our blackouts, that's for sure! And it's caused
the rates to go up. Worse service, higher cost, poorer maintenance.
And what's the deal? They privatised and deregulated the airline, the electric companies and the
phone company -- but in each case, as a sop to the poor NZ citizen, who may
have been losing an asset but was certainly getting poorer and more expensive
service, they earmarked blocks of stock that could only be issued to New Zealanders.
So that some New Zealanders could have the privilege of purchasing an asset
FROM THEMSELVES. They only fell for it because of this farking
myth about competition leading to better service and lower cost. Yeh right.
and I found it quite common for XP to go days at a time during the stress tests, which I thought was pretty impressive.
OOOh, whole DAYS. You're damning with faint praise. Try YEARS. That's the kind of stability you can get with a good Linux or BSD install.
Only two blue-screens in a supposedly stable install? I've *never* seen an app blue-screen Linux or BSD...in
TWENTY years and over a hundred installs, running 24/7 apps some of them well and truly close to the systems
limits. Hardware and drivers -- sometimes hardware is faulty,
sometimes drivers need to be debugged, and even then it's only when the driver has to dive down into
kernel space that it can crash the kernel.
*nix operating systems do proper process-based
memory management, with a clear separation between kernel space and user space. Windows OS's do not.
Even if it was a 3rd party app, it would not blue screen the machine if the OS were designed and implemented
properly.
Seems that after
20 years of Unix and Linux doing a great job of these things, Redmond may just be *starting* to catch on in their OS design?
Brava. Sure took them long enough.
I envision that every university could build a giant information repository in the center of their campuses. These massive edifices could act as a storehouse for books, magaizines, music cds and other forms of data. To gain entry the supplicant would need a badge of identification.
I shall call my creations LIBRARIES and students will flock to them.
Yup! Tee hee!
But you have to watch out for them Hippie Commie Univervsity Perfessers, you know.
In violation of DMCA, many university music practice rooms and
rehearsal halls have a device which can reproduce copyrighted music .
It's called A PIANO. I've got one in my living-room too. Quick call the cops.
Better get the RIAA out after Billy Collins, poet laureate of the US, too. In his poem
Piano Lesson, he admits to using his piano to reproduce copyrighted music!!!
I am learning to play
'It Might as Well Be Spring'
but my left hand would rather be jingling
the change in the darkness of my pocket
or taking a nap on an armrest.
I have to drag him into the music
like a difficult and neglected child
This is the revenge of the one who never gets
to hold the pen or wave good-bye,
and now, who never gets to play the melody
Even when I am not playing, I think about the piano.
It is the largest, heaviest,
and most beautiful object in this house.
I pause in the doorway just to take it all in.
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing there on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlight smile.
I think that it's more important to examine this work for evidence of
copyright violation, and look for ways to soak the Universities and their
students for additional fees than it does to teach students to analyse or appreciate the
poem and the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic it refers to. No, really!
It's important that, rather than learning what the phrase scholarly purposes
means, they should find out AS(c)AP that nobody, not even the university
gives a flying fark about scholarly purposes
One thing that's been left out of the debate thus far is the role of University communities in the
production of music. And of course they are free to freely distribute on their own
internal networks music which they have written and produced.
Universities have music programmes --everything from aspiring rock and roll bands to amateur chorale groups and semi-professional
jazz ensembles, to chamber orchestras and full-blown symphony orchestras. Has the RIAA taken so much control over the terms
of the debate that the role of University communities in providing cheap or free innovative cultural events is pushed so far over
to one side as to be completely missing? Personally, I think the Universities have a duty to their students to discourage the RIAA crap
music and provide a superior product themselves -- in the name of education.
As an example, a coffeehouse at Cornell, we had a folk concert series called "Bound for Glory" that usually featured one local
or not-so-local artist and an opening act by a student or student group. And it was broadcast free-to-air on the campus radio
station. What better way is there for students to learn about music performance, production and distribution than for them
to DO IT
THEMSELVES? The Talking Heads started out at RISD, and the music scene surrounding the university community in
Athens, Georgia is legendary for producing such bands as REM and The Indigo Girls. Carnegie Mellon University
would be the ideal place to start producing its own MP3s for distribution on campus, because it has both one of the
best Computer Science departments in the country and one of the best music schools in the country. In cities like
Boston and New York, you could have consoria, between, say, MIT nad the Boston Conservatory of Music; between Columbia
and Julliard. I can see NYU publishing its own film productions on internal broadband, UCLA and USC as well. Certainly, they're
already doing things like this, but why not promote it to students as a much better thing to do than downloading some
crap 80's music that you can hear on the radio anyway?
Quite frankly, I'm really disappointed with both the musical taste and leadership of college students that are such
passive consumers and apparently incapable of producing anything better than what the RIAA would sell them.
Pathetic! Is it that they're so technically incompetent that they cannot find music on campus to record and distribute
via mp3's-- or is it that their leadership and creative abilities are so underdeveloped that they can't even recognise
what a fantastic opportunity it is to be at university, where there are already all of the facilities and
pool of highly developed talent available to put on -- and electronically distribute -- creative productions?
I think the Universities should seize the high ground they have such easy access to. In 5 years the RIAA
will be begging the Universities for access to the Universities' MP3 archives for wider distribution.
You know, those early recordings of the frat party gigs of the student band that went platinum after graduation.
That remarkable performance of early church music on the University's collection of medeival instruments.
Stephen Speilberg started his career with a student film at USC, and Spike Lee started his career with
student films at NYU. Why not have a media server plus a critical forum for viewing and commenting on
student films, student music, student plays? The HECK with the *crap* the RIAA is laying claim to. They
can KEEP it. Sheesh!
People deliberately go to University in order to be exposed to the good stuff, and to hone their critical
thinking via discourse with the best -- i.e. why Mahler trumps Britney Spears and why
Melville is better than Mills and Boon. The Universities are doing the students a disservice
in protecting the students from RIAA legal moves -- not that they should be offering legal protection
when they steal other artists' copyrighted (a
Who wins? The person with the highest frequency or the highest wavelength?
The frequency of a swinging dick is inversely proportional to the square root of the length of the swinging dick.
Therefore, the dick with the lowest frequency would indicate which is the LONGEST dick.
However, the frequency of a swinging dick is independent of its mass. Therefore
in order to measure which dick is truly the LARGEST , we must measure the
force of each swinging dick in the course of swinging. So tell them both:
As someone whose job it is to make complex technical and business evaluations of the software platform my company uses uses, let me point out that this patronizing and ill-considered rant hardly endears you or your view to "PHB"s. Your attitude...
Congratulations! You've just proved the point of the original poster by your response.
In Switzerland, pretty much *everyone* has a firearm.
Now, think to yourself: Are you going to cause trouble in a society like that?
Nah. Only the men are given guns which they keep in their homes. Their wives
wouldn't have caused any trouble at all -- they weren't even allowed to
vote until the mid-80's in some places, and still don't have basic reproductive rights.
These facts may not be mere coincidence, as you well note.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, it costs a lot of money to exercise free speech in America.
The motto of the VFW: "Freedom isn't Free."
Millions of Americans have paid with more than money to protect this freedom. It is an absolute disgrace to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to allow international corporations to throw so much money and influence at destroying the freedoms others have died to preserve.
And people worry about hurting their careers by promoting open source. Not exactly the face of courage, is it.
actually, I'd invert that ordering, and only rank on GPA in relevant courses, or the old GPA-in-major. School and recommendations matter most, and can trump all, if their relevant work experience and most enthusiastic recommendation was from working closely with a world expert in the particular area you're hiring for.
The top three are basically a perpetual toss-up between Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with a different college (or pair) holding the top spot each year
Tee hee. At Cornell, there's a running joke: "Harvard, Princeton, Yale...and perhaps Cornell." So in the school paper, you often see the word "perhaps" placed before Cornell, even when not in the context of the rankings. "A University Spokesperson Announced today that perhaps Cornell would consider the measure to..." etc.
BTW I feel these rankings should be ignored by both prospective undergraduates and graduate students. The formula for undergrad should be first and foremost "Where can you get the best education for what your money?" -- and this means evaluating geography, what your parents are willing to help you out with, where you're going to fit in culturally, as well as whether you can afford it, and whether the faculty are there primarily to teach you.
Sure you can go for broke at "the best" school, but if you have to work 30 hours a week to afford it, your grades are going to suffer, and if you're stuck with a bunch of snobby prep-school kids who *can* afford it, you can get blindsided by class and social issues that you simply shouldn't have to deal with. When a graduate teaching assistant at another "top" school, we were told on no uncertain terms that the University had just changed its acceptance policy from needs-blind to needs-based. In other words, if your daddy's rich, you could get in more easily with poorer grades, SATs and so forth. Specific students were pointed out to us as being ones we might need to "go easy" on, and we were instructed to, when catching students cheating on exams, to bring the case before the professor rather than busting them on the spot--it could humiliate a big donor's sweet little angel, you see. As a working-class kid who'd made good by working and paying my own way through another "top" (read: expensive) school and had suspected crap like that was going on -- I was outraged to find that it was true. But kept my mouth shut--when the going gets tough, the tough take notes. And used this anecdote as ammunition when Cornell started considering the same admissions policy.
If you already live in a state with an excellent university system, take advantage of the fact. Your parents have been paying for it your whole life, through their taxes, so, in effect, the state university system owes you an education. If you don't, pick a state university you'd really like to go to -- UT Austin, UC Berkeley, UCLA...apply, and then defer your matriculation until after you've established residency. It might take a year or two of working and paying taxes and registering your car in that state, but it could well be an excellent investment of your time. You can get to know students, find out what programs are the most interesting to you, suss out which teachers do a good job and which ones are simply full of shit, and hopefully save up a bit of money for your studies -- and save a bundle on tuition. Hey, for a year or two of working before going to college, you can save a hundred grand in tuition over the following four years, and have more contacts in the community as well as some real-world work experience when you get out. Bonus!
Academics will try to hit you with their snobby attitude like you've "wasted time" and come up with all sorts of lame patronising damning-with-faint praise excuses on your behalf why you "had to take some time off." The sooner you learn to ignore the bullshit attitudes of academics, and only accept from them what's useful to you the easier it will be for you to just get on with your education anyway. And remember. They Work For You not the other way around. They owe you competent instruction and fair grading, not a steaming pile of bullshit patronising attitudes . If they try their attitudes out on you, just classify them as insecure and not worth your time -- and mo
Whats the smell? Ah Fear. Yup, you are going to get asked real world questions when you get finished with that PhD.
Nope. Coded and supported Unix systems full-time throughout my MSc and Ph.D. research, did a three-year stint as a Unix sys admin for four separate departments between my MSc and PhD, and finished my PhD nearly 14 years ago--and have been coding and managing Unix and Linux systems ever since. In addition to securing over a million dollars to support and publish my research--over half of it in the real world of technology transfer and running a succesful business.
I'm the one that asks the questions, buddy boy -- and people with just a pathetic little MSCE cert or DeVry training in "which button to push" just don't cut it. They have neither the intellectual capacity nor the experience to solve real-world problems, and certainly not the creativity to develop products for the real world.
Yes, some former academics are truly useless -- I've fired two. The lesson learned was to do exactly what I did--keep them on contract until they prove they can adapt and do something useful.
Agreed -- they'll probably incorrectly string up the guy at the bottom of the totem pole -- the overworked one that they dump all the actual work on, because "managers don't do that"-- and use the disaster as an excuse to bid for an increased in the well-adequate funding they already have for outsourced contracts and "providor of choice" purchases that they get kickbacks on.
One thing they won't do is solve the problem. They will not use a more reliable system-- because that would mean giving up their sweet little kickback deals with their "preferred vendor". And they will definitely not bring in knowledgable people to properly configure, recommend more staff and manage the operations -- too big a risk that one of those people will be knowledgable enough to detect and expose the corruption and incompetence in IT management for what it is.
They'll keep those people who could figure it out overworked and underrecognized--best way to do that is give them crap systems to work with, and not enough horsepower so the systems need just constant babysitting. And make sure these are junior people -- anybody technical should be junior so you can dismiss their recommendations, and push them around if they get too nosey and start pointing out that they could be doing a whole lot more for a whole lot less money.
"Or perhaps, uh,at least not put the public at grave risk to life and limb, perhaps? This is a nuke plant, after all..." you venture. WRONG! That's not important, you see. The important thing is who's got more "points" this week in the IT Status Game of Whose Parroting Which Salesman's Patter -- Is it Larry or is it Bill that We Should Be Parroting This Week? What New Buzzwords Can We Use To Flummox, Manipulate and Deceive?
Your problem, mate, is that you think that the important thing in this world is doing a good job, and making sure your systems at least do no harm. And what's worse, you think that your boss has the same goals. WRONG! The important thing to him (or her) is STATUS, and any bullshit he (or she) can spout to get it is good, any grave danger to the public he (or she) creates in the meantime is irelevant as long as he (or she) can find someone else to blame it on in public, and anyone "beneath" him (or her) whose accomplishments he (or she) can use to make himself (or herself) look good -- MUST BE KEPT THERE. That's the way the world works. Mmmm-kay? This is what is called "management" and it's why people have so much contempt for PHBs. It's why you overhear *real* admins use phrases like "full of shit" and "talking out of his arsehole" when discussing their managment. It's why you must discover your BOFH self.
Why do you think anybody with more than 5 years technical experience an IQ over 120 and a degree from anyplace where they expect you to think for yourself is..."overqualified"? That crap about "maybe they'll get bored" and "they'll want more money" is utter hogwash. They just want someone who can barely do the job and not figure out that the three layers of IT "management" above them is just a bunch of girly-boy male (or female) glorified secretaries preening their fucking plumage, taking kickbacks, and yah, probably handing out blow-jobs besides.
Why do you think we call them blowhards?
Go ahead, just quit spending mine.
At first glance, I thought this said "Go ahead, just quit smoking mine."
Agree on all counts, including my initial mis-reading.
SGML/XML are not typesetting formats: they are semantic markup languages.
Read the original design and development documents for SGML. It was developed as (as I said) to be the mother-of-all typesetting formats. The purpose of developing the markup standards in the first place was in order to generate (i.e. mother) a variety of typesetting formats. The idea was that you could write one document, and be able to generate PS, or TeX/LaTeX or (later) HTML or (even later) DocBook from it.
SGML was such a great idea, and such a simple implementation, that it evolved into what we now know as XML, which, as you point out, is used for a lot more than just a transfer format for the consistent generation of text+pictures documents across a variety of publication media.
However, the original goal of SGML was to have a single markup language with which to generate and distribute documentation in a variety of typesetting formats and on a variety of media. Looks like you might need a quick gander at the defining document for SGML, ISO-8879 -- published in 1986.
As for the other actions (threats against people's employment, property, persons, families, etc.) ... that is unacceptable whether it comes from government, business, or an individual. It makes an utter mockery of our freedoms and undermines our freedom to speak in its most fundamental form.
That's right. And when the free speech is concerned with illegal activities of, say, an employer that then imposes sanctions against the speaker, that too is illegal. IANAL, but it's generally called "Retaliation for Objection to an Unlawful Practice" and this retaliation is actionable...when you can prove it. Take notes.
Just the horribly arrogant ones who feel a need to point out they have...
You get a D- for leadership and teamwork. This will go down on your permanent record. Good luck. You'll need it.
SGML/XML was designed to be the mother-of-all information distribution and typesetting formats, so it gives you considerable power and flexibility--particularly with your vector graphics query: SVG . Output to LaTeX, Docbook, PDF, HTML, PS, etc.
Read lots of papers, write some papers, get published.
You left out the most important step between "Read Lots of Papers" and "Write Lots of Papers".
It's called research . There are a wide variety of areas in the "research" bit that can give you anywhere between ZERO coding experience, and FULL-TIME coding experience. For example, if your research is to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of different numerical analysis algorithms on different parallel architecture, you may well be coding in a variety of languages on a variety of different systems, many of which you've had to build and maintain yourself. Doing experimental or observational research you might find yourself writing device drivers for data acquisition boards and developing systems for storing and analysing the data in a variety of operating environments (at sea, in the lab, in space). You may find yourself writing systems control code, or developing robotics code. Even to display the data for analysis -- think GIS database work and 3D visualisation of scientific data here -- requires the development of specialist technical skills which are highly sought after, and can require a lot of coding if you're doing something new Which you should be doing, in a PhD programme.
The amount of actual coding you do is entirely up to you, in your choice of topic, in your choice of academic advisor, and in the directions you choose to take your research.
The downside of choosing this path, grasshopper, is that you don't necessarily get the credit or recognition for this activity that the effort and experience warrants -- from either the academy or the industry! The academy can dismiss it as "lab monkey" work, not original research, and the industry can characterise several tens of thousands of lines of clean running code and the development of a popular open-source systems utility as "oh, just a school project" because it was done in an academic setting -- as if somebody else set up some set-piece for you to do, rather than the reality which is that you came up with the idea, raised the funds to execute it, and then did the whole thing yourself or even organised and led a team of researchers and technicians to build your apparatus.
Despite that downside, what you actually get out of it (if you choose the harder road of acting on your own ideas and doing something new that actually requires coding) is the most valuable experience you'll ever have -- because, if you're as smart as you think you are, you will have arranged to own the IP of your research, and it will be incredibly valuable -- in economic terms.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to finishing your PhD than just doing the research and writing up your results for the scholarly literature. There's project planning, leadership, public speaking, fund-raising, engaging in scholarly debate, international contacts and mastery of foreign languages (encouraged)-- all of which prepare you for much higher-level roles in technology development than, say, a 2-year stint at DeVry or (gag!) passing some stupid little MSCE exam on which buttons to press.
This is analogous to the reports in the declining unemployment rate reflected in lower numbers of people collecting unemployment insurance. It doesn't count the people that have given up, or have turned to the black/gray market for a living.
Correct. It also doesn't count mothers who would like to be employed, or even need to be employed, but are classed as "full-time homemakers" just because they happen to be female with children. The double-digit unemployment rates in Europe, by contrast, do count these people as unemployed, because their definition of "unemployed" is not "receiving unemployment beneifts" (as it is in the US) but rather the far more honest definition of "not working."
By not counting unemployed mothers and underemployed mothers (i.e. the working poor), they're simply not tracking the group of people most likely to become homeless in the near future.
Privatisation (and liberalisation) have been hugely beneficial for NZ - but the benefits are now taken for granted.
Tell that to the pensioner who can no longer afford his electricity and phone bill. Tell that to the single mother of six small children shivering in the cold in a garage all winter that, prior to the privatisation of the public housing system, would have been able to rent a state house at a rate they could afford (you know the ones they sold off). Tell that to the unemployed baker out in Huia who can no longer get a bus into town to work because that route is not profitable enough. These people are my neighbors.
Privatisation only helped people who were already perfectly capable of helping themselves. Me, for instance. But just because it benefitted me doesn't mean I'm going to stand up and say it was the right thing to do. It wasn't.
New Zealand has seen how the privatisation of public services gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.
Ultimately, the basis for this is that the private sector had to absorb the fallout from the government. Blaming this on privatization is short-sighted.
In a way, you're right -- at some point the NZ government had a choice on its hands -- raise the money to upgrade the telephone, electrical and transportation systems, or sell 'em off and let some other poor sucker take the blame. Spending money on bringing some of these services into the second half of the 20th century would have meant raising taxes or raising rates -- both of them likely to make a politician unpopular. Whereas taking the decision to sell off these knackered assets meant they had a series of windfall surplusses with which to fund cushy patronage jobs in the regulatory bodies created in the process--which added another level of bureuaucracy to the equation, in the course of privatisation, further sheilding the providors of these public services from any and all forms of public oversight. So the blame, yes, your right, the blame lies with the people who took the decision to privatize public services rather than upgrade them.
rather than having two different contractors, both with a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would have had basically lazy government employees that would have had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem
That's the difference between having private maintenance contracts per issue rather than an SLA. Sounds like the city got taken for a sucker.
I'd be interested to know what you think would've happened if they had a maintenance contract with a service level agreement, and the possibility to hire another group if this one didn't work out (and teeth to the contract so that if the SLA isn't met, no/little money is paid).
There's not much difference between government workers and contract workers when they're both given a cushy exclusive contract in their favor.
First of all, it wasn't the City contracting the work, it was the private lines company
So there are two significant differences. The first is public oversight and accountability -- if this were a government contract, rather than a private contract, it's much easier for a NZ citizen to go into the next meeting at which these contracts are reviewed, and raise the issue. When it's a private company, they're free to do whatever the heck they like within the regulatory framework. So instead of saying "hey, these guys just aren't doing a good enough job for us", we have to figure out what kinds of modifications to the regulations need to be made in order to get the private lines company to manage its contractors more effectively. It's one step removed, and much slower.
The second is the use of contractors, period -- but we can't even start to have any say over whether or not contractors are used to maintain the lines when the transmission company that hires them is run for private profit, rather than the public good. The transmission companies' profits are not hurt when poor service is provided, so all they have to do (and in fact do) when complaints come through regarding the quality of the transmission, is complain back that they wouldn't be able to make a profit if they spent any more on maintenance -- while who knows what kinds of kickbacks the transmission company execs are getting in exchange for farming out tons of ineffective work at top dollar to a variety of contracting outfits who have no incentive to work together to actually solve problems.
Which brings us back to the lack of public oversight. Again, it's much easier to dig into the books of your local governement than it is to dig into the books of a private lines company to figure out whether there's any payola going on-- and payola is a much bigger offense for a public official (add breach of public trust to the fraud and embezzlement issues) than it is for a contracts manager in a private company.
SIMON: They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.
GAV: Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report.
Give it up, Gav. You're playing the same game of misdirection-at-the-details the government played.
The bottom line is, even taking your technical details into account, corners were cut on maintenance, and as a result, most of the 1.5 million people in Auckland either had no power at work, or no power at home -- or both . Rather than fixing the problem within a week, after a week it got much worse . Many companies went out of business -- so even if you weren't working in head office downtown, and didn't live in the blackout area -- if you worked for one of these businesses, you were still affected.
Furthermore, you can't compare Auckland to a city of 1.5 mil in the US, and you certainly can't compare the Auckland CBD to a city of 300K -- Pittsburgh?. Auckland is the New York of New Zealand, and the Auckland CBD is the MANHATTAN of New Zealand--not the Rochester or Pittsburgh. In terms of economic impact on the whole country , the Auckland CBD is where the national offices of most corporations and banks are located.
After the blackout, both Coca Cola corporation and IBM decided to move the bulk of their Australasian operations to Sydney. Now how does that affect everybody purchasing IBM gear who now have to get on the horn to OZ every time a new APAR is annouced? All the New Zealand IBM employees? All of the New Zealand employees of Coca-Cola? These weren't the only two major corps to flee. And then there were all the small shops in the CBD that went out of business. It was like a ghost town.
Another thing that makes it just cynical and callous in the extreme to dismiss this as "only" between 300,000 and 1.5 million people were affected is that -- this is between a tenth and nearly a half of all the people in the country!!! So it's comparable, in terms of the percentage of citizens affected -- to most of the US eastern seaboard going out. for months .
And involving the government would have solved any of this how?
First of all, rather than having two different contractors, both with a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would have had basically lazy government employees that would have had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem -- so they wouldn't get future callouts on cold rainy days. Who the heck wants to go out on a rainy day for n+1 emergency calls-- when they could schedule preventive maintenance requiring them to go outdoors during the months when it doesn't rain nearly as much.
When the government was directly involved (i.e. owned the power companies, and the telephone companies, and the national airline), there was *one* bureaucracy -- that was still ultimately accountable to the public. And the quality of service was very high.
Now there are half a dozen "state owned enterprises" (SOEs) which means the public still foots the bill, but now (being "privatised") we have absolutely no oversight, and they are accountable to their boards to make a profit, rather than directly to the people to provide a service. In the case of the lines companies and phone companies, the quality of service is directly related to the integrity of the lines themselves -- and without public feedback, there is no incentive to improve service, because the lines companies still have a monopoly. No such thing as competition there. Yet the SOEs were set up on the pretext of "providing competition" where no competition can possibly take place. It's an argument that would only appeal to a neocon ideologue.
Furthermore, because it's ex-government department employees in these SOEs that operate the SOEs but now without public oversight -- well, it's the same fat, lazy, corrupt, theiving do-nothing slobs you get in government departments, but now they can do nothing for more money and nobody but other fat, lazy, corrupt, theiving slobs --other ex-government bureaucrats--are looking over their shoulders. The public has no right to even find out what's going on---because now it is a private company.
They're more organisationally inefficient and cut more corners on service and funnel more plum contracts to their buddies now than they did when it was a government monopoly/bureaucracy-- because at least when it was a government monopoly/bureaucracy, we had some right to oversight. New Zealand has seen how the privatisation of public services gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.
Unfortunately.
(You've got a red-tape bound beuacuracy. Governments are famous for them.)
And when the NZ government-run electricity, telephone and airlines were privatised into SOEs, the tape only got longer, redder and meaner--and more expensive.
I agree with you, macdaddy. The power failures in Auckland NZ in 1998 were caused by deregulation. Lasted over a week. The cause was failure to properly maintain underground mains -- lines maintenance had been farmed out to a variety of cut-rate contractors who just didn't do a bloody thing. They had to call back in the old AEPB (Auckland Electrical Power Board) engineers who'd been made redundant in the deregulation craze of the mid-90's. Brought back in as contractors at top dollar, might I add.
The solution was to separate the lines companies from the generators and retailers -- i.e. re-regulation was introduced
This hasn't fixed things, really, because the lines companies now have no incentive to invest in maintenance, and the maintenance the do do (when there's a blackout -- we get 'em all the time where I am) is way piss-poor and the contractors do it in such a way as to maximise their own revenue.
For example, a few weeks ago, the power went out in a big rain/windstorm like it always does. So, Alstom (the same contracting outfit that maintains the public telephones for NZ telecom, which is the latest spectacular privatised public services failure story here) comes out to solve the immediate problem, which is the fact that some wet bamboo had blown over the three main lines servicing the whole valley, shorting us out. So they remove the one piece of bamboo causing the short. I watched them. This bit of bamboo had come off a whole stand of bamboo right next to the main lines, and there were over a DOZEN other bits of bamboo in the stand that had obviously also been blown over the same three lines -- burnt off at the same spot. I asked the Alstom guys if they could request that the stand of bamboo could be reported as the cause of repeated problems -- Answer? oh, no, that has to come from "head office."
Now, there was another contractor (different company) halfway up the road cutting down some foliage on behalf of the lines company -- foliage which had nothing to do with the problem . Funny, that. So I went and asked the tree cutter guy, there with all his gear and ladders, if he could please either cut down the stand of bamboo that was the real source of the problem, or notify "head office" (the lines company) that there was just a tad more foliage trimming that would need to be done to solve the source of the problem . No, he couldn't do that. He'd been sent out to cut down some tree branches, and by god that's what he was going to do.
Now why should either of these contracting companies do anything to solve the cause of the problem? After all, leaving the source of the problem in place assured them of ongoing work -- at top dollar . While this ate into any budget the lines company might have for other maintenance (like maybe uh, moving the 40-year-old overhead lines to a safer and more modern underground system so we don't get the spectacular exploding-transformer effect every time there's a lighting storm maybe? DUH!)
Privatisation is the cause of our blackouts, that's for sure! And it's caused the rates to go up. Worse service, higher cost, poorer maintenance.
And what's the deal? They privatised and deregulated the airline, the electric companies and the phone company -- but in each case, as a sop to the poor NZ citizen, who may have been losing an asset but was certainly getting poorer and more expensive service, they earmarked blocks of stock that could only be issued to New Zealanders.
So that some New Zealanders could have the privilege of purchasing an asset FROM THEMSELVES. They only fell for it because of this farking myth about competition leading to better service and lower cost. Yeh right.
and I found it quite common for XP to go days at a time during the stress tests, which I thought was pretty impressive.
OOOh, whole DAYS. You're damning with faint praise. Try YEARS. That's the kind of stability you can get with a good Linux or BSD install. Only two blue-screens in a supposedly stable install? I've *never* seen an app blue-screen Linux or BSD...in TWENTY years and over a hundred installs, running 24/7 apps some of them well and truly close to the systems limits. Hardware and drivers -- sometimes hardware is faulty, sometimes drivers need to be debugged, and even then it's only when the driver has to dive down into kernel space that it can crash the kernel.
*nix operating systems do proper process-based memory management, with a clear separation between kernel space and user space. Windows OS's do not. Even if it was a 3rd party app, it would not blue screen the machine if the OS were designed and implemented properly. Seems that after 20 years of Unix and Linux doing a great job of these things, Redmond may just be *starting* to catch on in their OS design? Brava. Sure took them long enough.
I envision that every university could build a giant information repository in the center of their campuses. These massive edifices could act as a storehouse for books, magaizines, music cds and other forms of data. To gain entry the supplicant would need a badge of identification. I shall call my creations LIBRARIES and students will flock to them.
Yup! Tee hee!
But you have to watch out for them Hippie Commie Univervsity Perfessers, you know. In violation of DMCA, many university music practice rooms and rehearsal halls have a device which can reproduce copyrighted music .
It's called A PIANO. I've got one in my living-room too. Quick call the cops.
Better get the RIAA out after Billy Collins, poet laureate of the US, too. In his poem Piano Lesson, he admits to using his piano to reproduce copyrighted music!!!
I think that it's more important to examine this work for evidence of copyright violation, and look for ways to soak the Universities and their students for additional fees than it does to teach students to analyse or appreciate the poem and the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic it refers to. No, really!
It's important that, rather than learning what the phrase scholarly purposes means, they should find out AS(c)AP that nobody, not even the university gives a flying fark about scholarly purposes
One thing that's been left out of the debate thus far is the role of University communities in the production of music. And of course they are free to freely distribute on their own internal networks music which they have written and produced.
Universities have music programmes --everything from aspiring rock and roll bands to amateur chorale groups and semi-professional jazz ensembles, to chamber orchestras and full-blown symphony orchestras. Has the RIAA taken so much control over the terms of the debate that the role of University communities in providing cheap or free innovative cultural events is pushed so far over to one side as to be completely missing? Personally, I think the Universities have a duty to their students to discourage the RIAA crap music and provide a superior product themselves -- in the name of education.
As an example, a coffeehouse at Cornell, we had a folk concert series called "Bound for Glory" that usually featured one local or not-so-local artist and an opening act by a student or student group. And it was broadcast free-to-air on the campus radio station. What better way is there for students to learn about music performance, production and distribution than for them to DO IT THEMSELVES? The Talking Heads started out at RISD, and the music scene surrounding the university community in Athens, Georgia is legendary for producing such bands as REM and The Indigo Girls. Carnegie Mellon University would be the ideal place to start producing its own MP3s for distribution on campus, because it has both one of the best Computer Science departments in the country and one of the best music schools in the country. In cities like Boston and New York, you could have consoria, between, say, MIT nad the Boston Conservatory of Music; between Columbia and Julliard. I can see NYU publishing its own film productions on internal broadband, UCLA and USC as well. Certainly, they're already doing things like this, but why not promote it to students as a much better thing to do than downloading some crap 80's music that you can hear on the radio anyway?
Quite frankly, I'm really disappointed with both the musical taste and leadership of college students that are such passive consumers and apparently incapable of producing anything better than what the RIAA would sell them. Pathetic! Is it that they're so technically incompetent that they cannot find music on campus to record and distribute via mp3's-- or is it that their leadership and creative abilities are so underdeveloped that they can't even recognise what a fantastic opportunity it is to be at university, where there are already all of the facilities and pool of highly developed talent available to put on -- and electronically distribute -- creative productions?
I think the Universities should seize the high ground they have such easy access to. In 5 years the RIAA will be begging the Universities for access to the Universities' MP3 archives for wider distribution. You know, those early recordings of the frat party gigs of the student band that went platinum after graduation. That remarkable performance of early church music on the University's collection of medeival instruments. Stephen Speilberg started his career with a student film at USC, and Spike Lee started his career with student films at NYU. Why not have a media server plus a critical forum for viewing and commenting on student films, student music, student plays? The HECK with the *crap* the RIAA is laying claim to. They can KEEP it. Sheesh!
People deliberately go to University in order to be exposed to the good stuff, and to hone their critical thinking via discourse with the best -- i.e. why Mahler trumps Britney Spears and why Melville is better than Mills and Boon. The Universities are doing the students a disservice in protecting the students from RIAA legal moves -- not that they should be offering legal protection when they steal other artists' copyrighted (a
Who wins? The person with the highest frequency or the highest wavelength?
The frequency of a swinging dick is inversely proportional to the square root of the length of the swinging dick.
Therefore, the dick with the lowest frequency would indicate which is the LONGEST dick.
However, the frequency of a swinging dick is independent of its mass. Therefore in order to measure which dick is truly the LARGEST , we must measure the force of each swinging dick in the course of swinging. So tell them both:
SWING IT AGAINST THE WALL, BUDDY!
The one that hits with the biggest "SLAP!" wins.
[in Australia] everyone turns out, and it is a much better system. We actually get a reasonable representation of the opinion of the people.
Um...how exactly does that make it better? ;)
In NZ we might say: Lord help you, and pity the poor immigrant.
As someone whose job it is to make complex technical and business evaluations of the software platform my company uses uses, let me point out that this patronizing and ill-considered rant hardly endears you or your view to "PHB"s. Your attitude...
Congratulations! You've just proved the point of the original poster by your response.
In Switzerland, pretty much *everyone* has a firearm. Now, think to yourself: Are you going to cause trouble in a society like that?
Nah. Only the men are given guns which they keep in their homes. Their wives wouldn't have caused any trouble at all -- they weren't even allowed to vote until the mid-80's in some places, and still don't have basic reproductive rights. These facts may not be mere coincidence, as you well note.