I got a CS degree from Rice. If I had to do it all over again, I would to Math and Linguistics in undergrad with some introductory CS classes speckled in, and then get a non-thesis masters in CS.
natural (human spoken) language is created by usage
natural language dictionaries and grammars are prescriptive, not descriptive
and regardless of that, the definition you gave for insecure (which i would paraphrase as "not secure") works just fine for the purpose of describing a system that is vulnerable to unauthorized access or usage.
It's a system for developing, sharing, and delivering course (or other) content, all under a creative commons license. Participation is open to the public. It's great!
my (perhaps naive) business mind cannot imagine any reason for SAP to support oracle's takover other than that oracle and SAP must have relatively different and well defined markets, and that peoplesoft is in both of them.
i really don't care if there is a monopoly in the database market, because [1]just like with windows and associated crapola tools and dev environments vs. open source, it will make it easier for us (as in people like you and i) to compete since we are using cheaper, more robust, and more easily deployable tools [2] i (perhaps naively) am seeing a real trend in terms of increased corporate scrutiny and mistrust these days, and this will contrubute to an environment where people will be even more motivated to apply that attitude and develop better policies. martha steward is going to jail! so are enron people! somewhat separately, we are also seeing linux begin to reach critical mass in some markets... and when the shit hits the fan in the sco case i think linux will get loads of press, ibm will go to bed with it (it already has to some extent... but i see it becoming a huge contributer in the coming years), et cetera.
iirc, dentists used to do something similar. patients would wear headphones while procedures were being done. i think they would play some sort of white noise.
I can't believe that it is easier to get a breathalyzer installed in every automobile than it is to create $15k fines for drunk driving. Maybe there are law/psychology experts on slashdot who can set me straight here... wouldn't it be easy enough to make first DUI offense $1k and 2 year suspension, second offense $15k and 5 year suspension, et cetera? Maybe the suspensions wouldn't be such a great idea since even criminals need to get to work, but the fines would be enough of a deterrent to significantly decrease the problem.
Installing a breathalyzer in every automobile is like... well... i can't even think of anything more ridiculous to make an analogy!
heh, after i had read half of your post i was going to say "get an att calling card from sam's club, it's 3 cents per minutes" but you seem to have done just that.
i know the phone companies give pretty shitty customer service, but i was refereing to a more abstract notion of indiscriminatory access to features for a reasonable fee. even if they end up charging you three times what you think they are charging you, this pales in comparison to other unregulated markets like health care, who's values and and norms and history and (thankfully high) standards of quality make it impossible to be accessible to a huge majority of the population, or cred, where the entire fundamental business model hinges on the ignorance and vulnerability of their customers.
hmmm but does this all conect with my original point about some markets benefiting from somewhat monopolistic environments due to conglomeration... well i can't make direct anaologies for all of the above points because i indeed don't think that health care and credit would benefit significantly from conglomeration of resources. now i'm confusing myself. zane help!!
well by some metrics we ARE at the bottom of the pile in terms of standard of living, compared to other industrialized nations.for example i believe we are 11th or so in infant mortality, and similarly low on the list in overall mortality. we are the only first world nation without universal health care, and the only one with the death penalty. and if it wasn't for china buying 200 billion i think of our currency recently our economy would have collapsed. but i don't know many details about that situation. anyone, anyone?
Creeping toward monopoly, or only a (smaller) handful of key players in the mobile phone market might not be so bad in terms of quality of service. For some markets consumers benefit from conglomeration of resources. Think about long distance service. There are 3 major players and a handful of tiny players. I don't feel particularly ripped off on my long distance service. If there were 45 different long distance companies, then they would all be charging each other fees to go from network to network, there would be incompatibility problems which would cause decreased quality and also slower adaptation of new technology.
Don't get me wrong, the reason it's like this is because the government doesn't step in and regulate the industry as much as it "should". If we were magically fully utilizing all of the state of the art fiber optic line that we had in the ground and it was all seamlessly available on the free market for any provider to rent at a standardized price, then having 100 bandwidth/long-distance companies would indeed be a good thing for consumers.
But like the wording of my example might suggest, I don't think it would be possible for the technology to stay state of the art AND fully regulated at the physical layer even if the government wanted to. Governments are (reasonably...) good at taking something economically tangible, like value-units of food or healthcare, and distributing it pretty much fairly (not that they always do this, but if they do then they are capable of succeeding).
But even if the US government regulated the network, and had a board of domain experts constantly auditing the state of the system, the fact of the matter is they would not have the motivation to maintain a state of the art network to support bandwidth and voice. Greedy corporations are good for that.
And 100 greedy corporations would never be able to interoperate and also provide state of the art and fairly priced services.
Lawrence Lessig, are you reading this? Set me straight!!:-)
i'm not sure if i'm being too picky or not picky enough with my terminology, but great event driven servers can still (and should) use threads, they just just shouldn't be spawned dynamically per request/task. so... event driven != no threads.
i have to hand it to sco, they are truly masters of FUD. they are taking complete bullshit and convincing the investment community that they are right. we all know the drill: the price goes up, they sell their shares, they drop the case and disappear from the scene. what fucking haters. but i really have to hand it to them. they have made FUD into a fine art form.
then again maybe half of the economy is like this but this is the only time i have been paying attention.
one thing is for sure, i'm going to be looking at buying stocks in a whole new way after all of this, and seeing comments like what phamNewman (parent poster) said he heard from day-traders. i mean i knew the stock market hinged on speculation and a system of perceived value and trust... but now i am seeing how these fools feed on press releases like hyenas, on.. umm... whatever hyenas feed on when they are hungry and tired and confused.
which is why i will stick to buying shares of companies i am familiar with. and also... priceline!!!(ouch).
in general monster cable rips you off. their high end stuff is pretty decent, but it's still way too expensive. the non-garbage cable market is unfortunately very small and dominated by Monster, and then a little bit by acoustic research. (as in, that's what you will find in best buy, other than the GE offerings which are comparable to radio shack).
for well built cables check out cobalt cable. They make solid cables from good materials and have great service. don't get the speaker cables though, word on the street is it's just 10 guage zip (which is actually a very good choice for speaker cables. and they also terminate and package them extremely well. but still it's much cheaper to get 10 or 12 guage zip in bulk from home depot.)
and here's another recommendation for griffin products. i LOVE my PowerWave. i have 30 feet of usb cord going across my room to my powerwave, which has a half meter rca cable (from cobalt cable) going into my receiver, through which i play my 192kbit mp4s. a low cost solution to get sound across a room without losing any quality (like you would with 30 feet of analog cable coming out of the computer's noise ridden d/a converter).
there is also the argument, hmm where i have i heard it before, that restricting distribution of software is unethical because it restricts access to information, truth, tools, et cetera. it currently is a luxury, and i (and perhaps other slashdot readers) think that is a bad thing. digital divide==bad. luxury items should be things that people don't need, but want. if i want to have a leather couch i have to work a little harder to make the money to afford it instead of a cloth one. if i want a big useless rock on my finger, i have to work even more. but if i want tools to use to express ideas and create things, an easy way to access information, or even a decent meal, i shouldn't have to do anything exceptional to get it. of course some might say my argument is wishy washy since it hinges on concepts like easy and exceptional, but i assert that these terms have widely consistent definitions.
the example you gave is ridiculous (btw the only reason i am using such harsh words is because you are anonymous, so i am insulting your argument and not you:), because you used an exceptional case, where someone has a lot more money in the short term than they did when they made the decision to pirate.
most of the time, people have a pretty good idea of what their budgets are going to be in the short and medium term, and also their needs and wants in that same time frame. so it's not sensible to not pirate something because you might win the lottery next week!
however it is sensible to not pirate because maybe you could eat out a little less often or buy one less drink when you go out, and save up for that software you need.
it's all about where to draw the line i guess. well, with most things it's all about where to draw the line, but in this case i think we need to migrate to a different value structure, first with music and movies, and then with software. and i don't just mean, do it like redhat, sell service, although that will probably be a significant part of intermediate steps. but the fact of the matter is, a copy of software is not a can of beans. no one is completely and intuitively comfortably with our current notion of virtual, history(development cost)-aware value. it's so easy to copy, but it's illegal...... but we've all hear this before. i can't wait for The Future when we get to see what the new value models will be.
Slashdot Mirror
coooool. where did you see this? do you happen to know the company that sets up the infrastructure?
amazing
natural (human) language is created by usage
natural language grammars and dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive
best
soviet
russia
joke
ever.
I got a CS degree from Rice. If I had to do it all over again, I would to Math and Linguistics in undergrad with some introductory CS classes speckled in, and then get a non-thesis masters in CS.
http://media.jjb.cc/random/sw.mov
http://media.jjb.cc/random/sw.mov
actually ibm is shipping 65 nm right now in the g5 xserve. or is my memory skipping a generation. the plant in fishkill is doing 65 right?
shit, i said it backwards. that's what i meant... that natural language dictionaries and grammars are _descriptive_.
natural (human spoken) language is created by usage
natural language dictionaries and grammars are prescriptive, not descriptive
and regardless of that, the definition you gave for insecure (which i would paraphrase as "not secure") works just fine for the purpose of describing a system that is vulnerable to unauthorized access or usage.
http://cnx.rice.edu
It's a system for developing, sharing, and delivering course (or other) content, all under a creative commons license. Participation is open to the public. It's great!
my (perhaps naive) business mind cannot imagine any reason for SAP to
support oracle's takover other than that oracle and SAP must have
relatively different and well defined markets, and that peoplesoft is in
both of them.
i really don't care if there is a monopoly in the database market, because
[1]just like with windows and associated crapola tools and dev
environments vs. open source, it will make it easier for us (as in people
like you and i) to compete since we are using cheaper, more robust, and
more easily deployable tools [2] i (perhaps naively) am seeing a real
trend in terms of increased corporate scrutiny and mistrust these days,
and this will contrubute to an environment where people will be even more
motivated to apply that attitude and develop better policies. martha
steward is going to jail! so are enron people! somewhat separately, we are
also seeing linux begin to reach critical mass in some markets... and when
the shit hits the fan in the sco case i think linux will get loads of
press, ibm will go to bed with it (it already has to some extent... but i
see it becoming a huge contributer in the coming years), et cetera.
iirc, dentists used to do something similar. patients would wear headphones while procedures were being done. i think they would play some sort of white noise.
j
I can't believe that it is easier to get a breathalyzer installed in every automobile than it is to create $15k fines for drunk driving. Maybe there are law/psychology experts on slashdot who can set me straight here... wouldn't it be easy enough to make first DUI offense $1k and 2 year suspension, second offense $15k and 5 year suspension, et cetera? Maybe the suspensions wouldn't be such a great idea since even criminals need to get to work, but the fines would be enough of a deterrent to significantly decrease the problem.
Installing a breathalyzer in every automobile is like... well... i can't even think of anything more ridiculous to make an analogy!
heh, after i had read half of your post i was going to say "get an att calling card from sam's club, it's 3 cents per minutes" but you seem to have done just that. i know the phone companies give pretty shitty customer service, but i was refereing to a more abstract notion of indiscriminatory access to features for a reasonable fee. even if they end up charging you three times what you think they are charging you, this pales in comparison to other unregulated markets like health care, who's values and and norms and history and (thankfully high) standards of quality make it impossible to be accessible to a huge majority of the population, or cred, where the entire fundamental business model hinges on the ignorance and vulnerability of their customers. hmmm but does this all conect with my original point about some markets benefiting from somewhat monopolistic environments due to conglomeration... well i can't make direct anaologies for all of the above points because i indeed don't think that health care and credit would benefit significantly from conglomeration of resources. now i'm confusing myself. zane help!!
well by some metrics we ARE at the bottom of the pile in terms of standard of living, compared to other industrialized nations.for example i believe we are 11th or so in infant mortality, and similarly low on the list in overall mortality. we are the only first world nation without universal health care, and the only one with the death penalty. and if it wasn't for china buying 200 billion i think of our currency recently our economy would have collapsed. but i don't know many details about that situation. anyone, anyone?
-1 offtopic? whatever happened to +1 funny?? this is an AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE QUOTE. from the first mooninite episode.
Creeping toward monopoly, or only a (smaller) handful of key players in the mobile phone market might not be so bad in terms of quality of service. For some markets consumers benefit from conglomeration of resources. Think about long distance service. There are 3 major players and a handful of tiny players. I don't feel particularly ripped off on my long distance service. If there were 45 different long distance companies, then they would all be charging each other fees to go from network to network, there would be incompatibility problems which would cause decreased quality and also slower adaptation of new technology.
:-)
Don't get me wrong, the reason it's like this is because the government doesn't step in and regulate the industry as much as it "should". If we were magically fully utilizing all of the state of the art fiber optic line that we had in the ground and it was all seamlessly available on the free market for any provider to rent at a standardized price, then having 100 bandwidth/long-distance companies would indeed be a good thing for consumers.
But like the wording of my example might suggest, I don't think it would be possible for the technology to stay state of the art AND fully regulated at the physical layer even if the government wanted to. Governments are (reasonably...) good at taking something economically tangible, like value-units of food or healthcare, and distributing it pretty much fairly (not that they always do this, but if they do then they are capable of succeeding).
But even if the US government regulated the network, and had a board of domain experts constantly auditing the state of the system, the fact of the matter is they would not have the motivation to maintain a state of the art network to support bandwidth and voice. Greedy corporations are good for that.
And 100 greedy corporations would never be able to interoperate and also provide state of the art and fairly priced services.
Lawrence Lessig, are you reading this? Set me straight!!
i'm not sure if i'm being too picky or not picky enough with my terminology, but great event driven servers can still (and should) use threads, they just just shouldn't be spawned dynamically per request/task. so... event driven != no threads.
wrap yourself around the dvds meatwad
i have to hand it to sco, they are truly masters of FUD. they are taking complete bullshit and convincing the investment community that they are right. we all know the drill: the price goes up, they sell their shares, they drop the case and disappear from the scene. what fucking haters. but i really have to hand it to them. they have made FUD into a fine art form.
then again maybe half of the economy is like this but this is the only time i have been paying attention.
one thing is for sure, i'm going to be looking at buying stocks in a whole new way after all of this, and seeing comments like what phamNewman (parent poster) said he heard from day-traders. i mean i knew the stock market hinged on speculation and a system of perceived value and trust... but now i am seeing how these fools feed on press releases like hyenas, on.. umm... whatever hyenas feed on when they are hungry and tired and confused.
which is why i will stick to buying shares of companies i am familiar with. and also... priceline!!!(ouch).
WELCOME
TO THE FUTURE
in general monster cable rips you off. their high end stuff is pretty decent, but it's still way too expensive. the non-garbage cable market is unfortunately very small and dominated by Monster, and then a little bit by acoustic research. (as in, that's what you will find in best buy, other than the GE offerings which are comparable to radio shack).
for well built cables check out cobalt cable. They make solid cables from good materials and have great service. don't get the speaker cables though, word on the street is it's just 10 guage zip (which is actually a very good choice for speaker cables. and they also terminate and package them extremely well. but still it's much cheaper to get 10 or 12 guage zip in bulk from home depot.)
and here's another recommendation for griffin products. i LOVE my PowerWave. i have 30 feet of usb cord going across my room to my powerwave, which has a half meter rca cable (from cobalt cable) going into my receiver, through which i play my 192kbit mp4s. a low cost solution to get sound across a room without losing any quality (like you would with 30 feet of analog cable coming out of the computer's noise ridden d/a converter).
there is also the argument, hmm where i have i heard it before, that restricting distribution of software is unethical because it restricts access to information, truth, tools, et cetera. it currently is a luxury, and i (and perhaps other slashdot readers) think that is a bad thing. digital divide==bad. luxury items should be things that people don't need, but want. if i want to have a leather couch i have to work a little harder to make the money to afford it instead of a cloth one. if i want a big useless rock on my finger, i have to work even more. but if i want tools to use to express ideas and create things, an easy way to access information, or even a decent meal, i shouldn't have to do anything exceptional to get it. of course some might say my argument is wishy washy since it hinges on concepts like easy and exceptional, but i assert that these terms have widely consistent definitions.
:), because you used an exceptional case, where someone has a lot more money in the short term than they did when they made the decision to pirate.
the example you gave is ridiculous (btw the only reason i am using such harsh words is because you are anonymous, so i am insulting your argument and not you
most of the time, people have a pretty good idea of what their budgets are going to be in the short and medium term, and also their needs and wants in that same time frame. so it's not sensible to not pirate something because you might win the lottery next week!
however it is sensible to not pirate because maybe you could eat out a little less often or buy one less drink when you go out, and save up for that software you need.
it's all about where to draw the line i guess. well, with most things it's all about where to draw the line, but in this case i think we need to migrate to a different value structure, first with music and movies, and then with software. and i don't just mean, do it like redhat, sell service, although that will probably be a significant part of intermediate steps. but the fact of the matter is, a copy of software is not a can of beans. no one is completely and intuitively comfortably with our current notion of virtual, history(development cost)-aware value. it's so easy to copy, but it's illegal...... but we've all hear this before. i can't wait for The Future when we get to see what the new value models will be.
well..... well... yeah you're right. well if you get one that's 100 then it's worth it. that's how much i think my friend's was.