If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
But there's less competition for the other half, which happens to be the half responsible for the disparity. Maybe someone could come up with an anti-trust angle to this?
Blatantly false. Trust me, when you have a stack of resumes, the first thing you do is toss out the simple demographic ones like no degree.
Maybe you do (you do actually participate in hiring new coworkers, right?). I haven't noticed that having a degree has much (if any) predictive power (what seems more useful is looking if their experience is all copypasta of job descriptions or expands on every trivial detail) so I don't pay much attention to it, and since there are a few people with no degree HR is clearly not just dumping them all either.
But the disparity TFS speaks of isn't real. You don't buy a computer because of its culture, you buy it because it serves you purposes better than other brands.
But for some people, their purposes include social, as well as technical, requirements. e.g., everyone else has a mac and they don't want to stand out, or they buy in to the whole "image" thing.
No, she's saying the authors should have control over their work, or whoever they sell those rights to.
I don't have any problem with that.
The natural state of things is that my thoughts are my own, and nobody needs to know when I share them with whoever I like. When original authors are given downstream control, they are given permission to intrude upon this. Why would anyone not have a problem with this?
Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.
Git, mercurial, monotone, etc. are all ready nice, and do pretty much the same thing, but it's annoying to have to use the one that the project leader decides on. It would be nice (if it's possible) to be able to pick which one you want to use as a client, and have it work with whatever the project manager wants to use for the upstream repository. I'm not sure what all this would encompass, probably some common distribution (push/pull) protocol would need to be implemented by all the different SCMs..
You can't have a common network protocol because of some fairly fundamental differences (rename tracking, use of crypto, concept of what a "branch" is, etc). What you can do, is have a common minimal-info dump format (for example, there's work to make monotone read/write git-fast-import data) that allows for one-shot, one-way data migration...you could probably extend this to allow for repeated pulls or maybe even bi-directional use, but you'd need code specific to each pair of systems and the people on both sides would likely need to avoid certain features.
Further, is there anything resembling Roberts Rules of Order for an online forum, email, etc?
I know the Debian developers vote on things sometimes, so they probably have something at least vaguely similar. But how much of the rules are about collision avoidance over a shared broadcast medium (ie, people in a room not talking over eachother), which wouldn't really apply to asynchronous communications like email and forums?
The real question is, can anything in the quantum world really involve a non-rational number (or even a non-terminating decimal)?
Take a simple circle. A mathematical perfect circle is effectively a polygon with an infinite number of sides, and pi is infinite because of this same fact. A 'circular' object in the real universe has faceted sides, each of at least the lengths between adjacent atoms. (It's also 'fuzzy' when measured at that scale, and part of that is also QM). The whole concept of Planck length dictates minimum distances, angles and such, and objects have granularity that means an infinite number of facets or an infinitely dividable curve isn't part of the real universe.
So, isn't what's been discovered here an expression of the golden ratio to only some finite number of decimal places?
Reality is not "granular" in the sense of being divided into fixed-size chunks. It is like you said, fuzzy. The Planck length is just the guaranteed minimum amount of fuzz that everything has... at that scale you don't have surfaces at all, just "most of the fuzz is gone by around here"
In this particular case I suspect they're actually talking about the atoms in these string flipping between spin-up and spin-down, rather than anything actually moving through space like an actual guitar string, so what really matters is the structure of time... this should be the same, not discrete/granular, but with a minimum fuzziness that limits the smallest interval you can measure.
If it works the same way as the health care reform legislation then you'll be limited to choosing a list of internet packages that were pre-approved by the FCC or some other Federal bureaucracy.
This sounds bogus, do you have a reference for it?
The second is going to give you practical skills in programming -- a wide array of practical skills. The first is most likely going to give you some automata theory for computers but unless you're going into theoretical research, the second is the obvious answer. Graphics and games are all vectors, the web is becoming even more so with new browser rendering technologies. Rendering is all euclidean space transposed onto a two dimensional plane (screen) using points (pixels). Differentials are huge in the vision and image processing world and again, in graphics. This is your obvious selection although I challenge you to take both.
No.
The second one sounds like it would only be useful if he's planning on working in a particular field that uses that kind of math (graphics, simulations, maybe low-level sensor/control stuff; but it would probably be very useful if he knows he's going into one of these fields). Discrete math and algorithms are important any time you have a non-trivial amount of data, and help in getting a good understanding of how the computer actually works. Some knowledge of proofs is also good, since it can help you make sure that your code will do what you want it to.
I know when I went to university, there were classes on data structures, algorithms, and discrete math that were required for Computer Science and Computer Engineering. In contrast, the linear algebra and multivariable-diff-eq classes I took were electives to get enough math credits.
Engineering is about carefully following an existing set of rules, like building codes and the laws of physics. It can require cleverness, but only in how to best achieve your goals while staying within the rules ("solve this problem, within these constraints"). Maybe there's a mindset where it just doesn't really matter where the rules come from, and religious rules are just as good as physical or legal rules? This would be in contrast to science, where the goal is to find the rules and poke at them until you understand them ("find out what the constraints are, and why").
Is to either remove all people from flights, or somehow put them all into a coma for the duration of the flight.
Actually, the plane could still crash due to mechanical failure, pilot stupidity (including other pilots not looking where they're going), unexpected bad weather, or collision with large birds.
A co-worker did some extremely clever testing of the compression software that proved conclusively that the compression algorithms were cheating, and that it was intentional fraud.
Cheating how? Either it decompresses or it doesn't...
If they both come in and work hard for eight hours every day, their productivity is equal.
This is nonsense. Are you saying that someone who can assemble 5 widgets per hour is exactly as productive as someone who can assemble 10 per hour, as long as they work the same number of hours? Or that someone writing 100 individual identical emails is productive as someone who knows how to use mail merge? Also, here's a nice quote from Eric Hoffer that might be relevant:
A workingman sure of his skill goes leisurely about his job, and accomplishes much though he works as if at play. On the other hand, the workingman who is without confidence attacks his work as if he were saving the world, and he must do so if he is to get anything done.
"Productivity" and "hours worked" are not the same (actually I'd say there's a negative correlation, which has some degree of causation going in both directions).
Beyond the amount of money needed to affect that attraction, CEO pay is both wasteful and unfair..... Currently CEOs are routinely pulling down up to four hundred times the average worker's salary. That is obviously too high, and is the result of business forces that have nothing to do with fair compensation or the worth of a CEO, any more than housing prices set by the market were based in reality.
Define "reality". Those housing prices were very much real, they just weren't stable. It could very well be that current CEO pay levels are currently necessary to attract the attention of suitable CEO candidates... and if the prospect of that pay leads enough people to develop the necessary skills, you'll end up with CEOs (call them "most senior management") getting similar pay to the most senior accountants/programmers/Engineers/mechanics/etc. Or maybe even the ability to outsource them to "rent-a-CEO" companies (yeah, right).
Software that's finished in finite time? (Forever-finished, not just this-release-finished.)
What a concept! Exactly what segment of the industry are you working in over there?
My job is writing programs that are often only ever used once, to translate (half-garbage) data from competitors' or customers' database structures to our own.
With NAT, every connection uses up a source port on the public IP. At some point, you run out of ports.
That's not inherent, since it's only the combination of source and destination address/port that has to be unique. It's no different than running out of file descriptors, just an implemenation limit.
Any more than Linux by itself is. It's half an OS.
Or really, a quarter of an OS because it won't be finished until the Second Coming of RMS to lead the faithful out of a world where all hardware (even your toaster) will only run software approved by the MPAA.
Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to names, titles, short phrases, ideas, systems, or methods.
Given the above, can someone please explain to me why Computer Software is copyrightable?
It is considered a literary work. Given that nobody actually practices literate programming, I don't think this makes much sense.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
I read that more as "Silverlight 4 finally supports these totally awesome features that everyone's been asking for, and that we already had in Moonlight. So now we (the Mono people) need to implement the rest of Silverlight 3 and 4, so we can run the upcoming flood of apps that use these features but don't specifically worry about being cross-platform."
Slashdot Mirror
If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
But there's less competition for the other half, which happens to be the half responsible for the disparity. Maybe someone could come up with an anti-trust angle to this?
So there are few women in technology. Sad. There are few men in primary or secondary education, nursing, or child care. Do we care?
Not that I've noticed, but we probably should. The gap in tech may well be partly caused by the gap in teaching.
Blatantly false. Trust me, when you have a stack of resumes, the first thing you do is toss out the simple demographic ones like no degree.
Maybe you do (you do actually participate in hiring new coworkers, right?). I haven't noticed that having a degree has much (if any) predictive power (what seems more useful is looking if their experience is all copypasta of job descriptions or expands on every trivial detail) so I don't pay much attention to it, and since there are a few people with no degree HR is clearly not just dumping them all either.
But the disparity TFS speaks of isn't real. You don't buy a computer because of its culture, you buy it because it serves you purposes better than other brands.
But for some people, their purposes include social, as well as technical, requirements. e.g., everyone else has a mac and they don't want to stand out, or they buy in to the whole "image" thing.
Use? I thought copyright was about COPYing.
It covers more than that, including public performance (say, playing the radio at work), and modifying existing copies.
No, she's saying the authors should have control over their work, or whoever they sell those rights to.
I don't have any problem with that.
The natural state of things is that my thoughts are my own, and nobody needs to know when I share them with whoever I like. When original authors are given downstream control, they are given permission to intrude upon this. Why would anyone not have a problem with this?
When will the management at game studios address this troubling issue properly?
They'll address it when people stop standing for it.
They'll address it when they get the memo (assuming they take time to actually read it).
Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.
Except that those laws unfortunately don't apply to programmers.
Yeah, that doesn't work in the real world, in F100 companies.
I'd think it would actually work out better for them, what with being the 800lb gorillas and all.
Git, mercurial, monotone, etc. are all ready nice, and do pretty much the same thing, but it's annoying to have to use the one that the project leader decides on. It would be nice (if it's possible) to be able to pick which one you want to use as a client, and have it work with whatever the project manager wants to use for the upstream repository. I'm not sure what all this would encompass, probably some common distribution (push/pull) protocol would need to be implemented by all the different SCMs..
You can't have a common network protocol because of some fairly fundamental differences (rename tracking, use of crypto, concept of what a "branch" is, etc). What you can do, is have a common minimal-info dump format (for example, there's work to make monotone read/write git-fast-import data) that allows for one-shot, one-way data migration...you could probably extend this to allow for repeated pulls or maybe even bi-directional use, but you'd need code specific to each pair of systems and the people on both sides would likely need to avoid certain features.
Further, is there anything resembling Roberts Rules of Order for an online forum, email, etc?
I know the Debian developers vote on things sometimes, so they probably have something at least vaguely similar. But how much of the rules are about collision avoidance over a shared broadcast medium (ie, people in a room not talking over eachother), which wouldn't really apply to asynchronous communications like email and forums?
The real question is, can anything in the quantum world really involve a non-rational number (or even a non-terminating decimal)?
Take a simple circle. A mathematical perfect circle is effectively a polygon with an infinite number of sides, and pi is infinite because of this same fact. A 'circular' object in the real universe has faceted sides, each of at least the lengths between adjacent atoms. (It's also 'fuzzy' when measured at that scale, and part of that is also QM). The whole concept of Planck length dictates minimum distances, angles and such, and objects have granularity that means an infinite number of facets or an infinitely dividable curve isn't part of the real universe.
So, isn't what's been discovered here an expression of the golden ratio to only some finite number of decimal places?
Reality is not "granular" in the sense of being divided into fixed-size chunks. It is like you said, fuzzy. The Planck length is just the guaranteed minimum amount of fuzz that everything has... at that scale you don't have surfaces at all, just "most of the fuzz is gone by around here"
In this particular case I suspect they're actually talking about the atoms in these string flipping between spin-up and spin-down, rather than anything actually moving through space like an actual guitar string, so what really matters is the structure of time... this should be the same, not discrete/granular, but with a minimum fuzziness that limits the smallest interval you can measure.
If it works the same way as the health care reform legislation then you'll be limited to choosing a list of internet packages that were pre-approved by the FCC or some other Federal bureaucracy.
This sounds bogus, do you have a reference for it?
The second is going to give you practical skills in programming -- a wide array of practical skills. The first is most likely going to give you some automata theory for computers but unless you're going into theoretical research, the second is the obvious answer. Graphics and games are all vectors, the web is becoming even more so with new browser rendering technologies. Rendering is all euclidean space transposed onto a two dimensional plane (screen) using points (pixels). Differentials are huge in the vision and image processing world and again, in graphics. This is your obvious selection although I challenge you to take both.
No.
The second one sounds like it would only be useful if he's planning on working in a particular field that uses that kind of math (graphics, simulations, maybe low-level sensor/control stuff; but it would probably be very useful if he knows he's going into one of these fields). Discrete math and algorithms are important any time you have a non-trivial amount of data, and help in getting a good understanding of how the computer actually works. Some knowledge of proofs is also good, since it can help you make sure that your code will do what you want it to.
I know when I went to university, there were classes on data structures, algorithms, and discrete math that were required for Computer Science and Computer Engineering. In contrast, the linear algebra and multivariable-diff-eq classes I took were electives to get enough math credits.
Engineering is about carefully following an existing set of rules, like building codes and the laws of physics. It can require cleverness, but only in how to best achieve your goals while staying within the rules ("solve this problem, within these constraints"). Maybe there's a mindset where it just doesn't really matter where the rules come from, and religious rules are just as good as physical or legal rules? This would be in contrast to science, where the goal is to find the rules and poke at them until you understand them ("find out what the constraints are, and why").
Is to either remove all people from flights, or somehow put them all into a coma for the duration of the flight.
Actually, the plane could still crash due to mechanical failure, pilot stupidity (including other pilots not looking where they're going), unexpected bad weather, or collision with large birds.
A co-worker did some extremely clever testing of the compression software that proved conclusively that the compression algorithms were cheating, and that it was intentional fraud.
Cheating how? Either it decompresses or it doesn't...
If they both come in and work hard for eight hours every day, their productivity is equal.
This is nonsense. Are you saying that someone who can assemble 5 widgets per hour is exactly as productive as someone who can assemble 10 per hour, as long as they work the same number of hours? Or that someone writing 100 individual identical emails is productive as someone who knows how to use mail merge? Also, here's a nice quote from Eric Hoffer that might be relevant:
"Productivity" and "hours worked" are not the same (actually I'd say there's a negative correlation, which has some degree of causation going in both directions).
Beyond the amount of money needed to affect that attraction, CEO pay is both wasteful and unfair. .... Currently CEOs are routinely pulling down up to four hundred times the average worker's salary. That is obviously too high, and is the result of business forces that have nothing to do with fair compensation or the worth of a CEO, any more than housing prices set by the market were based in reality.
Define "reality". Those housing prices were very much real, they just weren't stable. It could very well be that current CEO pay levels are currently necessary to attract the attention of suitable CEO candidates... and if the prospect of that pay leads enough people to develop the necessary skills, you'll end up with CEOs (call them "most senior management") getting similar pay to the most senior accountants/programmers/Engineers/mechanics/etc. Or maybe even the ability to outsource them to "rent-a-CEO" companies (yeah, right).
Software that's finished in finite time? (Forever-finished, not just this-release-finished.) What a concept! Exactly what segment of the industry are you working in over there?
My job is writing programs that are often only ever used once, to translate (half-garbage) data from competitors' or customers' database structures to our own.
With NAT, every connection uses up a source port on the public IP. At some point, you run out of ports.
That's not inherent, since it's only the combination of source and destination address/port that has to be unique. It's no different than running out of file descriptors, just an implemenation limit.
Any more than Linux by itself is. It's half an OS.
Or really, a quarter of an OS because it won't be finished until the Second Coming of RMS to lead the faithful out of a world where all hardware (even your toaster) will only run software approved by the MPAA.
they also say that because they pro-rate the fee depending on how much of your contract is left, they still lose money.
...So, they claim to be losing money on all the subscribers who don't cancel their contracts early?
That can't possibly be right, maybe I should go RTFA to see if it really says the same thing...
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
Given the above, can someone please explain to me why Computer Software is copyrightable?
It is considered a literary work. Given that nobody actually practices literate programming, I don't think this makes much sense.
They do not know how things went before GNU and Linux were there, when to have an usable development environment you had to
...use BSD?
In this instance Miguel wrote a blog post about Silverlight that reads like a press release. Silverlight is a proprietary and patent-encumbered replacement for Flash written by Microsoft.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
I read that more as "Silverlight 4 finally supports these totally awesome features that everyone's been asking for, and that we already had in Moonlight. So now we (the Mono people) need to implement the rest of Silverlight 3 and 4, so we can run the upcoming flood of apps that use these features but don't specifically worry about being cross-platform."