Could someone please explain how finding and fixing bugs/issues/problems/whatever is bad? Now, I understand that it is not particularly good from a PR perspective. However, it is not like they are ignoring these things or trying to spin it like they are not real problems (as certain commercial and proprietary software vendors are prone to do). This is, in fact, quite good for the users.
But shouldn't we at least try to figure out a better way? For example, wouldn't 'Commonsense Homeland Security' be a winning political banner, not a risky one?
Scenario 1:
$PRESIDENT and $EXECUTIVE_BRANCH_POLITICIANS say "this is overblown, go back about your normal business"
Terrorist attack happens
People howl that $PRESIDENT and $EXECUTIVE_BRANCH_POLITICIANS did nothing when they had the chance
Scenario 2:
$PRESIDENT and $EXECUTIVE_BRANCH_POLITICIANS do everything that they can to prevent anything even resembling a terrorist attack
No terrorist attacks happen for a short time
People howl that $PRESIDENT and $EXECUTIVE_BRANCH_POLITICIANS only want to take away people's rights and institute facism
With options like that, it doesn't matter what they do, as they are always going to be wrong.
Some friends were visiting last night and they had recently purchased a new HP laptop (1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM with 80 GB HDD). I was struck by how abysmally slow Vista was. The thing had Vista Home Premium on it. Putting a blank CD entailed a wait of anywhere from 15 to 25 seconds before the stupid dialog came up asking if I wanted to burn something to the blank disc. Connecting to a wireless network was a complete disaster. My wireless network is setup to not broadcast its SSID, so I had to enter the setting manually along with the WPA password. As soon as I was done, the thing would take the dialog away and then not connect. It took me 30 minutes of hunting to find the listing that had the wireless networks I had manually entered in (as opposed to the networks which were broadcasting). To top if off, the system kept prompting to allow things that it really seemed I should not need to be asked. I am seriously not trying to troll here, this is just my first impression of vista.
The only usable way to control Javascript is site by site, and turning it off by default slashes a whole army of exploits out of your life. Every browser should have this functionality built in.
Amen to that. I use noscript and I have lost count of how many sites fail completely or outright refuse to load if JS is disabled. The number of sites which degrade gracefully is sadly quite small. If every browser had this, maybe web developers would finally get it through their thick skulls that JavaScript is best utilized to enhance the user's experience. Obviously, there are some exceptions, like AJAX applications and the like. It bugs me so much that I have never developed a site that did not degrade gracefully in the absence of JS. In fact, the only way the user would notice something was different was if they had first seen the site with JS and then later without or vice versa. Some of the worst offenders are the "major" tech companies. Try logging into Yahoo webmail with JS turned off to see what I mean.
Unfortunately for Microsoft (but true to their character) they have tools for mouthpieces like Ballmer. Microsoft inks a deal in what could only be viewed with raised eyebrows, and Ballmer punctuates that with "they're infringing our IP anyway...". As long as Microsoft continues to be so hostile to the world in general, they get what they sow.
Nobody (or at least most people) argues that Microsoft doesn't come up with original ideas. Their research arm has a ton of truly brilliant people. I mean, Leslie Lamport and Tony Hoare work there. The problem is not that Microsoft can't come up with some innovative stuff. The problem is in how they translate it from their research side to their implementation and then marketing, which is usually pretty lousy.
I can't remember where I heard it or who said it, but I once heard someone say words about MySQL to the effect of "if you ignore all the things that make a real database a database, you can make it really fast." Now, I get that lots of web hosts use MySQL and that it is the dominant free database out there. However, there is lots of insight in that statement. Now, in 99% of the cases where MySQL is used, it probably works great with few hitches. However, I'd rather trust my data to a something that values data integrity over speed.
Recall that not too long ago, right here on slashdot we all got to see first hand what happens when MySQL craps out. All the threading was gone. I mean seriously, what sort of database accepts invalid and then silently truncates it and moves on? Again, I don't think that the number of people with MySQL tables with 16,000,000+ rows is very large, but it is still disturbing.
If you are going for something small and light and fast and you are not too concerned about standards, then MySQL is great. Note, I am not trying to troll, I am simply pointing out that for all the people who endlessly bash on one or the other DB, that there is a market space for each.
This is just shocking. I know public schools can be a mess and are certainly in need of reform (AND more funds) but abolishing them? How exactly are the underprivileged supposed to send their kids to school? I thought America was supposed to be about everyone being able to make something out of themselves? Well, without basic level education that is fucking hard.
OK. I'd settle for opt-out then. What really gets me is that money is forcibly taken from people for services which they do not use. I have a friend with five kids. All of them go to private school because he thinks that the public schools are crap. It is not right that he is still required to pay astronomically high property tax in order to support the failing public schools where he lives (among the worst in the country). He is basically forced to pay twice to get his kids an education. Let people who want to send their kids to public school pay the taxes and let the people who want to send their kids to a private school (where they can do simple things like fire underperforming teachers) not pay the taxes to support the system they don't use.
I could not have said it better myself. I had a good experience in high school, but as far as I can tell, that is by far the exception. Public schools are a mess. Parents have no leverage. Abolish public schools, quit taxing property to pay for schools and let the parents be responsible for their children's educations. When this country was founded private education was the norm. Heck is basically the only thing available.
Incidentally, literacy rates in this country peaked prior to the introduction of public education.
The aerospace industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies that would allow the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace, New Scientist reports. It will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum.
I'm not a EE or RF guy, but would the ISM band be of any use in this case? It is unregulated, after all.
What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one. Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?
First, I'm sure that anti-collision systems are under development for military applications. Airspace over a battlefield is arguably far busier than most civilian airspace (except maybe some of the busiest airports). Of course, in military air space you must make sure that nothing is below when you intentionally drop explosive devices, which is generally not a problem in civil airspace. I can guarantee that every military that uses UAVs is interested in them not taking out any other aircraft through a mid-air collision.
Second, everybody (the private sector and the military alike) has gotten spoiled by the trends of the last 20 to 30 years to everything COTS. UAVs are arguably much more applicable in a military environment at this time. That doesn't mean that civilian applications don't or won't exist, just that for this the military is the main driver for innovations in this area. People old enough to remember the early days of the cold war will remember that the military was the single largest driver of technological and scientific innovation across the board.
In short, give it time. Nobody has been cheated, things are just progressing a bit differently from what us young'uns are used to.
Yes, but Opera proper is not optimized for small screens. I know that there is a bit of a difference between a handheld device and even a 13" CRT. However, most programs today look absolutely terrible on anything less than a 17" or 19" monitor. I know, because most of the computers at my church still have old 14" CRTs, and many programs are just barely functional at any resolution that is still readable on such a small screen.
The feature list includes RSS integration, a user-interface geared towards mobile devices and small screen size, and its fast for relatively slower mobile data connections (with picture upload/sharing if you are into it). Requirement for using it: You must have a phone capable of running Java mobile applications and are using an Internet connection
I wonder if this might be a good choice for older machines as well. Think something like an old 486 or 1st-gen Pentium with 32 or 64 MB RAM and a 13" or 14" monitor. IIRC, there are stripped down versions of Mozilla available for mobiles (I'm not sure how feature complete or mature they are). But as they say, competition is good. Seeing as web browsing is probably the single most common activity, and arguably the best use of an old computer (running a word processor or some similarly resource-intensive application is probably a no-go). You can throw something like DSL on there and use a light-weight WM. I guess the main hangup would be being able to get Java ME running on it.
Is there a good guide (online or off) for the Software Engineering aspects of GUI programming, so that I can learn how to reuse code, and build my class hierarchies over the one provided by the toolkit?
Not sure if it is exactly what you are looking for, but I think a good starting place would be Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell from the O'Reilly collection. It helps if you are already familiar with design patterns, as the book casts its concepts in terms of patterns.
I would think that if you are an experienced Software Engineer and programmer, you would be much better served by something targetting the fundamentals of interface design. You can apply what you learn to any language or toolkit you know now or learn in the future. If you target a particular language or toolkit from the beginning you will limit yourself and make it harder to apply language-specific or toolkit-specific things to a different language or toolkit.
The updated documents that Microsoft has delivered, they hope, will put off the leveling of a several-millions-of-dollars-a-day fine against the OS maker. Whether or not the documents have accomplished that task will not be known for several months yet.
Being that they have already dragged their feet for years on this, they should be required to pay the fine (or at least a percentage of it) into escrow (which can bear interest for the benefit of the EU citizenry). Once the documentation is judged to have met the requirements of the EU regulators, the money can be returned.
Not sure if it would be possible, but I think it would help dissuade MS from future delay tactics.
Oh man, you were doing great right up until this part.
You really need to study American history again if you don't get this @#$% by now. Our founding fathers understood this stuff, and that's why "checks and balances" are a part of our government
Then you finish up with this:
(2000-2006 excepted).
You seriously think that getting around checks and balances is a new occurrence in the last six years? Let me say that you need to go back and study your American history.
Let me refresh your memory on a few things:
A little program called Carnivore was setup to basically allow wholesale wiretapping of email conversations. This program began in 1997, under the watch of the ultra-right wing fascist Clinton (being facetious). It was abandoned in 2001 in favor of commercial tools that do the same thing.
Back in 1998, President Clinton ordered missile strikes on a phramaceutical factory as part of Operation Infinite Reach. This was in retaliation for attacks on US embassies. Later, it came out that the evidence to support the attack was basically false. Hmmm, a commander in chief orders military action where people get killed, all based on bad intelligence. I'm certain he was lying to the American people about it so that he could help bring about a fascist police state where everyone feared the boogey-man. Or maybe he was trying to get people's attention off of the Lewinski scandal.
Of course, if we look further back in history, we see that President Kennedy was so concerned about checks and balances that he unilaterally ordered a military blockade and risked nuclear war with the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis
There are dozens of other examples in just the last fifty years, including the secret overflights of Soviet territory by US reconnaissance aircraft, CIA testing of drugs (LSD, IIRC) on members of the populations of several metropolitan areas.
And how many times did you ever go home and tell a parent about how a teacher treated you, and get ignored or dismissed with "They wouldn't do that."
And how many times have schools contacted parents or called them to a parent teacher conference to tell of some misbehavior by their child, only to have the parents say "that's not possible, my little angel would never do that and if you try and discipline him/her for it, we'll sue"? Now, if the teacher tried to record the little monsters (even for the teacher's own protection and to have proof of the act), the parents would be completely livid. Lawsuits would be flying and we would all be screaming about "The Man" trying to oppress the students.
I too am against a Big Brother society, but I think we are already getting there. The problem is that Big Brother is not the government, but rather any knucklehead with some sort of recording device. Personally, I think those kids should be treated the same way a teacher at that school would have been for similarly recording an altercation instigated by a student toward a teacher.
I absolutely despise teachers' unions. I think that they have done more to damage the quality of education in the industrialized world than any other force. However, it is abundantly clear that this teacher needs the full backing of the union. More than anything, kids today need to learn respect for authority. This doesn't mean that authority is always right or infallible, just that kids should be taught to respect and that there are proper channels in which to handle grievances (i.e., posting to youtube is not the proper channel).
by substituting 9% of the silicon atoms with boron atoms
That makes me wonder if it is still legitimately considered silicon. I mean, replacing nearly 10% of it with another element must mean that it falls into another classification. I don't think it could be considered a compound since the atoms are not bonding in the traditional sense, they are simply occupying places in a crystalline structure. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call it a "silicon-based material"
Netcraft confirms: IBM, Sun, and Google make boatloads of money off of the countless unnamed and unpaid developers who write the code that they use. Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?
You know what? You and the Thai IT Minister are right. I don't know how I missed it for all these years.
OK. Everyone, let's pack it up and go home. Some one be sure and shutdown the web servers on the way out. I hear that Best Buy is hiring, maybe I'll try there.
can't go too far without mentioning the canonical algorithms textbook --
Don't forget Stein.
On another note, the authors are awesome. I thought I had found a mistake (or inconsistency) in the book's explanation of an algorithm. I sent an email to the bug reporting address. Within a couple of days Dr. Cormen replied and told me that I was wrong:-) I restated my position and tried to explain to him why I thought the explanation in the text was wrong. He spent a couple of days trading emails with me about it and explaining in detail the rationale for the way it was explained in the book. Anyhow, he finally got me straightened out. I was most impressed since that was the first time I had ever received a reply from the author of a text book about a potential problem I had reported. I was even more impressed when he spent quite a bit of his own time to make sure that I properly understood why the text was correct.
The first, being more properly a science, would retain the name Computer Science, while the other, being more of an Engineering discipline, would be given the name Software Engineering. Then students can choose for themselves which group they belong to. If I'm not mistaken a number of colleges already do that.
I earned my B.S. in Computer Engineering with a concentration in Software Engineering (the school did not have a separate Software Engineering degree). The main problem is that many people are put off by "engineering." I put engineering in quotes because no self-respecting school (especially one that would like to keep its ABET accrediation) has an engineering degree that does not encompass engineering funadmentals. Things like Calc 1-3 (or 4), DiffEq, Statics, Dynamics, Phys I (Mechanics), Phys II (E&M), Chem, and so on. Many schools also have a common set of courses for all electrical/computer engineering majors, including Principles of EE, Principles of CpE, Electronics, Linear Controls, Intro to System programming, Semiconductor materials, etc.
Personally, I would not change anything about my degree since although I am not enamored of hardware, I like the fact that I have the flexibility to point my career and my future education in any direction from optics to algorithm design, since my education gives me the foundation for that. However, many people who would be the target of your suggested switch would likely not want to jump into a curriculum that laden with engineering. This sort of exposes the issue of whether there can be such a thing as software engineering. Of course, that is a discussion for another time.
Though, it appears of late that the movement has lost steam. Apparently George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il are trying to distract the world from Microsoft's barbaric actions.
Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here
Two things:
Please do not look at absolute dollar values, they are nonsense. Look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. The US defense budget is about the same size as it was during the isolationist period leading up to WWI. In terms of percentage, the US spends about 3.8% of its GDP on defense, putting it in the same area of the list as Tanzania.
Thanks to the neglect of the military under Clinton, the Air Force has ancient aircraft and can't maintain them all because they break so fast, the Navy has too few ships and many of those still in service have entire systems which are inoperable due to neglect, and the Army can no longer rely on unlimited overseas basing, unlimited Navy sealift and unlimited Air Force airlift and so must get rid of all their heavy artillery and heavy tanks to transform to a lighter force.
That said, the US defense is the smallest it's been in ages and re-equipping three branches of the military is not cheap.
For some reason Slashdot links to B & N, but if you look at the Amazon listing [amazon.com], you can see that some sellers are offering the book considerably cheaper.
Speaking of links, please do not include links in your reviews to online bookstores. Slashdot has an linking arrangement with Barnes & Noble; that's why when bn.com carries a particular book, you'll see a link to it at the bottom of the review.
Slashdot Mirror
Could someone please explain how finding and fixing bugs/issues/problems/whatever is bad? Now, I understand that it is not particularly good from a PR perspective. However, it is not like they are ignoring these things or trying to spin it like they are not real problems (as certain commercial and proprietary software vendors are prone to do). This is, in fact, quite good for the users.
But shouldn't we at least try to figure out a better way? For example, wouldn't 'Commonsense Homeland Security' be a winning political banner, not a risky one?
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
With options like that, it doesn't matter what they do, as they are always going to be wrong.
Some friends were visiting last night and they had recently purchased a new HP laptop (1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM with 80 GB HDD). I was struck by how abysmally slow Vista was. The thing had Vista Home Premium on it. Putting a blank CD entailed a wait of anywhere from 15 to 25 seconds before the stupid dialog came up asking if I wanted to burn something to the blank disc. Connecting to a wireless network was a complete disaster. My wireless network is setup to not broadcast its SSID, so I had to enter the setting manually along with the WPA password. As soon as I was done, the thing would take the dialog away and then not connect. It took me 30 minutes of hunting to find the listing that had the wireless networks I had manually entered in (as opposed to the networks which were broadcasting). To top if off, the system kept prompting to allow things that it really seemed I should not need to be asked. I am seriously not trying to troll here, this is just
my first impression of vista.
The only usable way to control Javascript is site by site, and turning it off by default slashes a whole army of exploits out of your life. Every browser should have this functionality built in.
Amen to that. I use noscript and I have lost count of how many sites fail completely or outright refuse to load if JS is disabled. The number of sites which degrade gracefully is sadly quite small. If every browser had this, maybe web developers would finally get it through their thick skulls that JavaScript is best utilized to enhance the user's experience. Obviously, there are some exceptions, like AJAX applications and the like. It bugs me so much that I have never developed a site that did not degrade gracefully in the absence of JS. In fact, the only way the user would notice something was different was if they had first seen the site with JS and then later without or vice versa. Some of the worst offenders are the "major" tech companies. Try logging into Yahoo webmail with JS turned off to see what I mean.
Unfortunately for Microsoft (but true to their character) they have tools for mouthpieces like Ballmer. Microsoft inks a deal in what could only be viewed with raised eyebrows, and Ballmer punctuates that with "they're infringing our IP anyway...". As long as Microsoft continues to be so hostile to the world in general, they get what they sow.
Nobody (or at least most people) argues that Microsoft doesn't come up with original ideas. Their research arm has a ton of truly brilliant people. I mean, Leslie Lamport and Tony Hoare work there. The problem is not that Microsoft can't come up with some innovative stuff. The problem is in how they translate it from their research side to their implementation and then marketing, which is usually pretty lousy.
How fast is it against MyISAM?
I can't remember where I heard it or who said it, but I once heard someone say words about MySQL to the effect of "if you ignore all the things that make a real database a database, you can make it really fast." Now, I get that lots of web hosts use MySQL and that it is the dominant free database out there. However, there is lots of insight in that statement. Now, in 99% of the cases where MySQL is used, it probably works great with few hitches. However, I'd rather trust my data to a something that values data integrity over speed.
Recall that not too long ago, right here on slashdot we all got to see first hand what happens when MySQL craps out. All the threading was gone. I mean seriously, what sort of database accepts invalid and then silently truncates it and moves on? Again, I don't think that the number of people with MySQL tables with 16,000,000+ rows is very large, but it is still disturbing.
If you are going for something small and light and fast and you are not too concerned about standards, then MySQL is great. Note, I am not trying to troll, I am simply pointing out that for all the people who endlessly bash on one or the other DB, that there is a market space for each.
Would 15 seconds be enough warning time to prepare for an earthquake?
Nope. But a few hours to a few days would be lots better.
This is just shocking. I know public schools can be a mess and are certainly in need of reform (AND more funds) but abolishing them? How exactly are the underprivileged supposed to send their kids to school? I thought America was supposed to be about everyone being able to make something out of themselves? Well, without basic level education that is fucking hard.
OK. I'd settle for opt-out then. What really gets me is that money is forcibly taken from people for services which they do not use. I have a friend with five kids. All of them go to private school because he thinks that the public schools are crap. It is not right that he is still required to pay astronomically high property tax in order to support the failing public schools where he lives (among the worst in the country). He is basically forced to pay twice to get his kids an education. Let people who want to send their kids to public school pay the taxes and let the people who want to send their kids to a private school (where they can do simple things like fire underperforming teachers) not pay the taxes to support the system they don't use.
American public education must be stopped.
I could not have said it better myself. I had a good experience in high school, but as far as I can tell, that is by far the exception. Public schools are a mess. Parents have no leverage. Abolish public schools, quit taxing property to pay for schools and let the parents be responsible for their children's educations. When this country was founded private education was the norm. Heck is basically the only thing available.
Incidentally, literacy rates in this country peaked prior to the introduction of public education.
The aerospace industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies that would allow the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace, New Scientist reports. It will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum.
I'm not a EE or RF guy, but would the ISM band be of any use in this case? It is unregulated, after all.
What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one. Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?
First, I'm sure that anti-collision systems are under development for military applications. Airspace over a battlefield is arguably far busier than most civilian airspace (except maybe some of the busiest airports). Of course, in military air space you must make sure that nothing is below when you intentionally drop explosive devices, which is generally not a problem in civil airspace. I can guarantee that every military that uses UAVs is interested in them not taking out any other aircraft through a mid-air collision.
Second, everybody (the private sector and the military alike) has gotten spoiled by the trends of the last 20 to 30 years to everything COTS. UAVs are arguably much more applicable in a military environment at this time. That doesn't mean that civilian applications don't or won't exist, just that for this the military is the main driver for innovations in this area. People old enough to remember the early days of the cold war will remember that the military was the single largest driver of technological and scientific innovation across the board.
In short, give it time. Nobody has been cheated, things are just progressing a bit differently from what us young'uns are used to.
Opera is pretty light as it is.
Yes, but Opera proper is not optimized for small screens. I know that there is a bit of a difference between a handheld device and even a 13" CRT. However, most programs today look absolutely terrible on anything less than a 17" or 19" monitor. I know, because most of the computers at my church still have old 14" CRTs, and many programs are just barely functional at any resolution that is still readable on such a small screen.
The feature list includes RSS integration, a user-interface geared towards mobile devices and small screen size, and its fast for relatively slower mobile data connections (with picture upload/sharing if you are into it). Requirement for using it: You must have a phone capable of running Java mobile applications and are using an Internet connection
I wonder if this might be a good choice for older machines as well. Think something like an old 486 or 1st-gen Pentium with 32 or 64 MB RAM and a 13" or 14" monitor. IIRC, there are stripped down versions of Mozilla available for mobiles (I'm not sure how feature complete or mature they are). But as they say, competition is good. Seeing as web browsing is probably the single most common activity, and arguably the best use of an old computer (running a word processor or some similarly resource-intensive application is probably a no-go). You can throw something like DSL on there and use a light-weight WM. I guess the main hangup would be being able to get Java ME running on it.
Is there a good guide (online or off) for the Software Engineering aspects of GUI programming, so that I can learn how to reuse code, and build my class hierarchies over the one provided by the toolkit?
Not sure if it is exactly what you are looking for, but I think a good starting place would be Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell from the O'Reilly collection. It helps if you are already familiar with design patterns, as the book casts its concepts in terms of patterns.
I would think that if you are an experienced Software Engineer and programmer, you would be much better served by something targetting the fundamentals of interface design. You can apply what you learn to any language or toolkit you know now or learn in the future. If you target a particular language or toolkit from the beginning you will limit yourself and make it harder to apply language-specific or toolkit-specific things to a different language or toolkit.
The updated documents that Microsoft has delivered, they hope, will put off the leveling of a several-millions-of-dollars-a-day fine against the OS maker. Whether or not the documents have accomplished that task will not be known for several months yet.
Being that they have already dragged their feet for years on this, they should be required to pay the fine (or at least a percentage of it) into escrow (which can bear interest for the benefit of the EU citizenry). Once the documentation is judged to have met the requirements of the EU regulators, the money can be returned.
Not sure if it would be possible, but I think it would help dissuade MS from future delay tactics.
Oh man, you were doing great right up until this part.
You really need to study American history again if you don't get this @#$% by now. Our founding fathers understood this stuff, and that's why "checks and balances" are a part of our government
Then you finish up with this:
(2000-2006 excepted).
You seriously think that getting around checks and balances is a new occurrence in the last six years? Let me say that you need to go back and study your American history.
Let me refresh your memory on a few things:
There are dozens of other examples in just the last fifty years, including the secret overflights of Soviet territory by US reconnaissance aircraft, CIA testing of drugs (LSD, IIRC) on members of the populations of several metropolitan areas.
And how many times did you ever go home and tell a parent about how a teacher treated you, and get ignored or dismissed with "They wouldn't do that."
And how many times have schools contacted parents or called them to a parent teacher conference to tell of some misbehavior by their child, only to have the parents say "that's not possible, my little angel would never do that and if you try and discipline him/her for it, we'll sue"? Now, if the teacher tried to record the little monsters (even for the teacher's own protection and to have proof of the act), the parents would be completely livid. Lawsuits would be flying and we would all be screaming about "The Man" trying to oppress the students.
I too am against a Big Brother society, but I think we are already getting there. The problem is that Big Brother is not the government, but rather any knucklehead with some sort of recording device. Personally, I think those kids should be treated the same way a teacher at that school would have been for similarly recording an altercation instigated by a student toward a teacher.
I absolutely despise teachers' unions. I think that they have done more to damage the quality of education in the industrialized world than any other force. However, it is abundantly clear that this teacher needs the full backing of the union. More than anything, kids today need to learn respect for authority. This doesn't mean that authority is always right or infallible, just that kids should be taught to respect and that there are proper channels in which to handle grievances (i.e., posting to youtube is not the proper channel).
by substituting 9% of the silicon atoms with boron atoms
That makes me wonder if it is still legitimately considered silicon. I mean, replacing nearly 10% of it with another element must mean that it falls into another classification. I don't think it could be considered a compound since the atoms are not bonding in the traditional sense, they are simply occupying places in a crystalline structure. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call it a "silicon-based material"
Netcraft confirms: IBM, Sun, and Google make boatloads of money off of the countless unnamed and unpaid developers who write the code that they use. Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?
You know what? You and the Thai IT Minister are right. I don't know how I missed it for all these years.
OK. Everyone, let's pack it up and go home. Some one be sure and shutdown the web servers on the way out. I hear that Best Buy is hiring, maybe I'll try there.
If nobody can make money from it ...
Maybe he would be so kind as to provide links where Netcraft confirms that IBM, Sun and Google are dead or dying?
Spoken like someone without a clue. Sheesh.
can't go too far without mentioning the canonical algorithms textbook --
Don't forget Stein.
On another note, the authors are awesome. I thought I had found a mistake (or inconsistency) in the book's explanation of an algorithm. I sent an email to the bug reporting address. Within a couple of days Dr. Cormen replied and told me that I was wrong :-) I restated my position and tried to explain to him why I thought the explanation in the text was wrong. He spent a couple of days trading emails with me about it and explaining in detail the rationale for the way it was explained in the book. Anyhow, he finally got me straightened out. I was most impressed since that was the first time I had ever received a reply from the author of a text book about a potential problem I had reported. I was even more impressed when he spent quite a bit of his own time to make sure that I properly understood why the text was correct.
The first, being more properly a science, would retain the name Computer Science, while the other, being more of an Engineering discipline, would be given the name Software Engineering. Then students can choose for themselves which group they belong to. If I'm not mistaken a number of colleges already do that.
I earned my B.S. in Computer Engineering with a concentration in Software Engineering (the school did not have a separate Software Engineering degree). The main problem is that many people are put off by "engineering." I put engineering in quotes because no self-respecting school (especially one that would like to keep its ABET accrediation) has an engineering degree that does not encompass engineering funadmentals. Things like Calc 1-3 (or 4), DiffEq, Statics, Dynamics, Phys I (Mechanics), Phys II (E&M), Chem, and so on. Many schools also have a common set of courses for all electrical/computer engineering majors, including Principles of EE, Principles of CpE, Electronics, Linear Controls, Intro to System programming, Semiconductor materials, etc.
Personally, I would not change anything about my degree since although I am not enamored of hardware, I like the fact that I have the flexibility to point my career and my future education in any direction from optics to algorithm design, since my education gives me the foundation for that. However, many people who would be the target of your suggested switch would likely not want to jump into a curriculum that laden with engineering. This sort of exposes the issue of whether there can be such a thing as software engineering. Of course, that is a discussion for another time.
Let's try again, kid. Those don't look like "HUMAN RIGHTS PROTESTS"; they look like people griping about software sales contracts. See sig.
Sorry. I forgot the <SARCASM> tags.
Where are the human rights protests over Microsoft?
Here:
More links here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=windows+refun d+day&btnG=Google+Search
Though, it appears of late that the movement has lost steam. Apparently George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il are trying to distract the world from Microsoft's barbaric actions.
Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here
Two things:
That said, the US defense is the smallest it's been in ages and re-equipping three branches of the military is not cheap.
For some reason Slashdot links to B & N, but if you look at the Amazon listing [amazon.com], you can see that some sellers are offering the book considerably cheaper.
http://slashdot.org/book.review.guidelines.shtml :
Speaking of links, please do not include links in your reviews to online bookstores. Slashdot has an linking arrangement with Barnes & Noble; that's why when bn.com carries a particular book, you'll see a link to it at the bottom of the review.