If the article is correct (which is not certain), companies will produce chips like this, "later this year".
The article isn't clear about whether these will be engineering samples or full production products. But if they are full production products, and can be produced at volume soon after, this will be huge.
For at least four years I've been following news about non-volatile memory technologies like MRAM (Magnetic RAM) and FeRAM (Fero-Electric RAM). The common availability of these RAMs will have massive implications for operating system, file system, and database design. The computer science and software engineering community will for years be preoccupied with the consequences.
So if the article is true, we computer scientist types are guaranteed a few years of tremendous fun. Or the article is full of crap and just another rose-tinted article by some indiscriminant author.
Profit Maximization. In Anglo-American jurisdictions, for-profit corporations are generally required to serve the best interests of the shareholders, a rule that courts have interpreted to mean the maximization of share value, and thus profits. Corporate directors are prohibited by corporate law from sacrificing profits to serve some other interest, including such areas as environmental protection, or the improvement of the welfare of the community. For example, when Henry Ford cut dividends and reduced car prices in order to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars, his brother-in-law, Mr. Dodge, a shareholder, sued him for having harmed profitability: Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 170 N.W 688 (Mich.S.C. 1919). Mr. Dodge succeeded and went on to form his own car company with the proceeds of the suit. Modern corporate law is settled and clear that corporate directors are only allowed to act in the best interests of the corporation, and that this means maximization of profits (see for example J.A. VanDuzer The Law of Partnerships and Corporations (Irwin Law: 2003, Toronto) at pp. 271-2). Corporations may be able to make charitable contributions to society, but only where this will enable profit maximization (e.g. if the public relations value of the contribution would boost profits more than any other potential use of the funds).
If I were the guy holding the patent, I would have sought tons of $$$ from Microsoft in court. Why did this just result in an obligation to fix up the infringement?
I think I would vote for this guy for president, just based on this alone.
I'm guessing you're kiding about the president thing. But seriously, I voted for Bush just because of the abortion issue. Learn from my mistake - don't vote on a single issue.
[This is wierd. We're actually having a civil, informative discussion about this topic on/. ]
I disagree that faith is limited to discussing only those things that we can't perceive, and that science covers what we can. Here's why...
Science, or at least (Bacon's?) Scientific Method, relies on repeatability and experimentation. Whether or not Jesus rose from the dead was something that people could perceive with regular perceptions, but is none-the-less pretty hard to test with the scientific method. Probably because it's claimed to be a one-time historical event and thus it's hard to cnovincingly test the claim via experimentation. So we have an example of something that was potentially perceived with regular senses but that science doesn't cover.
On a somewhat unrelated note, many religious people are strongly convinced by personal experience that they are able to sense things that are unyielding to scientific prying. For instance, some people claim to have experienced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the presence of God...
I personally, though agnostic, have had an experience that I still don't know what to make of. I was around a guy named Michael Card (a Christian author / musician) who struck me as being Very Good, in a way that I have trouble describing. Normally we say that something/someone is "good" as the conclussion of reasoning. That's in contrast to other beliefs we have which seem to be less questionable, such as my belief that I'm presently typing on a keyboard. My perception that Michael Card was Very Good was much more like my belief that I'm typing, than my belief that 1+1 = 2. It didn't seem to involve any reasoning or prior experience on my part - it was simply overpoweringly convincing and basic. A very strange experience indeed. I think religious people would count this as something that can be perceived, but that science can't say much about. (I guess this leads into the conversation about mind/brain duality, but that would be fair.)
I disagree that faith is limited to discussing only those things that we can't perceive, and that science covers what we can. Here's why...
Science, or at least (Bacon's?) Scientific Method, relies on repeatability and experimentation. Whether or not Jesus rose from the dead was something that people could perceive with regular perceptions, but is none-the-less pretty hard to test with the scientific method. Probably because it's claimed to be a one-time historical event and thus it's hard to cnovincingly test the claim via experimentation. So we have an example of something that was potentially perceived with regular senses but that science doesn't cover.
On a somewhat unrelated note, many religious people are strongly convinced by personal experience that they are able to sense things that are unyielding to scientific prying. For instance, some people claim to have experienced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the presence of God...
I personally, though agnostic, have had an experience that I still don't know what to make of. I was around a guy named Michael Card (a Christian author / musician) who struck me as being Very Good, in a way that I have trouble describing. Normally we say that something/someone is "good" as the conclussion of reasoning. That's in contrast to other beliefs we have which seem to be less questionable, such as my belief that I'm presently typing on a keyboard. My perception that Michael Card was Very Good was much more like my belief that I'm typing, than my belief that 1+1 = 2. It didn't seem to involve any reasoning or prior experience on my part - it was simply overpoweringly convincing and basic. A very strange experience indeed. I think religious people would count this as something that can be perceived, but that science can't say much about. (I guess this leads into the conversation about mind/brain duality, but that would be fair.)
Perhaps the most scathing charge you can make against those people, then, is hypocrisy or intellectual cowardice. They admit that God exists, and continue to live lives as though God does not exist.
That sounds to me just as respectible as believing that eating 20 Twkinkies a day will likely kill your kids quickly, and ignoring that fact because you don't want to make a fuss.
I'm not religious, so don't bother slandering me for that reason. I'm just pointing out an inconsistency in the Britons you describe.
Let me start this off by saying I'm agnostic, so don't bother loosing venom on me as a zealot in either camp.
I think that poll itself has a false dichotomy between evolution and I.D., and should not have forced respondants to make a mutually exclusive choice.
From a religious perspective, I see two versions of evoluation theory. Both versions say that evolution happens through the whacking of unsuitable species.
Here's the difference between the two theories: athiests and naturalists will hold that the generation of new candidate species, and possibly their whacking, is unguided by any being's intent.
The other theory holds that there actually is a willful intent in the generation of the particular candidate species, and possibly a willful intent regarding which circumstances arise in order to cause some of those species to get whacked. I think that many I.D. folks fall into this camp.
Note that both versions of evolution hold the process as "random", in the sense that we as humans don't really see a pattern in terms of what variations will arise, and which ones will get whacked. (We can sometimes understand why a species got whacked after the fact, but we can't really predict it so well.)
In the U.S. federal government, age is a non-issue.
On the projects I work on, the project managers are charged the same for my time regardless of my salary, so they have no financial disincentive for using me instead of a younger person. They also have to pay overtime, so it's not like they can get a bargain by abusing a young person's willingness to put in extra hours. In many ways unions lead to waste, but in this case I'm glad for it.
In some cases union-influenced system can be amazingly frustrating. Some people abuse the system and basically put in no work AND getting paid for seniority. But for others of us, it's very liberating because it lets us pursue the skill specialization needed for the job. If we didn't have these protections against age-based hiring, I'd always have to ensure I'm working on skills that are broadly marketable. As it stands, I can focus on developing skills that are narrowly useful but are important to my job.
It's also worth noting that while you can't necessarily stay an employable code jockey until retirement, you can keep a technical career going. Where I work, you do that by getting into research. Now on a typical project I spend less than 10% of my time coding, but I get to help design ad hoc network protocols, learn how to statistically characterize sensors, etc. It's not pure coding, but it's MORE DEEPLY techincal, and it's only possible because of my age/experience. So in this case, age/experience OPENED techinical doors for me rather than only closing them. (Note: if you get your PhD from Stanford or MIT, you can skip directly past the age/experience thing and can start doing what I'm doing upon graduation.)
This entire essay is bunk; every paragraph the author brings up a point that can quickly be refuted. He overgeneralizes issues and adds a big dollup of emotional appeal to make his points. And frankly, his points are just misguided, if not straight out wrong.
That entire post is bunk; every paragraph the author brings up a point that can quickly be refuted. He overgeneralizes issues and adds a big dollup of emotional appeal to make his points. And frankly, his points are just misguided, if not straight out wrong.
If the dot com bubble taught us anything, it's that "If it's free on the internet, it's unreliable and fully controlled by somebody who will run it into the ground".
Yeah, Slashdot SUCKS!!!!! and is run by playa' hatas.
... and no one has used C++ for any hardcore military project.
I'm surprised that you feel qualified to make this statement, since it would require you to have the rare combination of having top secret clearange (in order to know about all military projects) and have a "need to know" about each one of them and be in the habit of posting what you know to Slashdot.
I wonder, especially as Debian and Ubuntu become more popular: How much would users' desire for sudo access go away if apt / dpkg had the ability to install software for just the current user (and thus didn't require root)?
I know that in a home environment (such as if I'm setting up my parents' computer), I'd be a lot more comfortable having them use a version of Synaptic that installed software just for the current user. That would basically eliminate the need for them to have root access at all. Maybe a similar thing holds true even for most developers.
Granted people can usually install software for themselves by compiling the source code, but to require that is to basically ignore all of the benefits that apt / Synaptic offer.
(If you're a Gentoo, I think the same point can be made by using a find/replace on the terms apt/dpkg/synaptic.)
If anyone has figured out how we can decide the nature / nurture issue without performing experiments that are generally considered immoral, let me know.
But until then, I consider it perfectly plausible that there's just something about the trade girls tend to be bad at or not enjoy, regardless of enculturation?
I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to be open minded and scientific about this. I haven't seen evidence that the "nature" / "bell-curve" type hypotheses have been eliminated. We need to follow the truth wherever it leads.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not an unabashed Linux fanboy. I wrestle with hardware compatability, video codec lameness, etc.
But: once you get a Linux box up and running (for instance Debian or Ubuntu), you pretty much don't have any of the problems the author described.
Perhaps more importantly: Free Linux distros can focus fully on what makes the user happy. They have no need for idiotic vendor lock-in tactics, buggy product tie-ins, or denying you access to the OS install disks, etc. It's simply a complete non-issue. This is probably the main reason I love Linux even when not programming - I get to totally avoid this category of stupidity.
With Linux, yes it's often a rocky road getting it to work, but the distro authors and I are on the *same* side, without reservation. We just want me to have a system that's lean and stable and productive. And that's what I get.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's ok. Normally I wouldn't trust wikipedia either, but the wikipedia article came up in a *Google* search.
If the article is correct (which is not certain), companies will produce chips like this, "later this year".
The article isn't clear about whether these will be engineering samples or full production products. But if they are full production products, and can be produced at volume soon after, this will be huge.
For at least four years I've been following news about non-volatile memory technologies like MRAM (Magnetic RAM) and FeRAM (Fero-Electric RAM). The common availability of these RAMs will have massive implications for operating system, file system, and database design. The computer science and software engineering community will for years be preoccupied with the consequences.
So if the article is true, we computer scientist types are guaranteed a few years of tremendous fun. Or the article is full of crap and just another rose-tinted article by some indiscriminant author.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation:
I'll hear none of this stupidity! ...
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Formally stated, it's, "Yes, you CAN be half-Klingon and still have an embarassingly sensitive demeanor."
Nein, Herr Bush, I'm not winking at you. I just wanted to you to look more like the President than Der Fuehrer!
If I were the guy holding the patent, I would have sought tons of $$$ from Microsoft in court. Why did this just result in an obligation to fix up the infringement?
Isn't it funny that the People's Liberation Army would therefor charge him with the crime of being a counter-revolutionary?
[This is wierd. We're actually having a civil, informative discussion about this topic on /. ]
I disagree that faith is limited to discussing only those things that we can't perceive, and that science covers what we can. Here's why...
Science, or at least (Bacon's?) Scientific Method, relies on repeatability and experimentation. Whether or not Jesus rose from the dead was something that people could perceive with regular perceptions, but is none-the-less pretty hard to test with the scientific method. Probably because it's claimed to be a one-time historical event and thus it's hard to cnovincingly test the claim via experimentation. So we have an example of something that was potentially perceived with regular senses but that science doesn't cover.
On a somewhat unrelated note, many religious people are strongly convinced by personal experience that they are able to sense things that are unyielding to scientific prying. For instance, some people claim to have experienced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the presence of God...
I personally, though agnostic, have had an experience that I still don't know what to make of. I was around a guy named Michael Card (a Christian author / musician) who struck me as being Very Good, in a way that I have trouble describing. Normally we say that something/someone is "good" as the conclussion of reasoning. That's in contrast to other beliefs we have which seem to be less questionable, such as my belief that I'm presently typing on a keyboard. My perception that Michael Card was Very Good was much more like my belief that I'm typing, than my belief that 1+1 = 2. It didn't seem to involve any reasoning or prior experience on my part - it was simply overpoweringly convincing and basic. A very strange experience indeed. I think religious people would count this as something that can be perceived, but that science can't say much about. (I guess this leads into the conversation about mind/brain duality, but that would be fair.)
I disagree that faith is limited to discussing only those things that we can't perceive, and that science covers what we can. Here's why... Science, or at least (Bacon's?) Scientific Method, relies on repeatability and experimentation. Whether or not Jesus rose from the dead was something that people could perceive with regular perceptions, but is none-the-less pretty hard to test with the scientific method. Probably because it's claimed to be a one-time historical event and thus it's hard to cnovincingly test the claim via experimentation. So we have an example of something that was potentially perceived with regular senses but that science doesn't cover. On a somewhat unrelated note, many religious people are strongly convinced by personal experience that they are able to sense things that are unyielding to scientific prying. For instance, some people claim to have experienced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the presence of God... I personally, though agnostic, have had an experience that I still don't know what to make of. I was around a guy named Michael Card (a Christian author / musician) who struck me as being Very Good, in a way that I have trouble describing. Normally we say that something/someone is "good" as the conclussion of reasoning. That's in contrast to other beliefs we have which seem to be less questionable, such as my belief that I'm presently typing on a keyboard. My perception that Michael Card was Very Good was much more like my belief that I'm typing, than my belief that 1+1 = 2. It didn't seem to involve any reasoning or prior experience on my part - it was simply overpoweringly convincing and basic. A very strange experience indeed. I think religious people would count this as something that can be perceived, but that science can't say much about. (I guess this leads into the conversation about mind/brain duality, but that would be fair.)
Perhaps the most scathing charge you can make against those people, then, is hypocrisy or intellectual cowardice. They admit that God exists, and continue to live lives as though God does not exist.
That sounds to me just as respectible as believing that eating 20 Twkinkies a day will likely kill your kids quickly, and ignoring that fact because you don't want to make a fuss.
I'm not religious, so don't bother slandering me for that reason. I'm just pointing out an inconsistency in the Britons you describe.
Let me start this off by saying I'm agnostic, so don't bother loosing venom on me as a zealot in either camp.
I think that poll itself has a false dichotomy between evolution and I.D., and should not have forced respondants to make a mutually exclusive choice.
From a religious perspective, I see two versions of evoluation theory. Both versions say that evolution happens through the whacking of unsuitable species.
Here's the difference between the two theories: athiests and naturalists will hold that the generation of new candidate species, and possibly their whacking, is unguided by any being's intent.
The other theory holds that there actually is a willful intent in the generation of the particular candidate species, and possibly a willful intent regarding which circumstances arise in order to cause some of those species to get whacked. I think that many I.D. folks fall into this camp.
Note that both versions of evolution hold the process as "random", in the sense that we as humans don't really see a pattern in terms of what variations will arise, and which ones will get whacked. (We can sometimes understand why a species got whacked after the fact, but we can't really predict it so well.)
In the U.S. federal government, age is a non-issue.
On the projects I work on, the project managers are charged the same for my time regardless of my salary, so they have no financial disincentive for using me instead of a younger person. They also have to pay overtime, so it's not like they can get a bargain by abusing a young person's willingness to put in extra hours. In many ways unions lead to waste, but in this case I'm glad for it.
In some cases union-influenced system can be amazingly frustrating. Some people abuse the system and basically put in no work AND getting paid for seniority. But for others of us, it's very liberating because it lets us pursue the skill specialization needed for the job. If we didn't have these protections against age-based hiring, I'd always have to ensure I'm working on skills that are broadly marketable. As it stands, I can focus on developing skills that are narrowly useful but are important to my job.
It's also worth noting that while you can't necessarily stay an employable code jockey until retirement, you can keep a technical career going. Where I work, you do that by getting into research. Now on a typical project I spend less than 10% of my time coding, but I get to help design ad hoc network protocols, learn how to statistically characterize sensors, etc. It's not pure coding, but it's MORE DEEPLY techincal, and it's only possible because of my age/experience. So in this case, age/experience OPENED techinical doors for me rather than only closing them. (Note: if you get your PhD from Stanford or MIT, you can skip directly past the age/experience thing and can start doing what I'm doing upon graduation.)
You missed his point. Someone getting a *typical* position at EA games is dead within 3 months and has a moth stuffed down their throat.
(The point being that better lifetime and performance are no brainers only if all other quality measures don't suffer.)
I'm surprised that you feel qualified to make this statement, since it would require you to have the rare combination of having top secret clearange (in order to know about all military projects) and have a "need to know" about each one of them and be in the habit of posting what you know to Slashdot.
But you're simply incorrect in your statement.
I wonder, especially as Debian and Ubuntu become more popular: How much would users' desire for sudo access go away if apt / dpkg had the ability to install software for just the current user (and thus didn't require root)?
I know that in a home environment (such as if I'm setting up my parents' computer), I'd be a lot more comfortable having them use a version of Synaptic that installed software just for the current user. That would basically eliminate the need for them to have root access at all. Maybe a similar thing holds true even for most developers.
Granted people can usually install software for themselves by compiling the source code, but to require that is to basically ignore all of the benefits that apt / Synaptic offer.
(If you're a Gentoo, I think the same point can be made by using a find/replace on the terms apt/dpkg/synaptic.)
The patch can be found here:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/newsitems/release510/
If anyone has figured out how we can decide the nature / nurture issue without performing experiments that are generally considered immoral, let me know.
But until then, I consider it perfectly plausible that there's just something about the trade girls tend to be bad at or not enjoy, regardless of enculturation?
I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to be open minded and scientific about this. I haven't seen evidence that the "nature" / "bell-curve" type hypotheses have been eliminated. We need to follow the truth wherever it leads.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not an unabashed Linux fanboy. I wrestle with hardware compatability, video codec lameness, etc.
But: once you get a Linux box up and running (for instance Debian or Ubuntu), you pretty much don't have any of the problems the author described.
Perhaps more importantly: Free Linux distros can focus fully on what makes the user happy. They have no need for idiotic vendor lock-in tactics, buggy product tie-ins, or denying you access to the OS install disks, etc. It's simply a complete non-issue. This is probably the main reason I love Linux even when not programming - I get to totally avoid this category of stupidity.
With Linux, yes it's often a rocky road getting it to work, but the distro authors and I are on the *same* side, without reservation. We just want me to have a system that's lean and stable and productive. And that's what I get.
Many computer users are geeks. ...
Geeks don't have girlfriends.
Uugh.