So what? Donald Knuth doesn't use email since 1990. Does that also mean that, like what you are insinuating about Richard Stallman, he is somehow incompetent in the field of CS and IT? What does that mean, actually?
That's not a new idea at all. Mandriva already does that and it has been doing that for years. I mean, since the days of Mandrake 9.2, I believe. That means since the days of Ubuntu 5.04, now that it appears that everything linux has been somehow reduced and limited to Ubuntu.
I prefer imperial units for lots of everyday tasks like cooking.
I don't believe your cooking will go off if you follow the recipes in metric or imperial, as you witness first-hand the tangible amount of the ingredients.
Imperial units are much closer to a binary-based system, which is very convenient for human beings. Two cups in a pint. Two pints in a quart.
And you have two half-litres in a litre, two quarter of a litre in half a litre.... It's irrelevant.
An ounce of water weighs about an ounce. A pint of water weighs about a pound. Human beings are very good at halving or doubling things by eyeball, but we're lousy at dividing into tenths.
Tish tosh. Tha'ts for amateurs. A litre of water weighs exactly a kilogram. No more, no less. Well, if you aren't anal to the point of considering atmospheric pressure, altitude and temperature but we are talking about cooking, for $deity's sake.
But if you're building a fucking spaceship, use SI units for Christ's sake.
The thing is, SI units didn't got to be included in the International System of Units because they didn't made sense or were inpractical. Quite que contrary. Not only they are extremely easy to convert back and forth in magnitude but they are also tangibly related with materials used in every day life. Imperial units, on the other hand, could be handy if you still measured things when comparing to the size of your feet, thumbs and other body parts or if you weigh things while comparing with a certain price of silver.
How exactly does a unit get to be more precise than some other? I mean, units are only used to express amounts of certain measurable things, things that don't suddenly change just because you are using a different ruler to perform your measurements.
Having that in mind, let's not forget that bandwidth is getting ridiculously cheaper and we are getting incredibly fast connections by the month.
If this was some commercial offering from Microsoft, you would be criticizing it for using more bandwidth. Because it's an open source thing, you're justifying it by saying, "Eh, bandwidth is getting cheaper."
First of all, don't try to put words in my mouth.
Second, bandwidth is irrelevant. It's not even a matter of it getting cheaper, per se. It's a matter that nowadays the bandwidth available to any home user is far greater than the present needs, not only in terms of speed but also in the volume of information transfered. You never saw anyone complain about the quality of youtube's videos, which carry a rather low bitrate, rendering them unwatchable, nor you ever say anyone complain about how their ISP's charges went through the roof due to watching youtube videos. You never saw that because nowadays that doesn't matter at all. It's perfectly irrelevant. And if it's irrelevant on low-bitrate codecs and if it's still irrelevant after youtube launching it's hidef service then why would it become suddenly relevant with the introduction of theora as a standard codec?
Moreover, knowing that the bandwidth aspect of the thing is irrelevant then...
And then you suddenly assume that the bandwidth argument doesn't exist.
And it doesn't. Feel absolutely free to try to prove me wrong. I, on the other hand, only need to point out that bandwidth was never an issue, nor shall it ever be one, when services such as youtube were introduced, let alone their hi-def services. You will never hear anyone complain how they can only afford to watch 50 seconds of a minute-long video, let alone complain about how a small bitrate difference from theora to other competing codecs would render the service useless. It's a non-issue and the people who try to make it an issue are grasping at straws.
So, to put it short, Theora may demand more bandwidth but that is absolutely irrelevant.
This is a video codec. Of course the bandwidth is relevant. It determines the quality of the video. If you're a video hosting service, you're going to want the codec that delivers the highest quality using the lowest bandwidth. How could you possibly describe it as "absolutely irrelevant" when it's one of the most important things in determining video codec quality?
Oh, so you somehow believe that the codec availability are somehow a non-issue? Do you really believe that a media-streaming company looks at bitrates and ignores the ability that the general public has or lacks to access their service? Moreover, do you also believe that it is impossible to choose the bitrate of any given encoding? And last but not least, do you also believe that, even in the far-fetched scenario where bitrate/bandwidth actually matter something, the perceivede quality difference resulting from equivalent bitrate encodings actually makes any difference whatsoever in the eyes of anyone? Considering the level of quality being discussed, obviously it doesn't make any difference whatsoever.
After seeing the comparison videos, I have to say that I don't see where the problem resides. Although Theora does demand more bandwidth for a video with similar good video (a subjective trait), as anyone can see the, Theora's quality at lower bitrates is far from bad. It's still better than the quality that sites such as youtube relied on when starting their service.
Having that in mind, let's not forget that bandwidth is getting ridiculously cheaper and we are getting incredibly fast connections by the month. It's not like we are seeing people forfeiting their ISP contract due to the service fee being too much to bear or seeing people complaining about how their 1Mb/s connection not being fast enough. In fact, joe six-pack's internet connection is more than capable of downloading countless ISOs daily, let alone watching streaming video. And that's not counting all those fiber to the premises and similar projects. That means there is absolutely no problem caused by the difference in bitrate. The network is already more than capable of handling it.
Moreover, knowing that the bandwidth aspect of the thing is irrelevant then the only problem that needs to be tackled is the problem of implementing the service. That is also a no-brainer, as one option, Theora, is freely available and freely accessible while the other is proprietary, patent-incumbered and controlled by single private entities who forces an economic penalty on it's adoption. Who in their right mind wants to build their foundation on a technology that is controlled by someone who wants to raise tollbooths to to access it?
So, to put it short, Theora may demand more bandwidth but that is absolutely irrelevant. The real problem is that one contender is absolutely free, both economically and in terms of conditions, while the other will not only cost money but will also forces everyone to be at the mercy of some grand tech gatekeeper. Facing that question, I do believe the choice is obvious.
P.S.: fuck you, slashdot, for screwing up the comment edit box so that I can only get paragraphs separated by newlines if I post the messages under the code option.
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
What? Just because someone has a masters not only he doesn't need to know the basics but also no one should ever asked him/her any question about the basics? Your comment doesn't make any sense. If someone has a masters and proudly displays it in his/her resume then that person MUST know the basics, if not be better at it than someone else. No excuse, no exception. If not, what else? Should you also avoid questioning the IT master about stuff such as linked lists?
Direct your complaint to slashdot's comment text box's options. I don't know if it's because I used opera to write that comment but no matter what I did, whether I set the option to plain old text and added multiple newlines or whether I set the option to HTML and manually enclosed the paragraphs in
and/or fields, I couldn't manage to have the preview respect my paragraphs.
You may have plenty of reasons to criticize Miguel de Icaza but that sure isn't one of them. He invested his time in a project, he worked on it, the end result of his work is better than most people's work. That has absolutely no reason to criticize someone. On top of that, the end result is FLOSS, which means that anyone can just pick up where he supposedly stopped and keep driving it further. There's no wrong with that.
Besides that, I don't believe any software project is ever finished. There is always the need to fix this, implement that, tweak something... There is always stuff to do. It's yet another reason why your criticism targeted at Miguel is silly.
And to top things off, as you are criticizing the man who contributed to and had/has a decisive participation in quite a few software projects that are very influential in the free software world, care to compare your resume to Mr Icaza's? And I don't mean where you went to school or what was your grade point average. I mean, care to compare your contributions to the FLOSS ecosystem with mr Icaza's? After all, if you feel entitled to put up such self-righteous indignation regarding a man's contributions then you must have plenty of moral authority on the subject.
And last but not least, do you happen to know that Linus Thorvald wrote the basis of Git and once the project was up and running he abandoned it in the hands of some other people for them to pick it up where he left? Knowing that, do you also feel that you should attack mr Thorvald's contributions for being also "pathologically incapable of working on something until it's mature"?
Oh yes, another self-righteous rant attacking the directions of free software projects just because they have the audacity to venture far beyond where windows stagnated a decade ago. The article's author doesn't say much besides criticizing projects such as KDE, GNOME and even Ubuntu for their ideas regarding the desktop. And he does a bad job at it, to boot.
For example, the author criticizes KDE for the audacity of thinking about implementing social networking features into the desktop. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? I mean, what's the difference of having an application such as windows live messenger constantly running and implementing some sort of widget that performs the exact same task? At least with KDE their implementation follows standards which are open and it doesn't force plenty of ads down our throats. What's wrong with that sort of innovation? Absolutely nothing.
And his criticism of GNOME is pathetic. I mean, he criticizes GNOME not for innovating but for rewriting it. He hasn't absolutely any detail to grasp on and in fact the only thing he can muster about GNOME is "its final form at this stage is anybody's guess". Is that what the author perceives as innovation?
And more to the point, who exactly is the author to make authoritative judgments about what the users want or don't want? His he a psychic? In fact, where was the author on these past dozen years of the desktop windows? I mean, after all these years windows is incapable of offering extremely basic stuff such as the ability to set any window the user wishes for to be always on top. And what about the ability to scroll a window without changing the focus to it? And what about getting rid of that really annoying bug that, when a user launches an application, keeps the focus on the former application while the newly launched app is placed on top of every window on the desktop? Fixing those bugs would also count as too much innovation?
The article isn't worth the read. Nothing to see here, move along.
Part of the rationale behind Social Security is that people are too stupid to voluntarily put away their money.
That's a very naive and ignorant statement to make. The rationale behind social security is that if there is a system-wide resources pool created and maintained by tiny contributions by their members and managed in order to solve a specific set of issues then all members of that system will be able to easily deal with their issues whenever a need arises. That is due to economy of scale, supply and demand and suppression of redundancy. It's the very same system behind the entire insurance industry. Do you also believe that anyone, which may be a regular joe or a multinational corporation, "is too stupid to voluntarily put away their money" if they happen to sign up for some insurance? Are you also an idiot for signing up for car insurance or life insurance? Are you?
And the case for social security brings even more advantages than private insurance programmes, due to the fact that when you sign with a private company for insurance a hefty cut of your contribution will be misappropriated and misspent by the company managers when signing it off as "profit". As a national social security program isn't profit-driven then the system will be inherently more efficient due to suffering from less clutter and due to the fact that it doesn't lose resources on share-holder dividends an on management bonuses.
The pathetic thing about mr Doctorow's comment is that the media services provided by Amazon made it possible for the very first time in the history of the music business that a nobody could market it's modest album throughout the entire world without the intervention of the established music industry. Yes, amazon and the like are still middle men but this time the middle men only acts as the communications channel, without imposing any barriers to entry or even draconian distribution contracts thatm, for example, somehow automatically put the artists millions of dollars in debt, not to mention the Hollywood accountancy.
Let's see anyone do that with a geocities web site.
I wonder if the information in your text books doesn't have a geographical/climatic bias and is incomplete.
Why do you believe it hadn't? But FWIW, the course's required readings included an hefty list of AASHTO's standards along with other international standards derived from AASHTO's work which, obviously, also consider the climate's influence in a whole bunch of details.
Do you intend to submit your course work using the word "macadame" because you are an idiot. The mans name was John McAdam, and that is what the technique is named after. When bitumen was added to the surface of that structure it became "tarmacadam", usually shortened to tarmac.
It appears you are quick to accuse others of being idiots without even investing a fraction of the time you spent writing your post thinking about what you just read, which doesn't make you look that smart to begin with. You see, there wouldn't be a single problem if/when I submitted course work with macadame in it. Care to know why? Well, because I'm not from an anglophone country and the adopted word for that concept is exactly that: macadame. If I was an idiot due to that then all spanish speakers in the world would be idiots for using the word futbol and all english speakers would be idiots for using the word naive. Are you able to understand that?
Even then I would suggest that you took a peek at wikipedia's article on macadame in order for you to have the chance to learn something about the subject.
And a gravel road is not a McAdam road anyway. The stones and gravel have to be laid very specifically, large stones, then a bit smaller then smaller still, and the whole is then compacted to form a smooth surface. Just dumping gravel on the ground is not a McAdam road.
No one said that it was, so congrats for failing reading comprehension. You see, I mentioned macadame roads as being "basically" (do you know what that word means?) gravel roads to avoid stating largely irrelevant aspects (irrelevant to this discussion) regarding the layer thickness, number of layers, degree of compaction, granularity of the granulate being used and even if some sort of glue was also employed. Those aspects are perfectly irrelevant in this discussion as their level of detail goes beyond what is being discussed and, more to the point, they vary according to their deployment conditions such as the soil's geotechnical properties, hydrological profile of the region, the expected traffic density and even climate. But how exactly could you know that? Your only knowledge on this subject derives from your vast experience at "delivering stone to tarmac plants".
But that wouldn't matter anyway. Idiots of your calibre would still cling to some other petty detail to be anal about it and therefore feel entitled to accuse others of being idiots and therefore try to feel good about yourself by redirecting your frustrations to some innocent bystander.
So, why exactly do you believe that seeing a breast is somehow something to be avoided? And why exactly do you believe that you must enforce your belief on others in the form of censorship?
That problem is also caused by handing the construction of those roads to incompetent design/construction crews. You see, subsidence and settlement problems in road construction are nothing remotely new. Engineers know about them for centuries and they know how to build flexible pavement roads on that sort of soil for about as long. Basically, when a road is being built on soil which is prone to considerable settlement then it you only need to build a thicker intermediate gravel layer which can be more than 3 feet thick. That, alone, is more than enough to limit the displacements as it lead to the loads applied by the cars to the ground through the road being spread around more evenly and through a larger area.
On the other hand, if you have incompetent design/construction crews in charge of building a road then more often than not you will see them only caring if the pavement is near the generic minimum acceptable thickness described in some building code, without even doing the basic geotechnical survey of the area where the road is being built. If you add to that the fact that those construction crews that only do concrete roads don't even pay attention to the need of a decent draining system then no wonder the road exhibits problems a couple of years after it was built. But hey, the responsibility never lies on the people behind the construction, no matter how incompetent they are.
I am a licensed civil engineer, and I think your statement (and the one prior) bears qualifying.
The choice between an asphalt road and a concrete one should always be analyzed by a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA), which takes into account the up-front cost of the road plus the maintenance costs.
Yes, as any civil engineering project.
In Southern California, concrete will most often come out ahead in said analysis, especially given our traffic volumes and the traffic delay costs associated with the more frequent maintenance activities required by asphalt. We have concrete pavements here that are 50+ years old.
The thing is, that's not quite right. Flexible pavements, such as those with asphalt or bitumen-based rolling pavement, don't require any more maintenance than rigid and semi-rigid pavement roads. The only reason that may lead to premature repairs is if they suffer from draining problems or if the foundation suffers from excessive settlement, which is caused by poorly designed and/or built roads.
Moreover, there are also quite a few flexible pavement roads out there that are 50+ years old. In fact, there are flexible pavement roads built by the romans that are still being used up to this day. That doesn't mean all flexible pavement roads last for millennia but is a nice way to show that properly built roads do last a very, very long time.
In areas of high freeze-thaw cycles, an LCCA may produce different results. However, it should also be noted that the thump-thump of many concrete pavements today is due to a load-transfer failure between the slabs, something that in new pavements has been addressed with the inclusion of steel dowel bars between slabs.
Well, as you may know that "thump-thump" phenomenon is caused by the erosion of the road's foundation/base layer, which is caused by drainage problems. That is a sign that that road's drainage system was either poorly thought out/built or wasn't even implemented, which is seen by some people responsible for building them as irrelevant as they believe that the rigid concrete top-layer is more than capable of withstanding any action that may be thrown at it. The fact that the prescribed solution for a drainage/erosion problem, something that is fixed if you add a gravel bedding to the road, is more steel bars, which are comparably very expensive, leads to believe the people behind that solution are a bit out of touch with that problem, as they are trying to throw money at the symptom instead of simply fixing the problem to begin with.
That way of thinking starts to be the source of real trouble when you rely on the same people to build a semi-flexible or flexible pavement road. When that happens then you have entire design and construction crews not caring about stuff such as draining, subsidence, settlement, water movement or even making sure the rolling layer is water-proof, with the added inconvenience of, this time, not being able to fix it by throwing more expensive steel to make up for their poorly thought out design. That leads to all sorts of problems including, such as this case, blaming the technology in itself when the blame is solely in the incompetence of those being paid to do the job. After all, it's the technology that must be wrong instead of the people spending the money and failing at their job, right?
They're cheap to build, but they require a lot more maintenance that people think. They get rutting and nasty potholes pretty quickly if they're not consistently maintained (and they deteriorate a LOT faster than asphalt)
Simple: we'll just pave them over with asphalt! Next problem?
Things aren't that simple. Although a paved road is basically a macadame (gravel) road with an extra impermeable layer on top, a paved road needs to avoid stuff in order to simply not crumble. For example, your regular gravel road is nothing more than a layer of gravel that isn't even compacted. It even doesn't need to be build with an impermeable bedding. If you displace gravel then the car passing after you will run over it without any problem. On the other hand, if you build a paved road without paying attention to draining both subsoil water and rain then your pavement will not last long. The same goes for the gravel layer. If it isn't compacted or the right thickness then say bubye to your pavement.
A well-maintained gravel road isn't so bad physically. Rain doesn't wash them out as bad as dirt roads and they stay passable in about any kind of weather. The main downside is that you just can't drive as fast on them as asphalt.
Another easy solution: raise the speed limit! And I do believe I already said we'd just pave the gravel roads. Geez, aren't you listening?
I'm (almost) a civil engineer so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
If your asphalt roads need to be repaved less than a couple of decades after they were built then the problem doesn't lie on the technology (flexible pavement roads, asphalt) but instead due to being poorly built by incompetent construction crews. A flexible pavement road needs to have a impermeable rolling layer, a thick, tightly compacted gravel layer that must be at least a couple of feet deep and an impermeable bedding. The people building the road also need to make sure that everything drains perfectly, which means that the entire road and sometimes it's surrounding must be a drainage system.
So having that in mind, flexible roads only present problems if the road bed suffers from draining problems, if the macadame layer isn't thick enough or properly compacted and/or if the top layer isn't thick enough nor impermeable. If it's built with those problems in mind then it can easily be problem-free for around 30 years. On the other hand, if it's experiencing problems a few years after it's inauguration then you must take a good hard look at both the people building the road and the folks verifying that it's up to code, because they obviously didn't do their job properly.
I'm (almost) a civil engineer and so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
Concrete roads aren't indestructible. In fact, roads with rigid and semi-rigid pavements (concert layer without and with a gravel layer between the road bed) have only a slightly longer life expectancy (40 years) than regular flexible pavements (asphalt and bitumen-based rolling layer) (30 years). Just because concrete is seen as an artificial stone it doesn't mean it is eternal. Far from it. It does degrade and it degrades even faster when structures are designed to last just a few decades or so.
To make matters worse, rigid and semi-rigid pavements are much more expensive and labour-consuming than their flexible counterpart not only when building but also maintaining. They are also more prone to erosion due to water circulation in the road bed and all those regular problems related to concrete structures (carbonation, steel corrosion, those pesky freeze/thaw cycles, other nasty buggers).
So you may believe that concrete, just because it is concrete, ends up being an excellent solution but hey, there is a reason that it's only applied in very specific roads such as airport runways and parking lots (they withstand the forces from the landing impacts and don't degrade when in contact with fuel). It's a solution that is far too expensive and suffers from far too many problems than regular flexible pavement solutions, which means it is only used when it is absolutely necessary.
On the other hand, macadame roads are a time-tested technology. Although they don't make it possible to run around in high speeds they are one of the best road technologies developed up to this day. They are extremely easy to build, they are low-maintenance, they are cheap and sometimes they can even be built from the materials mined exactly from the construction site. In fact, flexible pavements are basically nothing more than macadame roads with an extra layer made out of some fancy material such as asphalt, bitumen, concrete or some other "glue" such as plaster. They may look "old school" but don't believe for a moment that them old time folk weren't smart or couldn't develop great stuff.
The point of wikipedia is that, as anyone can edit it, the non-neutral point of view is easily fixed by.
On the other hand, if you buy an editor, which is someone who has the power to block edits and has the power of perceived authority given by the common user of wikipedia. That means that if some organization pays an editor to edit someone, that organization is counting on the power granted to that editor to make their piece of propaganda be edit-proof by any common user who sees through the bullshit and takes it upon himself to fix that crap. After all, those organizations are only starting to talk about paying off editors after their less expensive paid astroturfers stopped being efficient.
The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc
The problem isn't the sporting event, it's the "etc."
These things are expensive. They're not going to sit there just for Superbowl Sunday or whatever. They'll be used for as much surveillance as they can get away with. Whether it's a good idea or not. Think 'mission creep'.</p></quote>
Exactly. It reminds me how all that "anti-terrorist" legislation that was passed in the US was suddenly used to monitor and hunt down all those anti-war and WTO protesters. Somehow these tools find themselves not being used against their announced targets, the evil doers and axis of evil characters, and are instead used to pacify those pesky citizens in the home front.
The issue goes far beyond the matter of reasonable expectation of privacy. Raytheon's newest totalitarian toy serves to gather information, information that can be stored, analysed and cross-referenced with other sources. That means that when someone employs Raytheon's new toy, along with other similar systems, that someone is now able to register everything you do in public. That means where you go, who you go with, how much time you spent in a place, who you talked to... That someone is putting himself in a position where he knows everything there is to know about you. To put it in other words, that person is placing himself in a position of power over you. And why exactly should someone have that power over yourself?
Let's just put it this way. If those blimps were deployed in the 70s throughout the former soviet union then nowadays we would be talking about those blimps as an example of evil totalitarian practices that were simply unacceptable in the free world.
I'm a civil engineering student who had Fortran in the curriculum. Although I don't use Fortran very often, I believe the article poses the wrong question. Instead of "why learn fortran" the question that the article's author should ask himself was "why am I forcing Python as a replacement of a tool that benefits from a battle-hardened technology that has the benefit of having a extremely serious, decades-long test on production environments in the real world?" I mean, "fortran is old" is not a technical argument. So it's first inception was decades ago. Is that even relevant?
More to the point, mentioning Python as a tool for numerical analysis is laughable, not because of having any blatant weakness but because there are a whole lot of tools that fit that job even better than Python, both in terms of speed and available APIs. If we were forced to abandon Fortran then why exactly would we adopt Python when there are other tools that are far better suited for the task? (Read C, C++, Maxima, Mathematica, Matlab, Octave, R, etc...)
As soon as major sites such as youtube adopt this standard and drop that PoS adobe flash then flash will be practically relegated to crappy early 90s sites and annoying ads, which means that removing the flash plugin from any system will vastly improve your web experience. Good riddance.
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So what? Donald Knuth doesn't use email since 1990. Does that also mean that, like what you are insinuating about Richard Stallman, he is somehow incompetent in the field of CS and IT? What does that mean, actually?
That's not a new idea at all. Mandriva already does that and it has been doing that for years. I mean, since the days of Mandrake 9.2, I believe. That means since the days of Ubuntu 5.04, now that it appears that everything linux has been somehow reduced and limited to Ubuntu.
I prefer imperial units for lots of everyday tasks like cooking.
I don't believe your cooking will go off if you follow the recipes in metric or imperial, as you witness first-hand the tangible amount of the ingredients.
Imperial units are much closer to a binary-based system, which is very convenient for human beings. Two cups in a pint. Two pints in a quart.
And you have two half-litres in a litre, two quarter of a litre in half a litre.... It's irrelevant.
An ounce of water weighs about an ounce. A pint of water weighs about a pound. Human beings are very good at halving or doubling things by eyeball, but we're lousy at dividing into tenths.
Tish tosh. Tha'ts for amateurs. A litre of water weighs exactly a kilogram. No more, no less. Well, if you aren't anal to the point of considering atmospheric pressure, altitude and temperature but we are talking about cooking, for $deity's sake.
But if you're building a fucking spaceship, use SI units for Christ's sake.
The thing is, SI units didn't got to be included in the International System of Units because they didn't made sense or were inpractical. Quite que contrary. Not only they are extremely easy to convert back and forth in magnitude but they are also tangibly related with materials used in every day life. Imperial units, on the other hand, could be handy if you still measured things when comparing to the size of your feet, thumbs and other body parts or if you weigh things while comparing with a certain price of silver.
How exactly does a unit get to be more precise than some other? I mean, units are only used to express amounts of certain measurable things, things that don't suddenly change just because you are using a different ruler to perform your measurements.
If this was some commercial offering from Microsoft, you would be criticizing it for using more bandwidth. Because it's an open source thing, you're justifying it by saying, "Eh, bandwidth is getting cheaper."
First of all, don't try to put words in my mouth. Second, bandwidth is irrelevant. It's not even a matter of it getting cheaper, per se. It's a matter that nowadays the bandwidth available to any home user is far greater than the present needs, not only in terms of speed but also in the volume of information transfered. You never saw anyone complain about the quality of youtube's videos, which carry a rather low bitrate, rendering them unwatchable, nor you ever say anyone complain about how their ISP's charges went through the roof due to watching youtube videos. You never saw that because nowadays that doesn't matter at all. It's perfectly irrelevant. And if it's irrelevant on low-bitrate codecs and if it's still irrelevant after youtube launching it's hidef service then why would it become suddenly relevant with the introduction of theora as a standard codec?
And then you suddenly assume that the bandwidth argument doesn't exist.
And it doesn't. Feel absolutely free to try to prove me wrong. I, on the other hand, only need to point out that bandwidth was never an issue, nor shall it ever be one, when services such as youtube were introduced, let alone their hi-def services. You will never hear anyone complain how they can only afford to watch 50 seconds of a minute-long video, let alone complain about how a small bitrate difference from theora to other competing codecs would render the service useless. It's a non-issue and the people who try to make it an issue are grasping at straws.
This is a video codec. Of course the bandwidth is relevant. It determines the quality of the video. If you're a video hosting service, you're going to want the codec that delivers the highest quality using the lowest bandwidth. How could you possibly describe it as "absolutely irrelevant" when it's one of the most important things in determining video codec quality?
Oh, so you somehow believe that the codec availability are somehow a non-issue? Do you really believe that a media-streaming company looks at bitrates and ignores the ability that the general public has or lacks to access their service? Moreover, do you also believe that it is impossible to choose the bitrate of any given encoding? And last but not least, do you also believe that, even in the far-fetched scenario where bitrate/bandwidth actually matter something, the perceivede quality difference resulting from equivalent bitrate encodings actually makes any difference whatsoever in the eyes of anyone? Considering the level of quality being discussed, obviously it doesn't make any difference whatsoever.
After seeing the comparison videos, I have to say that I don't see where the problem resides. Although Theora does demand more bandwidth for a video with similar good video (a subjective trait), as anyone can see the, Theora's quality at lower bitrates is far from bad. It's still better than the quality that sites such as youtube relied on when starting their service.
Having that in mind, let's not forget that bandwidth is getting ridiculously cheaper and we are getting incredibly fast connections by the month. It's not like we are seeing people forfeiting their ISP contract due to the service fee being too much to bear or seeing people complaining about how their 1Mb/s connection not being fast enough. In fact, joe six-pack's internet connection is more than capable of downloading countless ISOs daily, let alone watching streaming video. And that's not counting all those fiber to the premises and similar projects. That means there is absolutely no problem caused by the difference in bitrate. The network is already more than capable of handling it.
Moreover, knowing that the bandwidth aspect of the thing is irrelevant then the only problem that needs to be tackled is the problem of implementing the service. That is also a no-brainer, as one option, Theora, is freely available and freely accessible while the other is proprietary, patent-incumbered and controlled by single private entities who forces an economic penalty on it's adoption. Who in their right mind wants to build their foundation on a technology that is controlled by someone who wants to raise tollbooths to to access it?
So, to put it short, Theora may demand more bandwidth but that is absolutely irrelevant. The real problem is that one contender is absolutely free, both economically and in terms of conditions, while the other will not only cost money but will also forces everyone to be at the mercy of some grand tech gatekeeper. Facing that question, I do believe the choice is obvious.
P.S.: fuck you, slashdot, for screwing up the comment edit box so that I can only get paragraphs separated by newlines if I post the messages under the code option.
Wait, what? You're looking for basic coding and DB, but asking for candidates with a Master's in Information Science?
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders. There will be probably a few, but it's going to take a lot of effort to find them.
What? Just because someone has a masters not only he doesn't need to know the basics but also no one should ever asked him/her any question about the basics? Your comment doesn't make any sense. If someone has a masters and proudly displays it in his/her resume then that person MUST know the basics, if not be better at it than someone else. No excuse, no exception. If not, what else? Should you also avoid questioning the IT master about stuff such as linked lists?
and/or
fields, I couldn't manage to have the preview respect my paragraphs.
You may have plenty of reasons to criticize Miguel de Icaza but that sure isn't one of them. He invested his time in a project, he worked on it, the end result of his work is better than most people's work. That has absolutely no reason to criticize someone. On top of that, the end result is FLOSS, which means that anyone can just pick up where he supposedly stopped and keep driving it further. There's no wrong with that.
Besides that, I don't believe any software project is ever finished. There is always the need to fix this, implement that, tweak something... There is always stuff to do. It's yet another reason why your criticism targeted at Miguel is silly.
And to top things off, as you are criticizing the man who contributed to and had/has a decisive participation in quite a few software projects that are very influential in the free software world, care to compare your resume to Mr Icaza's? And I don't mean where you went to school or what was your grade point average. I mean, care to compare your contributions to the FLOSS ecosystem with mr Icaza's? After all, if you feel entitled to put up such self-righteous indignation regarding a man's contributions then you must have plenty of moral authority on the subject.
And last but not least, do you happen to know that Linus Thorvald wrote the basis of Git and once the project was up and running he abandoned it in the hands of some other people for them to pick it up where he left? Knowing that, do you also feel that you should attack mr Thorvald's contributions for being also "pathologically incapable of working on something until it's mature"?
Oh yes, another self-righteous rant attacking the directions of free software projects just because they have the audacity to venture far beyond where windows stagnated a decade ago. The article's author doesn't say much besides criticizing projects such as KDE, GNOME and even Ubuntu for their ideas regarding the desktop. And he does a bad job at it, to boot. For example, the author criticizes KDE for the audacity of thinking about implementing social networking features into the desktop. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? I mean, what's the difference of having an application such as windows live messenger constantly running and implementing some sort of widget that performs the exact same task? At least with KDE their implementation follows standards which are open and it doesn't force plenty of ads down our throats. What's wrong with that sort of innovation? Absolutely nothing. And his criticism of GNOME is pathetic. I mean, he criticizes GNOME not for innovating but for rewriting it. He hasn't absolutely any detail to grasp on and in fact the only thing he can muster about GNOME is "its final form at this stage is anybody's guess". Is that what the author perceives as innovation? And more to the point, who exactly is the author to make authoritative judgments about what the users want or don't want? His he a psychic? In fact, where was the author on these past dozen years of the desktop windows? I mean, after all these years windows is incapable of offering extremely basic stuff such as the ability to set any window the user wishes for to be always on top. And what about the ability to scroll a window without changing the focus to it? And what about getting rid of that really annoying bug that, when a user launches an application, keeps the focus on the former application while the newly launched app is placed on top of every window on the desktop? Fixing those bugs would also count as too much innovation? The article isn't worth the read. Nothing to see here, move along.
Part of the rationale behind Social Security is that people are too stupid to voluntarily put away their money.
That's a very naive and ignorant statement to make. The rationale behind social security is that if there is a system-wide resources pool created and maintained by tiny contributions by their members and managed in order to solve a specific set of issues then all members of that system will be able to easily deal with their issues whenever a need arises. That is due to economy of scale, supply and demand and suppression of redundancy. It's the very same system behind the entire insurance industry. Do you also believe that anyone, which may be a regular joe or a multinational corporation, "is too stupid to voluntarily put away their money" if they happen to sign up for some insurance? Are you also an idiot for signing up for car insurance or life insurance? Are you?
And the case for social security brings even more advantages than private insurance programmes, due to the fact that when you sign with a private company for insurance a hefty cut of your contribution will be misappropriated and misspent by the company managers when signing it off as "profit". As a national social security program isn't profit-driven then the system will be inherently more efficient due to suffering from less clutter and due to the fact that it doesn't lose resources on share-holder dividends an on management bonuses.
The pathetic thing about mr Doctorow's comment is that the media services provided by Amazon made it possible for the very first time in the history of the music business that a nobody could market it's modest album throughout the entire world without the intervention of the established music industry. Yes, amazon and the like are still middle men but this time the middle men only acts as the communications channel, without imposing any barriers to entry or even draconian distribution contracts thatm, for example, somehow automatically put the artists millions of dollars in debt, not to mention the Hollywood accountancy. Let's see anyone do that with a geocities web site.
I wonder if the information in your text books doesn't have a geographical/climatic bias and is incomplete.
Why do you believe it hadn't? But FWIW, the course's required readings included an hefty list of AASHTO's standards along with other international standards derived from AASHTO's work which, obviously, also consider the climate's influence in a whole bunch of details.
Do you intend to submit your course work using the word "macadame" because you are an idiot. The mans name was John McAdam, and that is what the technique is named after. When bitumen was added to the surface of that structure it became "tarmacadam", usually shortened to tarmac.
It appears you are quick to accuse others of being idiots without even investing a fraction of the time you spent writing your post thinking about what you just read, which doesn't make you look that smart to begin with. You see, there wouldn't be a single problem if/when I submitted course work with macadame in it. Care to know why? Well, because I'm not from an anglophone country and the adopted word for that concept is exactly that: macadame. If I was an idiot due to that then all spanish speakers in the world would be idiots for using the word futbol and all english speakers would be idiots for using the word naive. Are you able to understand that?
Even then I would suggest that you took a peek at wikipedia's article on macadame in order for you to have the chance to learn something about the subject.
And a gravel road is not a McAdam road anyway. The stones and gravel have to be laid very specifically, large stones, then a bit smaller then smaller still, and the whole is then compacted to form a smooth surface. Just dumping gravel on the ground is not a McAdam road.
No one said that it was, so congrats for failing reading comprehension. You see, I mentioned macadame roads as being "basically" (do you know what that word means?) gravel roads to avoid stating largely irrelevant aspects (irrelevant to this discussion) regarding the layer thickness, number of layers, degree of compaction, granularity of the granulate being used and even if some sort of glue was also employed. Those aspects are perfectly irrelevant in this discussion as their level of detail goes beyond what is being discussed and, more to the point, they vary according to their deployment conditions such as the soil's geotechnical properties, hydrological profile of the region, the expected traffic density and even climate. But how exactly could you know that? Your only knowledge on this subject derives from your vast experience at "delivering stone to tarmac plants".
But that wouldn't matter anyway. Idiots of your calibre would still cling to some other petty detail to be anal about it and therefore feel entitled to accuse others of being idiots and therefore try to feel good about yourself by redirecting your frustrations to some innocent bystander.
And yet the others are the ones who are idiots.
So, why exactly do you believe that seeing a breast is somehow something to be avoided? And why exactly do you believe that you must enforce your belief on others in the form of censorship?
On the other hand, if you have incompetent design/construction crews in charge of building a road then more often than not you will see them only caring if the pavement is near the generic minimum acceptable thickness described in some building code, without even doing the basic geotechnical survey of the area where the road is being built. If you add to that the fact that those construction crews that only do concrete roads don't even pay attention to the need of a decent draining system then no wonder the road exhibits problems a couple of years after it was built. But hey, the responsibility never lies on the people behind the construction, no matter how incompetent they are.
I am a licensed civil engineer, and I think your statement (and the one prior) bears qualifying. The choice between an asphalt road and a concrete one should always be analyzed by a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA), which takes into account the up-front cost of the road plus the maintenance costs.
Yes, as any civil engineering project.
In Southern California, concrete will most often come out ahead in said analysis, especially given our traffic volumes and the traffic delay costs associated with the more frequent maintenance activities required by asphalt. We have concrete pavements here that are 50+ years old.
The thing is, that's not quite right. Flexible pavements, such as those with asphalt or bitumen-based rolling pavement, don't require any more maintenance than rigid and semi-rigid pavement roads. The only reason that may lead to premature repairs is if they suffer from draining problems or if the foundation suffers from excessive settlement, which is caused by poorly designed and/or built roads.
Moreover, there are also quite a few flexible pavement roads out there that are 50+ years old. In fact, there are flexible pavement roads built by the romans that are still being used up to this day. That doesn't mean all flexible pavement roads last for millennia but is a nice way to show that properly built roads do last a very, very long time.
In areas of high freeze-thaw cycles, an LCCA may produce different results. However, it should also be noted that the thump-thump of many concrete pavements today is due to a load-transfer failure between the slabs, something that in new pavements has been addressed with the inclusion of steel dowel bars between slabs.
Well, as you may know that "thump-thump" phenomenon is caused by the erosion of the road's foundation/base layer, which is caused by drainage problems. That is a sign that that road's drainage system was either poorly thought out/built or wasn't even implemented, which is seen by some people responsible for building them as irrelevant as they believe that the rigid concrete top-layer is more than capable of withstanding any action that may be thrown at it. The fact that the prescribed solution for a drainage/erosion problem, something that is fixed if you add a gravel bedding to the road, is more steel bars, which are comparably very expensive, leads to believe the people behind that solution are a bit out of touch with that problem, as they are trying to throw money at the symptom instead of simply fixing the problem to begin with.
That way of thinking starts to be the source of real trouble when you rely on the same people to build a semi-flexible or flexible pavement road. When that happens then you have entire design and construction crews not caring about stuff such as draining, subsidence, settlement, water movement or even making sure the rolling layer is water-proof, with the added inconvenience of, this time, not being able to fix it by throwing more expensive steel to make up for their poorly thought out design. That leads to all sorts of problems including, such as this case, blaming the technology in itself when the blame is solely in the incompetence of those being paid to do the job. After all, it's the technology that must be wrong instead of the people spending the money and failing at their job, right?
They're cheap to build, but they require a lot more maintenance that people think. They get rutting and nasty potholes pretty quickly if they're not consistently maintained (and they deteriorate a LOT faster than asphalt)
Simple: we'll just pave them over with asphalt! Next problem?
Things aren't that simple. Although a paved road is basically a macadame (gravel) road with an extra impermeable layer on top, a paved road needs to avoid stuff in order to simply not crumble. For example, your regular gravel road is nothing more than a layer of gravel that isn't even compacted. It even doesn't need to be build with an impermeable bedding. If you displace gravel then the car passing after you will run over it without any problem. On the other hand, if you build a paved road without paying attention to draining both subsoil water and rain then your pavement will not last long. The same goes for the gravel layer. If it isn't compacted or the right thickness then say bubye to your pavement.
A well-maintained gravel road isn't so bad physically. Rain doesn't wash them out as bad as dirt roads and they stay passable in about any kind of weather. The main downside is that you just can't drive as fast on them as asphalt.
Another easy solution: raise the speed limit! And I do believe I already said we'd just pave the gravel roads. Geez, aren't you listening?
Here I assume you meant lower the speed limit.
I'm (almost) a civil engineer so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
If your asphalt roads need to be repaved less than a couple of decades after they were built then the problem doesn't lie on the technology (flexible pavement roads, asphalt) but instead due to being poorly built by incompetent construction crews. A flexible pavement road needs to have a impermeable rolling layer, a thick, tightly compacted gravel layer that must be at least a couple of feet deep and an impermeable bedding. The people building the road also need to make sure that everything drains perfectly, which means that the entire road and sometimes it's surrounding must be a drainage system.
So having that in mind, flexible roads only present problems if the road bed suffers from draining problems, if the macadame layer isn't thick enough or properly compacted and/or if the top layer isn't thick enough nor impermeable. If it's built with those problems in mind then it can easily be problem-free for around 30 years. On the other hand, if it's experiencing problems a few years after it's inauguration then you must take a good hard look at both the people building the road and the folks verifying that it's up to code, because they obviously didn't do their job properly.
I'm (almost) a civil engineer and so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
Concrete roads aren't indestructible. In fact, roads with rigid and semi-rigid pavements (concert layer without and with a gravel layer between the road bed) have only a slightly longer life expectancy (40 years) than regular flexible pavements (asphalt and bitumen-based rolling layer) (30 years). Just because concrete is seen as an artificial stone it doesn't mean it is eternal. Far from it. It does degrade and it degrades even faster when structures are designed to last just a few decades or so.
To make matters worse, rigid and semi-rigid pavements are much more expensive and labour-consuming than their flexible counterpart not only when building but also maintaining. They are also more prone to erosion due to water circulation in the road bed and all those regular problems related to concrete structures (carbonation, steel corrosion, those pesky freeze/thaw cycles, other nasty buggers).
So you may believe that concrete, just because it is concrete, ends up being an excellent solution but hey, there is a reason that it's only applied in very specific roads such as airport runways and parking lots (they withstand the forces from the landing impacts and don't degrade when in contact with fuel). It's a solution that is far too expensive and suffers from far too many problems than regular flexible pavement solutions, which means it is only used when it is absolutely necessary.
On the other hand, macadame roads are a time-tested technology. Although they don't make it possible to run around in high speeds they are one of the best road technologies developed up to this day. They are extremely easy to build, they are low-maintenance, they are cheap and sometimes they can even be built from the materials mined exactly from the construction site. In fact, flexible pavements are basically nothing more than macadame roads with an extra layer made out of some fancy material such as asphalt, bitumen, concrete or some other "glue" such as plaster. They may look "old school" but don't believe for a moment that them old time folk weren't smart or couldn't develop great stuff.
The point of wikipedia is that, as anyone can edit it, the non-neutral point of view is easily fixed by.
On the other hand, if you buy an editor, which is someone who has the power to block edits and has the power of perceived authority given by the common user of wikipedia. That means that if some organization pays an editor to edit someone, that organization is counting on the power granted to that editor to make their piece of propaganda be edit-proof by any common user who sees through the bullshit and takes it upon himself to fix that crap. After all, those organizations are only starting to talk about paying off editors after their less expensive paid astroturfers stopped being efficient.
The problem isn't the sporting event, it's the "etc."
These things are expensive. They're not going to sit there just for Superbowl Sunday or whatever. They'll be used for as much surveillance as they can get away with. Whether it's a good idea or not. Think 'mission creep'.</p></quote>
Exactly. It reminds me how all that "anti-terrorist" legislation that was passed in the US was suddenly used to monitor and hunt down all those anti-war and WTO protesters. Somehow these tools find themselves not being used against their announced targets, the evil doers and axis of evil characters, and are instead used to pacify those pesky citizens in the home front.
The issue goes far beyond the matter of reasonable expectation of privacy. Raytheon's newest totalitarian toy serves to gather information, information that can be stored, analysed and cross-referenced with other sources. That means that when someone employs Raytheon's new toy, along with other similar systems, that someone is now able to register everything you do in public. That means where you go, who you go with, how much time you spent in a place, who you talked to... That someone is putting himself in a position where he knows everything there is to know about you. To put it in other words, that person is placing himself in a position of power over you. And why exactly should someone have that power over yourself?
Let's just put it this way. If those blimps were deployed in the 70s throughout the former soviet union then nowadays we would be talking about those blimps as an example of evil totalitarian practices that were simply unacceptable in the free world.
I'm a civil engineering student who had Fortran in the curriculum. Although I don't use Fortran very often, I believe the article poses the wrong question. Instead of "why learn fortran" the question that the article's author should ask himself was "why am I forcing Python as a replacement of a tool that benefits from a battle-hardened technology that has the benefit of having a extremely serious, decades-long test on production environments in the real world?" I mean, "fortran is old" is not a technical argument. So it's first inception was decades ago. Is that even relevant?
More to the point, mentioning Python as a tool for numerical analysis is laughable, not because of having any blatant weakness but because there are a whole lot of tools that fit that job even better than Python, both in terms of speed and available APIs. If we were forced to abandon Fortran then why exactly would we adopt Python when there are other tools that are far better suited for the task? (Read C, C++, Maxima, Mathematica, Matlab, Octave, R, etc...)
As soon as major sites such as youtube adopt this standard and drop that PoS adobe flash then flash will be practically relegated to crappy early 90s sites and annoying ads, which means that removing the flash plugin from any system will vastly improve your web experience. Good riddance.