Having been through the process myself (four years of Japanese classes in college, one year of intensive study in Japan), I have definitely felt your pain. And no matter how great your classes, no matter how much you're immersed in the culture, the simple fact is that you have to spend hundreds of hours alone in a room pounding kanji. It's not sexy. It's not cool. But you have to do it if you want to get there.
Most language programs (whether Pimsleur, Living Language, Rosetta, whatever) focus more on the part that most (i.e., non-serious) students care about - fun little cultural exercises that teach you next to nothing. I wasn't able to find anything that really worked for me, so I ended up writing my own vocabulary drill website.
In the end, if you want to learn badly enough, you'll make it. And if you don't, you'll find something else that won't cause you as much heartbreak (French?).
This is an interesting analogy to the insurgency in Iraq - because Microsoft let things get to the current point, there's too much momentum/mindshare devoted to the problem to easily shut it down. If it had been extremely hard to crack the system in the first place, the rewards few and the risk significant, then we wouldn't be in the current mess. (I say "we" because no matter what OS you use, you're still going to have to pay for MS's boneheadedness - in spam, increased ISP fees, Internet worms, latency, etc.)
Yes, I pretty much try to put the scare of Internet into all of my family members and insist that they all get a hardware firewall. And, there's the issue of the difference in relative computer knowledge between people running Linux and Windows.
As someone who runs Linux, Windows XP, and Mac (home office), and administers a web site (linux + open source stuff), I have to admit that with the PC you at least feel like you've done everything you can possibly do - hardware firewall, software firewall, virus software, anti-spyware software, windows update. I don't use the mac enough to care (I keep it for testing, so scrub it every once in a while anyway - not like there are a whole lot of mac viruses out there in the first place). But with the Linux box, there's always this doubt in the back of my mind - is there something else I should be doing? Have I forgotten something? Is there some bit I forgot to twiddle? Some obscure.conf file that's exposing something?
Not when the damage is distributed. Notice how all of the dire predictions of the "hard disk erasing virus" never occurred? It's not because it's hard, it's just that it's not that interesting or useful to black hats. Much better than killing the host is to be a passive parasite. So home users have their machines turned into zombies, which they don't particularly care about because there's no perception that it affects *them*. On the other hand, people do get kind of miffed when people steal their passwords and bank accounts...
I would guess that the exploits are entirely different for the different types of machines. It seems as if Windows machines are cracked in bulk, and used as bots or key capture spyware, whereas Linux machines are more the target of DDoS, database theft, and traffic tracking malware.
I used to interview a lot of people, and the most important general thing I looked for was whether or not the person could (and would) honestly assess his or her own ability. "How would you assess your skill in 3D math?" If the person said "expert" and then couldn't perform a very simple task (like finding the angle between two vectors), then I knew something was wrong.
It sounds like you're applying for somewhat generic programming positions. You'll probably get the standard C++/linked list questions, some brainteasers ("what's the fastest way to determine if an int is a power of two?"), and some more abstract questions. Remember, the answer to any question about how you would go about a vaguely defined task is that you would first seek to define the task.
There was an excellent article in the NY Times magazine on this very topic - and why it's in the Chinese government's best interest not to stop it. Although it's cute (and popular) to whine about Johnny down the street serving 5-10 for downloading an MP3, that's not even remotely what this is about. It's not about taking down the little guy. It's not about bowing down to evil American corporations. It's about the Chinese klepto-industrial complex, which steals EVERYTHING.
I went to a conference at GDC a couple of years ago, and the product manager for Ultima Online was giving a talk about the economics of the game. A couple of fun facts...
- They made back their development costs in under a year (which is a stupid amount of money).
- The average amount of time spent by a player online is 80 hours per month. That's a part-time job. And that's only the average (there are some crazy people out there).
- Almost everyone checked in at least once a month. So there were very few people who were just holding onto accounts because they didn't want their characters to go away.
- He said that he thought that if they'd charged $20/month, people would have paid up (actually, he seemed a little bitter that they hadn't).
I think that for the big games, it doesn't really make sense - they're on the big end of a fat paycheck, and there's just not a lot of incentive for them to choose a different model. Also, they're trying to develop a core group of hardcore fans. The people who're only stopping by for a couple of hours a week are the aberrations, not their core audience. And by developing a pay-per-play system they'd actually be punishing the exact people they're trying to attract.
You have to realize that the history of AO is that it was the first MMORPG to crash and burn in a really frightening way (what if you had an MMORPG and no one came? kiss your $10-20 million investment goodbye). Basically, they pushed it out of beta too quickly (it crashed constantly), had really unattractive avatars, and the custom quest thing didn't really work very well. The solution? Give it away for free and announce version 2 as quickly as possible. One you have marketshare, you have a lot more options.
There was a fascinating article about some Caltech (?) researchers putting a little speech recognition into what was probably a Half-Life mod, and coming up with a 3rd-person shooter in which you had to learn Arabic words and phrases to complete missions. I think they were being funded by the DoD.
A point you made in a different reply was pretty interesting - that pronunciation calcifies after about a year. I'm curious - to what degree is that dependent on the intensity of study? I.e., would a person taking five classes a week reach that point faster than a person taking one or two classes at night?
I would be hard-pressed to count the number of language tapes and CD-ROMs I've gone through which have promised interactive environments and turned out to be complete garbage. I've also sat through language classes in which the professor spent time helping students memorize vocabulary - time which could have been used interacting, or practicing different aspects of grammar, or learning something for which we actually needed a teacher.
This, it seems to me, is the fundamental divide - that there are some things which can only be done in an immersive environment, and some which can only be done alone. For some reason, all of the "interactive language media" tries to solve the first problem, which is (at least at the current state of the art) somewhat absurd. On the other hand, at some point a student has to sit down and put in the hard, lonely work of pounding vocab. It's not sexy. It's not glamorous. But you're kidding yourself if you think there's any other way.
I've studied Japanese for six years, and Spanish, French, German, and Chinese for varying amounts of time. Japanese poses special problems along these lines because of the 2000 or so characters you have to learn; the average of three or four (and sometimes ten or more) different pronunciations you have to memorize for each; the multitude of compounds you have to memorize; the lack of cognates with English. A teacher can help out, but only on a retail basis - in the end you're going to have to learn them wholesale, well enough that when the moment comes, you'll be able to reach back into memory and pull the word out of deep storage (your internal hard disk). Next time you want to use it, hopefully it'll be in RAM - and eventually, after using it for a while, it'll be in your on-chip cache.
Shameless plug: I run a website to help people learn vocabulary. I don't do the immersive stuff because, as mentioned, I think this is a losing battle. But if you want to strap yourself into a memorization machine, come on by (and if you do, don't forget to check out the Web Decoder;).
Having written an HTML parser (and had to deal with the crazy HTML that even major websites use), I'd agree that it would be nice if only stricter HTML existed. On the other hand, crashing doesn't seem like a good way to handle malformed HTML. ("All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows [and] sometimes memory exhaustion, taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse," wrote Zalewski.) And, although not a contributor to Firefox, I wonder just how deliberate the strictness was (am genuinely curious - links, anyone?)
I remember a/. thread a couple of months ago from a student who was gathering input from the community for possible new features to put into firefox as part of a research project. I remember the comments veering from "neural net laser-guided search functionality would be pretty cool" to "for the love of Stallman, please don't bloat our browser!" I think the thing that's been so significant about Linux is that it's been able to generally avoid this problem through Linus's benevolent-rule-by-reputation. I think that this is also part of what Sun fears about letting go of Java.
Actually, I'd go one step further, and say that the do-it-yourself hacker mindset of the open source community (myself included) also makes it more secure. Every day I check CERT, and visit the sites of the products I use to check for updates. I use a hardware firewall to prevent incoming, a software firewall to prevent outgoing, anti-virus software, and spyware-removal software. I know how to perform an update, and more importantly, I know that I should (which sounds like an absurd thing to say, but I guarantee that most average users do not). And I would suspect that the open source community (and the/. community) is disproportionately more like me than like the average user.
So I would say that it's not even the OS, but rather the users who are more secure.
Oh, you are so wrong. The major reason Firefox works well is because the community took the bloated commercially-derived software (Mozilla) and pruned it down to its essentials (Firefox). It is about time that the same happened with Java.
As for Firefox, this basically boils down to a religious argument - you pretty much ignored the research showing that IE handles broken code better. As for Java, I would be happy to see an effort - whether open or not - to get a thin client working. Currently, I put up with Flash because I have to, but it would be nice if there were a Java-based alternative which didn't take ten minutes to download and a half-hour to install.
I'm sorry, but the comments here are getting a little absurd. The Java sandbox has had how many security exploits discovered in the eight or nine years it's been around? Perhaps there have been a couple, but I can't remember any. And now, a flaw is discovered by an independent researcher, a patch quickly released, and the bug made public only after a significant amount of time has passed for people to upgrade, and before an exploit appears - and you're complaining because...? Oh right, because Java isn't open source.
Open source, although a wonderful thing which should be given away at school bake sales, church meetings, and nascar rallies, is not a silver bullet. Case in point - the Firefox browser (which I use and love) has already had several security flaws (e.g. the same JPG flaw as IE) for which exploits have been released. The major reason we don't see more is *not* because it's so much more robust - it's because it still doesn't have the visibility and marketshare of IE, not to mention the raw hatred of ubergeeks around the world. I know, I know - the marketshare is going up, and as a faithful user I'm honestly torn. I'd love for it to be successful, and for Microsoft to have some kind of competition, but for now, Firefox is pretty safe. Give it the marketshare, and watch all those 2600-loving eyes start reappraising their goals.
I think there are two points to this - the first, being that we probably never thought that there'd be an atomic clock on a chip, but time marches on.
The second, and to my mind more interesting point, is that the cat is, to a certain extent, out of the bag. Especially if the basic research is being done all around the world, and made freely available. There's going to be a point in time between when house-sized (but usable) quantum computers are available to governments, and when they become ubiquitous (I can't wait to get a graphics card with quantum ray-tracing). During that time, governments will have perfect encryption and decryption, and you and I will not. Of course, I absolutely trust the (insert name of government here) and its benevolent intentions, but for you conspiracy freaks out there...
On the other hand, it kind of reminds me of a (fairly well-known?) short story about a machine that allows users to view the past - and about the government's reasons (legitimate, you discover in the end) for trying to keep it under wraps. (Does anyone remember the name of this story?) I know it's heresy to say on/., but I worry about what happens when perfect encryption becomes ubiquitous.
my question is, if
1) there's no patch yet for IIS servers to defend against the attack, and
2) the microsoft update servers are all IIS, then
how can we know that microsoft update hasn't been hacked?
hmm? (oh the humanity!)
But wouldn't it be interesting to discover that what were thought to be genetic predispositions turned out to have a considerable dietary component - passed down through the generations mimetically, not genetically.
i wonder what SCO is counting on in this case. it's hard to imagine that they started a $1 billion lawsuit and expected IBM to wimper, crawl into a corner, and settle. it seems to me that they either have evidence, think they have evidence ("hey look, there's an 'i++;' in the linux code - we have that in our code too!"), or are living in a spider hole next to another delusional freak.
don't get me wrong - i'd also like to see them go down in flames... i just wonder if their actually is anything to their case.
shirky clay has an interesting article on why he thinks that micropayments won't work. the main gist is that it's not a question of technology, but rather that users don't want to have to be constantly making decisions about whether or not to buy something, irrespective of the amount.
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Most language programs (whether Pimsleur, Living Language, Rosetta, whatever) focus more on the part that most (i.e., non-serious) students care about - fun little cultural exercises that teach you next to nothing. I wasn't able to find anything that really worked for me, so I ended up writing my own vocabulary drill website.
In the end, if you want to learn badly enough, you'll make it. And if you don't, you'll find something else that won't cause you as much heartbreak (French?).
All I can tell you is that it's worth it.
-daniel
This is an interesting analogy to the insurgency in Iraq - because Microsoft let things get to the current point, there's too much momentum/mindshare devoted to the problem to easily shut it down. If it had been extremely hard to crack the system in the first place, the rewards few and the risk significant, then we wouldn't be in the current mess. (I say "we" because no matter what OS you use, you're still going to have to pay for MS's boneheadedness - in spam, increased ISP fees, Internet worms, latency, etc.)
As someone who runs Linux, Windows XP, and Mac (home office), and administers a web site (linux + open source stuff), I have to admit that with the PC you at least feel like you've done everything you can possibly do - hardware firewall, software firewall, virus software, anti-spyware software, windows update. I don't use the mac enough to care (I keep it for testing, so scrub it every once in a while anyway - not like there are a whole lot of mac viruses out there in the first place). But with the Linux box, there's always this doubt in the back of my mind - is there something else I should be doing? Have I forgotten something? Is there some bit I forgot to twiddle? Some obscure .conf file that's exposing something?
daniel
I would guess that the exploits are entirely different for the different types of machines. It seems as if Windows machines are cracked in bulk, and used as bots or key capture spyware, whereas Linux machines are more the target of DDoS, database theft, and traffic tracking malware.
Any thoughts?
daniel
It sounds like you're applying for somewhat generic programming positions. You'll probably get the standard C++/linked list questions, some brainteasers ("what's the fastest way to determine if an int is a power of two?"), and some more abstract questions. Remember, the answer to any question about how you would go about a vaguely defined task is that you would first seek to define the task.
There was an excellent article in the NY Times magazine on this very topic - and why it's in the Chinese government's best interest not to stop it. Although it's cute (and popular) to whine about Johnny down the street serving 5-10 for downloading an MP3, that's not even remotely what this is about. It's not about taking down the little guy. It's not about bowing down to evil American corporations. It's about the Chinese klepto-industrial complex, which steals EVERYTHING.
- They made back their development costs in under a year (which is a stupid amount of money).
- The average amount of time spent by a player online is 80 hours per month. That's a part-time job. And that's only the average (there are some crazy people out there).
- Almost everyone checked in at least once a month. So there were very few people who were just holding onto accounts because they didn't want their characters to go away.
- He said that he thought that if they'd charged $20/month, people would have paid up (actually, he seemed a little bitter that they hadn't).
I think that for the big games, it doesn't really make sense - they're on the big end of a fat paycheck, and there's just not a lot of incentive for them to choose a different model. Also, they're trying to develop a core group of hardcore fans. The people who're only stopping by for a couple of hours a week are the aberrations, not their core audience. And by developing a pay-per-play system they'd actually be punishing the exact people they're trying to attract.
Clay Shirky had an interesting op-ed piece on micropayments and why they wouldn't work. I don't know if he's right, but I don't think that the pay-as-you-go model makes a whole lot of sense.
daniel
You have to realize that the history of AO is that it was the first MMORPG to crash and burn in a really frightening way (what if you had an MMORPG and no one came? kiss your $10-20 million investment goodbye). Basically, they pushed it out of beta too quickly (it crashed constantly), had really unattractive avatars, and the custom quest thing didn't really work very well. The solution? Give it away for free and announce version 2 as quickly as possible. One you have marketshare, you have a lot more options.
I agree - this is definitely one of those utilities that I don't NEEEEEEEED, and am happy to wait a couple of versions before jumping in.
A point you made in a different reply was pretty interesting - that pronunciation calcifies after about a year. I'm curious - to what degree is that dependent on the intensity of study? I.e., would a person taking five classes a week reach that point faster than a person taking one or two classes at night?
-daniel
This, it seems to me, is the fundamental divide - that there are some things which can only be done in an immersive environment, and some which can only be done alone. For some reason, all of the "interactive language media" tries to solve the first problem, which is (at least at the current state of the art) somewhat absurd. On the other hand, at some point a student has to sit down and put in the hard, lonely work of pounding vocab. It's not sexy. It's not glamorous. But you're kidding yourself if you think there's any other way.
I've studied Japanese for six years, and Spanish, French, German, and Chinese for varying amounts of time. Japanese poses special problems along these lines because of the 2000 or so characters you have to learn; the average of three or four (and sometimes ten or more) different pronunciations you have to memorize for each; the multitude of compounds you have to memorize; the lack of cognates with English. A teacher can help out, but only on a retail basis - in the end you're going to have to learn them wholesale, well enough that when the moment comes, you'll be able to reach back into memory and pull the word out of deep storage (your internal hard disk). Next time you want to use it, hopefully it'll be in RAM - and eventually, after using it for a while, it'll be in your on-chip cache.
Shameless plug: I run a website to help people learn vocabulary. I don't do the immersive stuff because, as mentioned, I think this is a losing battle. But if you want to strap yourself into a memorization machine, come on by (and if you do, don't forget to check out the Web Decoder ;).
-daniel
I remember a /. thread a couple of months ago from a student who was gathering input from the community for possible new features to put into firefox as part of a research project. I remember the comments veering from "neural net laser-guided search functionality would be pretty cool" to "for the love of Stallman, please don't bloat our browser!" I think the thing that's been so significant about Linux is that it's been able to generally avoid this problem through Linus's benevolent-rule-by-reputation. I think that this is also part of what Sun fears about letting go of Java.
daniel
So I would say that it's not even the OS, but rather the users who are more secure.
daniel
As for Firefox, this basically boils down to a religious argument - you pretty much ignored the research showing that IE handles broken code better. As for Java, I would be happy to see an effort - whether open or not - to get a thin client working. Currently, I put up with Flash because I have to, but it would be nice if there were a Java-based alternative which didn't take ten minutes to download and a half-hour to install.
daniel
Open source, although a wonderful thing which should be given away at school bake sales, church meetings, and nascar rallies, is not a silver bullet. Case in point - the Firefox browser (which I use and love) has already had several security flaws (e.g. the same JPG flaw as IE) for which exploits have been released. The major reason we don't see more is *not* because it's so much more robust - it's because it still doesn't have the visibility and marketshare of IE, not to mention the raw hatred of ubergeeks around the world. I know, I know - the marketshare is going up, and as a faithful user I'm honestly torn. I'd love for it to be successful, and for Microsoft to have some kind of competition, but for now, Firefox is pretty safe. Give it the marketshare, and watch all those 2600-loving eyes start reappraising their goals.
daniel
The second, and to my mind more interesting point, is that the cat is, to a certain extent, out of the bag. Especially if the basic research is being done all around the world, and made freely available. There's going to be a point in time between when house-sized (but usable) quantum computers are available to governments, and when they become ubiquitous (I can't wait to get a graphics card with quantum ray-tracing). During that time, governments will have perfect encryption and decryption, and you and I will not. Of course, I absolutely trust the (insert name of government here) and its benevolent intentions, but for you conspiracy freaks out there...
On the other hand, it kind of reminds me of a (fairly well-known?) short story about a machine that allows users to view the past - and about the government's reasons (legitimate, you discover in the end) for trying to keep it under wraps. (Does anyone remember the name of this story?) I know it's heresy to say on /., but I worry about what happens when perfect encryption becomes ubiquitous.
Sounds like Jane from Speaker for the Dead.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ appears to have been taken down by The Man. Hmmm...
my question is, if 1) there's no patch yet for IIS servers to defend against the attack, and 2) the microsoft update servers are all IIS, then how can we know that microsoft update hasn't been hacked? hmm? (oh the humanity!)
But wouldn't it be interesting to discover that what were thought to be genetic predispositions turned out to have a considerable dietary component - passed down through the generations mimetically, not genetically.
i wonder what SCO is counting on in this case. it's hard to imagine that they started a $1 billion lawsuit and expected IBM to wimper, crawl into a corner, and settle. it seems to me that they either have evidence, think they have evidence ("hey look, there's an 'i++;' in the linux code - we have that in our code too!"), or are living in a spider hole next to another delusional freak. don't get me wrong - i'd also like to see them go down in flames... i just wonder if their actually is anything to their case.
shirky clay has an interesting article on why he thinks that micropayments won't work. the main gist is that it's not a question of technology, but rather that users don't want to have to be constantly making decisions about whether or not to buy something, irrespective of the amount.