One the main points of TFA is that Moore's Law has continued to be true while clock speed has stalled. Actually you don't even have to RTFA, you can just look at the pretty graph on there.
Office Mac, which is, by the way, a nearly completely different(and completely better) product than Office XP/2003/whatever on Windows.
Whoa!!! Office '04 may look nicer than Office on Windows (though that is purely subjective), but it is hard to rate it as being superior in any other way. It is painfully slow in comparison (and I'm comparing it on a 1.8 GHz G5 w/512 MB vs. a 2.4 GHz P4 w/512 MB.) It has weird scrolling issues. It lacks a lot of integration features. For example, I can copy an HTML table from a web page in IE (Windows) and paste it into Excel. Excel automatically recognizes that it's a table and preserves the structure. Try doing this on a Mac! Excel will dump everything into a single cell in the spreadsheet. There are other weird things too. I had a Word doc that was basically a sheet of address labels. I had printed this countless times on my PC. Didn't print correctly on Windows/Mac even though it looked identical in the preview. And let's not even get into Entourage's (lack of) integration with an Exchange server...
AnandTech has an interesting
article about a Windows guy using a Mac, and discovering some of the above, as well as other problems. I'm glad that there is Office for Mac, but it falls way short of Office/Windows. It would be nice if there were versions of Project, Visio, OneNote, and MapPoint for the Mac too.
My wife made a DVD of a long slideshow (~300 photos/8 songs/30 minutes running length) on our PowerMac using iPhoto(pics from digital camera and scanner)/iTunes (music from CDs and ITMS)/iMovie (creating slideshow with music)/iDvd (creating DVD with menus and burning.) It had very nice quality and was very easy and fun for her to make. My brother-in-law wanted to do something similar for his daughter's 16th birthday, but of course he only had a WinTel PC. However, MS actually has a pretty nice program for doing this kind of thing: MS PhotoStory. You can
download it for free if you let MS validate that your version of XP is legit, or I think you can buy it as part of MS Plus! for a nominal fee (iLife ain't free either these days.) It seems to be a very nice and easy program with integration to Media Player (for music.) I haven't tried creating a DVD with it, though I would guess you would need another program for this.
You are right that movies, tv shows, music, games are all forms of entertainment. However, some of these things can go beyond that and be considered art. There are movies that have been around for decades and people still watch them, talk about them, get inspired by them, cry about them, etc. There are also songs that stand the test of time. Maybe you refute the very concept of art, but at the very least, there are movies and music that define a culture. And then there are movies and music that do not do this, are merely entertainment, and are quickly forgotten. It is this distinction that the Oscars (for example) try to award. Just being good entertainment is a reward to itself, since it should translate into $$$.
Uhh RTFA? Seriously, the big thing here was the desktop search (MSN Deskbar), not the IE toolbar. I think you would notice the little butterfly in your system tray.
It will be interesting to see how this compares with Google's DS. I've been using Google's at home since it came out. I tried this one on my work computer. It definitely seemed to do its indexing faster than Google. Like Google, it only indexed when the CPU usage had been low for awhile. Search response also seemed a little better, mostly because of the results-as-you-type feature. It also seemed to do a better job finding music files, including AAC files I ripped with iTunes.
Next Windows? You mean
Longhorn in 2006?
How about an update to Windows XP? Especially now that SP2 makes most people turn on auto-update... They could just slip this in one night while you're sleeping.
I wondered about this too. Perhaps GDS uses some part of the kernel of the mighty web search. If so, that is code written, and probably ridiculously optimized, to run on Linux. Perhaps Google intends to make DS for Linux and Mac as well? Or perhaps the author was only talking about the UI.
I have three. I have one though that I use the most. I've been using it since my college VAX account got hacked, and I'm not even going to say how long ago that was...
There is a HUGE socioeconomic stratification in terms of education in this country.
Yes there is, and do you want to know why? Because of people like you saying things like:
The question is, what can we do about it? The first step is admitting we have a problem (which we do), that there's no reason why we should be lagging behind ANYONE!
When you try to eliminate "stratification" by using the government to decide on how to educate people, you just make things much worse. The government tries to set standards for schools, mandate curriculums, etc. This has the effect of pushing people towards a common standard, and that standard is always going to be a minimum standard. You push all students towards a minimum standard. That includes students who might otherwise achieve at higher levels above those standards. You also push all teachers towards minimum standards. A buereaucrat winds up telling a teacher how to do their job.
The "no child left behind" program is idiotic. I have several nieces and nephews in public schools. Their teachers have set curriculums they must cover each year. If they don't cover everything and their kids do poorly in testing, they get in trouble. So they try to cover everything, teaching just enough of each topic to hopefully get everyone to answer the questions that will be on standardized testing. Hence all the rote learning as mentioned in the article.
And of course there is a price to pay for all this too. There is a significant tax burden to everyone to pay for schools. I am lucky enough to make enough money so that I can send my children to a private school and pay this tax burden. Many parents are not so lucky and have to send their children to public schools. And there's your socioeconomic stratification for you.
However, it's the attitude that "there's no reason why we should be lagging behind ANYONE" that is the root of these problems. There are actually a lot of good reasons for students to lag behind. If you have a child whose parents don't care about education, the child will not do well in school. There's nothing the government can do about this. It is up to parents to educate their children, not the government. That means there will be lots of children who don't go to school, but so what? If you round those kids up and force them to school, they won't do well anyways.
Testing is fine, but it should be up to parents to react to the results. If their child is doing poorly, they have options. Chances are there are things that they can do, but if they really think it's the school's fault, they should change schools. If the school is not publically financed, then it will do its best to make sure this does not happen so that it can continue to operate. However, if the parent has no reason to take personal responsibility for their children's education and, just as bad, has no way of taking action about it, then they will just blame the school and will have to rely on the government to do something about it. That is the current situation for the majority of parents/children in this country, and you can see where it's landed us -- in the bottom third.
The FCC claims that clearly defining what is indecent would be equivalent to true censorship and thus be unconstitutional. Thus by leaving at as
ex post facto as well as subjective, they can punish indecent content while preserving free speech. Who needs the rule of law anyways?
Bad analogy. The above nuclear reactor example does not NEED access to the internet to function.
I'm just using the parent's analogy. From the parent:
companies used to pay for maintaining seperate physical networks
Thus the parent was talking about companies going from self-maintained private networks to using the internet and thus introducing risks. Obviously if a system does not need any kind of networking access it would be silly for it to be connected to the internet, but that is hardly the kind of thing that is being talked about.
So following your logic, should the organization running the nuclear reactor in your above scenario also build its own roads to guarantee that all of its trucks carrying supplies can travel safely? Should they have their airplanes and airports? Should they build their own power plants and their own power lines delivering electricity to their reactor? Where do you stop? No matter how "secure" a company is, they are going to have to rely on public, or at least widely available, resources. There in always going to be a risk that such public resources can be attacked and thus companies/organizations relying on it could be vulnerable.
What bunch of flowery crap. Software is a product, it is not art. Let's not fool ourselves otherwise. Now that's not to say that there aren't creative innovators out there who come up with new ideas because of their passion for what they do. There are some of those. But even among innovators, the motivation is not just "love" but it is the possibility of getting really rich instead of just getting a paycheck. As for EA... They employee over 5000 people and there is nothing "creative" about Madden 2005.
Here's how a Canadian could arbitrage this. Offer to buy songs for any Americans. They send you $x where 0.83 x 0.99 via PayPal. You then create a bogus Apple ID (email address), buy the song they want, email it to them eith the password to the Apple ID. They change the Apple ID password and the song is all theirs. Actually this could be simplified by purchasing "gift certificates" perhaps? I'm sure there's multiple holes in this, but seems like there's potential!
Computer science is the foundation of sofware engineering. It's very easy to confuse the two, though and many computer scientists wind up doing software engineering because there is much more demand for it in the marketplace. But hey, steganography is very interesting even if you're not John Nash.
I only said there was a big difference, not that one was superior to the other. Software engineering is largely a subset of computer science, but computer science is clearly its foundation. I think that many institutions do not distinguish between these disciplines, at least not at a formal level. I've joked to colleagues that if you had a class that required you to read
The Mythical Man-Month
then you've taken a software engineering course.
Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is simply not true. R&D costs are huge, between $500M and $700M depending on who you believe. Clinical trials alone cost a fortune and take years to conduct. The vast majority of drugs do not make it to market. Thus pharmaceuticals must make huge profits on the ones that do to make up for all the many ones that don't.
Re:Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Simple: the prices in Canada are negotiated by customers who have the time to study the actual costs of production, and who aren't desperately begging for the treatment right now.
This is so completely false that it is not even funny. First off, price ceilings are affected in Canada by its Patented Medicine Prices Review Board. Second, drug distribution is controled by the provinces through each province's list of approved drugs, known as the provincial formulary. If you're not on the formulary, chances are you're not going to be sold in that province. The provicne then negotiates the prices of drugs on the formulary. This has allowed Ontario to freeze the prices on all formulary drugs since 1994. Customers do not negotiate the prices, the government does.
However, the biggest reason drugs are cheaper in Canada is because per capita income is about 20-30% lower in Canada than in the US and there are drug trade barriers between the two markets. If there were no barriers, then the prices would equalize across markets since one could buy a drug in Canada and sell it in the US. But with barriers, drug companies can easily set different prices in different markets, charging their richer customers (US) more than the poorer ones (Canada.) This is a classic monopolist tactic known as differential pricing. Ultimately it is the lower income caused by socialism in Canada and free trade barriers between the countries that cause such a large price disparity.
Software development is no different than any other field out there. Having a degree from a prestigous institution opens a lot of doors. In that regard, it doesn't matter if the school has a great CS program. Now just because it opens doors, doesn't mean you will actually get a great job. That requires you to be good at what you do, progress as you gain experience, communicate well, etc. Again, this is just like any other field. Now there are also not-so prestigous schools with programs that are really good and are even known to be really good. It is unlikely that this will "open doors" for you though, at least in my experience in hiring developers. A lot of people in software development didn't study CS or did their studies outside the US. So they don't know that Rensselaer or Illinois-Urbana has a great program. But they have heard of Yale, and will give you extra consideration if you went there.
Actually I would argue that a good program, regardless of what school is offering it, would teach you software engineering, not computer science. You are right that there is a big difference between programming and computer science, but there is perhaps an even bigger difference between computer science and software engineering.
AOL could then put pressure on those sites that don't work with firefox to fix their issues. THey can threaten to start popping up little windows saying "legacy mode support", "backward-compatibility mode", or "old-style technology mode", a mark of Cain the site in question would rather avoid.
The guys who really need to do this is Google. They could determine what sites get the "mark of Cain" when they crawl the sites to refresh their index. They could even put one nasty icons if a site has pop-ups, another nasty if it uses ActiveX, etc.
If you run IE unprotected and sans firewall, you're going to get trouble. Everyone knows that.
No they don't! That's the whole point. Your average, non-techie user doesn't know how to "protect" IE and doesn't know what a firewall is. Give them a brand new Dell, and they will have problems. In your analogy, they will crash the plane. Give them a brand new Mac, and they are far less likely to run into problems. It's hard to crash that plane.
Where do you go on the net? I've used IE ever since Netscape went shit, and have yet to have these spyware problems I'm told about.
I love your
ad homeniem fallacies. If you're getting spyware, it's your fault for going to that website!!! How ignorant. BTW, you would know some potent spyware sites if you RTFA. From TFA they list
this one,
this one, and this one. You might not want to click on those!
"The biggest weakness is clearly that Web sites design and test their site with the dominant browsers -- different versions of Internet Explorer -- and frequently never get around to making sure it works with Mozilla," Rosenblum explained. "This isn't super common, but there are Web sites that don't work with Mozilla"
Imagine if one of the things that Google determined when it crawled a site was if the HTML of the site was standards compliant (or even just Gecko compliant.) This could be included as metadata on search results, with some kind of small, nasty looking icon indicating that a site was "irregular" or something like that. Talk about a simple way to pressure sites into becoming more cross-platform friendly... Alternatively, it could list icons representing the plugins needed for a site, and just make the ActiveX icon a skull-n-crossbones.
Slashdot Mirror
One the main points of TFA is that Moore's Law has continued to be true while clock speed has stalled. Actually you don't even have to RTFA, you can just look at the pretty graph on there.
My wife made a DVD of a long slideshow (~300 photos/8 songs/30 minutes running length) on our PowerMac using iPhoto(pics from digital camera and scanner) /iTunes (music from CDs and ITMS) /iMovie (creating slideshow with music)/iDvd (creating DVD with menus and burning.) It had very nice quality and was very easy and fun for her to make. My brother-in-law wanted to do something similar for his daughter's 16th birthday, but of course he only had a WinTel PC. However, MS actually has a pretty nice program for doing this kind of thing: MS PhotoStory. You can
download it for free if you let MS validate that your version of XP is legit, or I think you can buy it as part of MS Plus! for a nominal fee (iLife ain't free either these days.) It seems to be a very nice and easy program with integration to Media Player (for music.) I haven't tried creating a DVD with it, though I would guess you would need another program for this.
You are right that movies, tv shows, music, games are all forms of entertainment. However, some of these things can go beyond that and be considered art. There are movies that have been around for decades and people still watch them, talk about them, get inspired by them, cry about them, etc. There are also songs that stand the test of time. Maybe you refute the very concept of art, but at the very least, there are movies and music that define a culture. And then there are movies and music that do not do this, are merely entertainment, and are quickly forgotten. It is this distinction that the Oscars (for example) try to award. Just being good entertainment is a reward to itself, since it should translate into $$$.
Uhh RTFA? Seriously, the big thing here was the desktop search (MSN Deskbar), not the IE toolbar. I think you would notice the little butterfly in your system tray.
It will be interesting to see how this compares with Google's DS. I've been using Google's at home since it came out. I tried this one on my work computer. It definitely seemed to do its indexing faster than Google. Like Google, it only indexed when the CPU usage had been low for awhile. Search response also seemed a little better, mostly because of the results-as-you-type feature. It also seemed to do a better job finding music files, including AAC files I ripped with iTunes.
Next Windows? You mean Longhorn in 2006? How about an update to Windows XP? Especially now that SP2 makes most people turn on auto-update... They could just slip this in one night while you're sleeping.
I wondered about this too. Perhaps GDS uses some part of the kernel of the mighty web search. If so, that is code written, and probably ridiculously optimized, to run on Linux. Perhaps Google intends to make DS for Linux and Mac as well? Or perhaps the author was only talking about the UI.
I have three. I have one though that I use the most. I've been using it since my college VAX account got hacked, and I'm not even going to say how long ago that was...
The "no child left behind" program is idiotic. I have several nieces and nephews in public schools. Their teachers have set curriculums they must cover each year. If they don't cover everything and their kids do poorly in testing, they get in trouble. So they try to cover everything, teaching just enough of each topic to hopefully get everyone to answer the questions that will be on standardized testing. Hence all the rote learning as mentioned in the article.
And of course there is a price to pay for all this too. There is a significant tax burden to everyone to pay for schools. I am lucky enough to make enough money so that I can send my children to a private school and pay this tax burden. Many parents are not so lucky and have to send their children to public schools. And there's your socioeconomic stratification for you.
However, it's the attitude that "there's no reason why we should be lagging behind ANYONE" that is the root of these problems. There are actually a lot of good reasons for students to lag behind. If you have a child whose parents don't care about education, the child will not do well in school. There's nothing the government can do about this. It is up to parents to educate their children, not the government. That means there will be lots of children who don't go to school, but so what? If you round those kids up and force them to school, they won't do well anyways.
Testing is fine, but it should be up to parents to react to the results. If their child is doing poorly, they have options. Chances are there are things that they can do, but if they really think it's the school's fault, they should change schools. If the school is not publically financed, then it will do its best to make sure this does not happen so that it can continue to operate. However, if the parent has no reason to take personal responsibility for their children's education and, just as bad, has no way of taking action about it, then they will just blame the school and will have to rely on the government to do something about it. That is the current situation for the majority of parents/children in this country, and you can see where it's landed us -- in the bottom third.
The FCC claims that clearly defining what is indecent would be equivalent to true censorship and thus be unconstitutional. Thus by leaving at as ex post facto as well as subjective, they can punish indecent content while preserving free speech. Who needs the rule of law anyways?
So following your logic, should the organization running the nuclear reactor in your above scenario also build its own roads to guarantee that all of its trucks carrying supplies can travel safely? Should they have their airplanes and airports? Should they build their own power plants and their own power lines delivering electricity to their reactor? Where do you stop? No matter how "secure" a company is, they are going to have to rely on public, or at least widely available, resources. There in always going to be a risk that such public resources can be attacked and thus companies/organizations relying on it could be vulnerable.
What bunch of flowery crap. Software is a product, it is not art. Let's not fool ourselves otherwise. Now that's not to say that there aren't creative innovators out there who come up with new ideas because of their passion for what they do. There are some of those. But even among innovators, the motivation is not just "love" but it is the possibility of getting really rich instead of just getting a paycheck. As for EA ... They employee over 5000 people and there is nothing "creative" about Madden 2005.
Here's how a Canadian could arbitrage this. Offer to buy songs for any Americans. They send you $x where 0.83 x 0.99 via PayPal. You then create a bogus Apple ID (email address), buy the song they want, email it to them eith the password to the Apple ID. They change the Apple ID password and the song is all theirs. Actually this could be simplified by purchasing "gift certificates" perhaps? I'm sure there's multiple holes in this, but seems like there's potential!
Computer science is the foundation of sofware engineering. It's very easy to confuse the two, though and many computer scientists wind up doing software engineering because there is much more demand for it in the marketplace. But hey, steganography is very interesting even if you're not John Nash.
I only said there was a big difference, not that one was superior to the other. Software engineering is largely a subset of computer science, but computer science is clearly its foundation. I think that many institutions do not distinguish between these disciplines, at least not at a formal level. I've joked to colleagues that if you had a class that required you to read The Mythical Man-Month then you've taken a software engineering course.
This is simply not true. R&D costs are huge, between $500M and $700M depending on who you believe. Clinical trials alone cost a fortune and take years to conduct. The vast majority of drugs do not make it to market. Thus pharmaceuticals must make huge profits on the ones that do to make up for all the many ones that don't.
However, the biggest reason drugs are cheaper in Canada is because per capita income is about 20-30% lower in Canada than in the US and there are drug trade barriers between the two markets. If there were no barriers, then the prices would equalize across markets since one could buy a drug in Canada and sell it in the US. But with barriers, drug companies can easily set different prices in different markets, charging their richer customers (US) more than the poorer ones (Canada.) This is a classic monopolist tactic known as differential pricing. Ultimately it is the lower income caused by socialism in Canada and free trade barriers between the countries that cause such a large price disparity.
Software development is no different than any other field out there. Having a degree from a prestigous institution opens a lot of doors. In that regard, it doesn't matter if the school has a great CS program. Now just because it opens doors, doesn't mean you will actually get a great job. That requires you to be good at what you do, progress as you gain experience, communicate well, etc. Again, this is just like any other field. Now there are also not-so prestigous schools with programs that are really good and are even known to be really good. It is unlikely that this will "open doors" for you though, at least in my experience in hiring developers. A lot of people in software development didn't study CS or did their studies outside the US. So they don't know that Rensselaer or Illinois-Urbana has a great program. But they have heard of Yale, and will give you extra consideration if you went there.
Actually I would argue that a good program, regardless of what school is offering it, would teach you software engineering, not computer science. You are right that there is a big difference between programming and computer science, but there is perhaps an even bigger difference between computer science and software engineering.