True... and "toughness" is not the same as "stiffness" either. "Toughness" refers to a material's resistance to failure by fatigue (whereas "stiffness" is, as you said, resistance to bending -- Young's Modulus). They are clearly not the same thing, as there are plenty of brittle materials which are stiff yet fail quickly in fatigue.
On a related subject, do you ever wince when somebody on TV refers to something that can push harder as being more "powerful?" Or who talks about some kind of battery having more "power" than another when they clearly mean "energy?" I understand that these words are commonly confused in everyday use, but -- if you're putting together a supposedly-educational show, for the love-of-god get it right; even if your viewers don't appreciate the subtlely, choosing words like "velocity" or "energy" when appropriate aren't going to confuse them!
To science writers everywhere: I know, I'm not perfect either -- but could you please refrain from running your fingernails across my mental chalkboard?
Y'know, I remember reading that the 'active ingredient' that makes feces smell as it does is actually used in small quantities in perfume. (A quick google search hints that the chemical is named methyl mercaptan -- but I remember it sounding different, so that might not be correct...)
So, one might say that the scent of the Jersey shore is reminiscent of a fine cologne...
QBasic was one of the first languages I ever played with. For me it was just a toy, so I didn't need it to be tremendous -- but as a toy, I actually thought it was a lot of fun (that's why I taught myself C;-)).
I think Microsoft's biggest mistake wasn't anything they screwed up with the language per-se, but hiding it on the Windows CD instead of giving it to everybody in the Start Menu! Imagine how much more computer literate everyone would be if their OS shipped with an easy-to-use programming language visibly installed! I'd argue that it'd do more than increase understanding of computers; playing with logic I will swear actively increases intelligence.
Programming is great fun. People need to get into it before they're too old or they won't see it. It'd be like expecting a 40-year-old to play with Legos... (We get the creative spark trained out of us as we age. I'm trying desperately to hang on to mine! [Got any pointers?*])
*(I can see those jokes with punchlines like '0xd3adb33f' coming from here already!)
Anyway, Windows needs a dead-simple BASIC or LISP or whatever, with a dead-simple graphics library, and some cool little example programs with source, and it needs to put them all in a folder on the Desktop with a good searchable helpfile. The world needs more Legos.
Fair enough. Actually, there's a robotics course here at college that is taught using basically that sort of setup. So I'm not writing off his idea -- just giving fair warning about some limitations (because, since I've run into them, I'm quite frustrated right now... and I'd rather the OP not be!).
Anyway.
If you're really not concerned with hard realtime stuff, and you're teaching kids, you know, you might even want to use a teaching language instead of Java (not that there's anything really wrong with Java...) Scheme?;-)
>I would go with something like DSL( Damn Small Linux )
I'm doing something similar with a headless single-board computer. The one thing that you forget, that I thought would be easy, and which is now kicking the crap out of me, is that Linux is not out of the box hard realtime. Latency sucks for control applications.
I thought I had a solution for this: RTAI. These are extensions to the kernel that allow you to do hard realtime tasks. But I can't get the damn thing to work. I can either compile a 2.2 kernel with an old version of RTAI which will boot but freeze the system if I try to access any of the realtime timers, or a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel with a newer and more mature version of RTAI -- but even without RTAI, neither the 2.4 nor 2.6 kernels seems to want to boot. So, I'm less-than-happy.
If you can get realtime Linux working, more power to you. Many people apparently do. But don't try it on a tight schedule!
DOS might be easier and make more sense. With a robot, you really want low-level control of the hardware, and DOS just hands that to you out of the box. You could try FreeDOS.
Sony lost money on each Playstation it sold, much as Microsoft loses money on each XBox. They both make a profit because game publishers pay them licensing fees for the right to publish games for their console. Assuming for the moment that licensing fees remain fixed, pirating a copy of a game in no way affects Sony. However, if we instead assume that licensing fees depend on how much revenue publishers are making, then, if piracy hurts publishers, then it impacts Sony.
>the publishers lost revenue
That's true so long as those people who were playing pirated games would have otherwise paid for the publisher's games. The OP implied that, were it not for a supply of pirated games, nobody would have bought a PS to begin with. We can assume that these PS owners, motivated to purchase their consoles by piracy, did on rare occasions buy games from publishers. The question then is: Does a large number of people (who mainly rely on piracy) who occasionally buy a game from a publisher, overall buy more games or fewer games than would the smaller group of people who would have bought a PS had piracy not been widespread and who would have more frequently bought games. If case A is true, then piracy is a net win for publishers (an example from outside of gaming where this is true: Adobe and Photoshop); if case B is true, then piracy really does hurt publishers.
>the developers lost revenue
Assuming that the cut that developers get is proportional to the number of copies that are sold, then essentially the same argument as above applies.
>everyone in the distribution chain lost revenue.
BestBuy or its equivalent made money by selling more Playstations, and lost money by selling fewer games. How do these balance out? Hard to tell.
You also left out one obvious winner:
The guy selling pirated copies on the corner made money!
This is an observation for which you'll certainly get annoyed with me;-), but don't ignore black markets just because they're not legal; they're a part of the economy too!
Overall, how are the benefits and harms distributed? Does anyone really come out worse? Hard to tell. The data will never exist, because it cannot be reliably collected -- and, if it could be, nobody without an ideology would exist to do the collecting!
I worked doing VLSI design for a short time as an intern, so, though I can't claim overwhelming expertise, I've learned more about the industry than I think the general public knows. Foundry tech is hideously expensive, requiring gigantic investments. It costs so much that it's gotten to the point that even competitors do joint work (with tension and assorted legal handcuffs, to be sure -- and they keep it quiet -- but in the end they all cross-license with each other) to develop new foundry technologies (and, to a lesser extent, "I.P."), because it's just so. damn. expensive. Old rivals are forced to quietly build each others' chips, because neither can handle it on their own.
You might be able to design a chip, send it off to TSMC, and have them produce it -- but even that costs boatloads. And it's not going to work quite right the first time!
I recall, maybe a year ago, there was a big press release about a Chinese CPU which was supposed to demonstrate China's rising power. It was about as fast as a Pentium III. Given what they were starting with, that's pretty damn impressive -- but you also notice that they couldn't pop out a Core 2 Duo. There's a lot of infrastructure required that's just not there yet.
Even people like PowerVR, with their Kyro cores, couldn't effectively challenge ATI and nVidia: They produced a decent budget core, for a little while, but they couldn't keep up, and now they're designing cores for chips other people design which end up in cell phones. They're probably making more money that way -- but they just couldn't stay on the bleeding edge.
So, no, a company in China can't build a low-budget ATI-killer overnight -- and I don't believe it's just the drivers.
They weren't poor, but I doubt they played the game for the cash prize.
Want another example of a clueless twat? Anybody who quietly contributes to an OSS project without the expectation of reward, who could have sold those hours for a wage instead. Linux and friends may now get help from some corporations, but they were the brainchildren of twats.
And, by your definition, I, who intend to spend the next five years pursuing an advanced degree which will cost of my time more than it can ever add to my bank account, am also a clueless twat. So, if you can't tell by now, I must respectfully disagree in the strongest terms.
You see, when we complain about the music being no good, we're not complaining that it's not mercenary enough. We're wishing that it had the soul you seem to insist we all sell.
You need money, but life's too short to just spend 9-to-5 each day chasing it.
>CS has become a joke, and most curriculum's resemble job training in Visual Studio.
Agreed: In many schools, that's what they call "Computer Science," when at best it's really "Software Engineering," or, more likely, just "Computer Programming." When friends at tech. schools tell me about their curricula, it often sounds like what you describe.
But my experience has been good. I have a lot of complaints about my university, but I'm actually quite impressed with what I've seen from the CS department. It's quite theoretical, and the CS majors with whom I'm friends have spent a lot of time on problems like computability and on proofs from graph theory.
I'm an E.E. so I've not spent much time in the C.S. department. But in the one course I took, the professor said the following -- which I think nicely demonstrates that he had the right idea about what his mission was: "I think 'Computer Science' is a terrible name," he said; "First off, it's not about computers. They're just a tool that we use. Would you call Astronomy 'Telescope Science?' Second, it's not a science. Science is about using the scientific method to test hypotheses. We don't do that. So what is computer science? Well, mostly, it's math. But whereas mathematicians tend to be concerned with 'what is true' -- for example, 'the square root of a number is some other number such that the product of that number with itself equals the first number' -- computer scientists tend to care about, 'So how do I get one?' -- in the case of a square root: How do I go about getting the number that satisfies the mathematician's definition? So whereas mathematicians speak in declarative sentences, computer scientists speak in imperative sentences. And it's also a little engineering; that's the practical application of CS. But basically, it's math."
Examples of horrible MySpace design?
on
Inside MySpace.com
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I keep hearing references to horribly designed myspace profiles. For the benefit of those Slashdotters who haven't see this dreck, please post your most egregious examples in reply.
>I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?
Depends.
If your second language is Spanish and you work in Miami -- definitely.
If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.
Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck.;-)
I'm so jealous of my friends from other countries. Language education in the U.S. is so screwed up: We don't start kids until it's far too late to learn to speak without an accent. My international friends have more than one native language; native languages come 'free!' I just have some minimal and essentially useless high school and intro college French.
Of course, my jealously extends to more than language education. It sounds like they've had so much more adventure in their lives. And they have an obvious target: If you want to go to the best colleges, you go to the U.S. (for now). What obvious overseas targets do I have? I'm here already!
I'd rather have been born in a country that's moving up, where I'd have more hope, than in a country that sits back on crumbling past glories.
>The two types of social intelligence are related, because understanding the emotional state of an audience is part of entertaining them.
Most definitely!
>Much of it comes from an egalitarian fallacy that they implicitly subscribe to - that we are "really" all the same, when we actually differ in some very fundamental ways.
>Computers are easy to learn. People are more complex. I often wonder, when I read topics like this and posts like yours, if the issue is that "geeks" are scared to figure out the more complex topic of people because they might fail and stick to computers because figuring out ones and zeros is easier.
I've heard arguments like that before, and I can understand where they come from, but I've never really thought that they were correct.
The way I see it, there are a few different types of social skills, which fall into two broad categories:
Emotional skills: the ability to empathize and to implicitly communicate good intentions.
Conversational skills: the talent for entertaining people by interacting with them.
It's often assumed that 'geeks' lack social skills in all their forms, but from what I've seen, many do have #1 -- just not #2 (Of course, there are also those who are just embittered jerks. But I think that's a minority.) Skill #2, I think, depends largely on confidence.
>
You made the conscious choice to develop that attitude. You can make the conscious choice to lose the attitude.
It's always good to nurture a more positive outlook. Certainly, these things take time to develop and you can't will yourself happy overnight, but you can help the right kind of worldvew to grow in your head. That said, I didn't pick up negative vibes from the OP -- it was other girls who had problems; she herself did feel like she had something to prove, but stayed reasonably positive (so, more power to her).
>Or is it that you aren't as smart about your own feelings, attitudes and behaviors as you are about computers?
That, I'll be honest, is something I've had to learn: To know what I want, and to appropriately reject the things I don't. That's not so much a 'nerd' thing: I think many people feel guilty thinking about themselves and their own wants; we're "supposed" to be selfless. But it's just not healthy. Pay attention to what other people want and try to help them. Sometimes, put their desires above your own. But know what your desires are. And you can't work them out logically from first principles; they are your axioms.
>Europe and America aren't becons of light either.
Ain't that the truth. And either I'm just getting older, or the whole world has just gotten uglier recently, full of tribalism and xenophobia. Here in the U.S., I keep hearing Mexicans used as scapegoats for our economic problems. In Europe -- well, the French riots a while back were graphic evidence that race is a real problem there too. What's going on? So, I've become hypersensitive to examples of racism everywhere -- which is probably not a good thing, because if I keep doing that then I'll look for racism directed at me, and so distrust those of races-not-my-own, and so become racist myself -- and I'd like to shape what goes on inside my head so as to avoid that as much as possible.
Anyway. (Before I get self-absorbedly bloggerlike...)
>Harley Davidson.
Really? Heh! I always thought they were overweight and silly, much preferring sportbikes myself. That's funny (I think most Americans think of Harleys as 'American' and, say, Suzukis as 'Japanese,' and so assume that sportbikes are more popular in Japan).
One even better example of a sort of 'exoticism with mirror symmetry' I heard recently is that, in the U.S., the puzzle-with-numbers game is called 'Sodoku,' whereas, in Japan, it is known as "Number Place." I keep chuckling at that. Silly, funny humans.
What I've heard, though, is that the younger generation is actually enamored of American culture, going so far as to buy American flags and put them up on their walls in the same way that American teens might put up posters of rock stars or Che Guevara. Those much older, I have heard, have memories of WWII and do hate the U.S. (partly because Japan never had much of a 'Nuremberg' - a public nose-rubbing - and there was not the same moral reflection there as there was in Germany.)
If Japanese youth-culture does exalt American pop-culture and consumerism, it does strike me as somewhat occidentalist/exoticist but that's not so bad.
All that said, I do hear (1) that non-Japanese Asian women (friends-of-friends) who've attempted to work in Japan have been shocked by a very-low glass ceiling (and symbolic things, like that they were expected to serve tea at meetings); (2) that if you are black you can expect a sort of celebrity novelty status but no real respect or advancement; (3) that if you are Korean you will meet with significant hostility; and (4) that Japanese immigration policy (especially w.r.t. the Phillipines) is rather xenophobic.
These negatives combined with the pro-American culture I mentioned earlier combine in my understanding to create a rather complicated picture.
But, like I said, this is just an impressionist painting made from anecdotes I've heard. I don't study Japanese culture or language myself, and I've never been there.
>Here's a hint: a service listening for incoming connections creates an "open port." If nobody is listening, the port is not open.
Hmm. Ok, that's sort of a semantic point, but I don't really disagree. I do understand that it's ports that services listen on: I've written some clients and servers in C for Windows and for Linux, so I get how all this stuff works. My point is that people take a voodoo approach of "closing ports" with some kind of ugly software firewall rather than just turning off what they don't need or trust.
Imagine you're running a call center, and there are a couple of employees who you're afraid are so dumb that they might reveal important company secrets to callers. You don't disconnect their telephones and continue to send them paychecks; you just fire them. The problem in that case isn't the telephone numbers at which your incompetant employees are contacted; it's the people themselves. Likewise, the "ports-as-open-doors" mentality, I think, distracts from the real problem, which is the services that are listening on those ports.
I'm responding to a lot of ignorance I've seen, where even career I.T. guys (MCSEs!) practiced 'network security' as though they didn't really understand what was going on. If you do understand, awesome.
(Next up: First, ways to wedge the phrase 'white male heterosexist patriarchy' into conversation; and then, techniques for applying the word 'phallus' to inanimate objects that in no way resemble the male reproductive organ. Stay tuned!)
>Yep then this magically secure windows box user fires up IE surfs a couple of web sites and gets smoked by a remote code execution vulnerability.
I guess I took it for granted that we were using a decent browser...;-)
>Yes you can do a fairly good job of securing a windows box but about the time you get it right you are left with a computer that has the usefulness of a toaster.
Ah! For simplicity, I'd left my solution to that problem out of my previous post. Once you kill the crap, connect, and update, you download safer replacements -- say, Firefox for browsing, Cygwin SFTP for sharing files, etc. In the process, I generally pretty-thoroughly unixify my Windows machines.
By now I'm obviously not talking about a general solution to Joe User's problems. I'm telling you what I personally like, which I can't expect others to -- and which would not be realistic in a production IT environment. So there are plenty of other solutions, and a hardware firewall is a perfectly good one.
My purpose is really to encourage a more rational worldview about what it is that makes a Windows box insecure. It's not "OMG Windows;" it's buggy services (and clients, like IE) that run by default. A dozen times, I've seen people "disable Windows filesharing because it's insecure" (fair enough) by blocking the appropriate ports on a local software firewall. That's silly. Just turn the service off. I'm trying to challenge the voodoo approach I've seen in homes (and even in IT) so many times, where people simply don't understand that their problem is not "hackers," mystical cyber-warriors who "break in" through sheer mental force, but low-IQ programs that can be sweet-talked out of their pants.
>Because you said 5 minutes instead of 12 minutes?
I hadn't recalled the exact figure -- 5 minutes, 12 minutes, etc -- but it is exactly this kind of anecdote that I'm talking about. If the research paper has data, I can't argue with that; it's fact. But if you take reasonable steps to secure the box before you insert that RJ-45 connector, in my experience, you'll be just fine.
I am offended every time an ISP tries to install software on my computer. When we go to the gas station, do the attendants try to glue widgets to our upholstery or steering wheels?
It's damned AOL, convincing people wrongly since the beginning that "The Internet" is a piece of software on their computer. It is not. It is a utility, and an ethernet cable is just like a power cord.
(This small rant after a Verizon FIOS install put shedloads of crap on my parents' PC. I had to explain to them that this changed nothing about how they were to use the computer, that they were to ignore the new icons until I got around to uninstalling the crap, and that Firefox and Thunderbird would continue to work as usual. Unfortunately, you HAD to install the software, as the installer also contacts servers at Verizon et al to confirm your account...)
I really, really don't get it. It's not that hard to keep a Windows box safe. I do understand how grandma can screw up, but I just do not buy the rubbish that every Windows machine gets compromised in five minutes.
People talk about "open ports." To me, that's right up there with "oh no! My IP address is visible!" paranoia. It's just not how computers work! Worms don't somehow jump into your computer through magic holes called "ports:" They exploit bugs in services.
So, disable all the services you don't need. Get rid of the blasted Windows filesharing cruft. Shoot the scripting host. Turn off the remote desktop crap. Look through all the services, and just clean all that junk out. If you don't have idiot programs running that worms can fool into executing arbitrary code or otherwise misbehaving, you're ok! Then connect to the 'net and install the latest updates. In the time it takes you to do that, nobody will jump up through your NIC and give your computer gonorrea.
A firewall is a safety net, and it makes perfect sense in, say, a production IT department to have as many safety nets and backups as you can. But a properly-configured machine, without exploitable crap running, shouldn't strictly need it, and I really think that a competent personal user can easily stay safe.
As for the "security software" the article speaks of: Though an up-to-date antivirus is a decent idea, most software firewalls and other pieces of security software really just operate something like modern-day politicians, keeping users alarmed so as to justify their own existance. "Someone is trying to HACK you!" they scream, as an innocent ICMP ping request arrives at your computer. Pfft. Save your CPU cycles and just don't be a fool!
Slashdot Mirror
True... and "toughness" is not the same as "stiffness" either. "Toughness" refers to a material's resistance to failure by fatigue (whereas "stiffness" is, as you said, resistance to bending -- Young's Modulus). They are clearly not the same thing, as there are plenty of brittle materials which are stiff yet fail quickly in fatigue.
On a related subject, do you ever wince when somebody on TV refers to something that can push harder as being more "powerful?" Or who talks about some kind of battery having more "power" than another when they clearly mean "energy?" I understand that these words are commonly confused in everyday use, but -- if you're putting together a supposedly-educational show, for the love-of-god get it right; even if your viewers don't appreciate the subtlely, choosing words like "velocity" or "energy" when appropriate aren't going to confuse them!
To science writers everywhere: I know, I'm not perfect either -- but could you please refrain from running your fingernails across my mental chalkboard?
Y'know, I remember reading that the 'active ingredient' that makes feces smell as it does is actually used in small quantities in perfume. (A quick google search hints that the chemical is named methyl mercaptan -- but I remember it sounding different, so that might not be correct...)
So, one might say that the scent of the Jersey shore is reminiscent of a fine cologne...
Debian r0x0rz! Gentoo is teh sux!
*intelligent conversation ensues*
QBasic was one of the first languages I ever played with. For me it was just a toy, so I didn't need it to be tremendous -- but as a toy, I actually thought it was a lot of fun (that's why I taught myself C ;-)).
I think Microsoft's biggest mistake wasn't anything they screwed up with the language per-se, but hiding it on the Windows CD instead of giving it to everybody in the Start Menu! Imagine how much more computer literate everyone would be if their OS shipped with an easy-to-use programming language visibly installed! I'd argue that it'd do more than increase understanding of computers; playing with logic I will swear actively increases intelligence.
Programming is great fun. People need to get into it before they're too old or they won't see it. It'd be like expecting a 40-year-old to play with Legos... (We get the creative spark trained out of us as we age. I'm trying desperately to hang on to mine! [Got any pointers?*])
*(I can see those jokes with punchlines like '0xd3adb33f' coming from here already!)
Anyway, Windows needs a dead-simple BASIC or LISP or whatever, with a dead-simple graphics library, and some cool little example programs with source, and it needs to put them all in a folder on the Desktop with a good searchable helpfile. The world needs more Legos.
Fair enough. Actually, there's a robotics course here at college that is taught using basically that sort of setup. So I'm not writing off his idea -- just giving fair warning about some limitations (because, since I've run into them, I'm quite frustrated right now... and I'd rather the OP not be!).
Anyway.
If you're really not concerned with hard realtime stuff, and you're teaching kids, you know, you might even want to use a teaching language instead of Java (not that there's anything really wrong with Java...) Scheme? ;-)
>I would go with something like DSL( Damn Small Linux )
I'm doing something similar with a headless single-board computer. The one thing that you forget, that I thought would be easy, and which is now kicking the crap out of me, is that Linux is not out of the box hard realtime. Latency sucks for control applications.
I thought I had a solution for this: RTAI. These are extensions to the kernel that allow you to do hard realtime tasks. But I can't get the damn thing to work. I can either compile a 2.2 kernel with an old version of RTAI which will boot but freeze the system if I try to access any of the realtime timers, or a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel with a newer and more mature version of RTAI -- but even without RTAI, neither the 2.4 nor 2.6 kernels seems to want to boot. So, I'm less-than-happy.
If you can get realtime Linux working, more power to you. Many people apparently do. But don't try it on a tight schedule!
DOS might be easier and make more sense. With a robot, you really want low-level control of the hardware, and DOS just hands that to you out of the box. You could try FreeDOS.
>Sony lost revenue
Sony lost money on each Playstation it sold, much as Microsoft loses money on each XBox. They both make a profit because game publishers pay them licensing fees for the right to publish games for their console. Assuming for the moment that licensing fees remain fixed, pirating a copy of a game in no way affects Sony. However, if we instead assume that licensing fees depend on how much revenue publishers are making, then, if piracy hurts publishers, then it impacts Sony.
>the publishers lost revenue
That's true so long as those people who were playing pirated games would have otherwise paid for the publisher's games. The OP implied that, were it not for a supply of pirated games, nobody would have bought a PS to begin with. We can assume that these PS owners, motivated to purchase their consoles by piracy, did on rare occasions buy games from publishers. The question then is: Does a large number of people (who mainly rely on piracy) who occasionally buy a game from a publisher, overall buy more games or fewer games than would the smaller group of people who would have bought a PS had piracy not been widespread and who would have more frequently bought games. If case A is true, then piracy is a net win for publishers (an example from outside of gaming where this is true: Adobe and Photoshop); if case B is true, then piracy really does hurt publishers.
>the developers lost revenue
Assuming that the cut that developers get is proportional to the number of copies that are sold, then essentially the same argument as above applies.
>everyone in the distribution chain lost revenue.
BestBuy or its equivalent made money by selling more Playstations, and lost money by selling fewer games. How do these balance out? Hard to tell.
You also left out one obvious winner:
The guy selling pirated copies on the corner made money!
This is an observation for which you'll certainly get annoyed with me ;-), but don't ignore black markets just because they're not legal; they're a part of the economy too!
Overall, how are the benefits and harms distributed? Does anyone really come out worse? Hard to tell. The data will never exist, because it cannot be reliably collected -- and, if it could be, nobody without an ideology would exist to do the collecting!
I'm not sure I believe this.
I worked doing VLSI design for a short time as an intern, so, though I can't claim overwhelming expertise, I've learned more about the industry than I think the general public knows. Foundry tech is hideously expensive, requiring gigantic investments. It costs so much that it's gotten to the point that even competitors do joint work (with tension and assorted legal handcuffs, to be sure -- and they keep it quiet -- but in the end they all cross-license with each other) to develop new foundry technologies (and, to a lesser extent, "I.P."), because it's just so. damn. expensive. Old rivals are forced to quietly build each others' chips, because neither can handle it on their own.
You might be able to design a chip, send it off to TSMC, and have them produce it -- but even that costs boatloads. And it's not going to work quite right the first time!
I recall, maybe a year ago, there was a big press release about a Chinese CPU which was supposed to demonstrate China's rising power. It was about as fast as a Pentium III. Given what they were starting with, that's pretty damn impressive -- but you also notice that they couldn't pop out a Core 2 Duo. There's a lot of infrastructure required that's just not there yet.
Even people like PowerVR, with their Kyro cores, couldn't effectively challenge ATI and nVidia: They produced a decent budget core, for a little while, but they couldn't keep up, and now they're designing cores for chips other people design which end up in cell phones. They're probably making more money that way -- but they just couldn't stay on the bleeding edge.
So, no, a company in China can't build a low-budget ATI-killer overnight -- and I don't believe it's just the drivers.
Ah, don't I feel dumb now? Well, good! I was afraid that Slashdot might be losing its edge and turning the wrong kind of cynical!
>Artists choose their fields based on desire, not money, and those that do deserve to get fucked over as they're clueless twats.
Do you know who else chose a career based on desire instead of money, and so by your definition was a clueless twat?
Leibniz. Gauss. Bohr. Planck. Einstein. Feynman. Heisenberg. Schrodinger.
They weren't poor, but I doubt they played the game for the cash prize.
Want another example of a clueless twat? Anybody who quietly contributes to an OSS project without the expectation of reward, who could have sold those hours for a wage instead. Linux and friends may now get help from some corporations, but they were the brainchildren of twats.
And, by your definition, I, who intend to spend the next five years pursuing an advanced degree which will cost of my time more than it can ever add to my bank account, am also a clueless twat. So, if you can't tell by now, I must respectfully disagree in the strongest terms.
You see, when we complain about the music being no good, we're not complaining that it's not mercenary enough. We're wishing that it had the soul you seem to insist we all sell.
You need money, but life's too short to just spend 9-to-5 each day chasing it.
>CS has become a joke, and most curriculum's resemble job training in Visual Studio.
Agreed: In many schools, that's what they call "Computer Science," when at best it's really "Software Engineering," or, more likely, just "Computer Programming." When friends at tech. schools tell me about their curricula, it often sounds like what you describe.
But my experience has been good. I have a lot of complaints about my university, but I'm actually quite impressed with what I've seen from the CS department. It's quite theoretical, and the CS majors with whom I'm friends have spent a lot of time on problems like computability and on proofs from graph theory.
I'm an E.E. so I've not spent much time in the C.S. department. But in the one course I took, the professor said the following -- which I think nicely demonstrates that he had the right idea about what his mission was: "I think 'Computer Science' is a terrible name," he said; "First off, it's not about computers. They're just a tool that we use. Would you call Astronomy 'Telescope Science?' Second, it's not a science. Science is about using the scientific method to test hypotheses. We don't do that. So what is computer science? Well, mostly, it's math. But whereas mathematicians tend to be concerned with 'what is true' -- for example, 'the square root of a number is some other number such that the product of that number with itself equals the first number' -- computer scientists tend to care about, 'So how do I get one?' -- in the case of a square root: How do I go about getting the number that satisfies the mathematician's definition? So whereas mathematicians speak in declarative sentences, computer scientists speak in imperative sentences. And it's also a little engineering; that's the practical application of CS. But basically, it's math."
I keep hearing references to horribly designed myspace profiles. For the benefit of those Slashdotters who haven't see this dreck, please post your most egregious examples in reply.
>I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?
Depends.
If your second language is Spanish and you work in Miami -- definitely.
If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.
Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-)
I'm so jealous of my friends from other countries. Language education in the U.S. is so screwed up: We don't start kids until it's far too late to learn to speak without an accent. My international friends have more than one native language; native languages come 'free!' I just have some minimal and essentially useless high school and intro college French.
Of course, my jealously extends to more than language education. It sounds like they've had so much more adventure in their lives. And they have an obvious target: If you want to go to the best colleges, you go to the U.S. (for now). What obvious overseas targets do I have? I'm here already!
I'd rather have been born in a country that's moving up, where I'd have more hope, than in a country that sits back on crumbling past glories.
*feebly waves a flag*
>The two types of social intelligence are related, because understanding the emotional state of an audience is part of entertaining them.
Most definitely!
>Much of it comes from an egalitarian fallacy that they implicitly subscribe to - that we are "really" all the same, when we actually differ in some very fundamental ways.
Do you have examples in mind?
>Computers are easy to learn. People are more complex. I often wonder, when I read topics like this and posts like yours, if the issue is that "geeks" are scared to figure out the more complex topic of people because they might fail and stick to computers because figuring out ones and zeros is easier.
I've heard arguments like that before, and I can understand where they come from, but I've never really thought that they were correct.
The way I see it, there are a few different types of social skills, which fall into two broad categories:
- Emotional skills: the ability to empathize and to implicitly communicate good intentions.
- Conversational skills: the talent for entertaining people by interacting with them.
It's often assumed that 'geeks' lack social skills in all their forms, but from what I've seen, many do have #1 -- just not #2 (Of course, there are also those who are just embittered jerks. But I think that's a minority.) Skill #2, I think, depends largely on confidence.> You made the conscious choice to develop that attitude. You can make the conscious choice to lose the attitude.
It's always good to nurture a more positive outlook. Certainly, these things take time to develop and you can't will yourself happy overnight, but you can help the right kind of worldvew to grow in your head. That said, I didn't pick up negative vibes from the OP -- it was other girls who had problems; she herself did feel like she had something to prove, but stayed reasonably positive (so, more power to her).
>Or is it that you aren't as smart about your own feelings, attitudes and behaviors as you are about computers?
That, I'll be honest, is something I've had to learn: To know what I want, and to appropriately reject the things I don't. That's not so much a 'nerd' thing: I think many people feel guilty thinking about themselves and their own wants; we're "supposed" to be selfless. But it's just not healthy. Pay attention to what other people want and try to help them. Sometimes, put their desires above your own. But know what your desires are. And you can't work them out logically from first principles; they are your axioms.
>Europe and America aren't becons of light either.
Ain't that the truth. And either I'm just getting older, or the whole world has just gotten uglier recently, full of tribalism and xenophobia. Here in the U.S., I keep hearing Mexicans used as scapegoats for our economic problems. In Europe -- well, the French riots a while back were graphic evidence that race is a real problem there too. What's going on? So, I've become hypersensitive to examples of racism everywhere -- which is probably not a good thing, because if I keep doing that then I'll look for racism directed at me, and so distrust those of races-not-my-own, and so become racist myself -- and I'd like to shape what goes on inside my head so as to avoid that as much as possible.
Anyway. (Before I get self-absorbedly bloggerlike...)
>Harley Davidson.
Really? Heh! I always thought they were overweight and silly, much preferring sportbikes myself. That's funny (I think most Americans think of Harleys as 'American' and, say, Suzukis as 'Japanese,' and so assume that sportbikes are more popular in Japan).
One even better example of a sort of 'exoticism with mirror symmetry' I heard recently is that, in the U.S., the puzzle-with-numbers game is called 'Sodoku,' whereas, in Japan, it is known as "Number Place." I keep chuckling at that. Silly, funny humans.
Do you or have you lived in Japan?
(I haven't.)
What I've heard, though, is that the younger generation is actually enamored of American culture, going so far as to buy American flags and put them up on their walls in the same way that American teens might put up posters of rock stars or Che Guevara. Those much older, I have heard, have memories of WWII and do hate the U.S. (partly because Japan never had much of a 'Nuremberg' - a public nose-rubbing - and there was not the same moral reflection there as there was in Germany.)
If Japanese youth-culture does exalt American pop-culture and consumerism, it does strike me as somewhat occidentalist/exoticist but that's not so bad.
All that said, I do hear (1) that non-Japanese Asian women (friends-of-friends) who've attempted to work in Japan have been shocked by a very-low glass ceiling (and symbolic things, like that they were expected to serve tea at meetings); (2) that if you are black you can expect a sort of celebrity novelty status but no real respect or advancement; (3) that if you are Korean you will meet with significant hostility; and (4) that Japanese immigration policy (especially w.r.t. the Phillipines) is rather xenophobic.
These negatives combined with the pro-American culture I mentioned earlier combine in my understanding to create a rather complicated picture.
But, like I said, this is just an impressionist painting made from anecdotes I've heard. I don't study Japanese culture or language myself, and I've never been there.
>Here's a hint: a service listening for incoming connections creates an "open port." If nobody is listening, the port is not open.
Hmm. Ok, that's sort of a semantic point, but I don't really disagree. I do understand that it's ports that services listen on: I've written some clients and servers in C for Windows and for Linux, so I get how all this stuff works. My point is that people take a voodoo approach of "closing ports" with some kind of ugly software firewall rather than just turning off what they don't need or trust.
Imagine you're running a call center, and there are a couple of employees who you're afraid are so dumb that they might reveal important company secrets to callers. You don't disconnect their telephones and continue to send them paychecks; you just fire them. The problem in that case isn't the telephone numbers at which your incompetant employees are contacted; it's the people themselves. Likewise, the "ports-as-open-doors" mentality, I think, distracts from the real problem, which is the services that are listening on those ports.
I'm responding to a lot of ignorance I've seen, where even career I.T. guys (MCSEs!) practiced 'network security' as though they didn't really understand what was going on. If you do understand, awesome.
...in a wheelchair
(Next up: First, ways to wedge the phrase 'white male heterosexist patriarchy' into conversation; and then, techniques for applying the word 'phallus' to inanimate objects that in no way resemble the male reproductive organ. Stay tuned!)
*rolls eyes*
>Yep then this magically secure windows box user fires up IE surfs a couple of web sites and gets smoked by a remote code execution vulnerability.
I guess I took it for granted that we were using a decent browser... ;-)
>Yes you can do a fairly good job of securing a windows box but about the time you get it right you are left with a computer that has the usefulness of a toaster.
Ah! For simplicity, I'd left my solution to that problem out of my previous post. Once you kill the crap, connect, and update, you download safer replacements -- say, Firefox for browsing, Cygwin SFTP for sharing files, etc. In the process, I generally pretty-thoroughly unixify my Windows machines.
By now I'm obviously not talking about a general solution to Joe User's problems. I'm telling you what I personally like, which I can't expect others to -- and which would not be realistic in a production IT environment. So there are plenty of other solutions, and a hardware firewall is a perfectly good one.
My purpose is really to encourage a more rational worldview about what it is that makes a Windows box insecure. It's not "OMG Windows;" it's buggy services (and clients, like IE) that run by default. A dozen times, I've seen people "disable Windows filesharing because it's insecure" (fair enough) by blocking the appropriate ports on a local software firewall. That's silly. Just turn the service off. I'm trying to challenge the voodoo approach I've seen in homes (and even in IT) so many times, where people simply don't understand that their problem is not "hackers," mystical cyber-warriors who "break in" through sheer mental force, but low-IQ programs that can be sweet-talked out of their pants.
>Because you said 5 minutes instead of 12 minutes?
I hadn't recalled the exact figure -- 5 minutes, 12 minutes, etc -- but it is exactly this kind of anecdote that I'm talking about. If the research paper has data, I can't argue with that; it's fact. But if you take reasonable steps to secure the box before you insert that RJ-45 connector, in my experience, you'll be just fine.
I am offended every time an ISP tries to install software on my computer. When we go to the gas station, do the attendants try to glue widgets to our upholstery or steering wheels?
It's damned AOL, convincing people wrongly since the beginning that "The Internet" is a piece of software on their computer. It is not. It is a utility, and an ethernet cable is just like a power cord.
(This small rant after a Verizon FIOS install put shedloads of crap on my parents' PC. I had to explain to them that this changed nothing about how they were to use the computer, that they were to ignore the new icons until I got around to uninstalling the crap, and that Firefox and Thunderbird would continue to work as usual. Unfortunately, you HAD to install the software, as the installer also contacts servers at Verizon et al to confirm your account...)
I really, really don't get it. It's not that hard to keep a Windows box safe. I do understand how grandma can screw up, but I just do not buy the rubbish that every Windows machine gets compromised in five minutes.
People talk about "open ports." To me, that's right up there with "oh no! My IP address is visible!" paranoia. It's just not how computers work! Worms don't somehow jump into your computer through magic holes called "ports:" They exploit bugs in services.
So, disable all the services you don't need. Get rid of the blasted Windows filesharing cruft. Shoot the scripting host. Turn off the remote desktop crap. Look through all the services, and just clean all that junk out. If you don't have idiot programs running that worms can fool into executing arbitrary code or otherwise misbehaving, you're ok! Then connect to the 'net and install the latest updates. In the time it takes you to do that, nobody will jump up through your NIC and give your computer gonorrea.
A firewall is a safety net, and it makes perfect sense in, say, a production IT department to have as many safety nets and backups as you can. But a properly-configured machine, without exploitable crap running, shouldn't strictly need it, and I really think that a competent personal user can easily stay safe.
As for the "security software" the article speaks of: Though an up-to-date antivirus is a decent idea, most software firewalls and other pieces of security software really just operate something like modern-day politicians, keeping users alarmed so as to justify their own existance. "Someone is trying to HACK you!" they scream, as an innocent ICMP ping request arrives at your computer. Pfft. Save your CPU cycles and just don't be a fool!
>I guess he was disappointed he can't safely store his server root passwords in his JS files.
I hope that, before that, he didn't think he could safely store his passwords in EXEs too...