Why do we need to restrict the TLDs at all? First make sure all countries and territories we have a name for have their name reserved. Then open it all up for registration. The rules for the domain you register will be those of the registrant, not something imposed on the TLD. "somedomain.xxx"? No problem. You want your telephone number.tel? Contact your nearest domain reggistrator. You're 14 years old, immature and want an "imso.horny" adress? Register it (just don't expect it to actually help you get a date).
Spend your summers doing stuff other than coding. Get a job working outside or at Mac Donalds. Once you graduate and spend your days coding, you'll wish you did. You have years of 'summers of code' ahead - at your job. Try something else while you have the chance.
Of course, once you graduate you compete for jobs with people that did things like Summer of Code or interned at future employers rather than pulling weeds or slinging burgers. Which means that those burger-cooking skills might come in handy after graduation as well.
There's a lot of different device categories out there, but only so much space in peoples' pockets or in their minds. Two interactive devices, perhaps three if one is special purpose, is probably the limit.
On the high end, small and light notebooks are good enough today that they work as real computers - I have a Panasonic R3, and it's my only computer. I meant to get a real desktop as a complement, but I just never got arond to it. Whenever I have my bag with me (and I usually have), it comes along. And it is a far better platform for "computing" than any PDA out there. If I were to get a PDA again, it would have to be something that complements this one on the low end.
On the other end, my current, normal (not a smartphone) phone is capable of most incidental things I need. Calling (not that I actually speak that often), email, music player, small text reader (directions, schedule and the like), alarm clock, dictionary - web surfing too, though I don't use it much. It's certainly not perfect - the screen resolution does equal that of my old PalmIII, and is in color and much easier to read, but is of course smaller - but it is always with me and it is _good_enough_.
A PDA would have to displace either my phone or my computer for me to consider one again. And to do that it would have to do what the lost gadget did at least reasonably well, and give me something extra - some compelling functionality that would make it interesting to switch in the first place. I am not aware of any such functionality today.
Yes, it's partly the optics. Mainly it is the size of the imaging sensor, though - or to be more precise, the size of the individual sensor sites. Smaller sensor and higher resolution both mean smaller sites, and smaller sites mean more noise.
In the end, you will not be able to ever get the same quality out from a tiny unit like on a camera phone as you get from an APS-sized fixed-lens or SLR-type one.
That said, I have both a DSLR and a 1.2Mp cameraphone and they both have their uses. The DSLR is more important of course, but I would not want to be without the cameraphone either. Even though I drag the big camera around most of the time, I still now and then find myself in situations where I didn't have it, or taking it out would have taken too long and drawn too much attention, or I just wanted to send a picture of something to my SO, and going via DSLR, computer and email was at least two steps too many and half a day too slow.
The last PC that I owned that ran Microsoft software had Windows 3.1 installed, but I just ran it in DOS mode.
I have a Linux PC, but I just turn up the monitor brightness really high, and use it as a lamp. What's your point?:-)
Well, I did the same thing with Win3.11. At that time, most software was still DOS-based, and the development system I used, from Borland, had a mature, very good DOS based environment. If you were going to develop DOS software anyway 3.11 didn't bring anything to the developer that you didn't have in DOS already - except greater instability, which was bad enough as it was.
3.11 was cute, but there was still little reason beyond that to actually run it. That changed with Win95, of course.
Let's take a realistic point of view. We have a computer user who seems to be well experienced. They even have a nicely designed blog online where you can write in your favourite Windows-only applications. Yet they claim that they have never been a windows user before (Making me wonder where they have been for the past 10+ years where windows has been the ubiquitous consumer & business software platform.)
I haven't used Windows since Windows 95 (in 1995, when I briefly worked as a developer, writing some DB interface apps). When I say "use" I of course do not include the occasional use of an internet café or airport machine to get at my webmail or any other temporary, superficial encounter - they could have been OSX or Linux and the experience would have been all but identical.
Windows have certainly been the premier consumer OS, and is the premier business platform. It is not, however, the only, or necessarily even the most common platform for technical and scientific computing. I have worked at three labs so far, and in only one of them did Windows have a real prescence beyond the administrative staff (and Linux was still the most common OS for development).
So, I run Linux at work and at home while my gf uses a mac. I have no need for any deeper knowledge of the Windows platform. I've never shunned it - apparently it's supposed to have become a fairly nice development platform nowadays - but I don't have a need for it and neither am I very interested. And since I don't need it and don't really want it, I don't want to spend the money and time to set a machine up either.
This is really only tangentially about search engines. It's really about people finding things by searching, rather than by browsing, today.
It used to be a potential reader would be standing in front of a magazine stand, or leafing idly through a newspaper. To grab that reader, a witty, slightly hard-to-understand headline was great - it catches your attention and makes you at least look closer since you want to know what that mysterious piece is actually about. And thus you made the single-copy sale, and perhaps, in time, sold a subrscription.
Today we increasingly don't start by picking up a paper and looking within for what we want; we find things by searching for what we want and end up on anyone of a large number of newspapers and magazine sites. The choice of paper isn't the start of the process - the search is. And when we search, that witty off-color headline is going to mislead us since it doesn't actually contain the key terms that would indicate relevance. Making headlines and summaries clear, straight and to the point isn't about pandering to search engines, but of adjusting to the changing behavior of the readership.
It's the reader behavior that has changed. The search engine angle is just a smokescreen.
I can't think of any reason why a UK company would buy a.EU domain unless it was out to alienate it's customers, market to the rest of the EU under a different domain, or simply just bought every TLD for it's domain name.
For more and more companies - in UK as in all other eu countries - the "home market" is increasingly eu as a whole, not the particular country they're residing in. Their relation to their customers in eu as a whole is as important as the customers in the home country - and a lot more important than the small minority that would get their underwear in knots over the use of an.eu domain.
It's hard work, though, much harder than a European language for English-speakers.
I disagree. Well, I'm not a native English-speaker (my native language is Swedish), but I'd say the difficulty should be the same for me as for you. I found German to be heavier going than Japanese - the grammar mess was much more difficult for me to get my head around than anythign I've encountered in Japanese.
natural cells in your eye than can detect light or "a power source, a camera of sorts, a computational element, and an array of electrodes that can crank out precise, well-timed current pulses" (from tfa)... is that really a choice??
You're right, of course.
Bring on the camera; zoom lens for me, please, and an external video input too!
Technically, any character that is valid Hanzi (Chinese character) is valid Japanese too. Old "comprehensive" multi-volume dictionaries used to list around 50000 characters; of course when it came to usage statistics, the majority of characters was only ever used in the dictionaries themselves, and never anywhere else.
So there is a standard set of characters defined today - about 2200 general Kanji and another 2-300 that are used only in names. These are the ones learned in school, and I believe that "state-supported" texts, like official documents, signs, textbooks and so on (and perhaps newspapers too?) are limited to this set only.
But then there are a lot of subject-specific characters in use, especially in academia. Someone said that the typical well-educated Japanese will know around 3-5000 characters total. On the other hand, about 800 characters are considered the minimum for literacy, and with the first 1100 - learned by sixth grade - you're going to be able to parse most general texts (you may not recognize everything, but you'll have enough context to figure out the meaning).
Japanese, the language, is not difficult at all. The grammar is very regular, and spelling problems are nonexistent. I've found it substantially easier than either English or German in this regard.
There are, however, three pitfalls:
1. Kanji. Yes, you do need to learn them. It's time-consuming, but necessary. One hurdle with learning Japanese is that you can't really practice your language through reading like with many other languages since you need the kanji to do so. SO picking them up will enable you to practice a lot more. On the upside, learning kanji makes for a nice shortcut to pick up new vocabulary.
2. Politeness. By convention or habit, all textbooks and courses tend to focus on polite language, only covering the familiar language to the extent you need it for grammatical correctness. That's often not how Japanese speak, however.
Your early contacts with Japanese in the real world will tend to be shopkeepers, waiters and so on, and they will not use the polite language to you; they'll use honirific language - which often isn't covered until fairly late in any introductory course. So you'll have no idea what they're saying, which makes them nervous so they start using even more polite language, which just makes it worse.
And once you start to know people, they'll drop the politeness (just like you do in any other language) and speak more familiar language - but since you haven't practiced it in class, you're lost again.
In television or radio, you'll often have either familiar language (dramas, comedies, game shows or anything with shouting, laughing and so on) or honorific language (news, debates or other 'serious' matters), again neither of which you've actually studied or practiced.
The politeness thing isn't difficult, really, but you do need to get an ear for those ways of speaking or writing as well, not just the safe-but-boring middle level. I'd wish that was covered much earlier.
3. Dialects. Japan is not a small country, and it has a large population. Dialects a numerous and varied. Of course, what you're learning is some abstract "television-presenter Japanese", that isn't too dissimilar from an attenuated Tokyo dialect. But go to Osaka further down the coast (where I reaside), and the language changes drastically. If you've only ever studied and heard "standard Japanese" you won't stand a chance. I've lived here a couple of years, and I still don't understand a word when someone starts speaking in a broad Osaka dialect.
Off the top of my head, three reasons email rules the roost:
1. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has it, and everyone uses it. You never run into any snag because your mother doesn't use the same collaboration tool (for planning your dad's 60th birthday) as your company uses (for planning the company president's 60th birthday).
2. It fails gracefully. Everybody knows email isn't perfect, and that the user's actions have a large inpact on it, so you always plan around the fact that people are forgetful, misplace things, delete stuff without meaning to and so on. You send reminders, ask for real confirmation replies (not automated calendar updates), keep a look at the general email banter for signs of misunderstandings and so on. If an email is misplaced, it will probably get caught or planned around.
3. It has an obvious mental model. An email is a note. You pass it to people, make copies of it, forward it, delete it. There is no complex internal state to the system to (mis)understand. All functional complexity lies with the users - and we're extraordinary good at understanding that particular complex system, and indeed find it joyful to do so.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is a "risktaker voter"? What risk is there in voting? There is almost no chance at all that your vote will be the deciding one; in almost all elections, your vote will either be superfluous to the winner, or you'll be voting for a loser.
With strict proportionality rather than winner-takes-all, the individual vote is slightly more influential - the more votes, the more seats, and it's linear (once you get over the minimum limit). Your vote still matters very little, but it's not zero.
With small parties, you're taking a risk since they have a pretty large chance of not reaching the cutoff limit, acheiving no seats at all, thus reducing the worth of your vote (and every vote on that party) to zero.
But that is tangential; the "risk" I had in mind was political, not statistical. A new, small party is an unknown card. The parties that have appeared and gotten seats in modern times have all veered wildly from their intended objectives within a few years. The Christian party went from a, well, born-again evangelical Christian party to a generic family oriented value-conservative member of the right - they no longer argue against abortion, and I don't even think they have "christian" in their name anymore. The green party veered from a centrist position, to the ridiculous left, back to center and lately into some liberal/left-wing/conservative combination I'm not sure even they understand. The "New Democracy" went from breakout to implosion within a few years; they mostly exist as a court case where fascist remnants are suing each other for the remains of the party money.
Voting for a new party is a risk - a political one. You don't know what you're going to get; the only certainty seems to be you're not getting what you thought. Not that many people are dissatisfied or risktaking enough to gamble on it, rather than choosing among the established, safer, options.
iWell, no. The poll was on Aftonbladet's site, not Expressen's site. (Not that the difference in sensationalism is all *that* great, but it's definitely noticeable.)
Um, I did say "news" - Expressen ceased to have anything to do with actual news years ago:)
The fact remains though that the EU should continue to have no say. They dont fund it, they never created it
A bit of a misconception. "The Internet" is a bunch of national networks (funded by their respective countries, with Arpanet being the US network, SUNET being the Swedish one and so on) interconnected and with common rules to make them work together seamlessly. The US funds the US networks and part of the transnational links; the EU countries fund their parts and part of the links and so on.
So the EU already has "their own network" just like the US, and it's the EU part of the Internet. Having a say on it is perfectly reasonable.
Even one seat in the swedish parliament would be a huge victory.
It would. It won't happen. 4% nationwide is a huge barrier, and it's a rare thing indeed for a party to be able to.
And this election year, as I mentioned, there are already a couple of other new parties with a lot more visibility and general appeal sucking away the available pool of risktaker voters. Notably, even the most visible, most believable new party is currently polling at below 1%.
Far easier is to get local seats; this happens in a few places every year. Those parties are focusing on local issues, on the other hand.
So, the party is a fun idea, a good exercize in democracy, and possibly a very good way to raise awareness of copyright issues, but no, it won't get seats in parliament.
Not to mention the gravity and seriousness of participating in an anonymous online poll on the frontpage of the foremost sensationalist evening paper in the country.
"Hehehe, cool, 'pirate party', let's click on that. Free rum to everyone, right? Hehehe. I like parrots. Hehehehe"
Worth noting is that the 57% approval rating was most likely achieved on a completely unbiased straw poll on DALnet.
I very seriously doubt 4% of the voting public is even aware of this party's existence. We already have three other new mobs of power-hungry morons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H groups of upstanding, concerned citizens hogging the spotlight; don't expect this one to make much of a splash.
If you want to do CS "for real", and not just have it as a job skill, then yes, you'll need quite a bit of mathematics.
On the other hand, programming, by itself, is not really worth all that much as a skill by itself outside the actual field of CS. Somebody who only have skills as a programmer is not going to find themselves in any great demand. You need to have something else that is relevant for the business field you will find yourself working in. A "programmer" is always going to lose out to a "[chosen field skill] with documented programming skills".
What I mean is, if you aim to work with programming in, say, the financial sector, then having a solid, documented skill set in economics or revision wil be at least as important as programming skill. If you're aiming for some technical field, you will need at least a bachelor's degree in subjects relevant to the field, whether it means a degree in chemistry, mechanical engineering, combustion physics, medicine or whatever. And always, always, "people skills" matter and are important, no matter what field you choose, since you will always be dealing with people.
Programming skills are a lot like mathematical skill. for most fields, it is a tool, not an end in itself, so you need to know your target field first and foremost. The lone exception is if your chosen field is CD (or mathematics) itself, but then you need to go a a lot deeper into the field; a doctorate will not hurt at all at that point.
they also said that about cars, computers, video games, television, space flight, electric cars. all those are still around, and probably will be for as long as we are.
Of course, they also said that about the cravatte, off-white nylon shirts with huge collars, pet rocks, steam cars and listening to live plays via the telephone. And they were right.
That said, no, I don't think blogging is a fad either; it's too useful for that.
If you don't want to be outsourced, work for a company that thinks that they actually need to produce something,...
You do understand, don't you, that IT is not part of the production for the vast majority of companies, but a support function - like accounting or inventory management? So if a company wants to focus on its core function, moving stuff like accounting or IT to an external firm instead of building in-house competence makes good sense.
For some reason, nurses and pharmacists have a much harder time phoning their work in.
Don't worry; robot labs all over the world are looking at automating all non-critical health-care skills already. With the ballooning costs, and aging population there is little choice.
And if they fail to buid nurturing robots, they can just have them push people down the stairs instead. No more human care needed either way. ^_^
The only thing that is going to save our jobs is higher wages overseas.
Which is happening.
And of course it isn't absolute wages that matter, but wage (production cost) differences. So it is happening through higher wages in low-cost countries, and it's also happening through the lack of wage rises in high-cost countries. And, of course, through different levels of unemployment.
But do realize that just doing coding, with no expert skills to back it up is inevitably becoming the same as, say, metal machining, which once was the province of skilled experts, and is now solidly low-end (or rather no-end, with CNC machinery) unless you have additional skills and expertise to bring. Or like writing - if you don't have some field to write about you're going to have a hard time finding employment.
If you want a career, you are probably better off making some other intellectual skill set (management, statistical mechanics, brain science, economy, genetics, whatever) your main area, and supplement it with a solid grounding in programming to differentiate you. You need to know the business your future company is in.
To put it another way, a financial company, say, will readily value an accountant with good programming skills higher than a programmer with an economy minor. And either will be much more valuable than a programmer with no other skill set.
The whole "we hire anyone who knows what a compiler is" era is gone, likely forever. That came from a sudden and enormous spike in job opportunities and is unlikely to ever happen again in this field. The salaries, perks - the whole employment market - was an anomaly, so there is little point in having that as the baseline for future comparisons.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do we need yet another TLD...
Why do we need to restrict the TLDs at all? First make sure all countries and territories we have a name for have their name reserved. Then open it all up for registration. The rules for the domain you register will be those of the registrant, not something imposed on the TLD. "somedomain.xxx"? No problem. You want your telephone number.tel? Contact your nearest domain reggistrator. You're 14 years old, immature and want an "imso.horny" adress? Register it (just don't expect it to actually help you get a date).
Spend your summers doing stuff other than coding. Get a job working outside or at Mac Donalds. Once you graduate and spend your days coding, you'll wish you did. You have years of 'summers of code' ahead - at your job. Try something else while you have the chance.
Of course, once you graduate you compete for jobs with people that did things like Summer of Code or interned at future employers rather than pulling weeds or slinging burgers. Which means that those burger-cooking skills might come in handy after graduation as well.
There's a lot of different device categories out there, but only so much space in peoples' pockets or in their minds. Two interactive devices, perhaps three if one is special purpose, is probably the limit.
On the high end, small and light notebooks are good enough today that they work as real computers - I have a Panasonic R3, and it's my only computer. I meant to get a real desktop as a complement, but I just never got arond to it. Whenever I have my bag with me (and I usually have), it comes along. And it is a far better platform for "computing" than any PDA out there. If I were to get a PDA again, it would have to be something that complements this one on the low end.
On the other end, my current, normal (not a smartphone) phone is capable of most incidental things I need. Calling (not that I actually speak that often), email, music player, small text reader (directions, schedule and the like), alarm clock, dictionary - web surfing too, though I don't use it much. It's certainly not perfect - the screen resolution does equal that of my old PalmIII, and is in color and much easier to read, but is of course smaller - but it is always with me and it is _good_enough_.
A PDA would have to displace either my phone or my computer for me to consider one again. And to do that it would have to do what the lost gadget did at least reasonably well, and give me something extra - some compelling functionality that would make it interesting to switch in the first place. I am not aware of any such functionality today.
Yes, it's partly the optics. Mainly it is the size of the imaging sensor, though - or to be more precise, the size of the individual sensor sites. Smaller sensor and higher resolution both mean smaller sites, and smaller sites mean more noise.
In the end, you will not be able to ever get the same quality out from a tiny unit like on a camera phone as you get from an APS-sized fixed-lens or SLR-type one.
That said, I have both a DSLR and a 1.2Mp cameraphone and they both have their uses. The DSLR is more important of course, but I would not want to be without the cameraphone either. Even though I drag the big camera around most of the time, I still now and then find myself in situations where I didn't have it, or taking it out would have taken too long and drawn too much attention, or I just wanted to send a picture of something to my SO, and going via DSLR, computer and email was at least two steps too many and half a day too slow.
The last PC that I owned that ran Microsoft software had Windows 3.1 installed, but I just ran it in DOS mode.
I have a Linux PC, but I just turn up the monitor brightness really high, and use it as a lamp. What's your point?
Well, I did the same thing with Win3.11. At that time, most software was still DOS-based, and the development system I used, from Borland, had a mature, very good DOS based environment. If you were going to develop DOS software anyway 3.11 didn't bring anything to the developer that you didn't have in DOS already - except greater instability, which was bad enough as it was.
3.11 was cute, but there was still little reason beyond that to actually run it. That changed with Win95, of course.
Let's take a realistic point of view. We have a computer user who seems to be well experienced. They even have a nicely designed blog online where you can write in your favourite Windows-only applications. Yet they claim that they have never been a windows user before (Making me wonder where they have been for the past 10+ years where windows has been the ubiquitous consumer & business software platform.)
I haven't used Windows since Windows 95 (in 1995, when I briefly worked as a developer, writing some DB interface apps). When I say "use" I of course do not include the occasional use of an internet café or airport machine to get at my webmail or any other temporary, superficial encounter - they could have been OSX or Linux and the experience would have been all but identical.
Windows have certainly been the premier consumer OS, and is the premier business platform. It is not, however, the only, or necessarily even the most common platform for technical and scientific computing. I have worked at three labs so far, and in only one of them did Windows have a real prescence beyond the administrative staff (and Linux was still the most common OS for development).
So, I run Linux at work and at home while my gf uses a mac. I have no need for any deeper knowledge of the Windows platform. I've never shunned it - apparently it's supposed to have become a fairly nice development platform nowadays - but I don't have a need for it and neither am I very interested. And since I don't need it and don't really want it, I don't want to spend the money and time to set a machine up either.
This is really only tangentially about search engines. It's really about people finding things by searching, rather than by browsing, today.
It used to be a potential reader would be standing in front of a magazine stand, or leafing idly through a newspaper. To grab that reader, a witty, slightly hard-to-understand headline was great - it catches your attention and makes you at least look closer since you want to know what that mysterious piece is actually about. And thus you made the single-copy sale, and perhaps, in time, sold a subrscription.
Today we increasingly don't start by picking up a paper and looking within for what we want; we find things by searching for what we want and end up on anyone of a large number of newspapers and magazine sites. The choice of paper isn't the start of the process - the search is. And when we search, that witty off-color headline is going to mislead us since it doesn't actually contain the key terms that would indicate relevance. Making headlines and summaries clear, straight and to the point isn't about pandering to search engines, but of adjusting to the changing behavior of the readership.
It's the reader behavior that has changed. The search engine angle is just a smokescreen.
I can't think of any reason why a UK company would buy a .EU domain unless it was out to alienate it's customers, market to the rest of the EU under a different domain, or simply just bought every TLD for it's domain name.
.eu domain.
For more and more companies - in UK as in all other eu countries - the "home market" is increasingly eu as a whole, not the particular country they're residing in. Their relation to their customers in eu as a whole is as important as the customers in the home country - and a lot more important than the small minority that would get their underwear in knots over the use of an
It's hard work, though, much harder than a European language for English-speakers.
I disagree. Well, I'm not a native English-speaker (my native language is Swedish), but I'd say the difficulty should be the same for me as for you. I found German to be heavier going than Japanese - the grammar mess was much more difficult for me to get my head around than anythign I've encountered in Japanese.
I guess it'll vary from person to person.
natural cells in your eye than can detect light or "a power source, a camera of sorts, a computational element, and an array of electrodes that can crank out precise, well-timed current pulses" (from tfa)... is that really a choice??
You're right, of course.
Bring on the camera; zoom lens for me, please, and an external video input too!
Technically, any character that is valid Hanzi (Chinese character) is valid Japanese too. Old "comprehensive" multi-volume dictionaries used to list around 50000 characters; of course when it came to usage statistics, the majority of characters was only ever used in the dictionaries themselves, and never anywhere else.
So there is a standard set of characters defined today - about 2200 general Kanji and another 2-300 that are used only in names. These are the ones learned in school, and I believe that "state-supported" texts, like official documents, signs, textbooks and so on (and perhaps newspapers too?) are limited to this set only.
But then there are a lot of subject-specific characters in use, especially in academia. Someone said that the typical well-educated Japanese will know around 3-5000 characters total. On the other hand, about 800 characters are considered the minimum for literacy, and with the first 1100 - learned by sixth grade - you're going to be able to parse most general texts (you may not recognize everything, but you'll have enough context to figure out the meaning).
Japanese, the language, is not difficult at all. The grammar is very regular, and spelling problems are nonexistent. I've found it substantially easier than either English or German in this regard.
There are, however, three pitfalls:
1. Kanji. Yes, you do need to learn them. It's time-consuming, but necessary. One hurdle with learning Japanese is that you can't really practice your language through reading like with many other languages since you need the kanji to do so. SO picking them up will enable you to practice a lot more. On the upside, learning kanji makes for a nice shortcut to pick up new vocabulary.
2. Politeness. By convention or habit, all textbooks and courses tend to focus on polite language, only covering the familiar language to the extent you need it for grammatical correctness. That's often not how Japanese speak, however.
Your early contacts with Japanese in the real world will tend to be shopkeepers, waiters and so on, and they will not use the polite language to you; they'll use honirific language - which often isn't covered until fairly late in any introductory course. So you'll have no idea what they're saying, which makes them nervous so they start using even more polite language, which just makes it worse.
And once you start to know people, they'll drop the politeness (just like you do in any other language) and speak more familiar language - but since you haven't practiced it in class, you're lost again.
In television or radio, you'll often have either familiar language (dramas, comedies, game shows or anything with shouting, laughing and so on) or honorific language (news, debates or other 'serious' matters), again neither of which you've actually studied or practiced.
The politeness thing isn't difficult, really, but you do need to get an ear for those ways of speaking or writing as well, not just the safe-but-boring middle level. I'd wish that was covered much earlier.
3. Dialects. Japan is not a small country, and it has a large population. Dialects a numerous and varied. Of course, what you're learning is some abstract "television-presenter Japanese", that isn't too dissimilar from an attenuated Tokyo dialect. But go to Osaka further down the coast (where I reaside), and the language changes drastically. If you've only ever studied and heard "standard Japanese" you won't stand a chance. I've lived here a couple of years, and I still don't understand a word when someone starts speaking in a broad Osaka dialect.
Off the top of my head, three reasons email rules the roost:
1. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has it, and everyone uses it. You never run into any snag because your mother doesn't use the same collaboration tool (for planning your dad's 60th birthday) as your company uses (for planning the company president's 60th birthday).
2. It fails gracefully. Everybody knows email isn't perfect, and that the user's actions have a large inpact on it, so you always plan around the fact that people are forgetful, misplace things, delete stuff without meaning to and so on. You send reminders, ask for real confirmation replies (not automated calendar updates), keep a look at the general email banter for signs of misunderstandings and so on. If an email is misplaced, it will probably get caught or planned around.
3. It has an obvious mental model. An email is a note. You pass it to people, make copies of it, forward it, delete it. There is no complex internal state to the system to (mis)understand. All functional complexity lies with the users - and we're extraordinary good at understanding that particular complex system, and indeed find it joyful to do so.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is a "risktaker voter"? What risk is there in voting? There is almost no chance at all that your vote will be the deciding one; in almost all elections, your vote will either be superfluous to the winner, or you'll be voting for a loser.
With strict proportionality rather than winner-takes-all, the individual vote is slightly more influential - the more votes, the more seats, and it's linear (once you get over the minimum limit). Your vote still matters very little, but it's not zero.
With small parties, you're taking a risk since they have a pretty large chance of not reaching the cutoff limit, acheiving no seats at all, thus reducing the worth of your vote (and every vote on that party) to zero.
But that is tangential; the "risk" I had in mind was political, not statistical. A new, small party is an unknown card. The parties that have appeared and gotten seats in modern times have all veered wildly from their intended objectives within a few years. The Christian party went from a, well, born-again evangelical Christian party to a generic family oriented value-conservative member of the right - they no longer argue against abortion, and I don't even think they have "christian" in their name anymore. The green party veered from a centrist position, to the ridiculous left, back to center and lately into some liberal/left-wing/conservative combination I'm not sure even they understand. The "New Democracy" went from breakout to implosion within a few years; they mostly exist as a court case where fascist remnants are suing each other for the remains of the party money.
Voting for a new party is a risk - a political one. You don't know what you're going to get; the only certainty seems to be you're not getting what you thought. Not that many people are dissatisfied or risktaking enough to gamble on it, rather than choosing among the established, safer, options.
iWell, no. The poll was on Aftonbladet's site, not Expressen's site. (Not that the difference in sensationalism is all *that* great, but it's definitely noticeable.)
:)
Um, I did say "news" - Expressen ceased to have anything to do with actual news years ago
The fact remains though that the EU should continue to have no say. They dont fund it, they never created it
A bit of a misconception. "The Internet" is a bunch of national networks (funded by their respective countries, with Arpanet being the US network, SUNET being the Swedish one and so on) interconnected and with common rules to make them work together seamlessly. The US funds the US networks and part of the transnational links; the EU countries fund their parts and part of the links and so on.
So the EU already has "their own network" just like the US, and it's the EU part of the Internet. Having a say on it is perfectly reasonable.
Even one seat in the swedish parliament would be a huge victory.
It would. It won't happen. 4% nationwide is a huge barrier, and it's a rare thing indeed for a party to be able to.
And this election year, as I mentioned, there are already a couple of other new parties with a lot more visibility and general appeal sucking away the available pool of risktaker voters. Notably, even the most visible, most believable new party is currently polling at below 1%.
Far easier is to get local seats; this happens in a few places every year. Those parties are focusing on local issues, on the other hand.
So, the party is a fun idea, a good exercize in democracy, and possibly a very good way to raise awareness of copyright issues, but no, it won't get seats in parliament.
Not to mention the gravity and seriousness of participating in an anonymous online poll on the frontpage of the foremost sensationalist evening paper in the country.
"Hehehe, cool, 'pirate party', let's click on that. Free rum to everyone, right? Hehehe. I like parrots. Hehehehe"
Worth noting is that the 57% approval rating was most likely achieved on a completely unbiased straw poll on DALnet.
I very seriously doubt 4% of the voting public is even aware of this party's existence. We already have three other new mobs of power-hungry morons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H groups of upstanding, concerned citizens hogging the spotlight; don't expect this one to make much of a splash.
If you want to do CS "for real", and not just have it as a job skill, then yes, you'll need quite a bit of mathematics.
On the other hand, programming, by itself, is not really worth all that much as a skill by itself outside the actual field of CS. Somebody who only have skills as a programmer is not going to find themselves in any great demand. You need to have something else that is relevant for the business field you will find yourself working in. A "programmer" is always going to lose out to a "[chosen field skill] with documented programming skills".
What I mean is, if you aim to work with programming in, say, the financial sector, then having a solid, documented skill set in economics or revision wil be at least as important as programming skill. If you're aiming for some technical field, you will need at least a bachelor's degree in subjects relevant to the field, whether it means a degree in chemistry, mechanical engineering, combustion physics, medicine or whatever. And always, always, "people skills" matter and are important, no matter what field you choose, since you will always be dealing with people.
Programming skills are a lot like mathematical skill. for most fields, it is a tool, not an end in itself, so you need to know your target field first and foremost. The lone exception is if your chosen field is CD (or mathematics) itself, but then you need to go a a lot deeper into the field; a doctorate will not hurt at all at that point.
they also said that about cars, computers, video games, television, space flight, electric cars. all those are still around, and probably will be for as long as we are.
Of course, they also said that about the cravatte, off-white nylon shirts with huge collars, pet rocks, steam cars and listening to live plays via the telephone. And they were right.
That said, no, I don't think blogging is a fad either; it's too useful for that.
Or they could shove them down the stairs.
Push, definitely. Please ignore the parent poster; he's malfunctioning.
If you don't want to be outsourced, work for a company that thinks that they actually need to produce something, ...
You do understand, don't you, that IT is not part of the production for the vast majority of companies, but a support function - like accounting or inventory management? So if a company wants to focus on its core function, moving stuff like accounting or IT to an external firm instead of building in-house competence makes good sense.
For some reason, nurses and pharmacists have a much harder time phoning their work in.
Don't worry; robot labs all over the world are looking at automating all non-critical health-care skills already. With the ballooning costs, and aging population there is little choice.
And if they fail to buid nurturing robots, they can just have them push people down the stairs instead. No more human care needed either way. ^_^
The only thing that is going to save our jobs is higher wages overseas.
Which is happening.
And of course it isn't absolute wages that matter, but wage (production cost) differences. So it is happening through higher wages in low-cost countries, and it's also happening through the lack of wage rises in high-cost countries. And, of course, through different levels of unemployment.
But do realize that just doing coding, with no expert skills to back it up is inevitably becoming the same as, say, metal machining, which once was the province of skilled experts, and is now solidly low-end (or rather no-end, with CNC machinery) unless you have additional skills and expertise to bring. Or like writing - if you don't have some field to write about you're going to have a hard time finding employment.
If you want a career, you are probably better off making some other intellectual skill set (management, statistical mechanics, brain science, economy, genetics, whatever) your main area, and supplement it with a solid grounding in programming to differentiate you. You need to know the business your future company is in.
To put it another way, a financial company, say, will readily value an accountant with good programming skills higher than a programmer with an economy minor. And either will be much more valuable than a programmer with no other skill set.
The whole "we hire anyone who knows what a compiler is" era is gone, likely forever. That came from a sudden and enormous spike in job opportunities and is unlikely to ever happen again in this field. The salaries, perks - the whole employment market - was an anomaly, so there is little point in having that as the baseline for future comparisons.