The problem is, we're talking morality here, not law. Google's motto is "do no evil", not "break no laws". Applying your logic to morality only leads to relativism, where there ceases to be any absolute good just because there's multiple subjectively valid claims to it. And it's this that really bugs people. With that kind of thinking, "evil" means almost nothing at all because the line between good and evil is a moving target.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but there is such a thing as being tried for legal acts in foreign countries. Canadians and Australians can be tried in their home country for sex tourism abroad.
So from one view, it is democracy that is young and still has to prove itself.
Another way of looking at this is that corruption and abuse of power is universal in whatever form of government you have. We hope that modern forms of democracy help to keep it in check, but there are cases where it really fares no better than say, a monarchy. Consider the scandal and corruption surrounding the current Canadian government, for example. What's more is that democracy's the "power of the people", but if the people are either complacent or apathetic, then really it might as well be a monarch in power.
There's something ironic about wanting to spread democracy in other lands when in our own, 30 to 40% of us won't even bother showing up to the polls....
You need to prefix the labels with label: in your query, much the same as the site: keyword....
The only bad thing is there doesn't seem to be a succinct way of querying over multiple labels. The best I've been able to come up with is something like
label:School OR label:ll-1 foo
for searching "foo" in messages labeled with School and ll-1. Thankfully, this kind of query rarely happens....
And the fact that it's ass-backwards from how we think. It's even backwards from how we do math. It's that RPN syntax that people can't grok.
It's not RPN, it's prefix. RPN would be something more like Forth. And even RPN has its die-hard fans--quite a few, in fact. But honestly, who the hell cares about syntax anyway? It's something superficial compared to the differences in expressiveness, succinctness and overall elegance. If it did matter, I don't think perl would be as popular as it is today.
Well, think for a second. The end result was suicide, which is not something a person does on a whim. Yet he managed to accomplish everything he did in spite of how other people made him feel for his sexuality earlier.
The key here is that the minority isn't just some minority, it's one that most people treated and still treat pretty badly. In this way, simultaneously being homosexual and one of the key figures in computer science is one of his accomplishments, not some trivial fact that we should ignore.
They teach Scheme, which doesn't have OOP, but allows you quite easily to implement your own in a good page of code. As for LISP in general, maybe you should read up a little on it before you talk about it....
This doesn't turn people off of computer science, IMO-- quite the opposite, it allows them to focus on the problem solving aspect of CS before getting down to the nitty gritty of having to deal with complex syntaxes in other languages and low-level optimization.
This brings in another point.... Programming is all about problem solving, so why should a beginner have to worry about doing it step by step according to some arbitrary machine's low-level instruction set? It's like telling someone to learn to build houses by building his first house using only his hands and a forest-full of trees. It's educational in a masochistic way at best. It's wrong to omit it completely, but still better to teach later in education, I think....
I stand corrected on maybe callous use of Kanji instead of Kanji compounds, but the point remains: even if minor, influence in vocabulary clearly went both ways... and though maybe not as interesting as grammatical ties, these common points in vocabulary are just as important.
Actually I did mean kanji as in kanji compound. I've never heard the usage kanjis, nor are people so pedantic in spoken conversation that they'll correct it, so it's fairly common use now. I don't see what the fuss is about though? The context was clearly about coining the compound, not creating graphemes or logograms.
Very true, but just because it's borrowed vocabulary and not linguistic family that the two have in common doesn't mean the links between the two are nothing.... Just the same as English might not be a romance language but is still very much tied to Latin through etymological roots of words.
Imo, anecdotally and from personal experience, anyone who knows one of the two languages immediately perceives similarities that help them learn the other language (sometimes there's even pseudo-homonyms like Mandarin kaixi/Japanese kaishi for the concept "begin". And the incidence of this rises the more Chinese dialects you know). Try getting the same results from a Finnish and a Mongol and tell me how successful you are. Recall that grammar only provides the rules to using vocabulary. Without vocabulary, a language is nothing. I would argue that because the two have common vocabulary, they're very "close" languages even in the absence of linguistic family ties.
Even less of a reason to look at linguistic family in isolation is the presence of Kanji/Hanzi; educated speakers of Japanese can easily decypher if not fully read quite a lot of written Chinese even if they don't speak the language. As a note, sharing of Kanji wasn't one-way either. Quite a few compounds made their way back into Chinese, though after they were coined they weren't regarded as foreign. Example is the Kanji for crisis, "opportunity + danger"; Japanese origin AFAIK.
In defense of slashdot, this project is interesting, but like everyone else has been saying, these guys need some serious PR lessons. And while our behaviour might not be all that dignified, it's only in reaction to their blatant and shameless over-hyping which clouds any technical value their product actually has.
What's more is that the project lead has unsuccessfully trolled dbforums before. Here's some nice quotes:
Some people like tables, some people like objects.
Were you at least convinced that Prevayler is an ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster and simpler OBJECT persistence mechanism than using ANY relational database for that?
Prevayler - TRANSPARENT persistence for Java.
9983 TIMES faster than ORACLE.
3251 TIMES faster than MySQL.
I would not believe it if I were you. But I would take a look:
http://www.prevayler.org
Probably seems ad hominem to point out someone's trolling tendencies, but read some of the threads he's participated in and the responses point out that Prevayler is nothing but a persistent object store with a transaction log all stored in RAM for speed. Does this replace an RDBMS? No. As said many times here, they each serve different purposes and each have different features and drawbacks. Promoting either as a THE data solution is foolish. RDBMS's give you advantages like physical and logical data independence, full transactional support and unlike Prevayler, include a query language to access and modify your data. If you need any of these features, then go with RDBMS. Prevayler mainly gives you a natural (from an oop view) and quick way of having objects persist, and using it as a simpler model than the relational one to build an OO app around, with the drawbacks that things like referential integrity and queries are largely for you to handle.
That said, what of your questions has remained unanswered?
Is anyone currently using this non-database solution in production? I'd say the lack of comments answering in the positive would make that a no, or at most possibly yes, but it's a secret.
Was there a significant learning curve to speak of? That's difficult when it's tied to the above. Although the Zodb thread gives hints on the learning curve of doing queries over the object store.
Is anyone considering using it in a transactional environment where speed is the paramount need? Again, silence says no.
And, are there any objections to using Prevayler that haven't been answered at the Prevayler wiki? Google is your friend, but if not then try this advogato article here that covers some nice discussion about Prevayler, although a little outdated.
... Is Prevayler a better way? Again, as its been said many times already, it depends on your app. However it's notable that OO to relational are not as disparate as one might believe, see here. Enterprise Objects are a good counter-example, but by all means probably not the only one to your statement.
And if you watch them for long enough, you'll realize they never hook in any customers. Talk to most Japanese people, in fact, and you'll find out they're one of the single most annoying groups of salesmen out there.
I know of a few friends that chose smaller isp's just because of how irritated they were from Yahoo BB flooding the street corners with their campaigns. This leads to another point, though, that the article is wrong to imply that adoption will occur out of availability of high-speeds--it'll likely occur because of the growth of options and competition driving prices down, simultaneously with broadband finally becoming widely available (this was not true for a long time here in Japan), and the internet having more use than just communication and recreational surfing (e-banking, online movie tickets, amazon.co.jp, etc).
Not only that, the article is seriously oversimplifying when it assumes Japan will catch up because of the availability of faster speeds.
Take a walk down Osaka, say, and you'll inevitably see Yahoo! BB ADSL sales reps vigourously peddling their broadband service exactly because adoption has been so slow. For the most part, the average Japanese person connects to the internet either in the workplace or through their cell phones.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but closer to reality than just assuming availability = adoption.
You spoke about a Chinese immigrant family, from the sounds of it, but how do international students fit into this, if at all? I might be wrong, but it seems like unless you're doing a PhD, it's relatively hard to find funding for a masters....? Canadians, and I'm guessing most other foreigners, mostly have the idea that an American education is prohibitively expensive....
I have a hard time believing this given that I've lived here all my life. In the three major cities, the immigrant population is so overwhelmingly large, that in many places, it outnumbers Canadian-born people (just take a look at Richmond, BC if you don't believe me). I really don't think employers look at foreigners with distaste out of xenophobia. Instead, it's more of a question of how well you fit in. It comes down to the age-old question of how good your communication abilities are and how well you work with the people around you....
For ages, Canadian immigration had next to zero requirements on the ability to speak either official language. And I think employers are rightfully cautious about hiring immigrants because they don't want someone who's going to stick out like a sore thumb in the workplace.
That said, if you can prove your communication abilities, and by the sounds of it, you're an English-speaker, then you've got a leg up on the majority of immigrants who arrive here.
At the same time, if you're looking for CS work, then be careful, because the Canadian computer industry has never really had an explosion Sillicon-valley style. It's strengths lie behind small startups trying to innovate their way into being successful, minus a few big-name companies like Bombardier, Corel (whether you like them or not), or ATI. Think ACD systems of ACDsee fame, or QNX, though that one's grown a lot over the years....
The question is, is this more to do with the field than the fact that they received their degrees overseas? Engineering, medecine, accounting and other business areas strike me as fields where there'd definitely be some difficulty in finding jobs outside of the degree-issuing country because each has very strict rules in practice that differ from one country to the next. Thus, immigrants might come in to the country as valid skilled workers, but realistically can't get equivalent jobs to what they could get in their home countries because they weren't taught up to the standard required in the new country.
Now, unless something like swebok gets its way, there isn't as much of a standard practice in CS and thus foreign degrees shouldn't, in theory, be shunned... I think?
As for foreign experience being of no value to employers, I'm really not sure what to say. Maybe it's politically incorrect to say so, but it's possible this is more of a factor in new immigrants rather than expats, because immigrants really have nothing to account towards being able to fit in with the local culture. Someone who expatriates themselves for education or work might not be seen in that same light. At the same time, I have a hard time believing the original quote--would you turn someone down if they worked at Ericsson or Nokia?
For more information, even more in depth, go to Time Magazine's special that ran a while back.
The one thing to note about both of the links above is that they were created before Gavin Menzies' research. However, it was never known how far and exactly where Zheng He went because his ships and any documents of his travels were burned upon returning from his journey in light of the increasingly isolationist government. The only evidence of travel lies in records of his visit in certain places, and secondary evidence like Menzies' map theory.
I think he meant Canada as in British North America... though the French Canadians fought also.
You're correct that Canada as it is known today didn't exist. But the people who fought the war would later be formally declared Canadians in 1867; our ancestors kicked some American "dumb ass", to use your own word.
The British soon got word that the only troops standing between them and Washington were militia units. The main British force moved into a Washington suburb and after a brief battle the militia units broke and ran, in the words of one American observer: "They ran like sheep being chased by dogs."
Several hunderd U.S. sailors came ashore to fight but they could not stop the British advance for very long.
The military problems of Mr. Madison and his cabinet faced on the Canadian frontier were now being repeated at the door of the nations capital.
Once the battle had commenced Mr. Madison and the Secretaries of War and State decided it would be better to withdraw to a position in the rear.
Ahead of the President word shot back to Washington that all was not well. The British invasion force was now clearly in on the capital, the presidents wife Dolly Madison dashes of a note to her sister:
Will you believe it my sister, we have a battle or skirmish near the city. I am still within sounds of the cannons, Mr. Madison comes not. May God protect us. Two messengers come in and asked me to leave the capital, I must stay here and wait for my husband.
While Mrs. Madison showed great courage at the White House . Mr. madison was tracking down the Secretary of War to find out what steps were in the works to meet the final British assault, he was shocked and disheartened to find out there was no plan.
The 25th of August 1814, the British approached the heart of Washington, march down Constitution Avenue bearing a flag of truce and demand a surrender. Suddenly from a house window the flag of truce is fired apon.
The British troops rushed into the house where the shots had been fired from, and put all who were found in the house to the sword and then reduced the house to ashes. They went onto burn and destroy every building connected to the government.
While Washington burned, the president and his cabinet became fugitives fleeing westward deep into the hills of Virginia. At the White House Mrs. Madison was persuaded to leave also, and soon after the British troops arrived.
When these British soldiers who had been sent to destroy the President's house entered they found a dinner that had been made for about forty people. They ate every bit of food and drank every bottle of wine, then started to destroy the White House.
Washington D.C. the capital of the United States was a city on fire, what had started two years earlier as the invasion and conquest of Canada had now turned into a defensive war.
Honestly, it depends largely on the audience you're talking about. Some groups are cheap, some aren't. Some are only here to troll, and others aren't, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, we're talking morality here, not law. Google's motto is "do no evil", not "break no laws". Applying your logic to morality only leads to relativism, where there ceases to be any absolute good just because there's multiple subjectively valid claims to it. And it's this that really bugs people. With that kind of thinking, "evil" means almost nothing at all because the line between good and evil is a moving target.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but there is such a thing as being tried for legal acts in foreign countries. Canadians and Australians can be tried in their home country for sex tourism abroad.
So sad but true. And you know a democracy's on the way down when voting choices are turning year-by-year into Kodos or Kang.
So from one view, it is democracy that is young and still has to prove itself.
Another way of looking at this is that corruption and abuse of power is universal in whatever form of government you have. We hope that modern forms of democracy help to keep it in check, but there are cases where it really fares no better than say, a monarchy. Consider the scandal and corruption surrounding the current Canadian government, for example. What's more is that democracy's the "power of the people", but if the people are either complacent or apathetic, then really it might as well be a monarch in power.
There's something ironic about wanting to spread democracy in other lands when in our own, 30 to 40% of us won't even bother showing up to the polls....
You need to prefix the labels with label: in your query, much the same as the site: keyword....
The only bad thing is there doesn't seem to be a succinct way of querying over multiple labels. The best I've been able to come up with is something like
for searching "foo" in messages labeled with School and ll-1. Thankfully, this kind of query rarely happens....
And the fact that it's ass-backwards from how we think. It's even backwards from how we do math. It's that RPN syntax that people can't grok.
It's not RPN, it's prefix. RPN would be something more like Forth. And even RPN has its die-hard fans--quite a few, in fact. But honestly, who the hell cares about syntax anyway? It's something superficial compared to the differences in expressiveness, succinctness and overall elegance. If it did matter, I don't think perl would be as popular as it is today.
Well, think for a second. The end result was suicide, which is not something a person does on a whim. Yet he managed to accomplish everything he did in spite of how other people made him feel for his sexuality earlier.
The key here is that the minority isn't just some minority, it's one that most people treated and still treat pretty badly. In this way, simultaneously being homosexual and one of the key figures in computer science is one of his accomplishments, not some trivial fact that we should ignore.
They teach Scheme, which doesn't have OOP, but allows you quite easily to implement your own in a good page of code. As for LISP in general, maybe you should read up a little on it before you talk about it....
See Common Lisp and CLOS.
This doesn't turn people off of computer science, IMO-- quite the opposite, it allows them to focus on the problem solving aspect of CS before getting down to the nitty gritty of having to deal with complex syntaxes in other languages and low-level optimization.
This brings in another point.... Programming is all about problem solving, so why should a beginner have to worry about doing it step by step according to some arbitrary machine's low-level instruction set? It's like telling someone to learn to build houses by building his first house using only his hands and a forest-full of trees. It's educational in a masochistic way at best. It's wrong to omit it completely, but still better to teach later in education, I think....
I stand corrected on maybe callous use of Kanji instead of Kanji compounds, but the point remains: even if minor, influence in vocabulary clearly went both ways... and though maybe not as interesting as grammatical ties, these common points in vocabulary are just as important.
Actually I did mean kanji as in kanji compound. I've never heard the usage kanjis, nor are people so pedantic in spoken conversation that they'll correct it, so it's fairly common use now. I don't see what the fuss is about though? The context was clearly about coining the compound, not creating graphemes or logograms.
Very true, but just because it's borrowed vocabulary and not linguistic family that the two have in common doesn't mean the links between the two are nothing.... Just the same as English might not be a romance language but is still very much tied to Latin through etymological roots of words.
Imo, anecdotally and from personal experience, anyone who knows one of the two languages immediately perceives similarities that help them learn the other language (sometimes there's even pseudo-homonyms like Mandarin kaixi/Japanese kaishi for the concept "begin". And the incidence of this rises the more Chinese dialects you know). Try getting the same results from a Finnish and a Mongol and tell me how successful you are. Recall that grammar only provides the rules to using vocabulary. Without vocabulary, a language is nothing. I would argue that because the two have common vocabulary, they're very "close" languages even in the absence of linguistic family ties.
Even less of a reason to look at linguistic family in isolation is the presence of Kanji/Hanzi; educated speakers of Japanese can easily decypher if not fully read quite a lot of written Chinese even if they don't speak the language. As a note, sharing of Kanji wasn't one-way either. Quite a few compounds made their way back into Chinese, though after they were coined they weren't regarded as foreign. Example is the Kanji for crisis, "opportunity + danger"; Japanese origin AFAIK.
In defense of slashdot, this project is interesting, but like everyone else has been saying, these guys need some serious PR lessons. And while our behaviour might not be all that dignified, it's only in reaction to their blatant and shameless over-hyping which clouds any technical value their product actually has.
What's more is that the project lead has unsuccessfully trolled dbforums before. Here's some nice quotes:
You can probably google him and find more.
Probably seems ad hominem to point out someone's trolling tendencies, but read some of the threads he's participated in and the responses point out that Prevayler is nothing but a persistent object store with a transaction log all stored in RAM for speed. Does this replace an RDBMS? No. As said many times here, they each serve different purposes and each have different features and drawbacks. Promoting either as a THE data solution is foolish. RDBMS's give you advantages like physical and logical data independence, full transactional support and unlike Prevayler, include a query language to access and modify your data. If you need any of these features, then go with RDBMS. Prevayler mainly gives you a natural (from an oop view) and quick way of having objects persist, and using it as a simpler model than the relational one to build an OO app around, with the drawbacks that things like referential integrity and queries are largely for you to handle.
That said, what of your questions has remained unanswered?
And if you watch them for long enough, you'll realize they never hook in any customers. Talk to most Japanese people, in fact, and you'll find out they're one of the single most annoying groups of salesmen out there.
I know of a few friends that chose smaller isp's just because of how irritated they were from Yahoo BB flooding the street corners with their campaigns. This leads to another point, though, that the article is wrong to imply that adoption will occur out of availability of high-speeds--it'll likely occur because of the growth of options and competition driving prices down, simultaneously with broadband finally becoming widely available (this was not true for a long time here in Japan), and the internet having more use than just communication and recreational surfing (e-banking, online movie tickets, amazon.co.jp, etc).
Not only that, the article is seriously oversimplifying when it assumes Japan will catch up because of the availability of faster speeds.
Take a walk down Osaka, say, and you'll inevitably see Yahoo! BB ADSL sales reps vigourously peddling their broadband service exactly because adoption has been so slow. For the most part, the average Japanese person connects to the internet either in the workplace or through their cell phones.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but closer to reality than just assuming availability = adoption.
You spoke about a Chinese immigrant family, from the sounds of it, but how do international students fit into this, if at all? I might be wrong, but it seems like unless you're doing a PhD, it's relatively hard to find funding for a masters....? Canadians, and I'm guessing most other foreigners, mostly have the idea that an American education is prohibitively expensive....
Does anyone have any information about Sweden? Chalmers comes to mind as being somewhat famous in the area....
I have a hard time believing this given that I've lived here all my life. In the three major cities, the immigrant population is so overwhelmingly large, that in many places, it outnumbers Canadian-born people (just take a look at Richmond, BC if you don't believe me). I really don't think employers look at foreigners with distaste out of xenophobia. Instead, it's more of a question of how well you fit in. It comes down to the age-old question of how good your communication abilities are and how well you work with the people around you....
For ages, Canadian immigration had next to zero requirements on the ability to speak either official language. And I think employers are rightfully cautious about hiring immigrants because they don't want someone who's going to stick out like a sore thumb in the workplace.
That said, if you can prove your communication abilities, and by the sounds of it, you're an English-speaker, then you've got a leg up on the majority of immigrants who arrive here.
At the same time, if you're looking for CS work, then be careful, because the Canadian computer industry has never really had an explosion Sillicon-valley style. It's strengths lie behind small startups trying to innovate their way into being successful, minus a few big-name companies like Bombardier, Corel (whether you like them or not), or ATI. Think ACD systems of ACDsee fame, or QNX, though that one's grown a lot over the years....
The question is, is this more to do with the field than the fact that they received their degrees overseas? Engineering, medecine, accounting and other business areas strike me as fields where there'd definitely be some difficulty in finding jobs outside of the degree-issuing country because each has very strict rules in practice that differ from one country to the next. Thus, immigrants might come in to the country as valid skilled workers, but realistically can't get equivalent jobs to what they could get in their home countries because they weren't taught up to the standard required in the new country.
Now, unless something like swebok gets its way, there isn't as much of a standard practice in CS and thus foreign degrees shouldn't, in theory, be shunned... I think?
As for foreign experience being of no value to employers, I'm really not sure what to say. Maybe it's politically incorrect to say so, but it's possible this is more of a factor in new immigrants rather than expats, because immigrants really have nothing to account towards being able to fit in with the local culture. Someone who expatriates themselves for education or work might not be seen in that same light. At the same time, I have a hard time believing the original quote--would you turn someone down if they worked at Ericsson or Nokia?
Oh yeah, and in case you have problems navigating the Millenium site, go to 15th century, and Multimedia Recap.
If anyone remembers the "Millenium" series on CNN, they had a blurb about Zheng He and the junks he used in his travels.
Here's a link: Millenium
For more information, even more in depth, go to Time Magazine's special that ran a while back.
The one thing to note about both of the links above is that they were created before Gavin Menzies' research. However, it was never known how far and exactly where Zheng He went because his ships and any documents of his travels were burned upon returning from his journey in light of the increasingly isolationist government. The only evidence of travel lies in records of his visit in certain places, and secondary evidence like Menzies' map theory.
LOL!
I think he meant Canada as in British North America... though the French Canadians fought also.
You're correct that Canada as it is known today didn't exist. But the people who fought the war would later be formally declared Canadians in 1867; our ancestors kicked some American "dumb ass", to use your own word.
Here's an interesting link:The battle (burning) of Washington
Interesting parts as follows:
Indeed, the United States were humiliated.
"Not willing to pay" is not always true..
CNet's write-up on Ars Technica's pay service
Honestly, it depends largely on the audience you're talking about. Some groups are cheap, some aren't. Some are only here to troll, and others aren't, plain and simple.
There are specialized schools for this kind of thing. One that comes to mind is Digipen.