Well, if a C(E|I|O)O just throws away $50 for stuff that doesn't fit or work together your company has a problem. Most places don't do that. When you have only a $1 million operating budget and plan to spend 5% of that on a server upgrade, I bet you will look at some specs and benchmarks and even at power consumption.
I didn't mean $15 for 1 can, I was thinking of a large pack. If you had read you woud've notices "shopping for a party" - you don't really buy 1 can for a party, rather buy a pack. Anyway, that is not even the point of the post. The point was that there is (or there should be at least!) a different kind of decision making when buying something that costs hundreds of thousand and only tens of dollars.
A large pack of 24 cans of soda could cost that much.
But the real problem is that you didn't get the point of the post that the decisions going into buying a server and buying coke are very different and Marketing 101 generalizations don't apply to both instances. So if I wrote $1 or $20, the ratio of that to $50K or $100K would still be large, that is the point. If you had read the whole post you would've understood that instead of seeing $15 and "Pepsi" and then saying "hell no that doesn't cost that much, I better tell everyone".
Good point, and valid in general (as rule of thumb). But in this case the market is run by only 3 or 4 companies. It is not as if those who will buy Sun have never heard of Dell and by seeing the add they'll say "Gee, the name 'Dell' comes to mind, I've looked at all the benchmarks and did a cost analysis but I think I'll still buy from this 'Dell' company, their name just comes to mind so often...".
The point here is that the consumers in this market are different than the consumers in the soft drink market. Spending $50K on a server upgrade is not the same as spending $15 on a Pepsi or a Coke. In the first case there is an evaluation and selection procedure. That is why Sun is incorporating performance comparison figures right into the add "150% faster, 66% more power savings, benchmarks are faster by such and such etc..."
The soda/pop/carbonated beverage consumer will often have to make a rather impromptu choice. If he is looking through the shelves to buy drinks for the party and Pepsi just happens to come into his mind out of nowhere, because Coke made the mistake of mentioning their name, so he grabs a box of Pepsi and there you go - textbook example of "don't mention your competitor in your ad".
Sun might be desperate, they might be silly, but they are not totally stupid. I think the ads are pretty good. Their audience are young professional males, probably in their 30s-40s, working in the IT and in IT management. Those people like funny, provocative ads that tell them the facts but also make them laugh. They will instinctively think of all the competitors anyway, to compare products, as there are only 3 or 4 of them, so not much damage is done if Sun also mentiones Dell in the ad.
No its not. Once they make a claim that OS will respond in less than 1 micro second, they imply that it is a hard realtime system (i.e. guaranteed response in a certain period of time). If NT can make the same claim then it will be in the same class, otherwise it falls into the "soft realtime" system class (response in an average time).
Microsecond resolution and RT environment is not for audio/video. You can run your audio and video with the regular Linux kernel. Would you really notice a microsecond delay on a 60 fps (60Hz) frame rate? - I don't think so.
But usecond resolution would be usefull for higher-frequency data processing and control.
Just aim a big parabolic mirror at it, much like Archimedes did back in the day, and the giant balloon will melt and fizzle.
For those of us with a large budget, a nice high powered laser will also do the trick. I might see some of them around the US cost but I don't imagine they'll be launching them in Iraq or Afghanistan too soon.
To fund the project they could just sell the advertisement space on it.
Microsoft, Oracle and others haven't done too badly selling "just software". So selling "mostly software" is part of selling "just software", so - "yes" it is _possible_ for them to survive. It all depends on what kind of software/hardware and how much software/how much hardware. Can they offer something different and better than IBM, HP, Dell, Microsoft and Intel? If so, they might be just fine in 10 years.
Knowing the time complixity of sorting and searching algorithms, data structures, different programming paradigms (oo, procedural, functional etc.) is something you can always rely on next year, or 20 years from now, but is not something they will teach you at a community college.
What you need is BOTH. Finish your BS at a University, learn about algorithms, data encoding, database theory, AI, optimization, machine learning, HCI theory, data security, networks, then as your electives go to that university's evening college and take some classes on Java, C++, C#, Apache, MySQL, Oracle or whatever applied classes you need for a short term. This way you'll be set for short term and long term.
There is a reason that there are CS degrees out there, it is not just a big conspiracy to scam students and take their money. Some things you will learn will seem boring until one day it all "clicks". When you have to make a decision to use a HashMap or an ArrayList (warning: crazy java talk) you will remember about big-O, about Hashes, about data structures and other stuff like that. It will be helpfull, trust me.
The fundamental question is what kind of jobs did you mean? Did you mean "code monkey" jobs where you re-write someone's code in a new language, or creating web-pages, or mentaining a server farm? If you plan all your life to do just that, one particular thing then take just a couple of community college courses and you are done. But don't complain 5 years later that you are stuck in a dead end job and nobody will hire you.
Another thing your university career should show is how well can you learn. Your GPA is an index that says "This person can learn new stuff if he puts his mind to it and here is the proof". Don't listen to people who say GPA doesn't matter. It does! It shows that you can learn English, Economics, Calculus, Computer Science, Math, Basket Weaving (well maybe not this one...) if you want. I would want to hire you because anything I throw at you, you will learn. (Imagine the difference between an adjustable wrench and a fixed size wrench.)
Yeah, but the next step is to actually splice in and out desirable genes from a more "fit" donor into either type of DNA. How many genes would it take to add and remove before that child would be considered 'not mine' anymore?
NOTE: Some genes that will cause one disease will protect from the other. This is the case if malaria and sickle cell anemia and other diseases. So there one has to pick and choose.
If they can take from two, take it from 10 and splice in the best genes and 'there you go' - superbaby. In the day and age, where genes come from doesn't really matter as long as they are good genes.
Up until a while ago people percieved this magic or spiritual connection between child and parents. Today it is all just genes. Manipulate then anyway you can and create custom children, with selected features.
Don't mess with Xenu , the mighty overlord copyrighted his name and you will get sued.
Re:It's called inferring
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The real question here is "who is being harmed?".
Let's take drugs for example. Why are drugs such as heroin or marijuana illegal? Who is the government to say what I can do with my body and what I cannot? What if I don't buy, so I don't even feed the drug trade, I just grow it in my back yard and use it and rot my brain the best way I know how? It turns out that even in such cases the drugs are still illegal. The main reason is because they don't just cause harm to the user but also to _others_ associated with him/her. Drugs will destroy families, they will deprive a child of a parent. In fact they will cause a great ammount of pain not just to the user but also to many other people, as there are very few people who are completely un-connected to anyone. Now consider that many criminal acts have drug addiction as the cause and you have another incentive to ban drugs.
The drug example can be extended to anything that can become addictive. Should the state also control people's eating? - That is debatable, some people did sue McDonalds. It seems kind of stupid though. What about gambling, if I get addicted to gambling and spend all my family's money, should the state put the smack down? -Again debatable.
Now, the next question to look at is whether porn is addictive. You bet it is! I've sat through psychology courses at the university and heard the professor say that there is no such thing as sexual addiction. I want him to tell that to thousands of people who loose their jobs and family because they are addicted to porn.
As the parent correctly pointed out, the release of the pleasure causing chemicals in the brain during viewing of porn and jerking off is similar in strengh to some pretty powerfull drugs. Even though there is no chemical introduced into the body. Nevertheless whenever there is a strong pleasurable stimulus, there will be a potential for addiction. Again, as the parent post pointed out, the addiction often is just an effect of another problem (coping, self-esteem, social anxiety - you name it). So some people deal with these problems by looking at porn, some drink, some gamble, some work 24/7 and do many other things more or less harmfull to themselves and their loved ones.
The real trick is to balance state interference and personal freedom. The answer is that there is no easy answer...
Interesting point. I wonder if any research has been done to follow up on that?
For obvious reasons though, I don't think anyone would want to touch the subject. Nobody, in the academic world where reputation is everything, will want to be "the one" who followed up on the Nazi eugenics program.
Check with your friend Hitler on that, already been done. In Nazi Germany during a certain period the state had the right to euthanize "unfit" babies and sterilize "unfit" adults.
Also, what you might not know, and what has been kept very quiet is that even in the "great" US of A eugenics reared its ugly head during that time. Oregon is the great "home of eugenics" in U.S., they sterilized more than 2000 people that were deemed to be "unfit" by the state. Here is some link about it. Also here .
Re:Names have been changed, addiction is real...
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Thanks for the support.
I'll give the book a try. I think am still too embarrassed (still somewhat in denial perhaps?) to go to a group meeting.
I've heard of some churches using some kind of accountability software, where everything I would surf would be broadcast to everyone in the group. The problem, though, I, like you, work with the computers (software development) so when the "porn addict" comes on, he will know how to bypass it...
Thanks again
Re:Names have been changed, addiction is real...
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Thanks for being honest. I think most people who have this problem think they are suffering alone, that they are the wierd ones, something is wrong with them etc...
I was taught in the classroom by a psychology professor that sex cannot become an addiction. I knew otherwise, but who was I to question the textbook and the "almighty professor." When I say sex, I mean mostly pornography in all its forms, as well as sex for money probably. The academia point of view on sexual addition is not really an objective fact, determined through research, it is more of a reaction to the previous ideas and attitudes toward sexuality. When it comes to sex and oppinions about it, there is nobody who is unbiased. You are one of the few who recognized it as a problem even though everyone around is saying that it is completely normal.
Many will say that sex can be addictive just like eating, exercising or gambling. But because the surge of pleasure associated chemicals in the brain is much, much higher than in the other activities, the corresponding potential for addiction is that much higher on average. Kind of like herion is considered to be more addictive than alcohol.
You are right about people who don't have the problem not understanding what it is like. "Just say 'no'" sounds like an easy slogan for those that don't have to say "no". I tried it seems everything, I would delete all the bookmarks and all the smut I had downloaded, I would swear to myself not to do it, because I would lose my job and my family. But, not 24 hours later, I would be looking for porn again, it is as if there is a personality switch, the "porn addict" would emerge and then I would want to save all the porn, I would want o encrypt all the bookmarks to protect them from the "normal person" who would come on later and be appalled at what has been done. Well, and this just keeps going on and on, like walking on the edge of the clif, on the one side my job, family and normal life, on the other porn, with isolation, loneliness and depression.
Well I know that the term 'bug' is in the software development world (I also write software for a living.)
The problem is when the software developer talks to a non-software developer. Say I come to the manager and tell him "the device driver I wrote has a bug in it and thus the hard drives will lock up on an SMP machine once in while". To the manager it sounds like something magic happened to the software just sitting on the file server and sounds as if I am just an innocent bystander to this whole problem.
Now if I come and tell him "I have made a serious mistake in the device driver and now the disks could lock up on some SMP machines" - now that, to the manager, sounds like I am accepting more responsability for my own mistake.
It is just petty terminology thing, but overall I think it represents the attitude of many software companies that do not pay much attention to testing and auditing of their code.
I disagree. I think they should disclose it as soon as possible.
First of all they should stop calling the mistakes"bugs". There are not "bugs" there, these are mistakes. If work for Ford and I am responsible for the carburators, I screw up and the QA never catches it and then people's cars are blowing up, it would not be called a "bug" as if something just crawled in there without anybody's fault, it would be _my_ mistake, a personal responsability.
The software companies are churning code to get it out of the door without adequate testing, it is their fault. If someone exploits it, it both software makers fault and the exploiter's. The company should restitute the costs associated with the loss. Hopefully, that would promote a culture of responsability, and software engineering would be taken more serously, just like mechanical, electrical or nuclear engineering is.
Chances are that if there is immediate disclosure, the users will have a chance to stop using the product until a patch is available. Every day until the patch is issued they should just bill the software company. That would be a great incentive to test well, code carefully and fix the problems faster.
No problemo, it has all been taken care off. It will be a priveledge working with such a great company that gets things done so well. See you there...Gusev Crater, then to the left of the Beagle 2 crash site, if I recall correctly...
Slashdot Mirror
If it is one The Web, it must be true.
I didn't mean $15 for 1 can, I was thinking of a large pack. If you had read you woud've notices "shopping for a party" - you don't really buy 1 can for a party, rather buy a pack. Anyway, that is not even the point of the post. The point was that there is (or there should be at least!) a different kind of decision making when buying something that costs hundreds of thousand and only tens of dollars.
But the real problem is that you didn't get the point of the post that the decisions going into buying a server and buying coke are very different and Marketing 101 generalizations don't apply to both instances. So if I wrote $1 or $20, the ratio of that to $50K or $100K would still be large, that is the point. If you had read the whole post you would've understood that instead of seeing $15 and "Pepsi" and then saying "hell no that doesn't cost that much, I better tell everyone".
The point here is that the consumers in this market are different than the consumers in the soft drink market. Spending $50K on a server upgrade is not the same as spending $15 on a Pepsi or a Coke. In the first case there is an evaluation and selection procedure. That is why Sun is incorporating performance comparison figures right into the add "150% faster, 66% more power savings, benchmarks are faster by such and such etc..."
The soda/pop/carbonated beverage consumer will often have to make a rather impromptu choice. If he is looking through the shelves to buy drinks for the party and Pepsi just happens to come into his mind out of nowhere, because Coke made the mistake of mentioning their name, so he grabs a box of Pepsi and there you go - textbook example of "don't mention your competitor in your ad".
Sun might be desperate, they might be silly, but they are not totally stupid. I think the ads are pretty good. Their audience are young professional males, probably in their 30s-40s, working in the IT and in IT management. Those people like funny, provocative ads that tell them the facts but also make them laugh. They will instinctively think of all the competitors anyway, to compare products, as there are only 3 or 4 of them, so not much damage is done if Sun also mentiones Dell in the ad.
That is what I've heard. He teaches Zoology with an emphasis on small and medium sized mammals and also Anger Management Strategies.
Tasmanian Devil reportedly not impressed. Already using 1GBit fiberoptic connection.
But usecond resolution would be usefull for higher-frequency data processing and control.
For those of us with a large budget, a nice high powered laser will also do the trick. I might see some of them around the US cost but I don't imagine they'll be launching them in Iraq or Afghanistan too soon.
To fund the project they could just sell the advertisement space on it.
...as soon as that can be harnessed by the application programmers and compilers. Right now that is still not the case for most programs out there.
Knowing the time complixity of sorting and searching algorithms, data structures, different programming paradigms (oo, procedural, functional etc.) is something you can always rely on next year, or 20 years from now, but is not something they will teach you at a community college.
What you need is BOTH. Finish your BS at a University, learn about algorithms, data encoding, database theory, AI, optimization, machine learning, HCI theory, data security, networks, then as your electives go to that university's evening college and take some classes on Java, C++, C#, Apache, MySQL, Oracle or whatever applied classes you need for a short term. This way you'll be set for short term and long term.
There is a reason that there are CS degrees out there, it is not just a big conspiracy to scam students and take their money. Some things you will learn will seem boring until one day it all "clicks". When you have to make a decision to use a HashMap or an ArrayList (warning: crazy java talk) you will remember about big-O, about Hashes, about data structures and other stuff like that. It will be helpfull, trust me.
The fundamental question is what kind of jobs did you mean? Did you mean "code monkey" jobs where you re-write someone's code in a new language, or creating web-pages, or mentaining a server farm? If you plan all your life to do just that, one particular thing then take just a couple of community college courses and you are done. But don't complain 5 years later that you are stuck in a dead end job and nobody will hire you.
Another thing your university career should show is how well can you learn. Your GPA is an index that says "This person can learn new stuff if he puts his mind to it and here is the proof". Don't listen to people who say GPA doesn't matter. It does! It shows that you can learn English, Economics, Calculus, Computer Science, Math, Basket Weaving (well maybe not this one...) if you want. I would want to hire you because anything I throw at you, you will learn. (Imagine the difference between an adjustable wrench and a fixed size wrench.)
NOTE: Some genes that will cause one disease will protect from the other. This is the case if malaria and sickle cell anemia and other diseases. So there one has to pick and choose.
Up until a while ago people percieved this magic or spiritual connection between child and parents. Today it is all just genes. Manipulate then anyway you can and create custom children, with selected features.
Let's take drugs for example. Why are drugs such as heroin or marijuana illegal? Who is the government to say what I can do with my body and what I cannot? What if I don't buy, so I don't even feed the drug trade, I just grow it in my back yard and use it and rot my brain the best way I know how? It turns out that even in such cases the drugs are still illegal. The main reason is because they don't just cause harm to the user but also to _others_ associated with him/her. Drugs will destroy families, they will deprive a child of a parent. In fact they will cause a great ammount of pain not just to the user but also to many other people, as there are very few people who are completely un-connected to anyone. Now consider that many criminal acts have drug addiction as the cause and you have another incentive to ban drugs.
The drug example can be extended to anything that can become addictive. Should the state also control people's eating? - That is debatable, some people did sue McDonalds. It seems kind of stupid though. What about gambling, if I get addicted to gambling and spend all my family's money, should the state put the smack down? -Again debatable.
Now, the next question to look at is whether porn is addictive. You bet it is! I've sat through psychology courses at the university and heard the professor say that there is no such thing as sexual addiction. I want him to tell that to thousands of people who loose their jobs and family because they are addicted to porn.
As the parent correctly pointed out, the release of the pleasure causing chemicals in the brain during viewing of porn and jerking off is similar in strengh to some pretty powerfull drugs. Even though there is no chemical introduced into the body. Nevertheless whenever there is a strong pleasurable stimulus, there will be a potential for addiction. Again, as the parent post pointed out, the addiction often is just an effect of another problem (coping, self-esteem, social anxiety - you name it). So some people deal with these problems by looking at porn, some drink, some gamble, some work 24/7 and do many other things more or less harmfull to themselves and their loved ones.
The real trick is to balance state interference and personal freedom. The answer is that there is no easy answer...
For obvious reasons though, I don't think anyone would want to touch the subject. Nobody, in the academic world where reputation is everything, will want to be "the one" who followed up on the Nazi eugenics program.
Oregon: Welcome to the home of the USA Eugenics.
Warning: Mandatory castration enforced by the state. .
Boy, if I only had the money...
Also, what you might not know, and what has been kept very quiet is that even in the "great" US of A eugenics reared its ugly head during that time. Oregon is the great "home of eugenics" in U.S., they sterilized more than 2000 people that were deemed to be "unfit" by the state. Here is some link about it. Also here .
I've heard of some churches using some kind of accountability software, where everything I would surf would be broadcast to everyone in the group. The problem, though, I, like you, work with the computers (software development) so when the "porn addict" comes on, he will know how to bypass it...
Thanks again
I was taught in the classroom by a psychology professor that sex cannot become an addiction. I knew otherwise, but who was I to question the textbook and the "almighty professor." When I say sex, I mean mostly pornography in all its forms, as well as sex for money probably. The academia point of view on sexual addition is not really an objective fact, determined through research, it is more of a reaction to the previous ideas and attitudes toward sexuality. When it comes to sex and oppinions about it, there is nobody who is unbiased. You are one of the few who recognized it as a problem even though everyone around is saying that it is completely normal.
Many will say that sex can be addictive just like eating, exercising or gambling. But because the surge of pleasure associated chemicals in the brain is much, much higher than in the other activities, the corresponding potential for addiction is that much higher on average. Kind of like herion is considered to be more addictive than alcohol.
You are right about people who don't have the problem not understanding what it is like. "Just say 'no'" sounds like an easy slogan for those that don't have to say "no". I tried it seems everything, I would delete all the bookmarks and all the smut I had downloaded, I would swear to myself not to do it, because I would lose my job and my family. But, not 24 hours later, I would be looking for porn again, it is as if there is a personality switch, the "porn addict" would emerge and then I would want to save all the porn, I would want o encrypt all the bookmarks to protect them from the "normal person" who would come on later and be appalled at what has been done. Well, and this just keeps going on and on, like walking on the edge of the clif, on the one side my job, family and normal life, on the other porn, with isolation, loneliness and depression.
The problem is when the software developer talks to a non-software developer. Say I come to the manager and tell him "the device driver I wrote has a bug in it and thus the hard drives will lock up on an SMP machine once in while". To the manager it sounds like something magic happened to the software just sitting on the file server and sounds as if I am just an innocent bystander to this whole problem.
Now if I come and tell him "I have made a serious mistake in the device driver and now the disks could lock up on some SMP machines" - now that, to the manager, sounds like I am accepting more responsability for my own mistake.
It is just petty terminology thing, but overall I think it represents the attitude of many software companies that do not pay much attention to testing and auditing of their code.
First of all they should stop calling the mistakes"bugs". There are not "bugs" there, these are mistakes. If work for Ford and I am responsible for the carburators, I screw up and the QA never catches it and then people's cars are blowing up, it would not be called a "bug" as if something just crawled in there without anybody's fault, it would be _my_ mistake, a personal responsability.
The software companies are churning code to get it out of the door without adequate testing, it is their fault. If someone exploits it, it both software makers fault and the exploiter's. The company should restitute the costs associated with the loss. Hopefully, that would promote a culture of responsability, and software engineering would be taken more serously, just like mechanical, electrical or nuclear engineering is.
Chances are that if there is immediate disclosure, the users will have a chance to stop using the product until a patch is available. Every day until the patch is issued they should just bill the software company. That would be a great incentive to test well, code carefully and fix the problems faster.
No problemo, it has all been taken care off. It will be a priveledge working with such a great company that gets things done so well. See you there...Gusev Crater, then to the left of the Beagle 2 crash site, if I recall correctly...
I'll work for them when I can meet them for an interview on Mars...