I find it interesting that the release announcement claims that FC4 is "unrestricted" when in fact it has a very important restriction - GPL. Given Linux's rise in stature, we should be more careful of our claims.
I'd like it to pre-load pages of story format pages like you find at Toms Hardware or DPReview. That way, I don't have to a) pre-load all pages at once or b) wait between each page and lose the story flow. Of course, all that pre-loading should be background, and should buffer to match dowload rate to my browsing rate (to avoid wasting bandwidth). The second idea is to scroll on logical boundaries - like from one slashdot comment to the next.
I bet if you looked behind the numbers, you'd find Texas dropped solely due to the HP/Compaq "merger" (Capellas was an idiot, and Carly brillian on that one). But, Adolph, because you asked, there are several good schools in Texas. Yes, certainly, UT-Austin, which is strong in almost any area you choose, but also Texas A&M is no slouch, especially for agrigcultural technology (don't laugh - people gotta eat). Rice University is also a nationally recognized school (including it's computer science program). Baylor and UT both have excellent law schools with very high bar passage rates. Still, all that aside, MIT, Harvard, and UMass are some power hitters that do pretty much put Massachusetts at the top of any list.
Some other comments here had asked what good was Texas for producing doctors: Houston is a major hub for medicine. Undergraduates from all over the world (literally) flock to Baylor University for its pre-med school program. You really can't beat Baylor College of Medicine (not affiliated with Baylor University or the Baylor Healthcare System) and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is world class for cancer treatment and research. Some people complain about public schools in Texas, but as a product of that system, I'd say they do pretty well especially since Texas has had a lot of immigration in the past two decades or so.
As for high-tech, Austin, Dallas, and Houston are all three very heavy in technology type businesses. IBM has labs in New York (Watson), California (Almaden), and Texas (Austin). (I guess MA is close enough to New York not to get its own.) I think, overall, Tech is #1 or #2 industry in the state. In Austin (800,000+ people in the city proper), when I worked at IBM (99), I believe the largest non-government employers in the city were Dell, IBM, and Motorola. Dallas is home to EDS, and of course, Johnson Space Center is just outside of Houston.
In the area of trade, Texas is important, too. It was the number one exporter of all 50 states in 2002 and 2003 (source here). I could go on, but I think you get the idea...
You don't use caps? Have you ever programmed in C? Set up your Unix environment? Needed to type some initials? How do you type NASA effectively without capslock? I use it all the time. If ever there's a key I thought useless, it has to be the context menu key.
I'm working towards a Ph.D., and I was always surprised when people seemed floored when I mentioned was going to graduate school to get a Ph.D. Some people think that a Ph.D. is only for teaching, and that is categorically untrue. Some people think that a Ph.D. is only good if you want to do research. That, too, is categorically untrue. When I arrived at Ga. Tech a fresh Systems graduate student, they made the statement (this was 3 years ago mind you) that about 80% of their students went to industry! That leaves only 20% to academic positions. Even then, I'm sure a good deal of those weren't as much teaching as research with teaching "on the side" Lest you think that research is your only other choice, you would want to be aware that if you are a researcher at a school, a large part of your time will actually be spent in a managerial capacity. This could involve a good deal of marketing and politics, too, as you jockey for getting your projects funded, or attracting the best grad students to your project. Beyond that, there is certainly a wide world out there in the corporate world. Andrew Grove, former Intel CEO, has a Ph.D. What you can say that is categorically true about a Ph.D. is that it will separate you from the masses of those with Bachelors and Masters. I think there definitely a huge trend in education of needing more to "get ahead". Thirty or forty years ago, a college degree would put you way ahead of the pack. But now it looks to me that a number of jobs require a Masters to separate yourself from the masses. Will that soon become a Ph.D.? I dunno. But I do know that with a Ph.D. I' m educationally qualified, at least, for every position that requires a Masters, PLUS the ones that require a Ph.D. (like college level) teaching. In the end, experience, drive, and ambition trumpsall, really. Gates has no degree in business (or anything) but runs a multi-billion dollar (evil?) empire. But I'm sure there are a few near destitute souls with Ph.D.'s, too. If your employer is worried about your education, it is your job, as it is with point on your resume to convince him it's an asset! If your future boss is worried about hiring someone smarter than him- or herself, then you have a Dilbert like problem at that company, don't you think? Good luck!
Interestingly, Dreamworks claimed one of their problems was that Adobe wouldn't port photoshop to Linux. One wonders if they have heard of Gimp - surely it couldn't be THAT far behind Photoshop (though I'm not a heavy user of either app) as to be useless to them. Makes me also wonder why HP wasn't pushing that. (Although it's possible they had a lot of scripts for Photoshop already? Anyone know?)
Zorn
Well, NASA is a different place than it was in the 1980's, but still, they themselves wanted to send up a "regular person" -- schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Arguably, it's safer now than it was then. Tito is arguably as fit for a space mission as she was. Especially since he worked for NASA. Zorn
According to the inventor's article on the Scientific American site, the FastShip really does plane. He calls it a "semi-planing" hull. This occurs becuase the FastShip has slight concavity to its hull in the stern. Supposedly, this lifts the stern and helps eliminate drag. Oh yes, I would imagine that any ship that can carry cargo would be able to handle passengers as well, but what passengers want to make that trip? Zorn
The same guy that programmed the Mars explorer must have written that article... -100 degrees Fahrenheit is -73 degrees Celsius, not -40! In fact, -40 is the only place where Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures are the same. Zorn
Of course/. is slow to report their own downtimes... they're down. And this was no ordinary "our server is flaky for a few minutes", K5 was getting creamed. Zorn
Rosen does make some good points about limits are being crossed, but I don't think the situtation is as dire as he would lead us to believe. Take the example of Amazon's recommendation software. Who hasn't been to some small store recently when they decided to show you another product? Were you interested? Did you buy it?
Now ask, how did they know what you might like? Simple, they looked at you, or they knew what you had purchased on previous trips to the store. I don't think Amazon's recommendations are that different. When I go to their store, I give them a certain permission to evaluate me, the customer. On the other hand, targeting a certain, very small class of people, like executives, by using ZIP codes and domain names is a little more disturbing. Now they are passing the bounds of the information that they glean from merely *their* "store". That is, they must conspire with others to create this information. I think most small brick-and-mortar operators would not be likely to share the customer purchasing decisions or consumer data with their friends or or store owners, and likewise online operators should follow a similar standard.
IMO, summing up, online retailers can collect information about me, but they shouldn't be sharing it, selling it, getting out of debt with it, or following me around like DoubleClick is wont to do. And I think I can be reasonably comfortable online with that. Zorn
What's kinda funny is to do a little comparison of this machine computer to the others on the Top500 list. Right up in the top 10 are two Japanses machines (Hitachis, I think) BUT they only use ~100 processors, not ~8000 or ~9000. Dang impressive. Not only that, but all the Hitachi and Fujitsu machines seems to be much, much smaller. Curious -- does anyone know what the $/flop difference between the two kinds of computers is? Zorn
Why not put a dot key on the phone and assign them IPv6 addresses? There are supposed to be plenty of those to go around, and with the (fairly) compact way you type them in you might stand a chance of remembering them. Then, of course, the natural extension is give em URIs like phone.callZorn.desk, phone.callZorn.home... Zorn
Dr. Poucher's a great guy. You just have to remember, in any contest, that you are catching the contest director in the absolute worst possible circumstances. I hope that you get to meet him some other time. Re: the ivory tower comment -- That may be a problem of some profs, but not Dr. Poucher -- he does a lot of "real world" work on the side. I have had two classes from Dr. Poucher (one theory and one software development) and I never knew him to be anything but fair to students. Ask yourself this, though, what would you have done in his situation? You knew that three people, whom you trusted, had checked the problem data. You knew that the problem had been solved on the data already. You've not encountered such a problem in ten years of running such a contest. You knew that every contestant at the contest was way keyed up and running on adrenaline. I agree about contests though. They are a lot of fun and you do learn a lot. This is true in general, IMHO. Texas has statewide academic contests in high schools -- participation in those takes away all the "test anxiety" many otherwise excellent students face. Programming contest is the same way. It gives you a great confidence, whether you win a contest or not, to just sit down and start slamming out code. Once again, I am sorry that you had to meet Dr. Poucher under such adverse circumstances! Zorn
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I find it interesting that the release announcement claims that FC4 is "unrestricted" when in fact it has a very important restriction - GPL. Given Linux's rise in stature, we should be more careful of our claims.
Chi Sigma Iota and Upsilon Pi Epsilon.
I'd like it to pre-load pages of story format pages like you find at Toms Hardware or DPReview. That way, I don't have to a) pre-load all pages at once or b) wait between each page and lose the story flow. Of course, all that pre-loading should be background, and should buffer to match dowload rate to my browsing rate (to avoid wasting bandwidth). The second idea is to scroll on logical boundaries - like from one slashdot comment to the next.
I bet if you looked behind the numbers, you'd find Texas dropped solely due to the HP/Compaq "merger" (Capellas was an idiot, and Carly brillian on that one).
But, Adolph, because you asked, there are several good schools in Texas. Yes, certainly, UT-Austin, which is strong in almost any area you choose, but also Texas A&M is no slouch, especially for agrigcultural technology (don't laugh - people gotta eat). Rice University is also a nationally recognized school (including it's computer science program). Baylor and UT both have excellent law schools with very high bar passage rates. Still, all that aside, MIT, Harvard, and UMass are some power hitters that do pretty much put Massachusetts at the top of any list.
Some other comments here had asked what good was Texas for producing doctors: Houston is a major hub for medicine. Undergraduates from all over the world (literally) flock to Baylor University for its pre-med school program. You really can't beat Baylor College of Medicine (not affiliated with Baylor University or the Baylor Healthcare System) and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is world class for cancer treatment and research. Some people complain about public schools in Texas, but as a product of that system, I'd say they do pretty well especially since Texas has had a lot of immigration in the past two decades or so.
As for high-tech, Austin, Dallas, and Houston are all three very heavy in technology type businesses. IBM has labs in New York (Watson), California (Almaden), and Texas (Austin). (I guess MA is close enough to New York not to get its own.) I think, overall, Tech is #1 or #2 industry in the state. In Austin (800,000+ people in the city proper), when I worked at IBM (99), I believe the largest non-government employers in the city were Dell, IBM, and Motorola. Dallas is home to EDS, and of course, Johnson Space Center is just outside of Houston.
In the area of trade, Texas is important, too. It was the number one exporter of all 50 states in 2002 and 2003 (source here).
I could go on, but I think you get the idea...
You don't use caps? Have you ever programmed in C? Set up your Unix environment? Needed to type some initials? How do you type NASA effectively without capslock? I use it all the time. If ever there's a key I thought useless, it has to be the context menu key.
I'm working towards a Ph.D., and I was always surprised when people seemed floored when I mentioned was going to graduate school to get a Ph.D. Some people think that a Ph.D. is only for teaching, and that is categorically untrue. Some people think that a Ph.D. is only good if you want to do research. That, too, is categorically untrue.
When I arrived at Ga. Tech a fresh Systems graduate student, they made the statement (this was 3 years ago mind you) that about 80% of their students went to industry! That leaves only 20% to academic positions. Even then, I'm sure a good deal of those weren't as much teaching as research with teaching "on the side"
Lest you think that research is your only other choice, you would want to be aware that if you are a researcher at a school, a large part of your time will actually be spent in a managerial capacity. This could involve a good deal of marketing and politics, too, as you jockey for getting your projects funded, or attracting the best grad students to your project. Beyond that, there is certainly a wide world out there in the corporate world. Andrew Grove, former Intel CEO, has a Ph.D.
What you can say that is categorically true about a Ph.D. is that it will separate you from the masses of those with Bachelors and Masters. I think there definitely a huge trend in education of needing more to "get ahead". Thirty or forty years ago, a college degree would put you way ahead of the pack. But now it looks to me that a number of jobs require a Masters to separate yourself from the masses. Will that soon become a Ph.D.? I dunno. But I do know that with a Ph.D. I' m educationally qualified, at least, for every position that requires a Masters, PLUS the ones that require a Ph.D. (like college level) teaching.
In the end, experience, drive, and ambition trumpsall, really. Gates has no degree in business (or anything) but runs a multi-billion dollar (evil?) empire. But I'm sure there are a few near destitute souls with Ph.D.'s, too. If your employer is worried about your education, it is your job, as it is with point on your resume to convince him it's an asset! If your future boss is worried about hiring someone smarter than him- or herself, then you have a Dilbert like problem at that company, don't you think?
Good luck!
Interestingly, Dreamworks claimed one of their problems was that Adobe wouldn't port photoshop to Linux. One wonders if they have heard of Gimp - surely it couldn't be THAT far behind Photoshop (though I'm not a heavy user of either app) as to be useless to them. Makes me also wonder why HP wasn't pushing that. (Although it's possible they had a lot of scripts for Photoshop already? Anyone know?)
Zorn
Ah, they named it that so the sequel to Game Boy Advance could be called Game Boy Advance A Little Further.
Zorn
Well, NASA is a different place than it was in the 1980's, but still, they themselves wanted to send up a "regular person" -- schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Arguably, it's safer now than it was then. Tito is arguably as fit for a space mission as she was. Especially since he worked for NASA.
Zorn
According to the inventor's article on the Scientific American site, the FastShip really does plane. He calls it a "semi-planing" hull. This occurs becuase the FastShip has slight concavity to its hull in the stern. Supposedly, this lifts the stern and helps eliminate drag. Oh yes, I would imagine that any ship that can carry cargo would be able to handle passengers as well, but what passengers want to make that trip?
Zorn
The same guy that programmed the Mars explorer must have written that article... -100 degrees Fahrenheit is -73 degrees Celsius, not -40! In fact, -40 is the only place where Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures are the same.
Zorn
Of course /. is slow to report their own downtimes... they're down. And this was no ordinary "our server is flaky for a few minutes", K5 was getting creamed.
Zorn
Rosen does make some good points about limits are being crossed, but I don't think the situtation is as dire as he would lead us to believe. Take the example of Amazon's recommendation software. Who hasn't been to some small store recently when they decided to show you another product? Were you interested? Did you buy it?
Now ask, how did they know what you might like? Simple, they looked at you, or they knew what you had purchased on previous trips to the store. I don't think Amazon's recommendations are that different. When I go to their store, I give them a certain permission to evaluate me, the customer.
On the other hand, targeting a certain, very small class of people, like executives, by using ZIP codes and domain names is a little more disturbing. Now they are passing the bounds of the information that they glean from merely *their* "store". That is, they must conspire with others to create this information.
I think most small brick-and-mortar operators would not be likely to share the customer purchasing decisions or consumer data with their friends or or store owners, and likewise online operators should follow a similar standard.
IMO, summing up, online retailers can collect information about me, but they shouldn't be sharing it, selling it, getting out of debt with it, or following me around like DoubleClick is wont to do.
And I think I can be reasonably comfortable online with that.
Zorn
Zorn
And now we need to genetically alter the bacteria and yeast, too, becasue bigger mice means we need bigger cheese to feed them!
Zorn
What's kinda funny is to do a little comparison of this machine computer to the others on the Top500 list. Right up in the top 10 are two Japanses machines (Hitachis, I think) BUT they only use ~100 processors, not ~8000 or ~9000. Dang impressive. Not only that, but all the Hitachi and Fujitsu machines seems to be much, much smaller. Curious -- does anyone know what the $/flop difference between the two kinds of computers is?
Zorn
Why not put a dot key on the phone and assign them IPv6 addresses? There are supposed to be plenty of those to go around, and with the (fairly) compact way you type them in you might stand a chance of remembering them. Then, of course, the natural extension is give em URIs like phone.callZorn.desk, phone.callZorn.home...
Zorn
Dr. Poucher's a great guy. You just have to remember, in any contest, that you are catching the contest director in the absolute worst possible circumstances. I hope that you get to meet him some other time. Re: the ivory tower comment -- That may be a problem of some profs, but not Dr. Poucher -- he does a lot of "real world" work on the side.
I have had two classes from Dr. Poucher (one theory and one software development) and I never knew him to be anything but fair to students.
Ask yourself this, though, what would you have done in his situation? You knew that three people, whom you trusted, had checked the problem data. You knew that the problem had been solved on the data already. You've not encountered such a problem in ten years of running such a contest. You knew that every contestant at the contest was way keyed up and running on adrenaline.
I agree about contests though. They are a lot of fun and you do learn a lot. This is true in general, IMHO. Texas has statewide academic contests in high schools -- participation in those takes away all the "test anxiety" many otherwise excellent students face. Programming contest is the same way. It gives you a great confidence, whether you win a contest or not, to just sit down and start slamming out code.
Once again, I am sorry that you had to meet Dr. Poucher under such adverse circumstances!
Zorn