There comes a time, when a service, good or utility becomes so vital, so pervasive and so common in peoples everyday lives that a nation simply cannot afford to have this essential aspect of their civilisation in the hands of unscruplous private companies.
There are onlt a few such services. Electricity, water, sewage, air, and landline telecommunications. You cannot allow the free market anywhere near these services. If you do, service will degrade, people will suffer and your economy, and indeed society, will slowly but surely fall behind.
Broadband penetration in the US is pitiful in comparision to other OECD countries. There are electricty blackouts in major US cities. People in metropolitian areas are being told to boil their water. This is what happens when you privatise public services. You get the dregs of the profits running them.
Somethings are just too important to leave to the likes of Gordon Gecko.
Ma Bell used to charge a monthly rental fee for each and every phone in your house.
I am an non USian and this is so unbelieveable that I'm afraid I have no option but to ask for some kind of citation to back up, what seems to me like, an absolutely ludacrious statement.
This is why I never got into Counterstrike. I play games to relax, not wind myself up into gordian knots of ultra tension while juggling fifty different variables around in my head only to have someone unexpectedly pull the plug by using a rail gun or nearest cultural equivilent.
Offtopic as hell, but with all the fairly anti-French comments that are going to get modded up as funny, I think I might as well set the facts straight.
A lot of Americans love to make a mockery of the French. A lot of this revolves around the French surrender in world war 2, and how the Americans had to "save" the French from Nazi occupation.
Let's make a few things clear here:
1) The French lost 1.5 million men in the First World War, with over 4 million wounded. [source]. The social and moral effect of this were devestating. The French are still feeling the demographic effects to this day. Petain, the infamous Nazi collaberator dur WWII, was one of those in command during the first war and was very aware of the devestation of modern war, and one of the major reasons for the surrender was that neither he, nor a huge amount of the French public were willing to pay such a high price again.
Americans love to mock the French over this, "Cheese eating..." surrender, but think for a moment of American war sentiment in the aftermath of Vietnam. Having suffered only ~60,000 war dead, America effectively became war adverse until after the first Gulf War, and probably till this day to some extent.
Multiply that by x23 times and then try and reasses the French situation.
2) Not everyone in France rolled over and surrendered. Everyone on these boards has heard of the french resistance, and not without good cause. "La Resistance" is to this day a phrase synonomous with any freedom fighters all over the world. Try to remember that quite a lot of French people did what most americans would never do if their country was occupied. Red Dawn is a feelgood movie, not a social commentary on American patriotism.
3) This one is Serious.
America did not win the Second World War In Europe.
The western front was absolutely not what defeated Germany. No way in hell. The war was decided on the Eastern Front. Almost completely. Russia defeated the Nazi's. Not British stiff upper lips. Not the D-day Landings. No. The Russians defeated the German Army.
Don't get me wrong. The Western front was a vital moment in that it ensured western europe did not fall under another dicatorship. But please, do not bullshit either yourself or others by perpetuating this myth that America, or England, defeated the Nazi's. It wasn't Shermans that rolled into Berlin.
So take a moment to come off the pedastal, realise that not everyone in the world lives in a nice safe and secure democracy, and please, stay out of penis size competitions with the French, because they see a lot more action than American's do. Both kinds.
Disclaimer: I am not French, and to be honest, I don't like France very much.
Go ahead, change the numbers around all you want. As long as you stick with possible values (ie. non-negative values), the facts remain the same. Namely that fact that one nation cannot always be the best at producing everything.
Yes it can. One nation can be the best at producing everything. It's 100% possible in theory. In practive however, of course the French will always make better cream coffee than Americans.
However, when it comes to mass produced goods like cars, computers, software, clothes, etc, etc, etc... China can and is best at producing these goods at the lowest price.
Economists love to fudge this stuff, but the reality is a lot of them are simply bullshitting and/or don't really know how things are going to turn out. Cheaper goods from China may or may not make things better for Americans, or for Chinese people for that matter.
The weightless economy is an ivory tower concept, that is consistently held up as an aspirational one. But bottom line, countries with a relatively high manufacturing and exports boom. Countries without don't. America is currently without, and seems most likely to continue withou for some time. All because some economist says that goods produced in sweatshops by serfs living a totalitatrian state should be allowed to freely compete with citizens in a prosperous democracy.
Jobs go to China for one reason and one reason only. It's cheaper.
The next gen console from apple will ship as a 5 inch diameter, perfect white sphere, powered by a thermal recharger in its shallow bowl cradle. The system itself will have a single 64bit 2GHz G5 processor with 256MB of ram and an Nvida Geforce onboard chip. Cooling will be achived through a liquid circulation system that runs fluid just below the surface of the sphere.
All communication will be wireless, with connectivity to the iMac monitor supported preferred, with the option to have the game display as the OSX background. Export to a television will be supported by an advanced Airport express optical link only.
The system will have no controllers, instead input will be via the next generation wireless enabled iPod, which will double as the systems memory save card.
The system will naturally seemless play streamed music from iTunes, as well as videos from the iTunes store.
There will be no game discs, or other input media. Games will instead be purchased from the iPlay online store for $19.99 per game and stored on either a local authorised computer, or optionally transferred to the wireless iPod controller.
The selection of games will be somewhat limited to; very stylistic or esoteric titles, Pixar movie licences, music/video based party trivia games with iTunes support, and iUnreal, which will be exclusive to the console.
So the fact that they ignored a security hole for two years and then botched the fix is unimportant, because it's fixed now?
Yeah! Yeah! Because... because Google are different OK?! They do NO EVIL! I mean "Don't be Evil", I mean, not like M$, I mean.........STOP DISSING GOOGLE!!!! They're cool and happy and good AJAX coders!!!!!! Better than others!!! They CAN'T Screw up!!!!!!!!!! This is a lie!!! WAS a lie!!! No Wait!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!
Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now.
* Bright people working for them
* msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year
Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine.
You've forgotten the (not so ) secret ingredient, that only Google bother implementing. On the internet, competition is massive. Every other site is only one click away. This means, if you want to suceed, the customer comes first.
Google make money because they give you a service, and you don't even realise they're trying to make money off you. Yahoo and MSN make less money because when you go to their homepages, you get spammed with advertisments and services, instead of just being able to search.
It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.
Go to MSN search right now. It's clear whoever is in charge needs to be fired. I can't get a search without first selecting where I want to search in an irritating popup menu. It's substandard. Users flock to better offerings.
Google still haven't lost the plot. You go to Google, and you get search. No mess, no fuss, no distractions, just the results. The sponsored links in no way distract you from the main goal. Google want you to be happy with the service, because the more happy people they get, the more happy people will use their other services.
That's how you make money on the internet. You please the customer. If you're shoving ads down peoples throats or bugging them to upgrade, or basically in any way throwing up and artifical barrier, you're wasting your time.
If you read the Penny Arcade Bacon Robot's book, Tycho really hits the nail on the head. If you're just sitting in front of the internet with your arms crossed, waiting for people to give you money, you're not going to get a dime. Pay per view content might as well not exist, and sites that push products and services on their users are basically just line noise.
If Microsoft, or anyone wants to succeed on the internet, they have to realise this; On the net, nice guys finish first.
If there is money in it, quality content will follow, and if it is a meritocracy where accredited people's edits aren't so trivially erased (discouraging them from further participation), the wikipedia thing could really work..
If there's money in it Wikipedia will crash and burn. Burn! Faster than you can say schisters.
It's not a toy OK! It just's able to run Counterstrike at really high framerates because scienctific simulations and game mechanics are very similar operations...
Now if you'll excuse me, my aimbots need seeing to.
Sorry. You've assummed that english, and english speakers and writers, follows a strict set of rules. It doesn't.
If enough people use effecting in the sense that they previously would have use affecting, then effecting will mean affecting, and it is no longer "wrong" to use 'effect' in this way.
Thinkpad. Not a bad choice for a Windows/Linux laptop.
Except that there's no way in hell you will be allowed to install linux on it. The university will require you to have a standard build so that the sysadms can slack off.
You put linux on it and all the DRM on the lecture notes won't work right. Expell him!!
Really!!?! That's so Cool!! WHAT!! Sorry I Can't hear You!! NO!! IT'S NOT INTERFERANCE!!! There's this Guy telling Me to be Quiet!! No wait Hang on A sec! I'm TALKING on my Cell OK!?! The WHAT!!?! How Dare... OH The Pilots!!! Oh Man!! First You Tell me To turn Down my iPod(TM), and Now This!! I Paid to Be on This flight too you Know!?
"We've noticed a substantial drop in the amount of EULA's being drafted, as well as an air of goodwill and cheer creeping into the normally sour and beligerent computer software industry, leading naturally to a decrease in important economy stimulating litigation.
I know an accountant. This guy is not a programmer by any manner or means.
Yet his spreadhseet are filled to bursting with simple summation formulae, and more advanced results. He even has a few if statements sprinkled in for good measure. He also records macros, carefully and with thought applied.
He also codes a lot in Access databases, regularly dipping in and out of the raw SQL. On occassion, he will even dip out to the command line, to what he refers to as "DOS".
After several years, he tried to get into VB programing, probably to try some VBA programming. It didn't work out so well, but the key point here is that this guy was a BS student. Not an honors BS student mind. The classic, "booze through college", BS student. Yet, to be frank, in a very real sense, he is a type of computer programmer.
He creates programs for computers.
He's able to do this because the languages he used are accessable to him. VBA through macros, spreadsheet commands, SQL through Access GUIs. If you asked him, he never realise he was actually "programming" anything.
Other people do it all the time. People create filters for their email. Shortcuts on their keyboard. Macros for their games and office apps. Change settings on their microwave or video or cellphone. Use TiVo. They are all creating, or more usually modifing, programs for computers. They just do it in a more restricted, but more accessable way than "real programmers".
End users need to be able to create programs if they are to really unlock the potential of the computer. They need to be able to easily create the most simple of programs, in a "language" that is so simple they don't even realise it's programming. They're not going to learn BASIC or Ruby. But they just might learn a little "Digital Radio Tuning++" or "TiVo on Rails".
Fisher Price Programming? Maybe. But it's better than nothing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a more appropriate cerification would be the AIM Registered Systems Engineer.
There comes a time, when a service, good or utility becomes so vital, so pervasive and so common in peoples everyday lives that a nation simply cannot afford to have this essential aspect of their civilisation in the hands of unscruplous private companies.
There are onlt a few such services. Electricity, water, sewage, air, and landline telecommunications. You cannot allow the free market anywhere near these services. If you do, service will degrade, people will suffer and your economy, and indeed society, will slowly but surely fall behind.
Broadband penetration in the US is pitiful in comparision to other OECD countries. There are electricty blackouts in major US cities. People in metropolitian areas are being told to boil their water. This is what happens when you privatise public services. You get the dregs of the profits running them.
Somethings are just too important to leave to the likes of Gordon Gecko.
Ma Bell used to charge a monthly rental fee for each and every phone in your house.
I am an non USian and this is so unbelieveable that I'm afraid I have no option but to ask for some kind of citation to back up, what seems to me like, an absolutely ludacrious statement.
This is why I never got into Counterstrike. I play games to relax, not wind myself up into gordian knots of ultra tension while juggling fifty different variables around in my head only to have someone unexpectedly pull the plug by using a rail gun or nearest cultural equivilent.
I value my arteries.
Offtopic as hell, but with all the fairly anti-French comments that are going to get modded up as funny, I think I might as well set the facts straight.
A lot of Americans love to make a mockery of the French. A lot of this revolves around the French surrender in world war 2, and how the Americans had to "save" the French from Nazi occupation.
Let's make a few things clear here:
1) The French lost 1.5 million men in the First World War, with over 4 million wounded. [source]. The social and moral effect of this were devestating. The French are still feeling the demographic effects to this day. Petain, the infamous Nazi collaberator dur WWII, was one of those in command during the first war and was very aware of the devestation of modern war, and one of the major reasons for the surrender was that neither he, nor a huge amount of the French public were willing to pay such a high price again.
Americans love to mock the French over this, "Cheese eating..." surrender, but think for a moment of American war sentiment in the aftermath of Vietnam. Having suffered only ~60,000 war dead, America effectively became war adverse until after the first Gulf War, and probably till this day to some extent.
Multiply that by x23 times and then try and reasses the French situation.
2) Not everyone in France rolled over and surrendered. Everyone on these boards has heard of the french resistance, and not without good cause. "La Resistance" is to this day a phrase synonomous with any freedom fighters all over the world. Try to remember that quite a lot of French people did what most americans would never do if their country was occupied. Red Dawn is a feelgood movie, not a social commentary on American patriotism.
3) This one is Serious.
America did not win the Second World War In Europe.
The western front was absolutely not what defeated Germany. No way in hell. The war was decided on the Eastern Front. Almost completely. Russia defeated the Nazi's. Not British stiff upper lips. Not the D-day Landings. No. The Russians defeated the German Army.
Don't get me wrong. The Western front was a vital moment in that it ensured western europe did not fall under another dicatorship. But please, do not bullshit either yourself or others by perpetuating this myth that America, or England, defeated the Nazi's. It wasn't Shermans that rolled into Berlin.
So take a moment to come off the pedastal, realise that not everyone in the world lives in a nice safe and secure democracy, and please, stay out of penis size competitions with the French, because they see a lot more action than American's do. Both kinds.
Disclaimer: I am not French, and to be honest, I don't like France very much.
Go ahead, change the numbers around all you want. As long as you stick with possible values (ie. non-negative values), the facts remain the same. Namely that fact that one nation cannot always be the best at producing everything.
Yes it can. One nation can be the best at producing everything. It's 100% possible in theory. In practive however, of course the French will always make better cream coffee than Americans.
However, when it comes to mass produced goods like cars, computers, software, clothes, etc, etc, etc... China can and is best at producing these goods at the lowest price.
Economists love to fudge this stuff, but the reality is a lot of them are simply bullshitting and/or don't really know how things are going to turn out. Cheaper goods from China may or may not make things better for Americans, or for Chinese people for that matter.
The weightless economy is an ivory tower concept, that is consistently held up as an aspirational one. But bottom line, countries with a relatively high manufacturing and exports boom. Countries without don't. America is currently without, and seems most likely to continue withou for some time. All because some economist says that goods produced in sweatshops by serfs living a totalitatrian state should be allowed to freely compete with citizens in a prosperous democracy.
Jobs go to China for one reason and one reason only. It's cheaper.
To see classified stuff, you must have two things:
1. clearance (assumed for members of congress)
2. need-to-know (not assumed for anyone)
Negative. Need to know is at best a subjective term. You need to have clearance to view the material. That is all.
Obtaining this clearance however, is quite another matter.
Norton was once a prestigous and vernable institution, who faithfully provided good, reliable service for years.
Not Any More.
Wooooooooosssshhhhhhh.. KKKKRACCCKKKK!!!
It's true. Already through the wonders of astronomy we can enjoy 450MB images of Ursulas. Imagine what the future will bring!
The next gen console from apple will ship as a 5 inch diameter, perfect white sphere, powered by a thermal recharger in its shallow bowl cradle. The system itself will have a single 64bit 2GHz G5 processor with 256MB of ram and an Nvida Geforce onboard chip. Cooling will be achived through a liquid circulation system that runs fluid just below the surface of the sphere.
All communication will be wireless, with connectivity to the iMac monitor supported preferred, with the option to have the game display as the OSX background. Export to a television will be supported by an advanced Airport express optical link only.
The system will have no controllers, instead input will be via the next generation wireless enabled iPod, which will double as the systems memory save card.
The system will naturally seemless play streamed music from iTunes, as well as videos from the iTunes store.
There will be no game discs, or other input media. Games will instead be purchased from the iPlay online store for $19.99 per game and stored on either a local authorised computer, or optionally transferred to the wireless iPod controller.
The selection of games will be somewhat limited to; very stylistic or esoteric titles, Pixar movie licences, music/video based party trivia games with iTunes support, and iUnreal, which will be exclusive to the console.
You're wrong.
So the fact that they ignored a security hole for two years and then botched the fix is unimportant, because it's fixed now?
....STOP DISSING GOOGLE!!!! They're cool and happy and good AJAX coders!!!!!! Better than others!!! They CAN'T Screw up!!!!!!!!!! This is a lie!!! WAS a lie!!! No Wait!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!
Yeah! Yeah! Because... because Google are different OK?! They do NO EVIL! I mean "Don't be Evil", I mean, not like M$, I mean.....
Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now.
* Bright people working for them
* msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year
Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine.
You've forgotten the (not so ) secret ingredient, that only Google bother implementing. On the internet, competition is massive. Every other site is only one click away. This means, if you want to suceed, the customer comes first.
Google make money because they give you a service, and you don't even realise they're trying to make money off you. Yahoo and MSN make less money because when you go to their homepages, you get spammed with advertisments and services, instead of just being able to search.
It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.
Go to MSN search right now. It's clear whoever is in charge needs to be fired. I can't get a search without first selecting where I want to search in an irritating popup menu. It's substandard. Users flock to better offerings.
Yahoo are better by comparision, but again, when I go to their main page, again, they too drop the ball.
Google still haven't lost the plot. You go to Google, and you get search. No mess, no fuss, no distractions, just the results. The sponsored links in no way distract you from the main goal. Google want you to be happy with the service, because the more happy people they get, the more happy people will use their other services.
That's how you make money on the internet. You please the customer. If you're shoving ads down peoples throats or bugging them to upgrade, or basically in any way throwing up and artifical barrier, you're wasting your time.
If you read the Penny Arcade Bacon Robot's book, Tycho really hits the nail on the head. If you're just sitting in front of the internet with your arms crossed, waiting for people to give you money, you're not going to get a dime. Pay per view content might as well not exist, and sites that push products and services on their users are basically just line noise.
If Microsoft, or anyone wants to succeed on the internet, they have to realise this; On the net, nice guys finish first.
If there is money in it, quality content will follow, and if it is a meritocracy where accredited people's edits aren't so trivially erased (discouraging them from further participation), the wikipedia thing could really work..
If there's money in it Wikipedia will crash and burn. Burn! Faster than you can say schisters.
Best you don't think to much on where hamburgers come from then.
get. a. fucking. life. ...Says the one who's trolling Slashdot with AC comments.
Now that's irony!
It's not a toy OK! It just's able to run Counterstrike at really high framerates because scienctific simulations and game mechanics are very similar operations...
Now if you'll excuse me, my aimbots need seeing to.
Sorry. You've assummed that english, and english speakers and writers, follows a strict set of rules. It doesn't.
If enough people use effecting in the sense that they previously would have use affecting, then effecting will mean affecting, and it is no longer "wrong" to use 'effect' in this way.
Thinkpad. Not a bad choice for a Windows/Linux laptop.
Except that there's no way in hell you will be allowed to install linux on it. The university will require you to have a standard build so that the sysadms can slack off.
You put linux on it and all the DRM on the lecture notes won't work right. Expell him!!
Really!!?! That's so Cool!! WHAT!! Sorry I Can't hear You!! NO!! IT'S NOT INTERFERANCE!!! There's this Guy telling Me to be Quiet!! No wait Hang on A sec! I'm TALKING on my Cell OK!?! The WHAT!!?! How Dare... OH The Pilots!!! Oh Man!! First You Tell me To turn Down my iPod(TM), and Now This!! I Paid to Be on This flight too you Know!?
"We've noticed a substantial drop in the amount of EULA's being drafted, as well as an air of goodwill and cheer creeping into the normally sour and beligerent computer software industry, leading naturally to a decrease in important economy stimulating litigation.
Time to break out the FUD cakes!"
My Kingdom for a torrent!! The Slashdotting alone will fry the server withing seconds!!
I can safely say; it wrote itself.
I know an accountant. This guy is not a programmer by any manner or means.
Yet his spreadhseet are filled to bursting with simple summation formulae, and more advanced results. He even has a few if statements sprinkled in for good measure. He also records macros, carefully and with thought applied.
He also codes a lot in Access databases, regularly dipping in and out of the raw SQL. On occassion, he will even dip out to the command line, to what he refers to as "DOS".
After several years, he tried to get into VB programing, probably to try some VBA programming. It didn't work out so well, but the key point here is that this guy was a BS student. Not an honors BS student mind. The classic, "booze through college", BS student. Yet, to be frank, in a very real sense, he is a type of computer programmer.
He creates programs for computers.
He's able to do this because the languages he used are accessable to him. VBA through macros, spreadsheet commands, SQL through Access GUIs. If you asked him, he never realise he was actually "programming" anything.
Other people do it all the time. People create filters for their email. Shortcuts on their keyboard. Macros for their games and office apps. Change settings on their microwave or video or cellphone. Use TiVo. They are all creating, or more usually modifing, programs for computers. They just do it in a more restricted, but more accessable way than "real programmers".
End users need to be able to create programs if they are to really unlock the potential of the computer. They need to be able to easily create the most simple of programs, in a "language" that is so simple they don't even realise it's programming. They're not going to learn BASIC or Ruby. But they just might learn a little "Digital Radio Tuning++" or "TiVo on Rails".
Fisher Price Programming? Maybe. But it's better than nothing at all.