Perhaps I missed something, but last time I looked at building systems on the Dell website, you could not get the same hardware options on the Optiplex "workstations" as you could on the Dimension "desktops." You could however, buy Dimensions from the small business store. That's where I got my current computer, although it still came with some crap that was worth deleting (like Windows ME...this was 4 years ago).
Since this is Slashdot, the bias is to be expected and I'm not bothered by it, but I want to point out that the gender gap exists beyond just CS majors. Look at electrical, civil, and mechanical engineering graduate statistics, too. I don't have any references, but it's easy to tell just from looking at my graduating class, which was about 80 percent male. And, of course, it's not just my school either. Attendence at ASME and SAE student and professional events is overwhelmingly male, too. And it shows at my job. There's probably about 30 people on my floor, including only 5 women, who I believe are mostly technical writers rather than engineers.
We are told that this is a problem, and to some extent, I agree. Sexual harassment or gender bias is obviously out of line, and we should not be creating an environment such that our coworkers feel uncomfortable, but some work guys simply tend to be more interested in. If a woman is more interested in the workings of the human body than how to program computers or (in my case) build forklifts, let her go study biology, chemistry, or nursing (majors which seem to have as many or more women than men). We don't need to BS people into thinking they'll like spending 8 hours a day debugging code or playing with hydraulic oil, just so the statistics impress Oprah or Hillary Clinton. Some women will like CS or engineering, some won't.
Of course, there is the question of why women often don't want to do the same things as guys, and any implication that women are fundamentally different from men different in their interests or the way they think will inevitably be called sexist by someone. Some times I get the impression that the thoughts of the politically correct mafia can be summed up as, "We have to have equality, and by golly, we're gonna get it even if the only way is to make everyone equally miserable."
Who still has working models of any of the computers mentioned?
I have two Commodore 64's hidden away in my parent's attic. I've read that they were designed to have a service life of roughly 20 years, because no one envisioned them becoming obsolete so fast. Last time I tried one of them, probably 2-3 years ago, it worked fine and I had bit of fun playing Pitstop and Omega Race with an old Atari joystick. I actually have floppy disks for Wing Commander, Sim City, and Bard's Tale (Wizardry clone), but they seem to be corrupt. I was only able to do the training mission in Wing Commander and couldn't load Sim City or Bard's Tale at all. I also used to have a bunch of random programs on casette tapes, but I think they all got thrown out. One of the C=64's is in the original box, with a Costco price tag from 1984 for $200 or so. I've never looked into what I might be able to accomplish with my 300 baud modem and the Compuserve trial disk I have.
Seriously. This is Slashdot for crying out loud. How many of you people take your computer in to CompUSA because you "lead a busy life?" It would take just as long to organize your collection, fill out the necessary forms and ship it anyways.
Download DBpoweramp: 3 minutes on DSL
Put CD in drive and start ripping: 2 minutes
Walk away and cook dinner/weed the garden/go to work: ???
Return and change CD's: 2 minutes
Staying true to your nerd roots: timeless
There are somethings money can't buy, but for an extra fee, you can upgrade to premium.
That makes a lot more sense. I was awestruck that it could've improved so much so quickly. I'm still impressed that it could be putting enough energy into its stride to have both feet simultaneously off the ground and not trip.
New tech advances are made just a little more exciting, too, by the addition of the vocal talents of Leonard Nimoy. When he tells you that you've developed a monarchy, you feel good about it.
I don't think you can get much better than having science officer Spock on your side.
In addition to the music industry apparently being staffed by reactionary, entitlement-oriented morons, as others have pointed out, I've got one more theory to add based on my experience: flexibility adds value to existing collections.
When I ripped all my CD's to MP3, I found I was less anxious to buy new CD's because it was easier to achieve a seamless variety. Just click random mode on Winamp (still v2.91 for me) and any song from my collection could be next. I wouldn't necessarily be listening to one artist for an entire album or constantly swapping CD's to keep the flavor changing. As a result, I get more satisfaction from the same number of CD's and don't feel a need to add to my collection as often.
As far as the money lost due to reduced sales, as soon as they start selling the songs I want DRM-free, I'll start buying music online to fill in the holes in my collection where I don't want the whole album.
Ok, while I had no information contrary to what REI said, I wasn't entirely convinced. If it's true, as you say, that this guy owns Regal Cinemas, then I'll have to concede that he is evil. Why should I pay the highest price in town to get the same seats/screen/sound system yet continue watching commercials for 20 minutes after the scheduled start time?
Is anyone else having these problems with these once great authors? Maybe I shouldn't care about their political viewpoints when I read their fiction?
I don't have this trouble. Granted, I am a devout Catholic, but also extremely interested in science and work as an engineer (I don't know why so many people still seem to see religion and science as being necessarily at odds).
My impression of Lewis' writings is that they are intended to help other people understand a faith that he adopted late in life (with some prodding from his friend Tolkien), and had his own struggle understanding. The Chronicles of Narnia target children, who have typically heard the Bible stories, but have trouble understanding some of the underlying concepts. The allegory is intended to help the readers with that. The Screwtape Letters and the The Space Trilogy are oriented toward adults and hit the theology much harder and more directly. To people familiar with the religious concepts, it takes the story to another level beyond the basic fantasy story. I believe that, although they may be entertaining for non-believers, Lewis' stories are ultimately targeted toward Christian readers or those considering becoming one, and it's no real surprise that many people who reject the Christian faith don't feel the same connection to the stories that others do.
I still do consider Lewis a great author because he accomplishes these aims masterfully. As a kid, you enjoyed the fairy tale component of the stories, but as an adult, you naturally evaluate the deeper component and find it doesn't match your philosophy as well. An author could also be a master at romance novels, but won't pique my interest because overly sappy love stories bore me.
For what it's worth, as a "man of science" I could never come to terms with the original Star Wars trilogy, but I still love those movies.
Perhaps you should discuss that with your parents, who brought you into "His country" when you were but a wee lad or las. The rules were already in place at the time of your immigration.
They have backed away from setting hard dates because they would rather push it back to cover any problems that can arise than rush into it and make a big fireball. Also, they are once again waiting on the Air Force to give them another launch window.
Personally, I was encouraged by the straightforward nature of the letter and apparently confident diagnosis of the 2 problems they encountered during last month's countdown.
While they are currently flying from the Kwajalein (sp?) and Vandenberg, they have some pretty ambitious plans for expansion. They have hinted at a desire to eventually launch manned capsules, although that is obviously a long ways off. Also, consider if they won a contract to launch a nuclear powered probe. NASA gets enough flak as is with Boeing and Lockheed handling those. I can imagine the whining if NASA trusts a "young upstart company operating on greedy, for-profit principles that has no experience in this sort of thing."
I've been told that this is the same group that created the Lord of the Rings along with Peter Jackson. They seem to have a refreshing habit of respecting the author's work and recognizing that what makes some of these stories great is...well, the original story. They're producing the whole series, right? If so, I'm glad they seem to going in the written order, instead of by the Narnia timeline. Somehow they came out better for me when I read them that way than for my friends who read them from the chronologically-arranged box set.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it downplayed Aslan a little bit, because of the obvious allegory involved and the fact that Disney bankrolled the film.
I didn't dwell on the dollar amounts, but it sounded to me like the total amount of money involved was $3 billion, but buying the shares back and minimizing the damage had cost the bank $225 million.
I'll bet there were some chairs thrown and people screaming at the "Progammers! Programmers! Programmers!" whose software will no doubt be blamed in screw up. Then the executives straightened up their ties and came out for the press conference. I doubt it matters what country you did it in, some mistakes are simply to big to hide. $200 million is lost. Somebody's getting fired. It would be a lot harder to cover this up and make the numbers still add up right, than it would be to pick someone to blame and write off the lost money. The thing I would have expected is for the company to try admitting that a mistake had been made, but that the client was at least partially liable for the cost.
I heard about it on a BBC news brief this morning during my commute. They played a sound bite from some guy apparently affiliated with the bank droning about how this is a known problem and it happens all the time and the banking industry needs to address this flaw in the system or some such drivel. Problems that cost money get fixed. It all comes down to somebody, somewhere, made a big mistake and had better figure out a way to make it look good on their resume, because they're going to be looking for a job.
Previous Work Experience:
Mizuho Bank of Japan
2001-2005 - Senior Accounts Broker
Accomplishments: Served client interests...blah, blah, blah,... with responsibility culminating in the brokering of a $200 million deal for the company.
They've been doing ok. While Mars Express has had no problems that couldn't be resolved, and Hguyens did fairly well, Hguyens failed to return a big chunk of it's data, and Beagle is a crater. I seem to remember a problem with a climate monitoring satellite recently, too.
The real issue seems to be that none of the EU member states is interested in spending any money on space. I think the ESA's budget is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 that of NASA's, and that's reflected in the number and scope of missions they are able to undertake.
1. Submit article to Slashdot about fake info for domain registrations
2. Find replies about people saying they only want to protect their privacy. Check their sig/profile for links to a personal website.
3. Report all bogus information to registrar. Snatch up domain when it returns to market
4. Disable question mark key to end another Slashdot cliche on the second to last step
5. Sell domain back to poor bugger you reported to begin with and profit!
At the same time, do the ICANN not need to have some ability to contact users of the domain name system? Perhaps this information, or at least mailing addresses, shouldn't be public to begin with, but that's a distinct issue from entering information you know to be false when it is a condition of the service you are purchasing.
Entering false information is a clear violation of the terms of service agreed to with the registrar (and illegal, if I'm not mistaken). If the registrar finds obviously false information (555 area codes, etc), they should drop the registration. It might be nice to send a 30 day notice to whatever bogus-sounding contact info they entered, just in case, but after that, they can promote their server by IP address alone if they can't play by the rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I missed something, but last time I looked at building systems on the Dell website, you could not get the same hardware options on the Optiplex "workstations" as you could on the Dimension "desktops." You could however, buy Dimensions from the small business store. That's where I got my current computer, although it still came with some crap that was worth deleting (like Windows ME...this was 4 years ago).
Since this is Slashdot, the bias is to be expected and I'm not bothered by it, but I want to point out that the gender gap exists beyond just CS majors. Look at electrical, civil, and mechanical engineering graduate statistics, too. I don't have any references, but it's easy to tell just from looking at my graduating class, which was about 80 percent male. And, of course, it's not just my school either. Attendence at ASME and SAE student and professional events is overwhelmingly male, too. And it shows at my job. There's probably about 30 people on my floor, including only 5 women, who I believe are mostly technical writers rather than engineers.
We are told that this is a problem, and to some extent, I agree. Sexual harassment or gender bias is obviously out of line, and we should not be creating an environment such that our coworkers feel uncomfortable, but some work guys simply tend to be more interested in. If a woman is more interested in the workings of the human body than how to program computers or (in my case) build forklifts, let her go study biology, chemistry, or nursing (majors which seem to have as many or more women than men). We don't need to BS people into thinking they'll like spending 8 hours a day debugging code or playing with hydraulic oil, just so the statistics impress Oprah or Hillary Clinton. Some women will like CS or engineering, some won't.
Of course, there is the question of why women often don't want to do the same things as guys, and any implication that women are fundamentally different from men different in their interests or the way they think will inevitably be called sexist by someone. Some times I get the impression that the thoughts of the politically correct mafia can be summed up as, "We have to have equality, and by golly, we're gonna get it even if the only way is to make everyone equally miserable."
Who still has working models of any of the computers mentioned?
I have two Commodore 64's hidden away in my parent's attic. I've read that they were designed to have a service life of roughly 20 years, because no one envisioned them becoming obsolete so fast. Last time I tried one of them, probably 2-3 years ago, it worked fine and I had bit of fun playing Pitstop and Omega Race with an old Atari joystick. I actually have floppy disks for Wing Commander, Sim City, and Bard's Tale (Wizardry clone), but they seem to be corrupt. I was only able to do the training mission in Wing Commander and couldn't load Sim City or Bard's Tale at all. I also used to have a bunch of random programs on casette tapes, but I think they all got thrown out. One of the C=64's is in the original box, with a Costco price tag from 1984 for $200 or so. I've never looked into what I might be able to accomplish with my 300 baud modem and the Compuserve trial disk I have.
Yikes! Is the end of "don't be evil?"
Staying true to your nerd roots: timeless
There are somethings money can't buy, but for an extra fee, you can upgrade to premium.
That makes a lot more sense. I was awestruck that it could've improved so much so quickly. I'm still impressed that it could be putting enough energy into its stride to have both feet simultaneously off the ground and not trip.
Which is what makes it so fun when you clip the whiskers off of one side only...
In addition to the music industry apparently being staffed by reactionary, entitlement-oriented morons, as others have pointed out, I've got one more theory to add based on my experience: flexibility adds value to existing collections.
When I ripped all my CD's to MP3, I found I was less anxious to buy new CD's because it was easier to achieve a seamless variety. Just click random mode on Winamp (still v2.91 for me) and any song from my collection could be next. I wouldn't necessarily be listening to one artist for an entire album or constantly swapping CD's to keep the flavor changing. As a result, I get more satisfaction from the same number of CD's and don't feel a need to add to my collection as often.
As far as the money lost due to reduced sales, as soon as they start selling the songs I want DRM-free, I'll start buying music online to fill in the holes in my collection where I don't want the whole album.
For the flame war potential, he very nearly could have said "Use $build."
Does it matter though? I though real penguins never leave their shell.
Ok, while I had no information contrary to what REI said, I wasn't entirely convinced. If it's true, as you say, that this guy owns Regal Cinemas, then I'll have to concede that he is evil. Why should I pay the highest price in town to get the same seats/screen/sound system yet continue watching commercials for 20 minutes after the scheduled start time?
My impression of Lewis' writings is that they are intended to help other people understand a faith that he adopted late in life (with some prodding from his friend Tolkien), and had his own struggle understanding. The Chronicles of Narnia target children, who have typically heard the Bible stories, but have trouble understanding some of the underlying concepts. The allegory is intended to help the readers with that. The Screwtape Letters and the The Space Trilogy are oriented toward adults and hit the theology much harder and more directly. To people familiar with the religious concepts, it takes the story to another level beyond the basic fantasy story. I believe that, although they may be entertaining for non-believers, Lewis' stories are ultimately targeted toward Christian readers or those considering becoming one, and it's no real surprise that many people who reject the Christian faith don't feel the same connection to the stories that others do.
I still do consider Lewis a great author because he accomplishes these aims masterfully. As a kid, you enjoyed the fairy tale component of the stories, but as an adult, you naturally evaluate the deeper component and find it doesn't match your philosophy as well. An author could also be a master at romance novels, but won't pique my interest because overly sappy love stories bore me.
For what it's worth, as a "man of science" I could never come to terms with the original Star Wars trilogy, but I still love those movies.
Perhaps you should discuss that with your parents, who brought you into "His country" when you were but a wee lad or las. The rules were already in place at the time of your immigration.
They have backed away from setting hard dates because they would rather push it back to cover any problems that can arise than rush into it and make a big fireball. Also, they are once again waiting on the Air Force to give them another launch window.
Personally, I was encouraged by the straightforward nature of the letter and apparently confident diagnosis of the 2 problems they encountered during last month's countdown.
While they are currently flying from the Kwajalein (sp?) and Vandenberg, they have some pretty ambitious plans for expansion. They have hinted at a desire to eventually launch manned capsules, although that is obviously a long ways off. Also, consider if they won a contract to launch a nuclear powered probe. NASA gets enough flak as is with Boeing and Lockheed handling those. I can imagine the whining if NASA trusts a "young upstart company operating on greedy, for-profit principles that has no experience in this sort of thing."
I've been told that this is the same group that created the Lord of the Rings along with Peter Jackson. They seem to have a refreshing habit of respecting the author's work and recognizing that what makes some of these stories great is...well, the original story. They're producing the whole series, right? If so, I'm glad they seem to going in the written order, instead of by the Narnia timeline. Somehow they came out better for me when I read them that way than for my friends who read them from the chronologically-arranged box set.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it downplayed Aslan a little bit, because of the obvious allegory involved and the fact that Disney bankrolled the film.
I can't wait to go see it.
Stop it! You're going to polarize slashdot readers into two groups: those who enjoy these chains of silly puns, and those who don't.
That was good. Unfortunately, for every good "in Soviet Russia joke," there are 10,000 bad ones. It's not worth it.
I didn't dwell on the dollar amounts, but it sounded to me like the total amount of money involved was $3 billion, but buying the shares back and minimizing the damage had cost the bank $225 million.
I'll bet there were some chairs thrown and people screaming at the "Progammers! Programmers! Programmers!" whose software will no doubt be blamed in screw up. Then the executives straightened up their ties and came out for the press conference. I doubt it matters what country you did it in, some mistakes are simply to big to hide. $200 million is lost. Somebody's getting fired. It would be a lot harder to cover this up and make the numbers still add up right, than it would be to pick someone to blame and write off the lost money. The thing I would have expected is for the company to try admitting that a mistake had been made, but that the client was at least partially liable for the cost.
I heard about it on a BBC news brief this morning during my commute. They played a sound bite from some guy apparently affiliated with the bank droning about how this is a known problem and it happens all the time and the banking industry needs to address this flaw in the system or some such drivel. Problems that cost money get fixed. It all comes down to somebody, somewhere, made a big mistake and had better figure out a way to make it look good on their resume, because they're going to be looking for a job.
Previous Work Experience:
Mizuho Bank of Japan
2001-2005 - Senior Accounts Broker
Accomplishments: Served client interests...blah, blah, blah,... with responsibility culminating in the brokering of a $200 million deal for the company.
They've been doing ok. While Mars Express has had no problems that couldn't be resolved, and Hguyens did fairly well, Hguyens failed to return a big chunk of it's data, and Beagle is a crater. I seem to remember a problem with a climate monitoring satellite recently, too.
The real issue seems to be that none of the EU member states is interested in spending any money on space. I think the ESA's budget is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 that of NASA's, and that's reflected in the number and scope of missions they are able to undertake.
1. Submit article to Slashdot about fake info for domain registrations
2. Find replies about people saying they only want to protect their privacy. Check their sig/profile for links to a personal website.
3. Report all bogus information to registrar. Snatch up domain when it returns to market
4. Disable question mark key to end another Slashdot cliche on the second to last step
5. Sell domain back to poor bugger you reported to begin with and profit!
At the same time, do the ICANN not need to have some ability to contact users of the domain name system? Perhaps this information, or at least mailing addresses, shouldn't be public to begin with, but that's a distinct issue from entering information you know to be false when it is a condition of the service you are purchasing.
Entering false information is a clear violation of the terms of service agreed to with the registrar (and illegal, if I'm not mistaken). If the registrar finds obviously false information (555 area codes, etc), they should drop the registration. It might be nice to send a 30 day notice to whatever bogus-sounding contact info they entered, just in case, but after that, they can promote their server by IP address alone if they can't play by the rules.