Where did you go to high school? I went to two high schools, one was an exclusive Catholic college prep school, the other was a public high school. I graduated in 1990, and neither of these schools had dedicated IT staff. And I'm pretty sure neither of them do now.
What IT people? Maybe a University has an IT person, but most K-12 institutions in the U.S. have no dedicated IT person. Usually the "IT person" is just a teacher very knowledgeable about computers -- and is usually one of the teachers teaching computer programming classes. There's usually not a lot of formal IT policies, either. But I do know one thing -- the teacher, as a member of the faculty, is a representative of the school. If it was indeed a school-owned computer, the teacher has every right to order the student to run this or that or not run this or that on the school computer.
And the TFA is unclear about whether this was a student-owned computer or a school computer.
You're right! It's obvious that the teacher in question is actually a super-secret spy working for Microsoft. They are trying to stamp out Firefox usage at all levels, even amongst school children! Everyone should be using IE, in their view, and they'll stop at nothing, even planting "teachers" in classrooms to make their message known!
S/He probably wants to be able to throw it on a DVD or whatever. In order to do that, you have to transcode the video to MPEG-2 and toss it in a VOB container (the menus are just window dressing).
The difference between parallel programming and multithreaded programming is this... with a parallel algorithm, different parts of one task/thread are done on separate CPUs, whereas with multithreaded programming each one thread/task is done entirely on one processor.
It's not a semantic difference. Threads are basically just lightweight processes...so each thread of a program execution can be thought of as a different process. OTOH, in parallel programming, a thread/task is broken down into pieces and brought back together when the pieces are done. Think SETI@Home, but on a much smaller scale.
This probably isn't all that useful for writing something like a web server, where it makes some sense to thread off each connection, but for writing a scientific computing application like a simulation or a climate model where you have number crunching that can be done on different subsets of data, you might want to break down those calculations so they occur on different processors. This requires some degree of sophistication as you usually have one part of the calculation that depends on another part and you have to send data back and forth between parts. This involves more than multithreading, but true parallel processing.
Who even says that the sensor necessarily needs to be fully electronic? You can have a mechanical piece that sticks in the fuel tank and have an electronic control piece that's outside of the fuel tank. In fact, this is exactly how the gas gauge in your car works. This design has, quite frankly, worked well for decades. Sure there's a few disadvantages, but, uh, who cares?
Never. Replacing Microsoft with Google will ultimately mean nothing. Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss. You're just replacing one monopoly with another. Proprietary closed-up code and vendor lock-in is bad no matter whose name you attach it to.
Yanks: DO something about your electoral system! It's time to move back to Democracy from Corporate Oligarchy. As someone outside of the situation, what would suggest? Seriously, because we seem to have no flippin' idea. None at all. Our elections have become fixed. Our politicians are totally corrupt. They've taken away all our rights and taxed us to death.
The last time this happened, we dumped a bunch of tea in Boston Harbor and told King George to go get fscked. Then we started shooting British soldiers.
If Ubuntu "just works" why can't I copy and paste more than text reliably between applications from different sources? And you reliably cut and paste between X11 applications on Mac OS X and native Mac OS X applications? (It's a rhetorical question. The answer is no.)
Oh, gimme a break. Name one thing worthwhile that comes at 'no cost'. Even Wikipedia comes at some cost. Somebody (probably Jimmy Wales/Wikimedia) has to pay for bandwidth and hosting. Whether Wikipedia hosts on its own servers or on someone else's, someone's paying for those hosts, the power and A/C to run them and the cost of an admin or two to keep them running. Therefore, you have to put up with cries for donations and such. Since there are no ads and no one gets paid to produce content, you have to put up with whatever is on there. The quality is wide and varied, just as in the open source community. Just as there are high-quality and poorly-written open source apps, there are high-quality or poorly-written Wikipedia articles. There's not much consistency, despite the best efforts of the Wikipedia community so far.
With an ad-supported site, and the possibility of Google even paying people for articles, the average level of quality will probably rise somewhat. With good editorial control, Google will probably be able to maintain a higher consistency of good quality articles than Wikipedia.
Flame me if you want, but look at it this way: Mac OS X is considered great because "it just works" and the quality of features is consistent throughout the OS. That's because Apple pays for its development and maintains tight control over its content.
Ubuntu works well, don't get me wrong, and it is my choice in desktop operating systems... it's more polished than many other distros because even though it is a community effort, it's tightly managed by Canonical, with final say for everything tracking back to one man -- Mark Shuttleworth. It's a model not too different from the Linux kernel itself.
But my point is that openness is good, but at some point you've gotta have tight controls on what gets in and what doesn't it and that's what Google brings to the table.
No, that's a unit of data. There's a large difference between knowledge and data. For example, let's say last week I sold 1000 PCs. Now out of those,
500 had FooStor hard drives 300 had BarMax hard drives 200 had BazStar hard drives
out of 500 FooStor hard drives there were 300 failures out 300 BarMax hard drives there were 3 failures out of 200 BazStar hard drives, there were no failures
That's data.
Knowledge is knowing that the FooStor hard drives and pieces of shit and you shouldn't use them.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that if you have reasonably common hardware (and Apple hardware is still not quite 'reasonably common', despite using Intel chips) Ubuntu is an OS that 'just works'.
Yes, you sometimes have to work around things on exotic hardware, very new hardware, or if you're trying to do something very specific that is outside the mainstream. In order to get a system that 'just works', you have to buy hardware that's known to work well on Linux. That's it. Stick with hardware that's been around a bit or has vendor support (like Nvidia graphics cards). Get an Epson or HP printer (and install Stylus Toolbox if you have an Epson printer). Use the well-supported Connectix Webcams. Get a scanner that's known to work with SANE. You get the idea. If you follow these guidelines, you will find that Ubuntu 'just works' every time. Or, if you're not quite so ambitious, go out and buy a machine that has Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell sells them.
Unfortunately, people don't realize this and then dismiss integration issues as Linux being 'too immmature.' That's crap. If all your hardware is known to work well under Linux, you won't run into these integration issues.
TFA's not saying that evolved by conscious choice to evolve -- rather that we evolved based on the choices we made as a species. We chose to move to environments in which we had to adapt. We came out of Africa, but moved to Europe and Asia -- considerably colder climates with a wider variety of different and harsher conditions. And that when we changed our environment through our culture, we adapted to that new environment as well...in essence, we caused our own evolution, even though that's not what we were trying to do.
To say that the incumbents in the wireless market are in some sort of trust or effective monopoly is incorrect. Over the course of the relatively short lived wireless market, consumers have seen cost to service ratios drop steadily as the competition between Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon remains constant. Are you so certain of that first statement? One doesn't necessarily imply the other. Collusion and competition can coexist. As long as everyone in the industry agrees to impose certain barriers to entry while still competing -- that's still collusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Beer? Alcohol? Beer isn't alcohol, it's basic nutrition!
And, sure, beer can optimize networks. Drink enough and watch how fast everything whizzes by you!
remind me to register 'politicianporn.com' later, okay?
Where did you go to high school? I went to two high schools, one was an exclusive Catholic college prep school, the other was a public high school. I graduated in 1990, and neither of these schools had dedicated IT staff. And I'm pretty sure neither of them do now.
What IT people? Maybe a University has an IT person, but most K-12 institutions in the U.S. have no dedicated IT person. Usually the "IT person" is just a teacher very knowledgeable about computers -- and is usually one of the teachers teaching computer programming classes. There's usually not a lot of formal IT policies, either. But I do know one thing -- the teacher, as a member of the faculty, is a representative of the school. If it was indeed a school-owned computer, the teacher has every right to order the student to run this or that or not run this or that on the school computer.
And the TFA is unclear about whether this was a student-owned computer or a school computer.
You're right! It's obvious that the teacher in question is actually a super-secret spy working for Microsoft. They are trying to stamp out Firefox usage at all levels, even amongst school children! Everyone should be using IE, in their view, and they'll stop at nothing, even planting "teachers" in classrooms to make their message known!
S/He probably wants to be able to throw it on a DVD or whatever. In order to do that, you have to transcode the video to MPEG-2 and toss it in a VOB container (the menus are just window dressing).
The difference between parallel programming and multithreaded programming is this ... with a parallel algorithm, different parts of one task/thread are done on separate CPUs, whereas with multithreaded programming each one thread/task is done entirely on one processor.
It's not a semantic difference. Threads are basically just lightweight processes...so each thread of a program execution can be thought of as a different process. OTOH, in parallel programming, a thread/task is broken down into pieces and brought back together when the pieces are done. Think SETI@Home, but on a much smaller scale.
This probably isn't all that useful for writing something like a web server, where it makes some sense to thread off each connection, but for writing a scientific computing application like a simulation or a climate model where you have number crunching that can be done on different subsets of data, you might want to break down those calculations so they occur on different processors. This requires some degree of sophistication as you usually have one part of the calculation that depends on another part and you have to send data back and forth between parts. This involves more than multithreading, but true parallel processing.
Who even says that the sensor necessarily needs to be fully electronic? You can have a mechanical piece that sticks in the fuel tank and have an electronic control piece that's outside of the fuel tank. In fact, this is exactly how the gas gauge in your car works. This design has, quite frankly, worked well for decades. Sure there's a few disadvantages, but, uh, who cares?
If it's Flash, there's a number of programs on Linux that will capture the stream and rip it to file.
Wow. Does that link say that Winona Ryder will be playing Amanda Grayson? Man, I think I just had a geekgasm!
Never. Replacing Microsoft with Google will ultimately mean nothing. Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss. You're just replacing one monopoly with another. Proprietary closed-up code and vendor lock-in is bad no matter whose name you attach it to.
Both standards are being worked on the by the W3C standards group. Microsoft, along with all other major browser developers, is a member.
The last time this happened, we dumped a bunch of tea in Boston Harbor and told King George to go get fscked. Then we started shooting British soldiers.
Sure, but does Mac OS X work well on non-Apple hardware?
(Hint: the answer is no)
Oh, gimme a break. Name one thing worthwhile that comes at 'no cost'. Even Wikipedia comes at some cost. Somebody (probably Jimmy Wales/Wikimedia) has to pay for bandwidth and hosting. Whether Wikipedia hosts on its own servers or on someone else's, someone's paying for those hosts, the power and A/C to run them and the cost of an admin or two to keep them running. Therefore, you have to put up with cries for donations and such. Since there are no ads and no one gets paid to produce content, you have to put up with whatever is on there. The quality is wide and varied, just as in the open source community. Just as there are high-quality and poorly-written open source apps, there are high-quality or poorly-written Wikipedia articles. There's not much consistency, despite the best efforts of the Wikipedia community so far.
... it's more polished than many other distros because even though it is a community effort, it's tightly managed by Canonical, with final say for everything tracking back to one man -- Mark Shuttleworth. It's a model not too different from the Linux kernel itself.
With an ad-supported site, and the possibility of Google even paying people for articles, the average level of quality will probably rise somewhat. With good editorial control, Google will probably be able to maintain a higher consistency of good quality articles than Wikipedia.
Flame me if you want, but look at it this way: Mac OS X is considered great because "it just works" and the quality of features is consistent throughout the OS. That's because Apple pays for its development and maintains tight control over its content.
Ubuntu works well, don't get me wrong, and it is my choice in desktop operating systems
But my point is that openness is good, but at some point you've gotta have tight controls on what gets in and what doesn't it and that's what Google brings to the table.
No, that's a unit of data. There's a large difference between knowledge and data. For example, let's say last week I sold 1000 PCs. Now out of those,
500 had FooStor hard drives
300 had BarMax hard drives
200 had BazStar hard drives
out of 500 FooStor hard drives there were 300 failures
out 300 BarMax hard drives there were 3 failures
out of 200 BazStar hard drives, there were no failures
That's data.
Knowledge is knowing that the FooStor hard drives and pieces of shit and you shouldn't use them.
Sorry. When I wrote it originally, I wrote it as 'knol's, but somehow I accidentally erased the first "'".
Google is trying to promote knol as a new buzzword meaning "a unit of knowledge."
I wonder how many knol's Slashdot is worth?
Did I say Connectix? Damn, I'm tired. I meant Logitech.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that if you have reasonably common hardware (and Apple hardware is still not quite 'reasonably common', despite using Intel chips) Ubuntu is an OS that 'just works'.
Yes, you sometimes have to work around things on exotic hardware, very new hardware, or if you're trying to do something very specific that is outside the mainstream. In order to get a system that 'just works', you have to buy hardware that's known to work well on Linux. That's it. Stick with hardware that's been around a bit or has vendor support (like Nvidia graphics cards). Get an Epson or HP printer (and install Stylus Toolbox if you have an Epson printer). Use the well-supported Connectix Webcams. Get a scanner that's known to work with SANE. You get the idea. If you follow these guidelines, you will find that Ubuntu 'just works' every time. Or, if you're not quite so ambitious, go out and buy a machine that has Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell sells them.
Unfortunately, people don't realize this and then dismiss integration issues as Linux being 'too immmature.' That's crap. If all your hardware is known to work well under Linux, you won't run into these integration issues.
Probably insecure. And buggy, too. In fact, it was major bloatware. Good thing we got it right this time.
TFA's not saying that evolved by conscious choice to evolve -- rather that we evolved based on the choices we made as a species. We chose to move to environments in which we had to adapt. We came out of Africa, but moved to Europe and Asia -- considerably colder climates with a wider variety of different and harsher conditions. And that when we changed our environment through our culture, we adapted to that new environment as well...in essence, we caused our own evolution, even though that's not what we were trying to do.