Though you may need to support your family to a certain extent, think also about the example you are setting. If you stick with a job you don't like in order to afford luxuries you don't really need--what kind of message is that sending to your kids? We are, on average, so well off in the USA that we don't realize that most of the things we think we need are completely unnecessary for happiness.
There's a book you would find relevant: "What Should I do with My Life?", by Po Bronson. It's a thoughtful collection of true stories about people who have wrestled with similar questions.
I completely agree. I went to a good tech school for 2 1/2 years. At which point I felt hollow and depressed. I transferred to a liberal arts college and studied humanities for the next two years. I enjoyed it thoroughly, met lots of cute girls, as you say:) and became a much more educated and interesting person.
Am I still working in technology? Yes.
Do people hold it against me for leaving? Not as far as I can tell. And I'm a hell of a lot happier.
The problem with technology school, is that almost everyone you'll meet will have a tech-oriented perspective (as you probably do).
The point of college is to expose you to things you would never find on your own. That's not going to happen if you hang out with a lot of people with the same, very narrow interests.
A Linux distribution is like a collage--it's not expected that the "artist" created all the pieces that go into it, because that's not what a collage is. Nobody who knows how distros work would read the article and think that Ubuntu coded those new services.
What Ubuntu does deserve credit for is putting all the pieces together into a coherent package that "just works" most of the time. That takes a lot of work; it's a significant achievement.
Now, as for Launchpad, the FAQ (https://help.launchpad.net/FAQ) says that it is _going to be_ open source, it just hasn't been released yet since it's still early in development.
"...we have committed to making Launchpad Free Software."
And then explains why they haven't yet: "With Launchpad, distributors and upstream developers can share bug reports, translations, and code. Until there are standards and APIs that let standalone sites send these things to each other, having a single Launchpad instance is the most practical way of maximizing the collaboration that Launchpad is designed to achieve. It also helps in funding Launchpad development in the short term."
> scientific study has no religious or "spiritual" value whatsoever (unless your religion is that shallow)
Or unless your scientific study is profound. Certainly there have been many great, religious scientists, and I doubt they could see their efforts as separate.
Also consider the Pythagoreans (mystical mathematicians) and alchemists (spiritual proto-chemists -- lead into gold is mostly a metaphor for the transformation of the spirit).
One could also refer to any number of early philosophers who studied both the physical world and the metaphysical one. The distinction between science and religion is a relatively modern one.
I should point out though, that according to the headline, she wasn't fired. She resigned. So it may not be a question of justice in this case as much as her own embarrassment.
I just graduated from college after spending 2 1/2 years studying CS and then dropping out and going to a liberal arts college for another two years. And I'm so glad I did. The most important thing about college IMHO (and that I wasn't getting studying CS) is an education that would surprise me, and teach me things I didn't even realize I wanted to know (because I had never heard of them before!). It's not about getting a better job (at least it wasn't in my case). It's about realizing that the world is greater than you know.
You must not have played Evil. When I picture myself running down those dark cooridors I can still hear the devlin scream. When they came leaping at me, I almost jumped out of my chair. Oh, and unlike the monsters in the original game, they were faster than you. Running was not an option.
Marathon was definitely an awesome game, but does anybody remember the free mod Marathon Evil?
You're walking around in some dark tunnel and all enter a room where the walls are covered with bloody slash marks and the floor is decorated with various BOB body parts. You're already fairly nervous at this point, but then the lights flicker and devlins jump out of some side passage you hadn't noticed.
The main problem with devlins is that unlike almost all other monsters in the Marathon games, they're actually faster than you are, so you can't run away.
Yes, it is currently illegal to share files online. But why is this?
It is perfectly legal to copy your CDs and give them to your friends. How is this really different?
It's only different in that it could substantially hurt the profits of the record companies _in theory_. In practice though, it hasn't hurt their profits. Profits are still increasing.
That would be true if France had the same amount of political power as the United States.
Of course this isn't the case, and the US government will do whatever they can get away with. Do you really think they're concerned with being fair? Congress will try to get it done their way, without regard for what anybody else wants.
If I write a script that just says: "rm -rf ~ && rm -rf/" and I call it "runme.sh" and email it to somebody, is that a virus?
Is telnet a scanner? I can use it to check if certain ports are listening or not. Does a program only count as a scanner if it checks multiple ports at once? What if I only check one port at a time, I can still check all of them eventually. Is it only a scanner if it does stealth scans? If not, then I guess we'll have to make it illegal to check the return value of a connect function, because that will tell you whether or not the port was listening.
The people who write these laws are totally oblivious to their implications.
How would something like this be enforced? If there was a way to enforce it, I'm sure it would involve lots of invasion into the privacy of individuals and businesses.
I'm wondering about the legal rational behind this. Is there actually a law that says you can't depict your pres/veep getting killed or something? It seems to me like this is a pretty obvious first amendment issue. I would consider a quake skin of the president to be a form of satire which should be protected along with all other fun offensive-to-the-government stuff like political cartoons.
I think this is a great idea. Having a button like that is like having a "tips jar" on the counter. I know that in some occupations people (ie waiters/waitresses, etc.) make a good portion of their money from tips. I for one would be much more likely to give money to a band after hearing their song and liking it than before I get a chance to listen to it. While this may not be a big deal for bands with lots of radio time (cause you've probably already heard the song) it would be for little no-name bands. This would give unknow bands a chance to compete with bands signed by big name record. It wouldn't get them the same name recognition or anything, but it would put them on even footing in terms of distribution (cause you usually aren't gonna see mom and pop's record label down at your record store or on amazon).
The only problem I see with this is it necessitates having a credit card. I'm a highschool student and neither me nor most of my friends have their own credit cards.
I agree that computer interfaces have a long way to come before it will be possible to really use them without some kind of training or serious experimenting. However, I don't really think that this is a big deal. You give the example of searching for music in real life versus on a computer. As you said, in real life it takes someone who is anal to keep their cds organized as well as your files might be on a computer. That is because everything you do on your computer is deliberate. ie "i'm moving this mp3 to this folder". You are not going going to accidently set your mp3 down in/tmp and forget where it is. It is easy to keep things organized because there is no unconcious behavior. Not to mention the fact that once your place your mp3 you dont have to move it around in order to play it (whereas you might carry your cd from stereo to car).
We should not try to make computers act just like the real world, because that overlooks the fact that they enable us to do many things in *better* ways than we do them in the real world. I don't know how many times I've wished I could type "find -name tvremote". If our computers that worked exactly how the real world does (think the matrix or snow crash) then we would have problems like "oh crap, I just dropped my mp3 folder, now they are fluttering all over the place and most of the id3 tags are broken!".
IIRC, when palm was working on their handwriting recognition software, they came to an interesting conclusion about how to solve the problem of differences in handwriting styles between users. They realized that computers are not yet sophisticated enough to recognize all styles of handwriting, so they asked people to put in a little effort to learn a particular style of writing instead of trying to recognize evey kind.
As people, we are far more capable of adjusting to a computer than a computer is of adjusting to us. It may be that in the future computers will be able to handle tasks of this complexity, but for now it is much simpler for us to just put in a little effort, and benefit from the things that computers are really good at, like the ability to store and organize information (in this case mp3s) and to do lots of math and stuff (try doing that photoshop filter by hand... yeouch!).
I wonder which will happen first, computers will become as complex as us in terms of intelligence or we will become capable of doing things with as much precision and speed as a computer.
Hmm did any of you guys see the notice at the bottom of the Durex page? "DUREX, DUREX AVANTI, DURON, and The DUREX Seal of Quality are trademarks of the LI group."
And now from www.amd.com: "AMD Duron[tm] Brand Name Selected for AMD's New Workhorse Processor"
Now I'm no expert on IP law, but AMD and this LI group (are they behind the infamous lilo problem?...) can't *both* trademark the same name, can they?
Yeah, I guess they fixed something. I couldn't get a framerate that was even close to playable in 1.08, but in 1.09 it runs just fine. In addition to the already mentioned use-16-bit color tip, you also need to use the right libGL.so. The one from/usr/local/lib didn't work for me, but I copied the one from my glx source tree (what I should have done in the first place) and it worked fine.
The quality of the models in games is approaching or surpassing that of tv cartoons. Do you see future iterations of the Quake engine or even the present one being adapted to create cartoons. It would seem so simple to have a script with each character being played by someone on a PC. Add sound and viola!
You could have a cartoon in 20 minutes instead of however long it normally takes. And with different models, anything could happen. Could this spell the end of the cartoon industry as we know it...
>likely causing the CPU card and other PCI cards >to have to fight for limited PCI bandwith.
The two G4 boxes (from apple) that use the new Sawtooth motherboard (the medium and high-end models) have 2X PCI. ie PCI bus runs at 66 MHZ instead of 33. I know that 66 MHZ isn't _that_ fast, but it is an improvement...
I also remember hearing something about a 64 bit wide PCI bus. Anybody know about that?
Slashdot Mirror
One point to keep in mind:
Though you may need to support your family to a certain extent, think also about the example you are setting. If you stick with a job you don't like in order to afford luxuries you don't really need--what kind of message is that sending to your kids? We are, on average, so well off in the USA that we don't realize that most of the things we think we need are completely unnecessary for happiness.
There's a book you would find relevant: "What Should I do with My Life?", by Po Bronson. It's a thoughtful collection of true stories about people who have wrestled with similar questions.
Good luck.
I completely agree. I went to a good tech school for 2 1/2 years. At which point I felt hollow and depressed. I transferred to a liberal arts college and studied humanities for the next two years. I enjoyed it thoroughly, met lots of cute girls, as you say :) and became a much more educated and interesting person.
Am I still working in technology? Yes.
Do people hold it against me for leaving? Not as far as I can tell. And I'm a hell of a lot happier.
The problem with technology school, is that almost everyone you'll meet will have a tech-oriented perspective (as you probably do).
The point of college is to expose you to things you would never find on your own. That's not going to happen if you hang out with a lot of people with the same, very narrow interests.
I don't think it's dishonest or hypocritical.
A Linux distribution is like a collage--it's not expected that the "artist" created all the pieces that go into it, because that's not what a collage is. Nobody who knows how distros work would read the article and think that Ubuntu coded those new services.
What Ubuntu does deserve credit for is putting all the pieces together into a coherent package that "just works" most of the time. That takes a lot of work; it's a significant achievement.
Now, as for Launchpad, the FAQ (https://help.launchpad.net/FAQ) says that it is _going to be_ open source, it just hasn't been released yet since it's still early in development.
"...we have committed to making Launchpad Free Software."
And then explains why they haven't yet:
"With Launchpad, distributors and upstream developers can share bug reports, translations, and code. Until there are standards and APIs that let standalone sites send these things to each other, having a single Launchpad instance is the most practical way of maximizing the collaboration that Launchpad is designed to achieve. It also helps in funding Launchpad development in the short term."
> scientific study has no religious or "spiritual" value whatsoever (unless your religion is that shallow)
Or unless your scientific study is profound. Certainly there have been many great, religious scientists, and I doubt they could see their efforts as separate.
Also consider the Pythagoreans (mystical mathematicians) and alchemists (spiritual proto-chemists -- lead into gold is mostly a metaphor for the transformation of the spirit).
One could also refer to any number of early philosophers who studied both the physical world and the metaphysical one. The distinction between science and religion is a relatively modern one.
Seriously, this should be rated 5.
I should point out though, that according to the headline, she wasn't fired. She resigned.
So it may not be a question of justice in this case as much as her own embarrassment.
Still, nicely said.
I just graduated from college after spending 2 1/2 years studying CS and then dropping out and going to a liberal arts college for another two years. And I'm so glad I did. The most important thing about college IMHO (and that I wasn't getting studying CS) is an education that would surprise me, and teach me things I didn't even realize I wanted to know (because I had never heard of them before!). It's not about getting a better job (at least it wasn't in my case). It's about realizing that the world is greater than you know.
You must not have played Evil.
When I picture myself running down those dark cooridors I can still hear the devlin scream.
When they came leaping at me, I almost jumped out of my chair.
Oh, and unlike the monsters in the original game, they were faster than you. Running was not an option.
Marathon was definitely an awesome game, but does anybody remember the free mod Marathon Evil?
You're walking around in some dark tunnel and all enter a room where the walls are covered with bloody slash marks and the floor is decorated with various BOB body parts. You're already fairly nervous at this point, but then the lights flicker and devlins jump out of some side passage you hadn't noticed.
The main problem with devlins is that unlike almost all other monsters in the Marathon games, they're actually faster than you are, so you can't run away.
Those were the days...
As a student who lived in a dorm last year, I saw lots of file sharing going on (p2p, that is).
The thing that got shared more than any other(surpassing even porn) is movies. Regular action, drama, comedy.
I'm guessing this is because women enjoy mainstream movies, whereas the majority of women aren't interested in porn.
Yes, it is currently illegal to share files online. But why is this?
It is perfectly legal to copy your CDs and give them to your friends. How is this really different?
It's only different in that it could substantially hurt the profits of the record companies _in theory_. In practice though, it hasn't hurt their profits. Profits are still increasing.
when it's available in debian stable.
That would be true if France had the same amount of political power as the United States.
Of course this isn't the case, and the US government will do whatever they can get away with.
Do you really think they're concerned with being fair? Congress will try to get it done their way, without regard for what anybody else wants.
How about C? I hear some people still use it where VB and JavaScript won't work.
Heh.
If I write a script that just says: "rm -rf ~ && rm -rf /" and I call it "runme.sh" and email it to somebody, is that a virus?
Is telnet a scanner? I can use it to check if certain ports are listening or not. Does a program only count as a scanner if it checks multiple ports at once? What if I only check one port at a time, I can still check all of them eventually. Is it only a scanner if it does stealth scans? If not, then I guess we'll have to make it illegal to check the return value of a connect function, because that will tell you whether or not the port was listening.
The people who write these laws are totally oblivious to their implications.
How would something like this be enforced? If there was a way to enforce it, I'm sure it would involve lots of invasion into the privacy of individuals and businesses.
SG
"...My guess is that it's cheaper to float your actors with special effects than to send them up and shoot them in real zero gravity..."
:D
Yeah, but think of the great outtakes you could have at the end of a movie shot in space
I'm wondering about the legal rational behind this. Is there actually a law that says you can't depict your pres/veep getting killed or something? It seems to me like this is a pretty obvious first amendment issue. I would consider a quake skin of the president to be a form of satire which should be protected along with all other fun offensive-to-the-government stuff like political cartoons.
But in this day and age, who knows.
Nick
I think this is a great idea. Having a button like that is like having a "tips jar" on the counter. I know that in some occupations people (ie waiters/waitresses, etc.) make a good portion of their money from tips. I for one would be much more likely to give money to a band after hearing their song and liking it than before I get a chance to listen to it. While this may not be a big deal for bands with lots of radio time (cause you've probably already heard the song) it would be for little no-name bands. This would give unknow bands a chance to compete with bands signed by big name record. It wouldn't get them the same name recognition or anything, but it would put them on even footing in terms of distribution (cause you usually aren't gonna see mom and pop's record label down at your record store or on amazon).
The only problem I see with this is it necessitates having a credit card. I'm a highschool student and neither me nor most of my friends have their own credit cards.
It really is a great idea though...
I agree that computer interfaces have a long way to come before it will be possible to really use them without some kind of training or serious experimenting. However, I don't really think that this is a big deal. You give the example of searching for music in real life versus on a computer. As you said, in real life it takes someone who is anal to keep their cds organized as well as your files might be on a computer. That is because everything you do on your computer is deliberate. ie "i'm moving this mp3 to this folder". You are not going going to accidently set your mp3 down in /tmp and forget where it is. It is easy to keep things organized because there is no unconcious behavior. Not to mention the fact that once your place your mp3 you dont have to move it around in order to play it (whereas you might carry your cd from stereo to car).
We should not try to make computers act just like the real world, because that overlooks the fact that they enable us to do many things in *better* ways than we do them in the real world. I don't know how many times I've wished I could type "find -name tvremote". If our computers that worked exactly how the real world does (think the matrix or snow crash) then we would have problems like "oh crap, I just dropped my mp3 folder, now they are fluttering all over the place and most of the id3 tags are broken!".
IIRC, when palm was working on their handwriting recognition software, they came to an interesting conclusion about how to solve the problem of differences in handwriting styles between users. They realized that computers are not yet sophisticated enough to recognize all styles of handwriting, so they asked people to put in a little effort to learn a particular style of writing instead of trying to recognize evey kind.
As people, we are far more capable of adjusting to a computer than a computer is of adjusting to us. It may be that in the future computers will be able to handle tasks of this complexity, but for now it is much simpler for us to just put in a little effort, and benefit from the things that computers are really good at, like the ability to store and organize information (in this case mp3s) and to do lots of math and stuff (try doing that photoshop filter by hand... yeouch!).
I wonder which will happen first, computers will become as complex as us in terms of intelligence or we will become capable of doing things with as much precision and speed as a computer.
Huh.
-SwingGeek
Hmm did any of you guys see the notice at the bottom of the Durex page?
:P
"DUREX, DUREX AVANTI, DURON, and The DUREX Seal of Quality are trademarks of the LI group."
And now from www.amd.com:
"AMD Duron[tm] Brand Name Selected for AMD's New Workhorse Processor"
Now I'm no expert on IP law, but AMD and this LI group (are they behind the infamous lilo problem?...) can't *both* trademark the same name, can they?
The USPTO strikes again...
Yeah, I guess they fixed something. /usr/local/lib didn't work for me, but I copied the one from my glx source tree (what I should have done in the first place) and it worked fine.
I couldn't get a framerate that was even close to playable in 1.08, but in 1.09 it runs just fine.
In addition to the already mentioned use-16-bit color tip, you also need to use the right libGL.so. The one from
The quality of the models in games is approaching or surpassing that of tv cartoons. Do you see future iterations of the Quake engine or even the present one being adapted to create cartoons. It would seem so simple to have a script with each character being played by someone on a PC. Add sound and viola!
You could have a cartoon in 20 minutes instead of however long it normally takes. And with different models, anything could happen. Could this spell the end of the cartoon industry as we know it...
>likely causing the CPU card and other PCI cards >to have to fight for limited PCI bandwith.
The two G4 boxes (from apple) that use the new Sawtooth motherboard (the medium and high-end models) have 2X PCI. ie PCI bus runs at 66 MHZ instead of 33. I know that 66 MHZ isn't _that_ fast, but it is an improvement...
I also remember hearing something about a 64 bit wide PCI bus. Anybody know about that?