unless you really stacked the deck against steel racks - loose screws, hard drives not properly mounted...?
Depending on where exactly they are, loose screws might actually help you. Tight metal-to-metal connections are much better at transferring vibrations, especially the higher frequency ones, than looser connections, where some of the vibrational energy is converted into lower-frequency vibrations. Steel is insanely good at carrying vibrations over long distances, hence the old movie trick of listening to railroad tracks for a train in the distance, or tapping on pipes in Morse code to communicate your escape plans to the inmate several cells over. (At the risk of veering off-topic, neither of these tricks work nearly as well in real life as in the movies, but they do work. Well, at least the railroad tracks do. Since the MPAA hasn't found my gargantuan mp3 collection yet, I haven't had a chance to test prison telegraphy yet.)
One thing that has always baffled me is why racks and computer cases are made of metal to begin with. There are, of course, certain areas where you need steel or aluminum for strength or carrying waste heat, but wood or plastic would do a much better job of damping vibrations. There's a reason audio speaker cabinets are made out of crappy, soft stuff like particle board: you don't want the cabinet to resonate, and particle board does a wonderfully poor job of transmitting vibrations, which is why it isn't used in guitars, where you want strong resonance. There are also a wide variety of synthetic rubbers like neoprene and sorbothane that do a good job of absorbing vibrations. Neoprene is cheap, and sorbothane, while more expensive, is still affordable and does such a good job of deadening vibration that it feels remarkably like meat. (I happen to have a square foot of it sitting on the counter next to me, waiting to be used in some vibration-damping experiments with my scooter, but having RTFA, I think I'll try using a little bit to replace the rubber pads on the bottom of my external drive enclosures.)
Yeah, if you are compiling your own software you can get things to work really fast with 6 cores [...]
Welcome to Slashdot, user #1287218. As it happens, a lot of us are compiling our own software. And many of those that aren't are running multiple simultaneous processes that are doing a lot more than waiting for user input. I'm probably not alone here when I say that I can use as many cores as I can get -- in my case for rendering jobs and data analysis. My brother, who works in video production, probably wouldn't turn his nose up at a truckload of extra cores, either.
Anyway, point being that you're probably right about "general usage", but general users don't have the background to understand a discussion of parallel processing and will probably buy their next box from an equally clueless sales rep at Best Buy on the basis of the neato metallic red color of the case.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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people are taking what is a normal and sane buisness practice and, because it is Apple, throwing a fit.
Yes, it's because it is Apple, but at least in an environment like Slashdot, at least some of the animosity towards Apple may be because of Apple's stance towards openness, which ranges from outright hostility -- their closed source, closed access hardware like the iPhone and iPad -- and their one-sided, parasitic relationships the open source projects they have used to build Mac software. There's probably also a bit of frustration at the Apple fans who are quick to condemn Microsoft's predatory behavior, but see no problem when Apple does the same or worse in their niche. And finally, most of the old enemies are dead (AOL), plainly past their peak (Microsoft), or have to some degree been co-opted (IBM), while Apple is on the rise and pursuing business strategies that are largely hostile to us and the things we value.
And yes, I get that the general consumer market likes what Apple is doing. But Slashdot readers aren't the general consumer market. Most of the people here are into computers and other technologies for their own sake, and the prospect of Apple becoming a dominant player in pretty much any area of the tech market means that those are areas we will be frozen out of. So yes, people get upset, and it's really not surprising that they do.
because people just love hating Apple
Right. And the Arabs just hate our freedom. It might just be that people hate Apple for specific reasons, some of which are well-founded.
This is clever thinking on the part of the students, but hand-cranked centrifuges have been around for a long time. They're not terribly expensive, they're sturdy as hell, and they're durable and easy to sterilize -- which almost certainly cannot be said of something made of disposable plastics and hot glue.
Besides, if you're in a part of the developing world where you have surplus salad shooters and the electricity to power your hot glue gun -- which is, come to think of it, a good description of the eighth grade science classroom where I first encountered a manual centrifuge -- you can probably afford the manual centrifuge.
The Facebook page attracted more than 1,200 fans in one week.
So they're several orders of magnitude behind the fanbase for "My Sister Said She'd Name Her Baby Megatron If I Got One Million Fans." If 1,200 is the best the Catholic Church can do in a week, they might want to consider going ahead and putting up the cathedrals for sale on eBay.
I've often made the argument that Apple is far more evil than Microsoft in terms of pursuing vendor lock-in and coercively leveraging one product in order to drive sales of others to the detriment of real competition; the only thing that held Apple back was that it blew the marketing battle against Wintel a long time ago. Now that their fortunes are on the rise again, we can reasonably expect to see Apple flex its muscles in ways that are just as insidious as Microsoft during its rise to dominance. This being one of those occasions, I'll say it again: Apple was innocuous for so long because they simply didn't have the market share to abuse their customers (much).
Now, for the other half of this endless loop, I'll yield the floor and let the usual crowd of Mac fanboys explain to us how Apple's predatory stance towards Open Source is really insanely great. (And really, this should be a great occasion for nostalgia, since the release of the iPad gives Apple fans the first chance they've had in several years to argue that preemptive multitasking -- or, in this case, any multitasking -- is actually a good thing.)
Considering that decent used laptops -- adequate for checking mail and browsing the web, anyway -- can be had for about a hundred bucks, I'd just buy one off eBay or Craigslist and use that for work purposes. For a little more, you could always pick up a netbook or a bottom-of-the-line laptop new.
Possibly. It's also possible that MS is privy to more accurate sales figures (and profit margins) from the iPad than the rest of us, and they decided it wasn't worth their time. And that could be because hardware margins are razor thin and the potential profit was not worth the investment, or it could be because they figured that everyone who wanted an iPad-like device would already have an iPad by the time MS could actually ship product. There's also opportunity cost to consider: MS may have been confident of producing a successful product, but decided that the same time and money spent elsewhere would generate greater returns. And finally, given the Crunchpad debacle, it may just be that they had a working design, but realized they couldn't source the parts cheaply enough for it to be competitive -- the iPad is expensive enough with its single screen, so it's likely that a dual-screen tablet would have been even more pricey.
Also worth considering is that Apple and Microsoft have very different business models. Where its "lifestyle" devices are concerned, Apple has an extensive infrastructure for providing add-on services and products -- iTunes and the App Store -- that Microsoft doesn't have. What could be a successful product for Apple might be a loser for Microsoft even if it was just as good and sold as well.
Even beyond "mistrust" or bias, if you're applying for a programming job outside the graphics/videogame field, it would seem that having a degree focused on a CS subset you won't be using puts you at a disadvantage.
More than likely, though my experience has been that job experience counts vastly more than education -- once you have a fair amount of job experience, anyway. I was an English major originally, but I've been working as a software engineer for the last fifteen years and have racked up enough attractive past positions and good references on my resume that my pay is on a par with my more formally educated colleagues. (With the giant caveat that I actually did have to self-educate rather extensively and continue to do so.)
The problem with any job in entertainment or the arts is that there are always more highly skilled workers available than there are jobs for them to fill. Success depends not just on skill in the specific field, but a whole bunch of largely unrelated skills -- not the least of which is being good at selling yourself and establishing an extensive network of contacts -- to say nothing of more than a little luck. As such, it's a little cynical of colleges to promote this sort of thing, but on the other hand, the same could be said of just about any liberal arts degree.
Have you ever worked for a large company (let's say 2k+ employees)? I have, and in those environments the main reason IT and dev staff behave in the way you describe is because that's how management behaves and a lot of times it's actually safer to play along with their little power trip game than it is to use common sense.
I've worked for several with 100k+ employees, and I know exactly what you mean. But part of playing along with their little power trip would, in Childs' case, have reasonably included handing over the passwords, if not immediately, then certainly by the time it became front page news.
One thing I've learned about the power games in large corporations is that you do not ever try to compete with people above you in the hierarchy. It's never a fair fight, partly because the rules are designed to reinforce the hierarchy, but also because those people ended up above you at least in part because they're really, really good at playing the game.
I have a feeling that producing 200 new game designers per year will vastly outstrip any conceivable demand. I hope these kids get enough of a grounding in general software engineering to be able to find decent jobs elsewhere when the bulk of them get turned down for the relatively small number of openings.
I think this is a good moment for all of us to reflect on how rallying around this lying criminal stained our profession, and how we should practice the same objectivity with ourselves and those "in the downtrodden world of IT" that we expect in others.
Childs' arguments reminded me of the kind of quasi-legal nitpicking one sees in Slashdot posts almost every day. It's the same kind of thing you see when you have two children in the back seat on a long road trip, and one or both of them are determined to pick a fight, so whatever rules you lay down, they interpret them as literally and selectively as possible in order to violate the spirit of the rule while keeping tenuously to the letter. Child A pokes child B, so you tell them not to touch each other, at which point A pokes B with some object, arguing that he didn't poke B, the object did. Similar rationales come up whenever copyright violations are discussed. It is, no pun intended, childish. Pirate all the mp3s you want, but show enough respect for other people's intelligence (and have enough balls) not to play word games about it.
At the end of the day, Terry Childs threw a tantrum using an exceedingly narrow and selective interpretation of the rules and then didn't have the good sense or maturity to back down before he ran afoul of the law. Your boss asks you to do something? In most cases -- including this one -- you can either do what you're asked to do or quit. And if you quit, walking off with company property, passwords included, is something that you can reasonably expect to be prosecuted for.
I don't think the sentence should be particularly harsh in light of the fact that the defendant is plainly emotionally immature and the level of actual harm done doesn't appear to have risen above the level of nuisance, but Childs is not some kind of innocent martyr in the name of principle, and his conviction does not bode particularly ill for any other IT worker with a modicum of maturity and common sense.
Just how much money is MPEG-LA making on their patent pool? How much are they spending on bad mouthing OGG to preserve/increase their income? Treat any criticism of proprietary product competitors with a very large grain of salt. Particularly against free competitors since it's legally safer as they often don't have the legal resources to fight half-truths and innuendo.
Good advice in general, but in this case, I think it verges on paranoia. The bulk of consumers not only don't care, they aren't even aware of the issue. Most software vendors don't particularly care either, as few of them are in the codec business, and MPEG-LA's licensing fees are not exorbitant. The calculation that likely licensees are probably making is that the proprietary solution is well-documented, well-tested, and easy to integrate (and already integrated in most cases), and Ogg is none of these things.
Sometimes the proprietary solution succeeds because of various nefarious anticompetitive practices and backroom deals. But sometimes it succeeds because the FOSS alternatives are lacking in one or more critical areas.
In the long term, the fix for this problem is either for us to somehow develop the political momentum to get rid of software patents or, more realistically, to develop a free codec that not only addresses Ogg's shortcomings, but also significantly outperforms the proprietary solutions.
The problem I see is that this will lead to more regulation, which leads to less innovation, more draconian laws (see DMCA) and losses of freedom. What congress needs to do is to force -everyone- not just Facebook, MySpace, etc. is that they can't just change terms and conditions whenever they see fit without making us agree to them again.
This is a word game. You're decrying regulation while arguing for regulation, which leads me to believe that you're using "regulation" to mean laws you don't agree with. Prohibiting fraud is regulating trade. It's exactly the kind of thing that we have regulations to accomplish. Regulations can lead to "less innovation", etc., but they can also lead to less fraud, higher quality, better worker safety, and greater accountability. Knee-jerk rejection of laws because some laws are bad is an embrace of anarchy, for which see Somalia.
Congress wants to regulate fraud, false advertising, and other forms of dishonesty and exploitation? Well, good. Will they also pass laws that aren't as good? Absolutely. But we live in a democracy, and we can continue to adjust and improve the laws, just as we've been doing for the last couple of centuries. I think we all pretty much agree that free enterprise is a good thing, within reasonable limits, which we can also all pretty much agree would exclude fraud. To do that, we need regulations.
I can only imagine. I don't think most civilians understand the level of isolation that soldiers endure, even in peacetime. Add to that the stress of being shot at, and being able to talk to people back home has got to be tremendously comforting. As long as the troops are trained to safeguard operational security -- as if they didn't have a very strong incentive to do so anyway -- any risk has got to be outweighed by the boost in morale.
Anyway, best wishes to your brother. I hope he gets to see his nephew in person soon.
Why do environmental groups get upset by paper? Paper is a very renewable resource. Trees get cut down, and grow back. When I'm done with it, it rots (I happen to compost mine). With this computer I'm typing on, rare metals had to be mined to make it, and when I'm done with it, it sits around for at least a few thousand years (or more?). I have no problem with paper.
Chiefly, it's the chemicals used in processing pulp and the resulting pollution. Ever live near a paper mill? Even after the reforms thirty years ago, it's still a pretty nasty business. Secondarily, a fairly large amount of energy is involved in the harvesting, chipping, and transport of wood chips to the mills. (The mills themselves are actually very energy-efficient, deriving a significant amount of their power from burning the waste wood products, which is basically carbon-neutral.) Then there's the energy involved in transporting the paper products and toxic compounds in a lot of the inks used, as well as the highly toxic solvents used in cleaning and maintaining large-scale printing presses -- for which reason brownfield sites formerly used for printing are quite cheap, if you can afford the necessary cleanup and remediation, anyway.
As with anything else, it is best not to be wasteful and to remember that, for practically any consumer good, a considerable amount of energy was consumed to bring it to you, along with (most likely) a non-trivial amount of pollution. Use more is almost always bad advice.
That said, your point about the manufacture (and disposal) of electronic hardware is spot-on. The paper industry is squeaky clean by comparison.
TFA, by the way, does not give the speech (or a translation of it) but just tiny parts of it, without any context. So even after reading it, I have no idea what he said.
Aside from his followers, who cares what he said? He's the Pope. That makes him an expert in exactly what real world concern?
Benedict is an expert in Catholic dogma, period. Excepting grade school, he has no education outside of Catholic doctrine and theology, and his entire professional life has revolved around promulgating Catholic doctrine. His opinion on practically anything else is at best worth no more than any randomly selected unskilled worker with access to the television and newspapers.
If I was Catholic, I would of course be interested in what he says -- I'd effectively be obligated to. Otherwise, even for other Christian denominations, there isn't the least reason to care that he exists, much less what he has to say, with the possible exception of law enforcement agencies investigating the increasingly notorious sex crimes committed by his underlings.
There are lots of high tech workers that read slashdot. I'm one of them. I decided, while at university, that I was not going to spend my life building weapons. Working on weapons certainly was an opportunity that presented itself when I was getting my degree in the late 80s. I do not want to create weapons because I would have no direct control over whether those weapons were limited to truly righteous causes.
I don't work on weapons, but I've considered it more than once. At the end of the day, I decided that I just didn't want to spend my life developing new and better ways to kill people. Even if I was okay with the idea, I'd still rather spend my life developing ways for people to live longer and healthier.
Of course, what I actually do now borders on irrelevance, but it's harmless and it's paying for my daughter to go to college, and I don't have to worry about turning on the news and seeing some general blithely dismissing the "collateral damage" stemming from one of my inventions.
You also might have been on either the breacher or the corporate side. I'd hate to be in either position myself.
It's not a problem if you handle it correctly. After we disemboweled the first guy, you'd have been surprised at how strong everyone's passwords became.
And here, we have another uncomfortable demonstration of the failures of the Slashdot moderation system: there is no "-1 So Fucked Up I Don't Know Where to Start" option.
Um, Apple owns its share of the market. OWNS. No one does what Apple does, not do they do something else as well, or as profitably.
Apple makes personal computers, cellphones, mp3 players, and tablet PCs, and they sell digital music. Whether they do that better than anyone else or not is a matter of opinion, but with the possible exception of the iTunes store, they do not "own" any area in which they compete, and they do not do anything that a dozens of other companies do. Most personal computers are not Macs, most cellphones are not iPhones, most mp3 players are not iPods, and most tablet PCs are not iPads, though I'll grant you that last one may actually change fairly rapidly.
Apple is very, very successful. Microsoft also. But in different ways. If I had to buy stock in either, it would be in Apple. If I had to predict who will be around in 50 years, it is almost a toss-up to me.
I doubt either one will be around in fifty years, or even twenty-five, though if I was buying stock, I'd buy Apple, too. I'm not sure how that in any way matters with respect to the possibility of Apple trying to get a lock on ARM in order to stifle competition.
That is only because Apple is actually Steve Jobs. His successor will have to have the same depth of vision, same drive, same demands and standards.
This is irrelevant hero worship. Steve Jobs could be Jesus (and may well think he is), but again, freezing out competitors by buying up parts suppliers rather than competing on innovation and product quality is still crappy.
But Apple is better at what it does than Microsoft is at what IT does.
What Apple and Microsoft both do that concerns me is to use vendor lock-in and other shady practices to diminish customer choice. Microsoft has historically been much better at being a bunch of ruthless bastards than Apple has, but Apple's "vision" involves a far more thorough lock-in than Microsoft ever dreamed possible. That they should cease to be an ignorable niche player and actually achieve dominance in one or more markets is potentially worse for consumers than Microsoft's dominance during its heyday.
To all of the people complaining about the terrifying specter of higher resolutions:
1. Relax, no one is going to take away your lower resolution monitor. Those will always be available. Those of us who want higher resolutions will have to pay extra for them. We're expect that.
2. Some people use computers to do something besides browse web pages and use MS Office. If you're a typical Photoshop user or otherwise involved in graphics either professionally or as a hobby, no resolution is high enough. If I could get a 36" inch screen with a resolution ten times higher than what I have today, I'd sell my firstborn for it.
3. Learn how to set your DPI properly and how to adjust the default font size. Most applications let you enlarge documents easily, too.
4. Go to an optometrist and have your damn eyeglass prescription updated. Odds are my vision is at least as bad as yours -- 20-200, for crying out loud -- but I've had my eyes examined in the last decade, so my glasses actually work properly.
This is good advice for practically every field. If you've done a good job of defining and documenting clean interfaces, it is almost always better to reuse a wheel than to reinvent it (usually badly). The only time a rewrite is in order is when it would actually take more effort to accommodate an existing subsystem.
(This applies mainly in a business context; for free software that is unconstrained by the need to turn a profit, the main question should be which choice will better serve the users, not which choice is quicker and easier for the developer.)
As far as games go, many of the games I've enjoyed most have had relatively primitive graphics but superb gameplay, while I've seen plenty of games that were visually stunning, but not all that much fun to play. For game developers, I'd recommend developing the game first with minimal placeholder graphics and then play it. Is it fun? If yes, then upgrade the graphics. If not, then no amount of eye-candy will save it.
Slashdot Mirror
unless you really stacked the deck against steel racks - loose screws, hard drives not properly mounted...?
Depending on where exactly they are, loose screws might actually help you. Tight metal-to-metal connections are much better at transferring vibrations, especially the higher frequency ones, than looser connections, where some of the vibrational energy is converted into lower-frequency vibrations. Steel is insanely good at carrying vibrations over long distances, hence the old movie trick of listening to railroad tracks for a train in the distance, or tapping on pipes in Morse code to communicate your escape plans to the inmate several cells over. (At the risk of veering off-topic, neither of these tricks work nearly as well in real life as in the movies, but they do work. Well, at least the railroad tracks do. Since the MPAA hasn't found my gargantuan mp3 collection yet, I haven't had a chance to test prison telegraphy yet.)
One thing that has always baffled me is why racks and computer cases are made of metal to begin with. There are, of course, certain areas where you need steel or aluminum for strength or carrying waste heat, but wood or plastic would do a much better job of damping vibrations. There's a reason audio speaker cabinets are made out of crappy, soft stuff like particle board: you don't want the cabinet to resonate, and particle board does a wonderfully poor job of transmitting vibrations, which is why it isn't used in guitars, where you want strong resonance. There are also a wide variety of synthetic rubbers like neoprene and sorbothane that do a good job of absorbing vibrations. Neoprene is cheap, and sorbothane, while more expensive, is still affordable and does such a good job of deadening vibration that it feels remarkably like meat. (I happen to have a square foot of it sitting on the counter next to me, waiting to be used in some vibration-damping experiments with my scooter, but having RTFA, I think I'll try using a little bit to replace the rubber pads on the bottom of my external drive enclosures.)
Yeah, if you are compiling your own software you can get things to work really fast with 6 cores [...]
Welcome to Slashdot, user #1287218. As it happens, a lot of us are compiling our own software. And many of those that aren't are running multiple simultaneous processes that are doing a lot more than waiting for user input. I'm probably not alone here when I say that I can use as many cores as I can get -- in my case for rendering jobs and data analysis. My brother, who works in video production, probably wouldn't turn his nose up at a truckload of extra cores, either.
Anyway, point being that you're probably right about "general usage", but general users don't have the background to understand a discussion of parallel processing and will probably buy their next box from an equally clueless sales rep at Best Buy on the basis of the neato metallic red color of the case.
people are taking what is a normal and sane buisness practice and, because it is Apple, throwing a fit.
Yes, it's because it is Apple, but at least in an environment like Slashdot, at least some of the animosity towards Apple may be because of Apple's stance towards openness, which ranges from outright hostility -- their closed source, closed access hardware like the iPhone and iPad -- and their one-sided, parasitic relationships the open source projects they have used to build Mac software. There's probably also a bit of frustration at the Apple fans who are quick to condemn Microsoft's predatory behavior, but see no problem when Apple does the same or worse in their niche. And finally, most of the old enemies are dead (AOL), plainly past their peak (Microsoft), or have to some degree been co-opted (IBM), while Apple is on the rise and pursuing business strategies that are largely hostile to us and the things we value.
And yes, I get that the general consumer market likes what Apple is doing. But Slashdot readers aren't the general consumer market. Most of the people here are into computers and other technologies for their own sake, and the prospect of Apple becoming a dominant player in pretty much any area of the tech market means that those are areas we will be frozen out of. So yes, people get upset, and it's really not surprising that they do.
because people just love hating Apple
Right. And the Arabs just hate our freedom. It might just be that people hate Apple for specific reasons, some of which are well-founded.
This is clever thinking on the part of the students, but hand-cranked centrifuges have been around for a long time. They're not terribly expensive, they're sturdy as hell, and they're durable and easy to sterilize -- which almost certainly cannot be said of something made of disposable plastics and hot glue.
Besides, if you're in a part of the developing world where you have surplus salad shooters and the electricity to power your hot glue gun -- which is, come to think of it, a good description of the eighth grade science classroom where I first encountered a manual centrifuge -- you can probably afford the manual centrifuge.
The Facebook page attracted more than 1,200 fans in one week.
So they're several orders of magnitude behind the fanbase for "My Sister Said She'd Name Her Baby Megatron If I Got One Million Fans." If 1,200 is the best the Catholic Church can do in a week, they might want to consider going ahead and putting up the cathedrals for sale on eBay.
I've often made the argument that Apple is far more evil than Microsoft in terms of pursuing vendor lock-in and coercively leveraging one product in order to drive sales of others to the detriment of real competition; the only thing that held Apple back was that it blew the marketing battle against Wintel a long time ago. Now that their fortunes are on the rise again, we can reasonably expect to see Apple flex its muscles in ways that are just as insidious as Microsoft during its rise to dominance. This being one of those occasions, I'll say it again: Apple was innocuous for so long because they simply didn't have the market share to abuse their customers (much).
Now, for the other half of this endless loop, I'll yield the floor and let the usual crowd of Mac fanboys explain to us how Apple's predatory stance towards Open Source is really insanely great. (And really, this should be a great occasion for nostalgia, since the release of the iPad gives Apple fans the first chance they've had in several years to argue that preemptive multitasking -- or, in this case, any multitasking -- is actually a good thing.)
Considering that decent used laptops -- adequate for checking mail and browsing the web, anyway -- can be had for about a hundred bucks, I'd just buy one off eBay or Craigslist and use that for work purposes. For a little more, you could always pick up a netbook or a bottom-of-the-line laptop new.
Possibly. It's also possible that MS is privy to more accurate sales figures (and profit margins) from the iPad than the rest of us, and they decided it wasn't worth their time. And that could be because hardware margins are razor thin and the potential profit was not worth the investment, or it could be because they figured that everyone who wanted an iPad-like device would already have an iPad by the time MS could actually ship product. There's also opportunity cost to consider: MS may have been confident of producing a successful product, but decided that the same time and money spent elsewhere would generate greater returns. And finally, given the Crunchpad debacle, it may just be that they had a working design, but realized they couldn't source the parts cheaply enough for it to be competitive -- the iPad is expensive enough with its single screen, so it's likely that a dual-screen tablet would have been even more pricey.
Also worth considering is that Apple and Microsoft have very different business models. Where its "lifestyle" devices are concerned, Apple has an extensive infrastructure for providing add-on services and products -- iTunes and the App Store -- that Microsoft doesn't have. What could be a successful product for Apple might be a loser for Microsoft even if it was just as good and sold as well.
Even beyond "mistrust" or bias, if you're applying for a programming job outside the graphics/videogame field, it would seem that having a degree focused on a CS subset you won't be using puts you at a disadvantage.
More than likely, though my experience has been that job experience counts vastly more than education -- once you have a fair amount of job experience, anyway. I was an English major originally, but I've been working as a software engineer for the last fifteen years and have racked up enough attractive past positions and good references on my resume that my pay is on a par with my more formally educated colleagues. (With the giant caveat that I actually did have to self-educate rather extensively and continue to do so.)
The problem with any job in entertainment or the arts is that there are always more highly skilled workers available than there are jobs for them to fill. Success depends not just on skill in the specific field, but a whole bunch of largely unrelated skills -- not the least of which is being good at selling yourself and establishing an extensive network of contacts -- to say nothing of more than a little luck. As such, it's a little cynical of colleges to promote this sort of thing, but on the other hand, the same could be said of just about any liberal arts degree.
Have you ever worked for a large company (let's say 2k+ employees)? I have, and in those environments the main reason IT and dev staff behave in the way you describe is because that's how management behaves and a lot of times it's actually safer to play along with their little power trip game than it is to use common sense.
I've worked for several with 100k+ employees, and I know exactly what you mean. But part of playing along with their little power trip would, in Childs' case, have reasonably included handing over the passwords, if not immediately, then certainly by the time it became front page news.
One thing I've learned about the power games in large corporations is that you do not ever try to compete with people above you in the hierarchy. It's never a fair fight, partly because the rules are designed to reinforce the hierarchy, but also because those people ended up above you at least in part because they're really, really good at playing the game.
I have a feeling that producing 200 new game designers per year will vastly outstrip any conceivable demand. I hope these kids get enough of a grounding in general software engineering to be able to find decent jobs elsewhere when the bulk of them get turned down for the relatively small number of openings.
I think this is a good moment for all of us to reflect on how rallying around this lying criminal stained our profession, and how we should practice the same objectivity with ourselves and those "in the downtrodden world of IT" that we expect in others.
Childs' arguments reminded me of the kind of quasi-legal nitpicking one sees in Slashdot posts almost every day. It's the same kind of thing you see when you have two children in the back seat on a long road trip, and one or both of them are determined to pick a fight, so whatever rules you lay down, they interpret them as literally and selectively as possible in order to violate the spirit of the rule while keeping tenuously to the letter. Child A pokes child B, so you tell them not to touch each other, at which point A pokes B with some object, arguing that he didn't poke B, the object did. Similar rationales come up whenever copyright violations are discussed. It is, no pun intended, childish. Pirate all the mp3s you want, but show enough respect for other people's intelligence (and have enough balls) not to play word games about it.
At the end of the day, Terry Childs threw a tantrum using an exceedingly narrow and selective interpretation of the rules and then didn't have the good sense or maturity to back down before he ran afoul of the law. Your boss asks you to do something? In most cases -- including this one -- you can either do what you're asked to do or quit. And if you quit, walking off with company property, passwords included, is something that you can reasonably expect to be prosecuted for.
I don't think the sentence should be particularly harsh in light of the fact that the defendant is plainly emotionally immature and the level of actual harm done doesn't appear to have risen above the level of nuisance, but Childs is not some kind of innocent martyr in the name of principle, and his conviction does not bode particularly ill for any other IT worker with a modicum of maturity and common sense.
A website implemented some UI changes to accommodate a popular mobile device. Stop the presses!
Just how much money is MPEG-LA making on their patent pool? How much are they spending on bad mouthing OGG to preserve/increase their income? Treat any criticism of proprietary product competitors with a very large grain of salt. Particularly against free competitors since it's legally safer as they often don't have the legal resources to fight half-truths and innuendo.
Good advice in general, but in this case, I think it verges on paranoia. The bulk of consumers not only don't care, they aren't even aware of the issue. Most software vendors don't particularly care either, as few of them are in the codec business, and MPEG-LA's licensing fees are not exorbitant. The calculation that likely licensees are probably making is that the proprietary solution is well-documented, well-tested, and easy to integrate (and already integrated in most cases), and Ogg is none of these things.
Sometimes the proprietary solution succeeds because of various nefarious anticompetitive practices and backroom deals. But sometimes it succeeds because the FOSS alternatives are lacking in one or more critical areas.
In the long term, the fix for this problem is either for us to somehow develop the political momentum to get rid of software patents or, more realistically, to develop a free codec that not only addresses Ogg's shortcomings, but also significantly outperforms the proprietary solutions.
The problem I see is that this will lead to more regulation, which leads to less innovation, more draconian laws (see DMCA) and losses of freedom. What congress needs to do is to force -everyone- not just Facebook, MySpace, etc. is that they can't just change terms and conditions whenever they see fit without making us agree to them again.
This is a word game. You're decrying regulation while arguing for regulation, which leads me to believe that you're using "regulation" to mean laws you don't agree with. Prohibiting fraud is regulating trade. It's exactly the kind of thing that we have regulations to accomplish. Regulations can lead to "less innovation", etc., but they can also lead to less fraud, higher quality, better worker safety, and greater accountability. Knee-jerk rejection of laws because some laws are bad is an embrace of anarchy, for which see Somalia.
Congress wants to regulate fraud, false advertising, and other forms of dishonesty and exploitation? Well, good. Will they also pass laws that aren't as good? Absolutely. But we live in a democracy, and we can continue to adjust and improve the laws, just as we've been doing for the last couple of centuries. I think we all pretty much agree that free enterprise is a good thing, within reasonable limits, which we can also all pretty much agree would exclude fraud. To do that, we need regulations.
I can only imagine. I don't think most civilians understand the level of isolation that soldiers endure, even in peacetime. Add to that the stress of being shot at, and being able to talk to people back home has got to be tremendously comforting. As long as the troops are trained to safeguard operational security -- as if they didn't have a very strong incentive to do so anyway -- any risk has got to be outweighed by the boost in morale.
Anyway, best wishes to your brother. I hope he gets to see his nephew in person soon.
Why do environmental groups get upset by paper? Paper is a very renewable resource. Trees get cut down, and grow back. When I'm done with it, it rots (I happen to compost mine). With this computer I'm typing on, rare metals had to be mined to make it, and when I'm done with it, it sits around for at least a few thousand years (or more?). I have no problem with paper.
Chiefly, it's the chemicals used in processing pulp and the resulting pollution. Ever live near a paper mill? Even after the reforms thirty years ago, it's still a pretty nasty business. Secondarily, a fairly large amount of energy is involved in the harvesting, chipping, and transport of wood chips to the mills. (The mills themselves are actually very energy-efficient, deriving a significant amount of their power from burning the waste wood products, which is basically carbon-neutral.) Then there's the energy involved in transporting the paper products and toxic compounds in a lot of the inks used, as well as the highly toxic solvents used in cleaning and maintaining large-scale printing presses -- for which reason brownfield sites formerly used for printing are quite cheap, if you can afford the necessary cleanup and remediation, anyway.
As with anything else, it is best not to be wasteful and to remember that, for practically any consumer good, a considerable amount of energy was consumed to bring it to you, along with (most likely) a non-trivial amount of pollution. Use more is almost always bad advice.
That said, your point about the manufacture (and disposal) of electronic hardware is spot-on. The paper industry is squeaky clean by comparison.
TFA, by the way, does not give the speech (or a translation of it) but just tiny parts of it, without any context. So even after reading it, I have no idea what he said.
Aside from his followers, who cares what he said? He's the Pope. That makes him an expert in exactly what real world concern?
Benedict is an expert in Catholic dogma, period. Excepting grade school, he has no education outside of Catholic doctrine and theology, and his entire professional life has revolved around promulgating Catholic doctrine. His opinion on practically anything else is at best worth no more than any randomly selected unskilled worker with access to the television and newspapers.
If I was Catholic, I would of course be interested in what he says -- I'd effectively be obligated to. Otherwise, even for other Christian denominations, there isn't the least reason to care that he exists, much less what he has to say, with the possible exception of law enforcement agencies investigating the increasingly notorious sex crimes committed by his underlings.
There are lots of high tech workers that read slashdot. I'm one of them. I decided, while at university, that I was not going to spend my life building weapons. Working on weapons certainly was an opportunity that presented itself when I was getting my degree in the late 80s. I do not want to create weapons because I would have no direct control over whether those weapons were limited to truly righteous causes.
I don't work on weapons, but I've considered it more than once. At the end of the day, I decided that I just didn't want to spend my life developing new and better ways to kill people. Even if I was okay with the idea, I'd still rather spend my life developing ways for people to live longer and healthier.
Of course, what I actually do now borders on irrelevance, but it's harmless and it's paying for my daughter to go to college, and I don't have to worry about turning on the news and seeing some general blithely dismissing the "collateral damage" stemming from one of my inventions.
You also might have been on either the breacher or the corporate side. I'd hate to be in either position myself.
It's not a problem if you handle it correctly. After we disemboweled the first guy, you'd have been surprised at how strong everyone's passwords became.
And here, we have another uncomfortable demonstration of the failures of the Slashdot moderation system: there is no "-1 So Fucked Up I Don't Know Where to Start" option.
Isn't that patent close to expiration now?
Um, Apple owns its share of the market. OWNS. No one does what Apple does, not do they do something else as well, or as profitably.
Apple makes personal computers, cellphones, mp3 players, and tablet PCs, and they sell digital music. Whether they do that better than anyone else or not is a matter of opinion, but with the possible exception of the iTunes store, they do not "own" any area in which they compete, and they do not do anything that a dozens of other companies do. Most personal computers are not Macs, most cellphones are not iPhones, most mp3 players are not iPods, and most tablet PCs are not iPads, though I'll grant you that last one may actually change fairly rapidly.
Apple is very, very successful. Microsoft also. But in different ways. If I had to buy stock in either, it would be in Apple. If I had to predict who will be around in 50 years, it is almost a toss-up to me.
I doubt either one will be around in fifty years, or even twenty-five, though if I was buying stock, I'd buy Apple, too. I'm not sure how that in any way matters with respect to the possibility of Apple trying to get a lock on ARM in order to stifle competition.
That is only because Apple is actually Steve Jobs. His successor will have to have the same depth of vision, same drive, same demands and standards.
This is irrelevant hero worship. Steve Jobs could be Jesus (and may well think he is), but again, freezing out competitors by buying up parts suppliers rather than competing on innovation and product quality is still crappy.
But Apple is better at what it does than Microsoft is at what IT does.
What Apple and Microsoft both do that concerns me is to use vendor lock-in and other shady practices to diminish customer choice. Microsoft has historically been much better at being a bunch of ruthless bastards than Apple has, but Apple's "vision" involves a far more thorough lock-in than Microsoft ever dreamed possible. That they should cease to be an ignorable niche player and actually achieve dominance in one or more markets is potentially worse for consumers than Microsoft's dominance during its heyday.
To all of the people complaining about the terrifying specter of higher resolutions:
1. Relax, no one is going to take away your lower resolution monitor. Those will always be available. Those of us who want higher resolutions will have to pay extra for them. We're expect that.
2. Some people use computers to do something besides browse web pages and use MS Office. If you're a typical Photoshop user or otherwise involved in graphics either professionally or as a hobby, no resolution is high enough. If I could get a 36" inch screen with a resolution ten times higher than what I have today, I'd sell my firstborn for it.
3. Learn how to set your DPI properly and how to adjust the default font size. Most applications let you enlarge documents easily, too.
4. Go to an optometrist and have your damn eyeglass prescription updated. Odds are my vision is at least as bad as yours -- 20-200, for crying out loud -- but I've had my eyes examined in the last decade, so my glasses actually work properly.
This is good advice for practically every field. If you've done a good job of defining and documenting clean interfaces, it is almost always better to reuse a wheel than to reinvent it (usually badly). The only time a rewrite is in order is when it would actually take more effort to accommodate an existing subsystem.
(This applies mainly in a business context; for free software that is unconstrained by the need to turn a profit, the main question should be which choice will better serve the users, not which choice is quicker and easier for the developer.)
As far as games go, many of the games I've enjoyed most have had relatively primitive graphics but superb gameplay, while I've seen plenty of games that were visually stunning, but not all that much fun to play. For game developers, I'd recommend developing the game first with minimal placeholder graphics and then play it. Is it fun? If yes, then upgrade the graphics. If not, then no amount of eye-candy will save it.