I've taken CS classes at a few different Universities and Tech Colleges.
At the Unis I learned theoretical stuff that as a business application developer I will never use. I will never bill my employer/consult to build a new compiler from scratch. Knowing the intricacies of how compilers work has never contributed significantly to my ability to debug a code problem. That said, they did a fair job of what they were trying to do: spit out scientists who could further the field of computer science.
At the Tech schools I saw a ton of technologies. SQL, SQLServer, C++, C#/VB.Net, Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Access, etc... tons of hands on lab time. And walking out of a tech school program I felt they did a great job doing exactly what they were trying to do: spit out working class programmers who could hit the ground running on day 1 in a wide variety of entry level contractor jobs.
Neither option is perfect. Going to a University you'll miss out on the actual practical coding, so while you might be able to pointer math in your head, you'll be way behind the curve in application development. Going to a tech college, you'll have a great framework to start from, but you'll have none of the in-depth or more advanced technical knowledge that someone with a university degree will have.
In both cases I found the knowledge transfer on application design to be completely lacking. Limited exposure to design patterns. No coverage of data abstraction or n-tier designs. Course work on customer interactions, requirements gathering, documentation, and project management were completely lacking (although the tech colleges did a fair bit of PM and Business focus in their Bachelor's program).
When I'm looking at college grad resumes, from a programmer's perspective I want to know that they can: 1) Code in 2 languages (preferably with different fundamentals) 2) Understand some amount of design theory 3) Manage their time 4) Interact well with users and coworkers
And for the love of all things binary, if they try to answer the "Swap the values of A and B" with out creating a 3rd variable on the screening test, they get round filed. I don't care if an instructor showed them a neat trick with pointers, answer the question the right way and save the flaunting for personal projects.
Which is exactly the problem, it is entirely too costly to do. ISPs have been marketing 10Mb service (or 3-5Mb service in my area) with out the ability to actually provide 10Mb as a minimum service level.
By selling based on the upper limit of service and leaving the lower limit undefined, they can prove that they can provide up to the marketed rate (in ideal conditions) but you can not prove that they fail to meet that lower limit.
So people assume that by paying for "(up to) 10Mb Service!" that they should be able to get 10Mb service 99.999999% of the time. When in reality they can get 256Kb service or better 99.999999% of the time.
Once you drop those 30k users down to 256Kb connections, you're only looking at 7,860,000Mbps instead of 300,000,000,000Mbps. Push it up to 10,000,000Mbps and you have the 256Kb minimum with enough head room for people to hit 10Mb upper limit under ideal circumstances. And a single OC-192 will carry it all.
Sure, if they want to provide a true 10Mb connection with near 100% uptime and bandwidth availability, they're going to need a stack of OC-192. But they don't. It's the old "As little as possible, as much as necessary" line. And the Marketing department hasn't kept in line with the Engineering department, so the issue will inevitably wind up in the Legal department.
with no other benefits than the ability to use your paid for bandwidth.
Which gets back to the root issue. ISPs have over sold their networks. They are unable to guarantee the bandwith the they have sold. The easiest solution is to cut the marketing hype and sell responsible bandwidth allocations that they know that they can guarantee. Yeah, that means everyone takes a hit and that instead of paying $30 a month for 3Mb service (where I will rarely ever see 3Mb), I'll be paying $30 a month for 784Kb service (where I will have 768Kb service 99.9999% of the time).
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a speed vs consumption model. For the first X GB downloaded, you have Speed1 service. For the next Y GB downloaded, you have Speed2 service, for the nezt Z GB downloaded, you have Speed3 service, etc...
Where the size of X, Y and Z and Speed 1, 2, and 3 are dependant on how much you pay.
$10 a month? 0GB at 1.5Mb, 5GB at 768, remainder at 512.... $100 a month? 20 GB as 3Mb, 100 GB at 1.5Mb, remainder at 768.
Fair to everyone, and if you're a P2P junkie, you are either capped at a slower connection speed (and thus not eating other peoples bandwidth) or you are paying significantly so you wind up funding network improvements.
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does.
P2P does not transfer large files.
It transfers small files, very small files. And it is designed in such a way that it expects failures and to be unable to find those files. So if a transfer fails, it just requests that file again. Once it has all those tiny files, they get reassembled into the original large file.
There is no need for a robust transportation layer, the application is explicitly designed to account for such issues.
16 linecards at 50k each, for 800,000. Lets call it a cool mill in asset costs.
30k subscribers paying $20 each a month. $600,000 a month. $7.2 mill a year.
Yeah, I can see how the initial sticker value of a 2 router closet is going to a road to ruin for most ISPs.
I don't think ISPs are cash cows by any means, once you consider opperating expenses and labor. But a $1 million dollar switch station can be easily amorted out over a 5 year loan when the ROI on that million is quite solid.
Most of the time when I hear crap like "By most estimates..." with out any sign of a source to back it up, I attribute the remainder of the sentence the same amount of credence as the sound of my coworker's ass cheaks flapping together after an especially hanious fart.
Maybe he's right, but with out anything to back up his opinion, he just looks like some shill who is lobying for some organization with a strong financial incentive for not seeing net nuetrality laws and being allowed to run deep packet inspection.
Another obvious way to see what the impact is would be to look at a tool like http://www.internettrafficreport.com/30day.htm to see if the change to UDP and expected rise in bandwidth actually effects TCP communication. If it is as gloom and doom as the author makes it out to be, we should see a steady rise in lost packets as the P2P users upgrade to the new UDP defaulting version.
This report from March 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342988,00.html sites Arbor Networks (they bought out Ellacoya in early 2008) claims P2P traffic represents about a third of internet traffic.
I'm all for making a plan to be able to react if a problem is detected. But lets not get all worked up over someone's questionable theories.
Do you see an alternative in the heavy fright industry to natural gas?
Absolutely: Diesel.
More specifically, Bio-Diesel.
Any power plan in the US that doesn't consider the use of Coal in a significant way is unrealistic. It is too cheap and easy to do for even heavily subsidized energy sources to entirely replace. So instead of replacing coal, we need to find ways to improve its efficiency and reduce its ecological impact. One of the greatest technologies coming to market that will really have an impact in this realm is Algae Farms. By pumping coal fired power plant exhaust through algae farms we can reduce CO2 emissions by over 40%. Not only that, but the algae, grown fat on the unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust can be processed very similarly to Soy to produce Bio Diesel. Soy can generate ~50 gallons of Bio Diesel per acre, Algae Farms can generate about 100,000 gallons of Bio Diesel per acre (per year). The pulp left over can then be distilled to get Ethanol to introduce E15 and E85 fuels in places where shipping it would be impractical.
Will it reduce foreign dependency as well? Let's hope so.
It won't. We depend on foreign oil and cheap labor. Windmills provide neither. The US has coal. Lots of coal. Lots and lots and lots of coal. In another couple of decades, it wouldn't be surprising to hear about the US being a fuel provider exporting coal to the world market. If we didn't invest in wind energy, we would just burn more coal.
T. Boone Pickens, get to work!
T Boone Pickens is a salesman. What do salesmen do? They sell things. Why do they sell things? To make a profit. Remember that. His willingness to invest in wind power is admirable, but the natural gas plans he is pushing through along with wind will largely pad his wallet. So if we go the Pickens route, we have to keep an eye on the ball and make sure that we're not winding up on the short side of the stick with little to show for it. Maybe in the long term it'll be a good decision, but for now we need to approach it as pragmatists and look beyond the tri-fold full color brochure.
I thought about spending several paragraphs and a couple of examples explaining this, but from past experience I have learned that probability is sometimes counter-intuitive and some people just never get it.
No joke, you ever try to explain the Monte Hall logic of changing doors? I've had people fight to the bitter end on that one. I've drawn pictures. I even wrote a little.Net app with three doors and a picture of a goat just to help people comprehend...
If you want to get into intent, then she is significantly MORE guilty.
She was interested in an obviously illegal opperation that would net her a significant untaxed income. Even if she was oblivious to the legal rammifications, even a village idiot could identify it as ill-gotten gains.
She was a co-conspiritor. If we tried her on intent, she would be a criminal in the US where she currently resides.
Also, I did not RTFA, but it is entirely possible that the acts of the scammer were not illegal in Nigeria. In which case, he is not a criminal. The scammer has not likely been convicted in the US so he wouldn't a criminal here either.
She was greedy, irrisponsible, and blind to every single warning that her friends, family, and even law enforcement agents were giving here.
She was not forced, she gave it up willingly. This isn't blaming the rape victum, nor the home owner, nor any of your other straw man arguements. She wasn't destitute and desperate. She wasn't mentally handicapped. She gave her money away to people who asked for it.
She is nothing more than a prostitute who called the cops when her John refused to pay her after she provided a service.
Her family has my pitty, but she is entitled to nothing but scorn.
Heh, nice catch. I think I actually wrote that, went out to a meeting, then came back, saw the post waiting and hit the submit button with out re-reading it.
If you think that is bad, I totally slaughtered the english language in another post today that was interrupted by a bagel break.
The labor costs of checking meters is pretty significant to utility companies. One thing many municipality companies are trying is WiFi enabled meters that will report consumption to a meter truck as it drives down the street, saving hours apon hours of labor every day.
I haven't tried to tap into my own meter, but if they can read it, with sufficient time and effort I'm sure most of the readers of/. could read it as well.
The US's inability to stand up to the world bank and level the playing field through tarrifs and inport duties would alliviate much of the problem you mention.
While on active duty the military will cover 75-100% of your education.
Once you are out you have the GI Bill, and if you did your homework before listening to your recruiter's lies, the College Fund as well (helps if you enlist with a ship date in february-march).
And depending on the state you reside in, you may get additional kick backs. In Wisconsin, the state reimburses vets for up to 75% of the UW's cost. So going to the local community college is almost free, with the GI bill to pay for your housing while you focus on school.
All in all, if you are willing to take the risk, Military Service is not a bad option for getting a great education.
The author is talking about using other peoples' code, which may be copyrighted. They are recommending that the developers should investigate IF the open source tool is protected, and if so that they should respect those limitations. But if they do not know if there are patents on the technology, they should contact the legal department, because the majority of USPTO listings are written like crap with legalise, jargon, and intentional vagueness written in.
What they are trying to prevent is some developer who finds some OS tool online, checks the USPTO database for any claims, and not finding anything obvious, uses the tool with out any concern for the IP owner.
I'm all for flaming MS when they f'up, but this sure seems like good advice. When followed, it protects MS from lawsuits and IP holders from being infringed upon.
And come next year when the market their donation with CCF logo's and make a press release about the donation that makes it appear as though CCF was involved, drama ensues.
Just to put that $5,000 tax credit into scope, the year my son was born I was an LTE employee of the State. I had worked there for a year (college job) so I was elligible to enlist in the benefits plan, but I would not recieve employer contributions until I hit 1.5 years on the job. For family coverage I had to pay $980 every month. My take home pay at the time was just under $900. $5000 wouldn't cover 1/2 a year's worth of insurance.
Not to mention that a $5,000 tax credit isn't money in the hand. At that point in time my wife and I were already tax exempt due to our low incomes and write offs. The tax credit would have done absolutely nothing for us.
And on top of that, McCain's taxation of medical expenses would wind up increasing service costs, which would cause an immediate rise in insurance premiums.
Not that I'm all that keen on Obama's plan either, but McCain's plan smells worse than a used douche on a shit sandwhich. It might help a very narrow range of the young/healthy middle class, but it screws the old, the sick, and the poor.
Odds of one innocent file's md5 hash matching one identified file's hash md5 is insignificant. But in this case we are talking about and entire hard drive's worth of files compared to a database of all known digital kiddie porn.
Take a PC that has been in heavy use for a few years, you might have a couple hundred thousand files, each of which could collide with any of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of hashes for every known kiddie porn related file on the internet.
Think of it like rolling dice. Rolling a double 6 on a pair of 6 sided dice is a 1/36 chance, but rolling any doubles is a 1/6 chance.
The odds of any single file on your hard drive matching any single file they have on record is significantly better than a specific file on your hard drive matching a specific file they have on record.
The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there.
What evidence? Some md5 hashes that happen to match hashes from a select number of images? Odds are if we hash out every file on your hard drive we will also find matches to that same list. There for, by your own logic, we should arrest you, put your name on the sexual offenders list, and drag you into court, all with out a warrant.
If you really want to live in a country with that much legitimate power in the government, there are numerous flights to China every day.
In short: Good: Civil liberties defended. Bad: Possible case against alleged child porn possessor blown. Worse: Cops too f'ing incompetent/lazy/ill-trained to get a freaking warrant.
The problem here is not civil liberties getting in the way of prosecution, it's the prosecution failing to follow the law.
Agreed. In fact I have seen no decline in the amount of cold calls I'm getting from recruiters. It seems like the downturn's effect on IT has been largely limited. In fact, I'm seeing a lot of oppertunities in IT for automation and process improvement for non-IT departments. Places where existing IT resources can be leveraged to reduce costs/overhead or improve performance/ROI of non-IT functions.
And when I go to my manager and say "we need a tool to do X. We can use (proprietary software package Y) licensed at $1,000 a seat, or we can use (open software package Z) for free. More often than not, they are interested in the freebie.
You are intending to have 256^6 individually controllable lights/components in your house? Or are you planning on exposing some number of lights in your house to the public internet where they would have to share out of the possible addresses?
So web developers should only aim to provide text based content because some people refuse to keep up to date?
Silverlight is currently in beta, soon to be launched. I would imagine that MS will do their damnest to get as much penetration as they can. And that means improving performance on FF (I haven't had it crash yet, but it is much laggier) and working with the folks at Moonlight to get things flowing there.
But hey, some people complained about this whole 'Netscape Navigator' thing back in the day. It's just some new fangled fad that won't amount to anything...
For now, Silverlight is competition for Flash. If the competition between the two of them gets us either a flash level of portability in Silverlight, or an ease of development like Silverlight has in Flash, it will be good for us the developers and consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
I've taken CS classes at a few different Universities and Tech Colleges.
At the Unis I learned theoretical stuff that as a business application developer I will never use. I will never bill my employer/consult to build a new compiler from scratch. Knowing the intricacies of how compilers work has never contributed significantly to my ability to debug a code problem. That said, they did a fair job of what they were trying to do: spit out scientists who could further the field of computer science.
At the Tech schools I saw a ton of technologies. SQL, SQLServer, C++, C#/VB.Net, Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Access, etc... tons of hands on lab time. And walking out of a tech school program I felt they did a great job doing exactly what they were trying to do: spit out working class programmers who could hit the ground running on day 1 in a wide variety of entry level contractor jobs.
Neither option is perfect. Going to a University you'll miss out on the actual practical coding, so while you might be able to pointer math in your head, you'll be way behind the curve in application development. Going to a tech college, you'll have a great framework to start from, but you'll have none of the in-depth or more advanced technical knowledge that someone with a university degree will have.
In both cases I found the knowledge transfer on application design to be completely lacking. Limited exposure to design patterns. No coverage of data abstraction or n-tier designs. Course work on customer interactions, requirements gathering, documentation, and project management were completely lacking (although the tech colleges did a fair bit of PM and Business focus in their Bachelor's program).
When I'm looking at college grad resumes, from a programmer's perspective I want to know that they can:
1) Code in 2 languages (preferably with different fundamentals)
2) Understand some amount of design theory
3) Manage their time
4) Interact well with users and coworkers
And for the love of all things binary, if they try to answer the "Swap the values of A and B" with out creating a 3rd variable on the screening test, they get round filed. I don't care if an instructor showed them a neat trick with pointers, answer the question the right way and save the flaunting for personal projects.
-Rick
Which is exactly the problem, it is entirely too costly to do. ISPs have been marketing 10Mb service (or 3-5Mb service in my area) with out the ability to actually provide 10Mb as a minimum service level.
By selling based on the upper limit of service and leaving the lower limit undefined, they can prove that they can provide up to the marketed rate (in ideal conditions) but you can not prove that they fail to meet that lower limit.
So people assume that by paying for "(up to) 10Mb Service!" that they should be able to get 10Mb service 99.999999% of the time. When in reality they can get 256Kb service or better 99.999999% of the time.
Once you drop those 30k users down to 256Kb connections, you're only looking at 7,860,000Mbps instead of 300,000,000,000Mbps. Push it up to 10,000,000Mbps and you have the 256Kb minimum with enough head room for people to hit 10Mb upper limit under ideal circumstances. And a single OC-192 will carry it all.
Sure, if they want to provide a true 10Mb connection with near 100% uptime and bandwidth availability, they're going to need a stack of OC-192. But they don't. It's the old "As little as possible, as much as necessary" line. And the Marketing department hasn't kept in line with the Engineering department, so the issue will inevitably wind up in the Legal department.
-Rick
with no other benefits than the ability to use your paid for bandwidth.
Which gets back to the root issue. ISPs have over sold their networks. They are unable to guarantee the bandwith the they have sold. The easiest solution is to cut the marketing hype and sell responsible bandwidth allocations that they know that they can guarantee. Yeah, that means everyone takes a hit and that instead of paying $30 a month for 3Mb service (where I will rarely ever see 3Mb), I'll be paying $30 a month for 784Kb service (where I will have 768Kb service 99.9999% of the time).
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a speed vs consumption model. For the first X GB downloaded, you have Speed1 service. For the next Y GB downloaded, you have Speed2 service, for the nezt Z GB downloaded, you have Speed3 service, etc...
Where the size of X, Y and Z and Speed 1, 2, and 3 are dependant on how much you pay.
$10 a month? 0GB at 1.5Mb, 5GB at 768, remainder at 512. ...
$100 a month? 20 GB as 3Mb, 100 GB at 1.5Mb, remainder at 768.
Fair to everyone, and if you're a P2P junkie, you are either capped at a slower connection speed (and thus not eating other peoples bandwidth) or you are paying significantly so you wind up funding network improvements.
-Rick
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does.
P2P does not transfer large files.
It transfers small files, very small files. And it is designed in such a way that it expects failures and to be unable to find those files. So if a transfer fails, it just requests that file again. Once it has all those tiny files, they get reassembled into the original large file.
There is no need for a robust transportation layer, the application is explicitly designed to account for such issues.
-Rick
16 linecards at 50k each, for 800,000. Lets call it a cool mill in asset costs.
30k subscribers paying $20 each a month. $600,000 a month. $7.2 mill a year.
Yeah, I can see how the initial sticker value of a 2 router closet is going to a road to ruin for most ISPs.
I don't think ISPs are cash cows by any means, once you consider opperating expenses and labor. But a $1 million dollar switch station can be easily amorted out over a 5 year loan when the ROI on that million is quite solid.
-Rick
I'd bet at least 2/3 of all torrent traffic is for pirated movies, music or software and a large portion of the remaining 1/3 is probably porn.
As long as we're empowering gamblers with legal and commercial ramifications, I bet that you are a child molester that steals from your employer.
Now how about instead of making blind accusations we investigate and have a meaningful conversation.
-Rick
Most of the time when I hear crap like "By most estimates..." with out any sign of a source to back it up, I attribute the remainder of the sentence the same amount of credence as the sound of my coworker's ass cheaks flapping together after an especially hanious fart.
Maybe he's right, but with out anything to back up his opinion, he just looks like some shill who is lobying for some organization with a strong financial incentive for not seeing net nuetrality laws and being allowed to run deep packet inspection.
The best I can find is Ellacoya's June 2007 report that put P2P at 37% of total bandwidth. http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070618005912&newsLang=en
A wee bit shy of the 50% the author is claiming.
Another obvious way to see what the impact is would be to look at a tool like http://www.internettrafficreport.com/30day.htm to see if the change to UDP and expected rise in bandwidth actually effects TCP communication. If it is as gloom and doom as the author makes it out to be, we should see a steady rise in lost packets as the P2P users upgrade to the new UDP defaulting version.
This report from March 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342988,00.html sites Arbor Networks (they bought out Ellacoya in early 2008) claims P2P traffic represents about a third of internet traffic.
I'm all for making a plan to be able to react if a problem is detected. But lets not get all worked up over someone's questionable theories.
-Rick
Do you see an alternative in the heavy fright industry to natural gas?
Absolutely: Diesel.
More specifically, Bio-Diesel.
Any power plan in the US that doesn't consider the use of Coal in a significant way is unrealistic. It is too cheap and easy to do for even heavily subsidized energy sources to entirely replace. So instead of replacing coal, we need to find ways to improve its efficiency and reduce its ecological impact. One of the greatest technologies coming to market that will really have an impact in this realm is Algae Farms. By pumping coal fired power plant exhaust through algae farms we can reduce CO2 emissions by over 40%. Not only that, but the algae, grown fat on the unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust can be processed very similarly to Soy to produce Bio Diesel. Soy can generate ~50 gallons of Bio Diesel per acre, Algae Farms can generate about 100,000 gallons of Bio Diesel per acre (per year). The pulp left over can then be distilled to get Ethanol to introduce E15 and E85 fuels in places where shipping it would be impractical.
-Rick
Will it reduce foreign dependency as well? Let's hope so.
It won't. We depend on foreign oil and cheap labor. Windmills provide neither. The US has coal. Lots of coal. Lots and lots and lots of coal. In another couple of decades, it wouldn't be surprising to hear about the US being a fuel provider exporting coal to the world market. If we didn't invest in wind energy, we would just burn more coal.
T. Boone Pickens, get to work!
T Boone Pickens is a salesman. What do salesmen do? They sell things. Why do they sell things? To make a profit. Remember that. His willingness to invest in wind power is admirable, but the natural gas plans he is pushing through along with wind will largely pad his wallet. So if we go the Pickens route, we have to keep an eye on the ball and make sure that we're not winding up on the short side of the stick with little to show for it. Maybe in the long term it'll be a good decision, but for now we need to approach it as pragmatists and look beyond the tri-fold full color brochure.
-Rick
I thought about spending several paragraphs and a couple of examples explaining this, but from past experience I have learned that probability is sometimes counter-intuitive and some people just never get it.
No joke, you ever try to explain the Monte Hall logic of changing doors? I've had people fight to the bitter end on that one. I've drawn pictures. I even wrote a little .Net app with three doors and a picture of a goat just to help people comprehend...
-Rick
If you want to get into intent, then she is significantly MORE guilty.
She was interested in an obviously illegal opperation that would net her a significant untaxed income. Even if she was oblivious to the legal rammifications, even a village idiot could identify it as ill-gotten gains.
She was a co-conspiritor. If we tried her on intent, she would be a criminal in the US where she currently resides.
Also, I did not RTFA, but it is entirely possible that the acts of the scammer were not illegal in Nigeria. In which case, he is not a criminal. The scammer has not likely been convicted in the US so he wouldn't a criminal here either.
She was greedy, irrisponsible, and blind to every single warning that her friends, family, and even law enforcement agents were giving here.
She was not forced, she gave it up willingly. This isn't blaming the rape victum, nor the home owner, nor any of your other straw man arguements. She wasn't destitute and desperate. She wasn't mentally handicapped. She gave her money away to people who asked for it.
She is nothing more than a prostitute who called the cops when her John refused to pay her after she provided a service.
Her family has my pitty, but she is entitled to nothing but scorn.
-Rick
No, it doesn't.
http://www.skepdic.com/begging.html
-Rick
Heh, nice catch. I think I actually wrote that, went out to a meeting, then came back, saw the post waiting and hit the submit button with out re-reading it.
If you think that is bad, I totally slaughtered the english language in another post today that was interrupted by a bagel break.
-Rick
The labor costs of checking meters is pretty significant to utility companies. One thing many municipality companies are trying is WiFi enabled meters that will report consumption to a meter truck as it drives down the street, saving hours apon hours of labor every day.
I haven't tried to tap into my own meter, but if they can read it, with sufficient time and effort I'm sure most of the readers of /. could read it as well.
-Rick
The US's inability to stand up to the world bank and level the playing field through tarrifs and inport duties would alliviate much of the problem you mention.
-Rick
If the product was priced such that it was sufficient to maintain their opperations, then how exactly was it over priced?
-Rick
While on active duty the military will cover 75-100% of your education.
Once you are out you have the GI Bill, and if you did your homework before listening to your recruiter's lies, the College Fund as well (helps if you enlist with a ship date in february-march).
And depending on the state you reside in, you may get additional kick backs. In Wisconsin, the state reimburses vets for up to 75% of the UW's cost. So going to the local community college is almost free, with the GI bill to pay for your housing while you focus on school.
All in all, if you are willing to take the risk, Military Service is not a bad option for getting a great education.
-Rick
The author is talking about using other peoples' code, which may be copyrighted. They are recommending that the developers should investigate IF the open source tool is protected, and if so that they should respect those limitations. But if they do not know if there are patents on the technology, they should contact the legal department, because the majority of USPTO listings are written like crap with legalise, jargon, and intentional vagueness written in.
What they are trying to prevent is some developer who finds some OS tool online, checks the USPTO database for any claims, and not finding anything obvious, uses the tool with out any concern for the IP owner.
I'm all for flaming MS when they f'up, but this sure seems like good advice. When followed, it protects MS from lawsuits and IP holders from being infringed upon.
-Rick
And come next year when the market their donation with CCF logo's and make a press release about the donation that makes it appear as though CCF was involved, drama ensues.
-Rick
Just to put that $5,000 tax credit into scope, the year my son was born I was an LTE employee of the State. I had worked there for a year (college job) so I was elligible to enlist in the benefits plan, but I would not recieve employer contributions until I hit 1.5 years on the job. For family coverage I had to pay $980 every month. My take home pay at the time was just under $900. $5000 wouldn't cover 1/2 a year's worth of insurance.
Not to mention that a $5,000 tax credit isn't money in the hand. At that point in time my wife and I were already tax exempt due to our low incomes and write offs. The tax credit would have done absolutely nothing for us.
And on top of that, McCain's taxation of medical expenses would wind up increasing service costs, which would cause an immediate rise in insurance premiums.
Not that I'm all that keen on Obama's plan either, but McCain's plan smells worse than a used douche on a shit sandwhich. It might help a very narrow range of the young/healthy middle class, but it screws the old, the sick, and the poor.
-Rick
Odds of one innocent file's md5 hash matching one identified file's hash md5 is insignificant. But in this case we are talking about and entire hard drive's worth of files compared to a database of all known digital kiddie porn.
Take a PC that has been in heavy use for a few years, you might have a couple hundred thousand files, each of which could collide with any of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of hashes for every known kiddie porn related file on the internet.
Think of it like rolling dice. Rolling a double 6 on a pair of 6 sided dice is a 1/36 chance, but rolling any doubles is a 1/6 chance.
The odds of any single file on your hard drive matching any single file they have on record is significantly better than a specific file on your hard drive matching a specific file they have on record.
-Rick
The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there.
What evidence? Some md5 hashes that happen to match hashes from a select number of images? Odds are if we hash out every file on your hard drive we will also find matches to that same list. There for, by your own logic, we should arrest you, put your name on the sexual offenders list, and drag you into court, all with out a warrant.
If you really want to live in a country with that much legitimate power in the government, there are numerous flights to China every day.
In short:
Good: Civil liberties defended.
Bad: Possible case against alleged child porn possessor blown.
Worse: Cops too f'ing incompetent/lazy/ill-trained to get a freaking warrant.
The problem here is not civil liberties getting in the way of prosecution, it's the prosecution failing to follow the law.
-Rick
Agreed. In fact I have seen no decline in the amount of cold calls I'm getting from recruiters. It seems like the downturn's effect on IT has been largely limited. In fact, I'm seeing a lot of oppertunities in IT for automation and process improvement for non-IT departments. Places where existing IT resources can be leveraged to reduce costs/overhead or improve performance/ROI of non-IT functions.
And when I go to my manager and say "we need a tool to do X. We can use (proprietary software package Y) licensed at $1,000 a seat, or we can use (open software package Z) for free. More often than not, they are interested in the freebie.
-Rick
You are intending to have 256^6 individually controllable lights/components in your house? Or are you planning on exposing some number of lights in your house to the public internet where they would have to share out of the possible addresses?
-Rick
So web developers should only aim to provide text based content because some people refuse to keep up to date?
Silverlight is currently in beta, soon to be launched. I would imagine that MS will do their damnest to get as much penetration as they can. And that means improving performance on FF (I haven't had it crash yet, but it is much laggier) and working with the folks at Moonlight to get things flowing there.
But hey, some people complained about this whole 'Netscape Navigator' thing back in the day. It's just some new fangled fad that won't amount to anything...
For now, Silverlight is competition for Flash. If the competition between the two of them gets us either a flash level of portability in Silverlight, or an ease of development like Silverlight has in Flash, it will be good for us the developers and consumers.
-Rick