Seriously, if there was one country that was going to have to get nukes before anyone else, the US isn't *such* a bad choice. It's nicely isolated from most of the rest of the world, it's enough of a mix of peoples that ethnic extremism tends to get tamped down (sure, maybe 5% of your population *really* hates Lithuanians, but the other 95% really doesn't care and doesn't like bombing Lithuania for no apparent reason), and it's (in recent memory) been fairly stable and wealthy (so you don't have desperate coups with nukes floating around).
I mean, yes, US world dominance not so good, but would, say, Spanish world dominance be better?
I wonder whether this is just due to inefficient coding, or whether there is a legitimate justification for support in the protocol to redirect someone to a new tracker once there are a certain number of active users online (I doubt that someone is going to get better data rates on a torrent with 100,000 users than on a tracker with 10,000 users.)
No, that was just being a dick, because he clearly didn't mean what you said, just as nobody means to say "he's better than any composer" when what they really mean to say is "he's better than any *other* composer".
However, I think that it's reasonable to say that essentially nobody would claim that ten thousand people living out the rest of their natural lives in torture would be worth the life of one person.
That worth can range from hundreds of thousands of dollars for people we know and love, to less than $10 for people we don't care about (ie: starving children in Africa).
A lot less than $10. There are probably at least hundreds of millions of people affected by lacking various basic requirements (water, food, etc), and I've never sent anything to any of them.
I think the problem is that the human mind didn't evolve in environments where it was expected to ever deal with billions of anything (or, really, of anything it couldn't *see* -- when Sally Struthers gets money for Africa, it's because people see *pictures* of the little kiddies), and its value evaluation gets a little funky when trying to deal with huge numbers of people that we've never seen.
It seemed like a big gripe there was blood pushing the clotting agent out of the way.
I know that some attempts to deal with bleeding use adhesive (like SuperGlue) instead of attempting to produce clotting. I wonder if it's reasonable to just dump a blob of fast-setting-on-water-contact glop on a wound, or if blockage of arteries would be too much of a risk.
Currently, we have a complex set of heuristics that get used to help stop spam, yet our decisions to help stop random attacks coming in from the network are almost entirely non-heuristic.
I could see software that decides that an IP that has hit me twenty times with an incorrect password over the past week without ever successfully logging in correctly is not a legitimate user.
We shouldn't ever rely on heuristics alone for security, but I could see them being a useful addition.
Maybe a manufacturer could introduce a program in which you purchase a computer, and if anything goes wrong, you send the thing back (or drop it off at your local service center) and they send out another. The idea would be something like repair, except there would be no attempt to give you the same hardware every time. The only thing that would happen is that your personal data would be duplicated onto the new machine, the old one would undergo some diagnostics, any of the five-or-so parts on such a system that are bad be swapped out, and the system automatically be reimaged for the next customer.
This would require a single, standard computer so that the hardware could be swapped out underneath, something like a console. I could see Dell doing something like this in the future -- the greatest problem for ordinary home users seems to be maintenance of computers, and I have seen very few strides to attempt to address this.
This "standard computer" may not be a geek paradise, but I think that it might do a better job of serving the masses.
I don't think that there's that much wasted effort.
I doubt that most software authors spend that much time on packaging, which is really where the differences come in.
Furthermore, it's easy to consider something necessary "wasted" effort. Capitalism is more "wasteful" than coordinated communism, because all the overhead of competition can be eliminated. However, it turns out that maybe capitalism does a better job of dealing with human nature.
Maybe open source authors don't want to just write to one big project -- maybe they want the freedom to try out their own ideas and have other people that agree popularize them. Otherwise, you'd have "anything that Red Hat (for instance) doesn't like not existing". Red Hat would probably axe KDE, and SuSE GNOME, if either one could control the whole industry. Maybe that freedom is necessary to produce the fun that drives the whole open source world?
My first thoughts on nano were probably the same sci-fi ideas that everyone else has -- self-assembling nanobots could build just about anything, and do anything.
But real-life applications of nano are much less groundbreaking, and much more mundane -- making circuits and storage a bit smaller, and so forth. Nano is more of a psychological barrier than anything else.
If self-assembling robots were really such an awesome idea, for getting work done, we would have done them at the far-easier-to-work-with size scales that we are comfortable with.
I doubt this. TCG is no secret, has not been for a long time, and Apple does not need to panic-move. They could just have added such a feature to their own systems when people first started talking about trusted PCs, or made efforts to provide this on their own systems. I doubt that Intel is interested in using this to shut Apple out, but as a means to enter the home entertainment market. Sony is the one to get twitchy, not Apple.
I think that the simplest explanation is the best -- Intel/AMD just provided the fastest/cheapest chips, and the economies of scale of the x86 market made sense for Apple. They've been bringing their systems up to parity for years (dropping ADB/NuBus, and probably lots of other stuff after I stopped paying attention.)
It's not just Amazon. Every large company that does research churns out absurd patents.
I work at a corporate computer science research wing of an extremely large company (which I won't name, but isn't much different from my previous employer, and is probably not much different from any other large company in the same position). At the moment, the work I'm doing is not research, but software development. Our group has a requirement to turn out N invention disclosures a year, even though we aren't doing research. Naturally, this results in plenty of grumbling and people just grabbing something handy to "disclose" as an invention. There are people Googling for random things online, and submitting them as "inventions" to get upstream management off their back. Thus, the poison seed enters the system as a result of a poor goal/reward structure around research.
To keep *their* bosses happy, research management has to convert some number of these into patents.
The USPTO, which does not have the incredible amount of funding that it would require to block all stupid patents (you would literally have to hire the best researchers in every field and give them a long time to mull over each patent), might send these patents back a time or two, but sooner or later they will get through.
This is where stupid patents come from. Sometime down the road, lawyers will use these as clubs.
I am not on the financial side, but as far as I can tell, existing players in a market generally just cross-license. AMD and Intel will never duke it out over patents, because neither one would be able to produce chips.
What happens is that nobody new is able to enter the market, by virtue of a steady stream of patents existing covering all kinds of basic-but-crucial ideas. The idea, from the standpoint of existing players, seems to be to convert a free market into an ogliopoly, in which there is much more profit to be made from consumers, and in which the continuous push to commoditize products can be stopped. And every now and then, existing players merge or go bankrupt, and the market gets ever richer for the existing ones.
The problem (well, the problem that pisses off a lot of open source programmers) comes in in that open source projects generally don't have any money (certainly not enough to take on a large company in patent litigation). So, instead of being able to do what other large companies do (cross-license, just dump a bunch of money on the other company, whatever is necessary to continue doing their work), open source projects simply cannot do things for fear of being sued (or just having all their hard work thrown out). So we have stupid things like lower quality font rendering (because the FreeType people cannot legally support the TrueType hinting data) and so forth.
I have fond memories of one meeting at my previous employer where a bunch of researchers and an extremely key (i.e. essentially nonfireable) software developer was. The meeting was to encourage the project to produce more IP, and was being conducted by one of our in-house corporate lawyers. Halfway through the meeting, the software developer (who felt that the whole thing was a waste of his time in the first place, and clearly disliked software patents) stood up and started railing on software patents. The research folks just stood there. Talking privately after the meeting, I discovered most of the researchers agreed with the guy, but saw any complaints as politically incorrect and simply likely to get them fired or research funding (always a popular target for funding cuts) cut.
The very root issue is twofold: (a) that it's not easy for people to make money on research (in the US, I've been told by people who are more interested in the business side of research that many corporate research labs have gone away or been closed down), and (b) that it is *exceedingly* difficult to effectively judge how well someone is doing research. Everyone will try to present their research as the next gro
And the reason she's giving those speeches is because her campaign team has looked at the polls and decided that she doesn't have enough appeal to conservatives. Why do you think she had the sudden and abrupt change? Because her values suddenly made a 180? If you're thinking about running for President, you don't *get* to have ideology -- that gets in the way of the centrist race.
A) stop being insulted by jokes, its why some women piss me off so much, they can't take things at face value they HAVE to see some deep down inner shit or something and get all defensive and stupid about stuff. And his joke was pretty funny! and very hard to take as women "bashing?"
That's hardly a female-specific or even -associated characteristic, in my experience.
B) its DANGLEY bits, women have the jiggly bits, men don't. ours DANGLE.
This is the strongest point in the email.
C) MCP exams don't have much to do with programming, and i dare to say most thigns to do with MS now a days isn't programming. unless its win32 or drivers that is;)
Uh, the girl had written (at least) two apps in C# -- a calculator and a sorting application. Not exactly senior developer material yet, perhaps, but she is most definitely coding.
D) If you were trying to be funny you failed. maybe women just arn't funny? ^_^
I'd say that your item (D) isn't particularly funny either.
O)And from personal experiance i've yet to meet any good women programmers, but then i've met very few good male programmers, most way old, so it might be that there are very few good programmers period. So the simple fact its 80-100% male in CS and ENSC classes at university means i'll probably never get to meet a good female programmer. But then with 60% females at my university you wonder why so few ladies in the sciences.
I do know a few good female coders. There were several at CMU: there was the girl that TA'd my vision class at Carnegie Mellon. She knew her stuff very well. There was the PhD student that TAed my systems class there and taught a recitation. She was good too. There were two female professors that I had, a database prof (Anastassia Ailamaki, don't know much about her research) and a networks prof (Mor Harchol-Balter), both of whom were quite knowledgeable (I believe Mor, at least, has some significant network scheduling research under her belt, though she toned the content of her class down a *lot* in difficulty, and FWIW has written the single best document ever to hand to a student thinking about a PhD). There was another female professor, Jessica Hodgins (whose class I did not take, but heard a good deal about from fellow students) who is decidedly hot shit in the graphics world. And I've seen her research, and it's some seriously amazing-looking stuff (through graphics researchers kinda have it easy to make their research look good). I knew one definite Unix geek girl student at Carnegie Mellon. I am currently writing software in a department that contains a number of competent female programmers.
I agree that, in general, the software development (somewhat) and the computer science (overwhelmingly) fields are male. Also, possibly simply due to the proportions, I have generally found that at the very, *very* tippy-top of areas in CS and programming, the people are male. Finally, I have been very disappointed with some people who have clearly been hired/enrolled because they were female, and simply did not have the fascination necessary with the field to really excel.
I do have some things to say about women that aren't immediately covered in the above:
This may be just because I am male, but my sheerly anecdotal evidence is that women tend to get along with people slightly better. This is nice, even if not directly skill-relevant, when deadlines near and tensions fray.
I think that motherhood is a significant hinderance that women need to deal with -- first simply because of maternity leave, but also because we still have a strong correlation with the classic social structure of women staying home and taking care of kids, and men working in an office. Two-working-parent families hav
Where I disagree with you is in what I see as your implicit statement that kids cannot learn things which "require an understanding of math that simply takes some time to comprehend and grasp".
Okay, here is what I'm trying to say. Even fairly basic physics really, really hurts without you knowing calculus. It generally takes several years of math classes to work up to calculus -- I admit that this is not the highest-speed rate that a human could work at, but it does take time to process and to really understand various concepts, since you really want to actually have time to apply them a bit to make things "click" easily. Now, probably if your sole goal was to teach someone the math necessary to do physics work, you pare down the time a bit by eliminating irrelevant knowledge. But unless your sole goal is to take a six-year-old and get him doing advanced astronomy, I do think that it's just going to take some time.
Programming doesn't have the prerequisite knowledge requirements that my examples of astronomy (via physics) and philosophy involve. Computer science has more prerequisites (though still, IMHO, a lighter set than some of the older fields).
I admit that I chose "easy" for my title as a bit of a teaser, whereas what I mean to really say is that it doesn't have many prerequisites.
Okay, it might require a bit of work on the part of a few P2P hackers -- a request comes in for a non-running tracker item, a lookup is done in a database for the item, and the item is added to the tracker.
But if there's one thing the open source world is rich in, it's clever P2P hackers...
Actually, a BitTorrent tracker that could do that would have a hell of a lot of legitimate applications for *other* folks, too. What company *wouldn't* want to stick a "BitTorrent" link next to their "http download" link and knock their bandwidth costs down? Might even be a commercially salable system.
The only reason we think it's a major accomplishment, though, is we've been fooled into thinking kids can't learn complex things.
Just like deaf people or blind people, children are "crippled" as well. The handicap of a child is that they have no experience. It would be very difficult, for instance, for a child to do new, advanced astronomy work, for instance, or new philosophy work. The astrononmy work requires an understanding of math that simply takes some time to comprehend and grasp, and the philosophy work requires digesting a significant body of work and spending time mulling over the implications.
Basic computer programming, however, is rather unique. It is considered "difficult" because
1) Most people don't know how to do it, and don't have the time to learn it (because they're at work or fixing the sink or whatnot all the time). Kids have a hell of a lot of free time, so this isn't a problem.
2) Most people have built themselves a mental approach for solving problems that is less structured than that necessary for computer programming. They require a significant amount of "relearning". Kids aren't affected by this.
3) It takes a while, in programming, before you can produce "useful" results. Children can enjoy programming just due to the rather more unique (to them) ability to *control* something, to make it do whatever they want. Printing "Sarah rocks" an infinite number of times on a screen really *is* cool to a kid. Plus, it does that ever-so-difficult task of impressing adults that you can do something that they can't.
Programming is simply the task of translation, the art of translating something in human language syntax to computer language syntax. Children pick up additional human languages quite easily.
Being able to write a computer program doesn't require much knowledge other than the structured thought process and the syntax knowledge (sure, experience definitely helps, but it's not a prerequisite to code). Both of those two things come at least as easily to kids as adults. You don't have to have years of math or science to write useful software. I know people who started learning to program and were writing software in, oh, two years...why shouldn't a child be able to do the same, if there are no skills that they must learn first?
Uh...Hillary's concern would be not getting elected because she is not centrist enough, not because she isn't liberal enough.
In our electoral system, which stabilizes around two parties, the system comes out to an interesting contest of chicken -- who can be the most centrist.
As a bit of a digression, I just started using graylisting on mailsnare.com, and I was wondering what other mail providers people use that they're pleased with.
(I used a bunch of online comparison resources to find mailsnare, and chose it because the configuration is most like my own mail processing system (ClamAV + SA) so I could configure it to block a bunch of mail before I have to download it and because they do encrypted pop/imap. Oh, and because they give you a subdomain of your own, which my previous university did and I had gotten attached to.
I don't have much to compare it to, but I haven't had any problems getting email through, so they beat my place of employment and my former university, both of which were known for occasional glitches and hold-ups.
I'm a bit curious to know what services the other techies on Slashdot use, particularly if they're quite happy with them or there are unusual, geek-friendly features.
I'm not tied to mailsnare (since I have a "lifetime" account elsewhere that forwards to them), and I could pretty easily switch services if there was something better out there.
The main disadvantage of mailsnare is that their email boxes are relatively small (100 MB for my account), but which happens to not be a problem for me because my normal mode of operation is to regularly suck mail down to my box via fetchmail, not to leave it on-server (thus, the point of me getting service is essentially to provide a reliable access point that does some filtering and provides a secure channel back to my machine).
Anyone else have favorites that might be worth looking into?
SPF is roughly on par with the overpriced solutions that consultants sell stupid, desperate clients. Think Y2K era. People will do *anything* to stop spam, so they accepted an authentication system that:
* Doesn't have anything better than domain-level granularity (If I compromise a single account at Ford, you've got a fun time ahead of you.)
* Doesn't actually provide a proposal as to how to stop spam (this is actually verbally danced around on the SPF website, with hand-wavy statements about webs of trust and other things that have failed to materialize).
* Doesn't deal with throwaway domains.
* Treats as trusted a non-authenticated transport (DNS), which allows not only breaking SPF, but due to DNS caching, severely breaking it.
* Has severe side effects. We've moved away from the era of the true peer-to-peer mail server, where each box ran a mail server and didn't need to own a domain, and I'm still getting spam. However, now I have to live with the side effects.
Basically, SPF is a system that attempts to do nothing other than authentication to a domain (not spam stopping), and fails to securely do even that.
The problem is the people that say "yes, it won't *stop* spam, but it will stop N%". The problem is that if you continue accepting solutions with negative side effects but which can be worked around, spammers simply work around them. Just like biology, if you start dumping a small amount of antibiotic on bacteria, sooner or later you have bacteria that aren't bothered by the antibiotic (except spammers are a lot smarter than bacteria and evolve a lot faster). No solution with negative side effects should be adopted unless it really has promise to *stop* spam in a non-workaroundable way, or at least permanently reduce it to an insignificant amount.
I'm just waiting for people to give up and use PGP (or similar) with whitelists plus some sort of trust system. It will happen sooner or later. It might wait until Outlook starts doing it, but it will happen.
While Groklaw/PJ is hardly impartial in editorializing
Actually, PJ started out as a lot more neutral, but somewhere along the line she shifted to be much more partisan. I'm guessing that this was probably a combination of SCO being absolutely outrageous from a legal standpoint, and because of all the love she gets from the open source community (probably due to her position as one of the rare and precious legal folks publically involving herself with open source, especially in a volunteer mode).
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, if there was one country that was going to have to get nukes before anyone else, the US isn't *such* a bad choice. It's nicely isolated from most of the rest of the world, it's enough of a mix of peoples that ethnic extremism tends to get tamped down (sure, maybe 5% of your population *really* hates Lithuanians, but the other 95% really doesn't care and doesn't like bombing Lithuania for no apparent reason), and it's (in recent memory) been fairly stable and wealthy (so you don't have desperate coups with nukes floating around).
I mean, yes, US world dominance not so good, but would, say, Spanish world dominance be better?
I wonder whether this is just due to inefficient coding, or whether there is a legitimate justification for support in the protocol to redirect someone to a new tracker once there are a certain number of active users online (I doubt that someone is going to get better data rates on a torrent with 100,000 users than on a tracker with 10,000 users.)
No, that was just being a dick, because he clearly didn't mean what you said, just as nobody means to say "he's better than any composer" when what they really mean to say is "he's better than any *other* composer".
However, I think that it's reasonable to say that essentially nobody would claim that ten thousand people living out the rest of their natural lives in torture would be worth the life of one person.
That worth can range from hundreds of thousands of dollars for people we know and love, to less than $10 for people we don't care about (ie: starving children in Africa).
A lot less than $10. There are probably at least hundreds of millions of people affected by lacking various basic requirements (water, food, etc), and I've never sent anything to any of them.
I think the problem is that the human mind didn't evolve in environments where it was expected to ever deal with billions of anything (or, really, of anything it couldn't *see* -- when Sally Struthers gets money for Africa, it's because people see *pictures* of the little kiddies), and its value evaluation gets a little funky when trying to deal with huge numbers of people that we've never seen.
It seemed like a big gripe there was blood pushing the clotting agent out of the way.
I know that some attempts to deal with bleeding use adhesive (like SuperGlue) instead of attempting to produce clotting. I wonder if it's reasonable to just dump a blob of fast-setting-on-water-contact glop on a wound, or if blockage of arteries would be too much of a risk.
Currently, we have a complex set of heuristics that get used to help stop spam, yet our decisions to help stop random attacks coming in from the network are almost entirely non-heuristic.
I could see software that decides that an IP that has hit me twenty times with an incorrect password over the past week without ever successfully logging in correctly is not a legitimate user.
We shouldn't ever rely on heuristics alone for security, but I could see them being a useful addition.
Maybe a manufacturer could introduce a program in which you purchase a computer, and if anything goes wrong, you send the thing back (or drop it off at your local service center) and they send out another. The idea would be something like repair, except there would be no attempt to give you the same hardware every time. The only thing that would happen is that your personal data would be duplicated onto the new machine, the old one would undergo some diagnostics, any of the five-or-so parts on such a system that are bad be swapped out, and the system automatically be reimaged for the next customer.
This would require a single, standard computer so that the hardware could be swapped out underneath, something like a console. I could see Dell doing something like this in the future -- the greatest problem for ordinary home users seems to be maintenance of computers, and I have seen very few strides to attempt to address this.
This "standard computer" may not be a geek paradise, but I think that it might do a better job of serving the masses.
I don't think that there's that much wasted effort.
I doubt that most software authors spend that much time on packaging, which is really where the differences come in.
Furthermore, it's easy to consider something necessary "wasted" effort. Capitalism is more "wasteful" than coordinated communism, because all the overhead of competition can be eliminated. However, it turns out that maybe capitalism does a better job of dealing with human nature.
Maybe open source authors don't want to just write to one big project -- maybe they want the freedom to try out their own ideas and have other people that agree popularize them. Otherwise, you'd have "anything that Red Hat (for instance) doesn't like not existing". Red Hat would probably axe KDE, and SuSE GNOME, if either one could control the whole industry. Maybe that freedom is necessary to produce the fun that drives the whole open source world?
My first thoughts on nano were probably the same sci-fi ideas that everyone else has -- self-assembling nanobots could build just about anything, and do anything.
But real-life applications of nano are much less groundbreaking, and much more mundane -- making circuits and storage a bit smaller, and so forth. Nano is more of a psychological barrier than anything else.
If self-assembling robots were really such an awesome idea, for getting work done, we would have done them at the far-easier-to-work-with size scales that we are comfortable with.
I doubt this. TCG is no secret, has not been for a long time, and Apple does not need to panic-move. They could just have added such a feature to their own systems when people first started talking about trusted PCs, or made efforts to provide this on their own systems. I doubt that Intel is interested in using this to shut Apple out, but as a means to enter the home entertainment market. Sony is the one to get twitchy, not Apple.
I think that the simplest explanation is the best -- Intel/AMD just provided the fastest/cheapest chips, and the economies of scale of the x86 market made sense for Apple. They've been bringing their systems up to parity for years (dropping ADB/NuBus, and probably lots of other stuff after I stopped paying attention.)
It would be kind of interesting to rate housing/apartments by power cleanliness.
It's not just Amazon. Every large company that does research churns out absurd patents.
I work at a corporate computer science research wing of an extremely large company (which I won't name, but isn't much different from my previous employer, and is probably not much different from any other large company in the same position). At the moment, the work I'm doing is not research, but software development. Our group has a requirement to turn out N invention disclosures a year, even though we aren't doing research. Naturally, this results in plenty of grumbling and people just grabbing something handy to "disclose" as an invention. There are people Googling for random things online, and submitting them as "inventions" to get upstream management off their back. Thus, the poison seed enters the system as a result of a poor goal/reward structure around research.
To keep *their* bosses happy, research management has to convert some number of these into patents.
The USPTO, which does not have the incredible amount of funding that it would require to block all stupid patents (you would literally have to hire the best researchers in every field and give them a long time to mull over each patent), might send these patents back a time or two, but sooner or later they will get through.
This is where stupid patents come from. Sometime down the road, lawyers will use these as clubs.
I am not on the financial side, but as far as I can tell, existing players in a market generally just cross-license. AMD and Intel will never duke it out over patents, because neither one would be able to produce chips.
What happens is that nobody new is able to enter the market, by virtue of a steady stream of patents existing covering all kinds of basic-but-crucial ideas. The idea, from the standpoint of existing players, seems to be to convert a free market into an ogliopoly, in which there is much more profit to be made from consumers, and in which the continuous push to commoditize products can be stopped. And every now and then, existing players merge or go bankrupt, and the market gets ever richer for the existing ones.
The problem (well, the problem that pisses off a lot of open source programmers) comes in in that open source projects generally don't have any money (certainly not enough to take on a large company in patent litigation). So, instead of being able to do what other large companies do (cross-license, just dump a bunch of money on the other company, whatever is necessary to continue doing their work), open source projects simply cannot do things for fear of being sued (or just having all their hard work thrown out). So we have stupid things like lower quality font rendering (because the FreeType people cannot legally support the TrueType hinting data) and so forth.
I have fond memories of one meeting at my previous employer where a bunch of researchers and an extremely key (i.e. essentially nonfireable) software developer was. The meeting was to encourage the project to produce more IP, and was being conducted by one of our in-house corporate lawyers. Halfway through the meeting, the software developer (who felt that the whole thing was a waste of his time in the first place, and clearly disliked software patents) stood up and started railing on software patents. The research folks just stood there. Talking privately after the meeting, I discovered most of the researchers agreed with the guy, but saw any complaints as politically incorrect and simply likely to get them fired or research funding (always a popular target for funding cuts) cut.
The very root issue is twofold: (a) that it's not easy for people to make money on research (in the US, I've been told by people who are more interested in the business side of research that many corporate research labs have gone away or been closed down), and (b) that it is *exceedingly* difficult to effectively judge how well someone is doing research. Everyone will try to present their research as the next gro
If by $600 billion you mean $7.29 billion, then yes.
And the reason she's giving those speeches is because her campaign team has looked at the polls and decided that she doesn't have enough appeal to conservatives. Why do you think she had the sudden and abrupt change? Because her values suddenly made a 180? If you're thinking about running for President, you don't *get* to have ideology -- that gets in the way of the centrist race.
Don't think of it as wasteful, think of it as Patriotic!
If you live in Singapore, that is.
A post about (a) animation and (b) Star Wars which has been (c) posted to Slashdot.
If this doesn't serve as a stress test of BitTorrent's scalability, nothing will.
Argh, okay, astrophysics, dammit. Do astrophysics! :-P
A) stop being insulted by jokes, its why some women piss me off so much, they can't take things at face value they HAVE to see some deep down inner shit or something and get all defensive and stupid about stuff. And his joke was pretty funny! and very hard to take as women "bashing?"
That's hardly a female-specific or even -associated characteristic, in my experience.
B) its DANGLEY bits, women have the jiggly bits, men don't. ours DANGLE.
This is the strongest point in the email.
C) MCP exams don't have much to do with programming, and i dare to say most thigns to do with MS now a days isn't programming. unless its win32 or drivers that is;)
Uh, the girl had written (at least) two apps in C# -- a calculator and a sorting application. Not exactly senior developer material yet, perhaps, but she is most definitely coding.
D) If you were trying to be funny you failed. maybe women just arn't funny? ^_^
I'd say that your item (D) isn't particularly funny either.
O)And from personal experiance i've yet to meet any good women programmers, but then i've met very few good male programmers, most way old, so it might be that there are very few good programmers period. So the simple fact its 80-100% male in CS and ENSC classes at university means i'll probably never get to meet a good female programmer. But then with 60% females at my university you wonder why so few ladies in the sciences.
I do know a few good female coders. There were several at CMU: there was the girl that TA'd my vision class at Carnegie Mellon. She knew her stuff very well. There was the PhD student that TAed my systems class there and taught a recitation. She was good too. There were two female professors that I had, a database prof (Anastassia Ailamaki, don't know much about her research) and a networks prof (Mor Harchol-Balter), both of whom were quite knowledgeable (I believe Mor, at least, has some significant network scheduling research under her belt, though she toned the content of her class down a *lot* in difficulty, and FWIW has written the single best document ever to hand to a student thinking about a PhD). There was another female professor, Jessica Hodgins (whose class I did not take, but heard a good deal about from fellow students) who is decidedly hot shit in the graphics world. And I've seen her research, and it's some seriously amazing-looking stuff (through graphics researchers kinda have it easy to make their research look good). I knew one definite Unix geek girl student at Carnegie Mellon. I am currently writing software in a department that contains a number of competent female programmers.
I agree that, in general, the software development (somewhat) and the computer science (overwhelmingly) fields are male. Also, possibly simply due to the proportions, I have generally found that at the very, *very* tippy-top of areas in CS and programming, the people are male. Finally, I have been very disappointed with some people who have clearly been hired/enrolled because they were female, and simply did not have the fascination necessary with the field to really excel.
I do have some things to say about women that aren't immediately covered in the above:
This may be just because I am male, but my sheerly anecdotal evidence is that women tend to get along with people slightly better. This is nice, even if not directly skill-relevant, when deadlines near and tensions fray.
I think that motherhood is a significant hinderance that women need to deal with -- first simply because of maternity leave, but also because we still have a strong correlation with the classic social structure of women staying home and taking care of kids, and men working in an office. Two-working-parent families hav
Where I disagree with you is in what I see as your implicit statement that kids cannot learn things which "require an understanding of math that simply takes some time to comprehend and grasp".
Okay, here is what I'm trying to say. Even fairly basic physics really, really hurts without you knowing calculus. It generally takes several years of math classes to work up to calculus -- I admit that this is not the highest-speed rate that a human could work at, but it does take time to process and to really understand various concepts, since you really want to actually have time to apply them a bit to make things "click" easily. Now, probably if your sole goal was to teach someone the math necessary to do physics work, you pare down the time a bit by eliminating irrelevant knowledge. But unless your sole goal is to take a six-year-old and get him doing advanced astronomy, I do think that it's just going to take some time.
Programming doesn't have the prerequisite knowledge requirements that my examples of astronomy (via physics) and philosophy involve. Computer science has more prerequisites (though still, IMHO, a lighter set than some of the older fields).
I admit that I chose "easy" for my title as a bit of a teaser, whereas what I mean to really say is that it doesn't have many prerequisites.
Okay, it might require a bit of work on the part of a few P2P hackers -- a request comes in for a non-running tracker item, a lookup is done in a database for the item, and the item is added to the tracker.
But if there's one thing the open source world is rich in, it's clever P2P hackers...
Actually, a BitTorrent tracker that could do that would have a hell of a lot of legitimate applications for *other* folks, too. What company *wouldn't* want to stick a "BitTorrent" link next to their "http download" link and knock their bandwidth costs down? Might even be a commercially salable system.
The only reason we think it's a major accomplishment, though, is we've been fooled into thinking kids can't learn complex things.
Just like deaf people or blind people, children are "crippled" as well. The handicap of a child is that they have no experience. It would be very difficult, for instance, for a child to do new, advanced astronomy work, for instance, or new philosophy work. The astrononmy work requires an understanding of math that simply takes some time to comprehend and grasp, and the philosophy work requires digesting a significant body of work and spending time mulling over the implications.
Basic computer programming, however, is rather unique. It is considered "difficult" because
1) Most people don't know how to do it, and don't have the time to learn it (because they're at work or fixing the sink or whatnot all the time). Kids have a hell of a lot of free time, so this isn't a problem.
2) Most people have built themselves a mental approach for solving problems that is less structured than that necessary for computer programming. They require a significant amount of "relearning". Kids aren't affected by this.
3) It takes a while, in programming, before you can produce "useful" results. Children can enjoy programming just due to the rather more unique (to them) ability to *control* something, to make it do whatever they want. Printing "Sarah rocks" an infinite number of times on a screen really *is* cool to a kid. Plus, it does that ever-so-difficult task of impressing adults that you can do something that they can't.
Programming is simply the task of translation, the art of translating something in human language syntax to computer language syntax. Children pick up additional human languages quite easily.
Being able to write a computer program doesn't require much knowledge other than the structured thought process and the syntax knowledge (sure, experience definitely helps, but it's not a prerequisite to code). Both of those two things come at least as easily to kids as adults. You don't have to have years of math or science to write useful software. I know people who started learning to program and were writing software in, oh, two years...why shouldn't a child be able to do the same, if there are no skills that they must learn first?
Uh...Hillary's concern would be not getting elected because she is not centrist enough, not because she isn't liberal enough.
In our electoral system, which stabilizes around two parties, the system comes out to an interesting contest of chicken -- who can be the most centrist.
As a bit of a digression, I just started using graylisting on mailsnare.com, and I was wondering what other mail providers people use that they're pleased with.
(I used a bunch of online comparison resources to find mailsnare, and chose it because the configuration is most like my own mail processing system (ClamAV + SA) so I could configure it to block a bunch of mail before I have to download it and because they do encrypted pop/imap. Oh, and because they give you a subdomain of your own, which my previous university did and I had gotten attached to.
I don't have much to compare it to, but I haven't had any problems getting email through, so they beat my place of employment and my former university, both of which were known for occasional glitches and hold-ups.
I'm a bit curious to know what services the other techies on Slashdot use, particularly if they're quite happy with them or there are unusual, geek-friendly features.
I'm not tied to mailsnare (since I have a "lifetime" account elsewhere that forwards to them), and I could pretty easily switch services if there was something better out there.
The main disadvantage of mailsnare is that their email boxes are relatively small (100 MB for my account), but which happens to not be a problem for me because my normal mode of operation is to regularly suck mail down to my box via fetchmail, not to leave it on-server (thus, the point of me getting service is essentially to provide a reliable access point that does some filtering and provides a secure channel back to my machine).
Anyone else have favorites that might be worth looking into?
SPF is roughly on par with the overpriced solutions that consultants sell stupid, desperate clients. Think Y2K era. People will do *anything* to stop spam, so they accepted an authentication system that:
* Doesn't have anything better than domain-level granularity (If I compromise a single account at Ford, you've got a fun time ahead of you.)
* Doesn't actually provide a proposal as to how to stop spam (this is actually verbally danced around on the SPF website, with hand-wavy statements about webs of trust and other things that have failed to materialize).
* Doesn't deal with throwaway domains.
* Treats as trusted a non-authenticated transport (DNS), which allows not only breaking SPF, but due to DNS caching, severely breaking it.
* Has severe side effects. We've moved away from the era of the true peer-to-peer mail server, where each box ran a mail server and didn't need to own a domain, and I'm still getting spam. However, now I have to live with the side effects.
Basically, SPF is a system that attempts to do nothing other than authentication to a domain (not spam stopping), and fails to securely do even that.
The problem is the people that say "yes, it won't *stop* spam, but it will stop N%". The problem is that if you continue accepting solutions with negative side effects but which can be worked around, spammers simply work around them. Just like biology, if you start dumping a small amount of antibiotic on bacteria, sooner or later you have bacteria that aren't bothered by the antibiotic (except spammers are a lot smarter than bacteria and evolve a lot faster). No solution with negative side effects should be adopted unless it really has promise to *stop* spam in a non-workaroundable way, or at least permanently reduce it to an insignificant amount.
I'm just waiting for people to give up and use PGP (or similar) with whitelists plus some sort of trust system. It will happen sooner or later. It might wait until Outlook starts doing it, but it will happen.
While Groklaw/PJ is hardly impartial in editorializing
Actually, PJ started out as a lot more neutral, but somewhere along the line she shifted to be much more partisan. I'm guessing that this was probably a combination of SCO being absolutely outrageous from a legal standpoint, and because of all the love she gets from the open source community (probably due to her position as one of the rare and precious legal folks publically involving herself with open source, especially in a volunteer mode).