In high school while doing term papers at least 1/3 of most of my papers weren't written by me. They were quotes from other sources. What's the difference? It's only plagiarized if you don't cite the source properly. Legally you are allowed to take small quotes and use them in a publication as long as you cite sources. I'm guessing many of those offenders could go legit just by citing the source alone without removing the quote.
The reason PC sales are slowing is because the economy in general is slowing. There are many forecasts for a recession in 2007. Unnecessary technology would be one of the first things to go in a slowing economy.
It's really interesting you bring this up. There was actually a study done last year by Novell that found people who've never used computers before acclimate to Linux as fast (or faster) than Windows.
Red Hat sounds really arrogant in the article. However, much of it is basically true. I was a long time Novell/SuSe support after the acquisition. I use products from both companies on a daily basis. In the past few months I have pretty much left the suse train and jumped on the red hat one. Why? All this Oracle, Microsoft, Novell news is great for market analysts who never actually will ever use any of their products. But for someone who uses them on a daily basis, red hat's products and support are far superior.
The stock can take a major hit in the short term by this sort of news, but quality products and good management (both of which red hat has) is what will keep the company alive in the long term. One year is much too short a timeframe for all this to pan out. Three years is more realistic. Oracle linux will turn into Sun's java desktop. The Novell/MS partnership will have yielded little/no technology advances. And Novell as a company may or may not have enough steam to keep on chugging in general (non-linux related activities).
The information on how to build an atomic bomb is already on the web. The issue isn't the directions. It's actually executing the directions. It's not an easy thing to do correctly. Plus, actually obtaining the materials to do so isn't easy either. A few years ago there was a mass panic in some state because a kid did his science project on how to build an atomic bomb. How many high school kids actually built one after that?
Basically, if you have enough resources to obtain the correct materials and the scientific minds to do it correctly, the directions sheet is the last of your worries. I can use the same recipe as Wolfgang Puck, but it takes a certain expertise to do it right.
Exactly. As computers get faster people will just move on to higher level languages that may not be as efficient. 5 years ago I don't think it was realistic to expect consumers to pay for a GUI based python program. Today, as long as there is an icon on their desktop, it's no problem. Faster hardware means the ability to use higher level languages and spend more time solving real world problems rather than specifics of the language.
Basically, yes. However, these chips seems to be marketed first to gamers (I don't understand why because they'd be 100x more useful in the enterprise market). Games are not the easiest things to thread. They don't exactly thread infinitely like a web server (ala 1 thread per connection). So basically the game companies just write for what's popular at the time. 2 threads seems to be the minimum right now. I think four cores is the maximum they'll be able to do without major revamps in graphics engines. The more threads, the more complicated. Look forward to buggier games and more race conditions than you could have imagined!
Like I said before, I think that marketing these chips to gamer types is just to create some buzz and their real use is in the scientific, supercomputing, and client/server software.
Really, I don't know why any US companies can do business with China. China does terrible, horrible things to their people. We're talking on par with Cuba, Iraq, and many rogue African and S. American countries. Yet for some reason we seem to turn a blind eye to it. I've never understood it. I'm sure it's all political because the US couldn't survive as a country without China. It's easy to say no to cuba, it's much more difficult to say no to a country which supplies over 90% of our furniture and large chunks of our circuit boards.
Is there any chance at all this will work? Myspace can't even handle basic uptime issues, let alone complex audio fingerprinting technology. I'm not even 100% sure they have a test environment yet (for many years they didn't). Half the time you go to the site at least one part of it is completely broken. Will we start getting messages from Tom, "sorry guys, every song thinks that it's hey ya. We'll fix it. In the meantime don't email us. We know.".
They could get a pretty penny for hubble I'm sure. Even if it isn't used, it's quite a piece of historical data some rich crazy cowboy would buy. As great as it has been in the past, I may just be time for it to retire. NASA doesn't have billions to spend on projects like it used to. They can't operate like an IBM mainframe like they once did. They've got to be cheaper even if it means less reliable. More expendable. 30 years ago we would have never seen the types of mistakes we see today in unmanned missions. However, if there's a mistake on a mars rover today, it's not as big a deal. We'll have another on the way in a couple of years and we didn't lose a whole lot of money. I'm fairly confident that something better, faster, and cheaper could replace the hubble in less than 5 years and take pictures we would have never imagined.
Either way, I would take the freedom of someone saying the most racist hurtful things on the planet to me directly over censorship any day. Google is right. The funny part is they've got more balls to do what's right regarding freedom of speech than the US government these days.
I think the days of windows base prices being high are gone. Compared to other offerings from Sun and Novell (similar type proprietary software companies), Microsoft is way cheaper. However, RedHat is a pretty good value. It comes with a alot out of the box for that price. Windows comes with almost nothing. RedHat support is pretty good. MS support is next to useless. In fact, I've never once heard of a person actually getting an issue resolved through Microsoft. It's the most frustrating process in the world. You buy the product from Microsoft, but you find an expert local consulting firm for your support contract.
I have to admit many times I'm the same way. I have trouble finishing personal programs. Probably only about 1/4th my hobby programs end up completed. But it's not as bad as it sounds. Many times I'll just solve the difficult parts of a program and that'll be good enough for me. So for example, for many people the next step is dealing directly with hardware. Get some simple hardware like RC motors and get them to do some simple things. Don't worry about a complex program, just solve the problems you currently can't mentally work out quickly. For learning purposes it's the next best thing to actually writing the program end to end. Espically if you have a hard time getting motivated for the boring parts.
Did it actually ever have any street cred? For as long as I can remember RAC has been filled with insanely low bids being eaten up by foreign coders. I've gone there several times over the years looking to pick up some extra cash and have never seen a bid I thought was worth my time.
The article cites one of the reasons for the appliance would be for SMB's that want something that just works really well out of the box. That's fine and dandy for a lot of software products. However, I don't think Oracle falls into this category. Sometimes people seem to forget that Oracle doesn't really do much by itself. Users don't directly type in SQL queries. It needs an application to be used with. Say the business wrote the application in house. I can almost guarantee that application was written for windows. If the programmer is smart enough to know how to port it to Linux, they are probably smart enough to configure Oracle themselves. If they don't posess the technical skills to port it, the appliance is useless to them. At the same time, most ISV type applications usually aren't written for Linux either. It would defeat the whole purpose anyway because you just bought the Oracle appliance pre-configured, and now you have to make adjustments for this application and install the app. You buy appliances so you don't have to do that sort of thing
There are only two scenarios I could see this actually being practical. One is if there's a seperate dedicated DB server and an application server. However, the loads that occour in the SMB environment rarely warrant this. Most of the time the database and application run on the same server. The second would be to pass the appliance off to ISV's whom install and configure their software and resell it. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense either because then they are just paying an Oracle tax for something they could do themselves.
Really, the only reason I could see them doing this is to stick it to Red Hat and make PHB's get a boner.
I've done some work with asterisk and sphinx. It's a damn cool idea. However, voice recognition over the phone is extremely tricky. It really depends how big of a vocabulary you want. A small list of distinct words and it's ok. However, saying numbers and letters, and trying to have a huge vocabulary is asking for disaster.
First of all, make them not terrible. If we could get them to at least on par with the quality of ATM's we'd be somewhere. I am all for electronic voting machines. However, the job application kiosk at wal mart had more effort put into its engineering and design than our current generation voting machines.
Basically, as someone else said, these sorts of things should be funnelled through your HR dept. Any investigation that could result in disicipline of an employee should go through HR. It isn't up to you guys to determine what requests are legit or not. There needs to be a central channel that all investigitory requests concerning employees has to go through. 99% of the time that's an HR dept. If a union got wiff of what's going on, you might be in the beating end of the union stick.
People have choice. Of course. A person with a strong will can quit the game. And yes, certain people with addictive personalities will probably get addicted to anything you give them. Whether it be eating, sex, a hobby, whatever.
However, what's interesting is WoW's ability to suck in "normal" people. I know a lot of people addicted that normally don't have addictive personalities. That's when it is a problem. When people with normal mental capacities become easily addicted is when you should worry. True, there are other things just as addictive. Crack or smoking for example. However, people are pretty educated on those addictions. WoW is a sneaky little bastard because it's just a video game. Most normal people would never think a video game could be as addicting and life ruining as a drug. But it really is. I understand it's not blizzards responsibility to be the worlds big brother and police game addicts. However, I do think they have at least a social responsibility to try and encourage responsible play. If nothing else, hire some WoW councilers and make them available for people who want to quit but can't.
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In high school while doing term papers at least 1/3 of most of my papers weren't written by me. They were quotes from other sources. What's the difference? It's only plagiarized if you don't cite the source properly. Legally you are allowed to take small quotes and use them in a publication as long as you cite sources. I'm guessing many of those offenders could go legit just by citing the source alone without removing the quote.
The reason PC sales are slowing is because the economy in general is slowing. There are many forecasts for a recession in 2007. Unnecessary technology would be one of the first things to go in a slowing economy.
It's really interesting you bring this up. There was actually a study done last year by Novell that found people who've never used computers before acclimate to Linux as fast (or faster) than Windows.
Instead why don't you give them lottery tickets or something else equally as useless.
Red Hat sounds really arrogant in the article. However, much of it is basically true. I was a long time Novell/SuSe support after the acquisition. I use products from both companies on a daily basis. In the past few months I have pretty much left the suse train and jumped on the red hat one. Why? All this Oracle, Microsoft, Novell news is great for market analysts who never actually will ever use any of their products. But for someone who uses them on a daily basis, red hat's products and support are far superior.
The stock can take a major hit in the short term by this sort of news, but quality products and good management (both of which red hat has) is what will keep the company alive in the long term. One year is much too short a timeframe for all this to pan out. Three years is more realistic. Oracle linux will turn into Sun's java desktop. The Novell/MS partnership will have yielded little/no technology advances. And Novell as a company may or may not have enough steam to keep on chugging in general (non-linux related activities).
The information on how to build an atomic bomb is already on the web. The issue isn't the directions. It's actually executing the directions. It's not an easy thing to do correctly. Plus, actually obtaining the materials to do so isn't easy either. A few years ago there was a mass panic in some state because a kid did his science project on how to build an atomic bomb. How many high school kids actually built one after that?
Basically, if you have enough resources to obtain the correct materials and the scientific minds to do it correctly, the directions sheet is the last of your worries. I can use the same recipe as Wolfgang Puck, but it takes a certain expertise to do it right.
and I'm sure it'll have all the quality of IE for mac...
Exactly. As computers get faster people will just move on to higher level languages that may not be as efficient. 5 years ago I don't think it was realistic to expect consumers to pay for a GUI based python program. Today, as long as there is an icon on their desktop, it's no problem. Faster hardware means the ability to use higher level languages and spend more time solving real world problems rather than specifics of the language.
Basically, yes. However, these chips seems to be marketed first to gamers (I don't understand why because they'd be 100x more useful in the enterprise market). Games are not the easiest things to thread. They don't exactly thread infinitely like a web server (ala 1 thread per connection). So basically the game companies just write for what's popular at the time. 2 threads seems to be the minimum right now. I think four cores is the maximum they'll be able to do without major revamps in graphics engines. The more threads, the more complicated. Look forward to buggier games and more race conditions than you could have imagined!
Like I said before, I think that marketing these chips to gamer types is just to create some buzz and their real use is in the scientific, supercomputing, and client/server software.
Really, I don't know why any US companies can do business with China. China does terrible, horrible things to their people. We're talking on par with Cuba, Iraq, and many rogue African and S. American countries. Yet for some reason we seem to turn a blind eye to it. I've never understood it. I'm sure it's all political because the US couldn't survive as a country without China. It's easy to say no to cuba, it's much more difficult to say no to a country which supplies over 90% of our furniture and large chunks of our circuit boards.
Great idea! Hey, while you're at it why don't you get America to use the metric system too.
I think I may have SIDS
You think you may have Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? I don't think you can have that
Well I think mine may be going more gradually. I think I may have GRIDS.
Is there any chance at all this will work? Myspace can't even handle basic uptime issues, let alone complex audio fingerprinting technology. I'm not even 100% sure they have a test environment yet (for many years they didn't). Half the time you go to the site at least one part of it is completely broken. Will we start getting messages from Tom, "sorry guys, every song thinks that it's hey ya. We'll fix it. In the meantime don't email us. We know.".
Slashdot: News for nerds. Tips for hygiene.
They could get a pretty penny for hubble I'm sure. Even if it isn't used, it's quite a piece of historical data some rich crazy cowboy would buy. As great as it has been in the past, I may just be time for it to retire. NASA doesn't have billions to spend on projects like it used to. They can't operate like an IBM mainframe like they once did. They've got to be cheaper even if it means less reliable. More expendable. 30 years ago we would have never seen the types of mistakes we see today in unmanned missions. However, if there's a mistake on a mars rover today, it's not as big a deal. We'll have another on the way in a couple of years and we didn't lose a whole lot of money. I'm fairly confident that something better, faster, and cheaper could replace the hubble in less than 5 years and take pictures we would have never imagined.
Chomsky? Linkavich Chomsky?
Either way, I would take the freedom of someone saying the most racist hurtful things on the planet to me directly over censorship any day. Google is right. The funny part is they've got more balls to do what's right regarding freedom of speech than the US government these days.
I think the days of windows base prices being high are gone. Compared to other offerings from Sun and Novell (similar type proprietary software companies), Microsoft is way cheaper. However, RedHat is a pretty good value. It comes with a alot out of the box for that price. Windows comes with almost nothing. RedHat support is pretty good. MS support is next to useless. In fact, I've never once heard of a person actually getting an issue resolved through Microsoft. It's the most frustrating process in the world. You buy the product from Microsoft, but you find an expert local consulting firm for your support contract.
I have to admit many times I'm the same way. I have trouble finishing personal programs. Probably only about 1/4th my hobby programs end up completed. But it's not as bad as it sounds. Many times I'll just solve the difficult parts of a program and that'll be good enough for me. So for example, for many people the next step is dealing directly with hardware. Get some simple hardware like RC motors and get them to do some simple things. Don't worry about a complex program, just solve the problems you currently can't mentally work out quickly. For learning purposes it's the next best thing to actually writing the program end to end. Espically if you have a hard time getting motivated for the boring parts.
My head hurts from the ambiguity and acronyms.
Did it actually ever have any street cred? For as long as I can remember RAC has been filled with insanely low bids being eaten up by foreign coders. I've gone there several times over the years looking to pick up some extra cash and have never seen a bid I thought was worth my time.
The article cites one of the reasons for the appliance would be for SMB's that want something that just works really well out of the box. That's fine and dandy for a lot of software products. However, I don't think Oracle falls into this category. Sometimes people seem to forget that Oracle doesn't really do much by itself. Users don't directly type in SQL queries. It needs an application to be used with. Say the business wrote the application in house. I can almost guarantee that application was written for windows. If the programmer is smart enough to know how to port it to Linux, they are probably smart enough to configure Oracle themselves. If they don't posess the technical skills to port it, the appliance is useless to them. At the same time, most ISV type applications usually aren't written for Linux either. It would defeat the whole purpose anyway because you just bought the Oracle appliance pre-configured, and now you have to make adjustments for this application and install the app. You buy appliances so you don't have to do that sort of thing
There are only two scenarios I could see this actually being practical. One is if there's a seperate dedicated DB server and an application server. However, the loads that occour in the SMB environment rarely warrant this. Most of the time the database and application run on the same server. The second would be to pass the appliance off to ISV's whom install and configure their software and resell it. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense either because then they are just paying an Oracle tax for something they could do themselves.
Really, the only reason I could see them doing this is to stick it to Red Hat and make PHB's get a boner.
I've done some work with asterisk and sphinx. It's a damn cool idea. However, voice recognition over the phone is extremely tricky. It really depends how big of a vocabulary you want. A small list of distinct words and it's ok. However, saying numbers and letters, and trying to have a huge vocabulary is asking for disaster.
First of all, make them not terrible. If we could get them to at least on par with the quality of ATM's we'd be somewhere. I am all for electronic voting machines. However, the job application kiosk at wal mart had more effort put into its engineering and design than our current generation voting machines.
Basically, as someone else said, these sorts of things should be funnelled through your HR dept. Any investigation that could result in disicipline of an employee should go through HR. It isn't up to you guys to determine what requests are legit or not. There needs to be a central channel that all investigitory requests concerning employees has to go through. 99% of the time that's an HR dept. If a union got wiff of what's going on, you might be in the beating end of the union stick.
People have choice. Of course. A person with a strong will can quit the game. And yes, certain people with addictive personalities will probably get addicted to anything you give them. Whether it be eating, sex, a hobby, whatever.
However, what's interesting is WoW's ability to suck in "normal" people. I know a lot of people addicted that normally don't have addictive personalities. That's when it is a problem. When people with normal mental capacities become easily addicted is when you should worry. True, there are other things just as addictive. Crack or smoking for example. However, people are pretty educated on those addictions. WoW is a sneaky little bastard because it's just a video game. Most normal people would never think a video game could be as addicting and life ruining as a drug. But it really is. I understand it's not blizzards responsibility to be the worlds big brother and police game addicts. However, I do think they have at least a social responsibility to try and encourage responsible play. If nothing else, hire some WoW councilers and make them available for people who want to quit but can't.