Then this. After all the talk keeping it affordable, then they pull this crap.
You've come an awful long way to be discouraged by something that still costs significantly less than the phones that most people buy yearly. Look at what people spend on other components and this still isn't out of line for what you get. I bet they could have charged $500 and still sold tons of units.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that a summary written by "Billy Gates" would be this slanted... I read the MS blog and I didn't see anything that ruffled my feathers. Don't get me wrong, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the IE6 days, but all the blog post is doing is saying is "don't make your site webkit specific". This is good advice not because of IE, but because there are still other browsers out there such as Opera Mobile.
In fact, MS blog post specifically states: "Now, it’s very easy to adapt a WebKit-optimized site to also support IE10." See that keyword I emphasized, it means they aren't telling people to abandon webkit. The examples they provide back that up as they leave webkit support in place and add either the non-prefixed standards compliant property or when that's not available, add the IE specific property alongside the webkit one.
As a side note, I take a site like this much less seriously when it stoops to the same level of bipartisan drivel and mud slinging that we all had to endure for the last six months with the US elections.
If your class is about engineering your way into someone else's computer, then yes.
No, not even then. Do you think a professor that teaches a security class has any control over the LMS that the school selects or the security built around it? Even so, being able to manipulate a computer system that way is merely one aspect of computers and does not constitute mastery of the subject.
Using your same logic, if the student who breaks into the computer system and changes his grade also fails another student, that's OK too, because hey, that's what the class is about and if the now-failing student can't protect themselves, so be it.
Researchers said that the procedure seemed to be safe and no signs of rejection or abnormal cell growth had been observed, and results show that patients’ vision improved slightly.
Can anyone do a better job of defining what exactly that means? Can they see some light now? Shapes? What?
we may need to explore alternatives to the massive amounts of wood we use for tinderbox McMansions.
I think you're underestimating how fast Southern Yellow Pine that is used for framing grows. I live around many acres of tree farms and it's impressive how fast they grow. Also, this is what wikipedia has to say (emphasis mine):
Green building minimizes the impact or "environmental footprint" of a building. Wood is a major building material that is renewable and uses the sun’s energy to renew itself in a continuous sustainable cycle.[20] Studies show manufacturing wood uses less energy and results in less air and water pollution than steel and concrete.
And beyond that, anything that doesn't promote additional works should be unconstitutional. Taking dead authors' works out of the public domain doesn't encourage creation.
Let me be clear, I'm certainly not in favor of this ruling, but allow me to play Devil's advocate for a moment with out being moded down: The counter argument to what you are saying is that taking a work out of the public domain allows the owner of the work to profit from it. The profits can then be used to fund new creative works.
I don't believe that's what really happens now or what will happen with the now non-public works, but I can see that as the counter argument to what you say.
Wikipedia cites an 86% efficiency for inductive charging. I would bet that efficiency is hurt as this scales up from a cell phone to a car. Other than helping to improve EV adoption by making it more convenient, why would we want such a system?
Given the current costs of an EV, plus the length of time it already takes to charge, it seems there are other areas of research that would be better focused on. This technology only makes an EV more expensive to own and would probably take longer to charge with. People seem to do just fine connecting a short, thick, clunky hose to their cars now.
Amazon has recently been involved in disputes with much larger and more legitimate entities attempting to increase their costs and in all cases they didn't bend like a wet noodle. I'm referring to the multitude of states attempting to force Amazon to collect sales tax, therefore, I say they fight it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax
As a supporter of the Fair Tax, I completely agree, however I think there are two reasons why it won't happen:
1) Entrenched interested in the current system (Accountants, the IRS, politicians, etc) who wouldn't want to see income tax and the complicated system go away
2) The fear that people will really see how much of their money goes to taxes.
#1 prevents a national tax because people don't want to have a new tax, they want a replacement tax. It will be very hard to eliminate income tax in my opinion.
#2 is a real concern because under the current system, no one knows how much of the cost of an item goes towards taxes. If you asked me what percentage of my income went towards taxes, I couldn't tell you. Between matching taxes my employer pays, deductions that I take, taxes that are built in to the price of all the goods I by, etc, there's no way to know. A lot of people will be pissed when they see a 23% VAT (30% sales tax) on everything they buy because for the first time, people will really know that a quarter of all their money goes to taxes.
You laugh, but in college, I worked a pizza joint and saw people go through this thought process, just the other way around. They needed to feed more people, so they had the pizzas cut into 10 slices instead of 8. Apparently, these people thought we had Jesus working in the back to feed more people with the same number of pizzas.
I would never claim to be qualified to run a whole government agency.
Nor should having a silver spoon, or lots of money, or famous parents, or a successful Hollywood career, yet those pass as qualifications all the time.
I think you are underestimating his accomplishments as well as underestimating what it takes to run a government agency.
I know we all like to laugh at MS for not shipping a product on time, but as a web-developer, I am not happy (nor surprised). Anything that delays the average web-surfer from having a more standards compliant browser is not a good thing. While I'm sure IE8 won't be as compliant as it should be, it's still a step in the right direction.
I'll never get back the hours and days I've wasted on browser differences and bugs, but the mirage that one day I won't have to waste that time is enough to keep me wandering through the desert with a little bit of hope.
Not really on topic, but there is a shuttle launch that is scheduled for tonight at 7:55pm EST, weather permitting. It should be especially neat because it is a night time launch. I live in north Florida and if the sky is clear enough, it's an awesome sight to see! I hate to think of the possibility that my generation could see the end of the space program, while my parents' generation saw the start of it.
Make sure to check out some of the amazing picture of the shuttle at night: http://images.google.com/images?sa=N&tab=ni&q=night%20time%20shuttle%20launch
From the sound of your post, you've decided on learning Java, but I wanted to relate my previous experience and at least get you to question if Java is where you want to invest your time.
I've spent most of my career (about 5 years) working in C++, but for various reasons a few months ago, I wanted to make a change. It came down to either Java or C#. I had done a little of each: C# in my spare time and Java in college. Due to my limited experience, I had no preference. Since I had no preference, I searched the job boards for Java and C# positions. If I recall, there were about 30 C# positions and about 35 Java positions, so that metric was a wash. The tipping point came when I compared salaries. C# positions, at least in my area, paid significantly more. My assumption is that colleges teaching Java allows employers a better selection and can therefore pay less. So, do some research into your local markets and see which language you should invest your time in.
In case anyone is curious, the job market for C++ is small to non-existent in my area and that is the primary reason I decided to move away from C++.
You make a lot of valid points in your post, but I wonder if those "long 28 years" have left you somewhat jaded. As a programmer, I've not had a hard time keeping a job, finding a new job, or advancing in my career at all. On the other hand, I've seen people who have had problems in all those areas. Why, you ask? I think the IT market is a good market for non-idiots.
Let me clarify "non-idiot". A non-idiot is someone who:
Knows that people-skills are as important as technical skills
Is flexible with respect to which technologies they work with. Where I live, there are very few jobs working with C++, even though that's what I have most of my skills with. So, instead of going homeless, complaining about "dem der foriegners steelin' are jobs", I'm switching to the dark-side and am doing web development using MSFT technologies (ASP.NET, C#, etc) because it's what's popular in my area (and I don't want to move).
Isn't afraid to work hard. That means work hard to get a job (code up a sample application, create a website showcasing your skills, do OSS work, etc) and work hard to keep your job.
By and far, the people I've known who are dissatisfied with IT fail in one or more of those areas. It's a simple formula, and it probably goes for many fields, not just IT.
I would recommend IT to my offspring (should I have them) because it is a good field. What other career opens so many doors? Want to work with big equipment and simulators, you can! Want to work with small, high-tech equipment, you can! Want to work in the medical field and meet that hot rich doctor so you can retire early, you maybe definitely can! IT is everywhere, and you can work from any place from NASA to a local mom and pop setup. I think there are very few fields that can offer that level of flexibility!
I'm using CUDA for my masters project, and I've had the same problem that you describe. The way CUDA works, having a conditional statement that evaluates differently in each thread will kill your performance. It makes sense as to why: A GeForce 8800GTX has 16 multiprocessors, which each have 8 processors, so a total of 128 processors. It's your basic SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) architecture. So if you have lots of conditions, you go from having 128 processors, to having 16 as your code serializes because it has turned into MIMD.
In my particular project, there have been times where I've tried to optimize something with an if statement, but it's not worth it for the reason described above. With that said, it's still much faster then doing computation on the CPU. I think the biggest problem to working with CUDA, at least for me, is that I've never worked with an SIMD architecture like it, so I don't know any really good techniques. I assume they're out there, but I haven't come across anything more then what they say in the CUDA programming guide, which is fairly minimal.
I think CUDA is good for what it is designed to do, but you won't see a real time raytracer on it anytime soon even though the gflops are there.
I've read above that this guy was paid "just" £30,000 for his work.
Now, even if that's adjust for inflation and he was paid less than that, I still wouldn't feel sorry for him. If the only thing you put on your resume for the rest of your life is "Designed Storm Troopers Costume", then your career is made!
I'm sure he's been reaping the benifits of his work indirectly ever since. Sure, it's not as much as Lucas himself, but he's gotten his share of the pie. He shouldn't be allowed to sell something that's not his, and when he sold the design to Lucas, it stopped being his, end-of-story.
Re:I went to high school with this kid
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Will liked to bounce some of his crazy ideas off of us, potato guns and the like. Tell me, did it hurt when he bounced that crazy potato gun idea off you?
I think it's very easy to get side tracked on this discussion with parenting issues, so instead, let's talk about why this is important. The reason is that many adults have the same problems coming up with strong passwords just like this 7 year old girl!
With that said, it's good to have a list of ways to make secure passwords. Here are a couple that I've seen (some from this discussion):
Use a favorite phrase, something like: nosoupforyou!
Use the first characters from a sentence, "to be or not to be, that is the question?" would then become: tbontb,titq?
Use a pattern on the keyboard, something like all the the outside keys on a qwerty keyboard: qaz]'/
Pick two words, put 'em together, and add an exclamation point: passwordredbaran!
Anyone else want to add some methods for coming up with good passwords? I think we all know some adult that could use some help coming up with a strong password!
So with there being no mention of the Eudora code base that Qualcomm gave to the Mozilla folks, does this mean there are no plans for those features in Thunderbird? Does Eudora only have implications for the Penelope project?
I think it would be a shame if all we got out of Qualcomm's Eudora are some very superficial changes (new buttons, etc). Then again, maybe I have an overly rosey memory of Eudora and it really didn't have much to contribute.
While I have my little soap-box, how come Thunderbird doesn't start off with a Junk email folder so that I can mark something as Junk and have it go to that folder? Apparently, there are people out there who don't get Junk email!
The best thing this church could do is call the NFL's bluff and play the game anyway!
Let's consider the worst scenario, the NFL does sue. So what?!?! Odds are that the NFL will lose and then there is a good chance the church could counter-sue and reclaim any costs incurred.
But, let's be realistic, it would be a PR suicide attempt for the NFL to sue a church. The only thing the church could do better then simply showing the game would be to bus in a load of poor, handicapped, cancer-inflicted children from broken homes. I'd like to see the NFL sue that!!
Then this. After all the talk keeping it affordable, then they pull this crap.
You've come an awful long way to be discouraged by something that still costs significantly less than the phones that most people buy yearly. Look at what people spend on other components and this still isn't out of line for what you get. I bet they could have charged $500 and still sold tons of units.
Come on government, it's just metadata about your requests, what's the big deal?
It shouldn't come as a surprise that a summary written by "Billy Gates" would be this slanted... I read the MS blog and I didn't see anything that ruffled my feathers. Don't get me wrong, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the IE6 days, but all the blog post is doing is saying is "don't make your site webkit specific". This is good advice not because of IE, but because there are still other browsers out there such as Opera Mobile.
In fact, MS blog post specifically states: "Now, it’s very easy to adapt a WebKit-optimized site to also support IE10." See that keyword I emphasized, it means they aren't telling people to abandon webkit. The examples they provide back that up as they leave webkit support in place and add either the non-prefixed standards compliant property or when that's not available, add the IE specific property alongside the webkit one.
As a side note, I take a site like this much less seriously when it stoops to the same level of bipartisan drivel and mud slinging that we all had to endure for the last six months with the US elections.
If your class is about engineering your way into someone else's computer, then yes.
No, not even then. Do you think a professor that teaches a security class has any control over the LMS that the school selects or the security built around it? Even so, being able to manipulate a computer system that way is merely one aspect of computers and does not constitute mastery of the subject.
Using your same logic, if the student who breaks into the computer system and changes his grade also fails another student, that's OK too, because hey, that's what the class is about and if the now-failing student can't protect themselves, so be it.
Researchers said that the procedure seemed to be safe and no signs of rejection or abnormal cell growth had been observed, and results show that patients’ vision improved slightly.
Can anyone do a better job of defining what exactly that means? Can they see some light now? Shapes? What?
we may need to explore alternatives to the massive amounts of wood we use for tinderbox McMansions.
I think you're underestimating how fast Southern Yellow Pine that is used for framing grows. I live around many acres of tree farms and it's impressive how fast they grow. Also, this is what wikipedia has to say (emphasis mine):
Green building minimizes the impact or "environmental footprint" of a building. Wood is a major building material that is renewable and uses the sun’s energy to renew itself in a continuous sustainable cycle.[20] Studies show manufacturing wood uses less energy and results in less air and water pollution than steel and concrete.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_lumber#Environmental_benefits_of_lumber
And beyond that, anything that doesn't promote additional works should be unconstitutional. Taking dead authors' works out of the public domain doesn't encourage creation.
Let me be clear, I'm certainly not in favor of this ruling, but allow me to play Devil's advocate for a moment with out being moded down: The counter argument to what you are saying is that taking a work out of the public domain allows the owner of the work to profit from it. The profits can then be used to fund new creative works.
I don't believe that's what really happens now or what will happen with the now non-public works, but I can see that as the counter argument to what you say.
Wikipedia cites an 86% efficiency for inductive charging. I would bet that efficiency is hurt as this scales up from a cell phone to a car. Other than helping to improve EV adoption by making it more convenient, why would we want such a system?
Given the current costs of an EV, plus the length of time it already takes to charge, it seems there are other areas of research that would be better focused on. This technology only makes an EV more expensive to own and would probably take longer to charge with. People seem to do just fine connecting a short, thick, clunky hose to their cars now.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging#Disadvantages)
Amazon has recently been involved in disputes with much larger and more legitimate entities attempting to increase their costs and in all cases they didn't bend like a wet noodle. I'm referring to the multitude of states attempting to force Amazon to collect sales tax, therefore, I say they fight it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax
As a supporter of the Fair Tax, I completely agree, however I think there are two reasons why it won't happen:
1) Entrenched interested in the current system (Accountants, the IRS, politicians, etc) who wouldn't want to see income tax and the complicated system go away
2) The fear that people will really see how much of their money goes to taxes.
#1 prevents a national tax because people don't want to have a new tax, they want a replacement tax. It will be very hard to eliminate income tax in my opinion.
#2 is a real concern because under the current system, no one knows how much of the cost of an item goes towards taxes. If you asked me what percentage of my income went towards taxes, I couldn't tell you. Between matching taxes my employer pays, deductions that I take, taxes that are built in to the price of all the goods I by, etc, there's no way to know. A lot of people will be pissed when they see a 23% VAT (30% sales tax) on everything they buy because for the first time, people will really know that a quarter of all their money goes to taxes.
For those not familiar with the topic, the Wikipedia article is an exceptionally good read in this area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_tax
Let them charge as much as they want! All the better for companies like MetroPCS and the pay-as-you-go shops. Walmart has a $45 30day unlimited everything plan: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Straight-Talk-Unlimited-Text-Talk-and-Web-Access-30-Day-Service-Card-Email-Delivery/15443344 This isn't discrimination against "the poor and oppressed" like the summary implies, it's more like a stupid tax for someone who can't find a better deal.
I would rather die quietly in my sleep at an old age.
Me too... that's how my grandfather died and it certainly beats how all of the passengers in his car died.
You laugh, but in college, I worked a pizza joint and saw people go through this thought process, just the other way around. They needed to feed more people, so they had the pizzas cut into 10 slices instead of 8. Apparently, these people thought we had Jesus working in the back to feed more people with the same number of pizzas.
I run several websites.
I would never claim to be qualified to run a whole government agency.
Nor should having a silver spoon, or lots of money, or famous parents, or a successful Hollywood career, yet those pass as qualifications all the time.
I think you are underestimating his accomplishments as well as underestimating what it takes to run a government agency.
I know we all like to laugh at MS for not shipping a product on time, but as a web-developer, I am not happy (nor surprised). Anything that delays the average web-surfer from having a more standards compliant browser is not a good thing. While I'm sure IE8 won't be as compliant as it should be, it's still a step in the right direction.
I'll never get back the hours and days I've wasted on browser differences and bugs, but the mirage that one day I won't have to waste that time is enough to keep me wandering through the desert with a little bit of hope.
Not really on topic, but there is a shuttle launch that is scheduled for tonight at 7:55pm EST, weather permitting. It should be especially neat because it is a night time launch. I live in north Florida and if the sky is clear enough, it's an awesome sight to see! I hate to think of the possibility that my generation could see the end of the space program, while my parents' generation saw the start of it. Make sure to check out some of the amazing picture of the shuttle at night: http://images.google.com/images?sa=N&tab=ni&q=night%20time%20shuttle%20launch
From the sound of your post, you've decided on learning Java, but I wanted to relate my previous experience and at least get you to question if Java is where you want to invest your time.
I've spent most of my career (about 5 years) working in C++, but for various reasons a few months ago, I wanted to make a change. It came down to either Java or C#. I had done a little of each: C# in my spare time and Java in college. Due to my limited experience, I had no preference. Since I had no preference, I searched the job boards for Java and C# positions. If I recall, there were about 30 C# positions and about 35 Java positions, so that metric was a wash. The tipping point came when I compared salaries. C# positions, at least in my area, paid significantly more. My assumption is that colleges teaching Java allows employers a better selection and can therefore pay less. So, do some research into your local markets and see which language you should invest your time in.
In case anyone is curious, the job market for C++ is small to non-existent in my area and that is the primary reason I decided to move away from C++.
Let me clarify "non-idiot". A non-idiot is someone who:
By and far, the people I've known who are dissatisfied with IT fail in one or more of those areas. It's a simple formula, and it probably goes for many fields, not just IT.
I would recommend IT to my offspring (should I have them) because it is a good field. What other career opens so many doors? Want to work with big equipment and simulators, you can! Want to work with small, high-tech equipment, you can! Want to work in the medical field and meet that hot rich doctor so you can retire early, you maybe definitely can! IT is everywhere, and you can work from any place from NASA to a local mom and pop setup. I think there are very few fields that can offer that level of flexibility!
So is IT "done", no way!
No, they are actually dangling pointers to the same object. The garbage collection doesn't seem to be working here for some reason.
I'm using CUDA for my masters project, and I've had the same problem that you describe. The way CUDA works, having a conditional statement that evaluates differently in each thread will kill your performance. It makes sense as to why:
A GeForce 8800GTX has 16 multiprocessors, which each have 8 processors, so a total of 128 processors. It's your basic SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) architecture. So if you have lots of conditions, you go from having 128 processors, to having 16 as your code serializes because it has turned into MIMD.
In my particular project, there have been times where I've tried to optimize something with an if statement, but it's not worth it for the reason described above. With that said, it's still much faster then doing computation on the CPU. I think the biggest problem to working with CUDA, at least for me, is that I've never worked with an SIMD architecture like it, so I don't know any really good techniques. I assume they're out there, but I haven't come across anything more then what they say in the CUDA programming guide, which is fairly minimal.
I think CUDA is good for what it is designed to do, but you won't see a real time raytracer on it anytime soon even though the gflops are there.
I've read above that this guy was paid "just" £30,000 for his work. Now, even if that's adjust for inflation and he was paid less than that, I still wouldn't feel sorry for him. If the only thing you put on your resume for the rest of your life is "Designed Storm Troopers Costume", then your career is made! I'm sure he's been reaping the benifits of his work indirectly ever since. Sure, it's not as much as Lucas himself, but he's gotten his share of the pie. He shouldn't be allowed to sell something that's not his, and when he sold the design to Lucas, it stopped being his, end-of-story.
With that said, it's good to have a list of ways to make secure passwords. Here are a couple that I've seen (some from this discussion):
- Use a favorite phrase, something like: nosoupforyou!
- Use the first characters from a sentence, "to be or not to be, that is the question?" would then become: tbontb,titq?
- Use a pattern on the keyboard, something like all the the outside keys on a qwerty keyboard: qaz]'/
- Pick two words, put 'em together, and add an exclamation point: passwordredbaran!
Anyone else want to add some methods for coming up with good passwords? I think we all know some adult that could use some help coming up with a strong password!So with there being no mention of the Eudora code base that Qualcomm gave to the Mozilla folks, does this mean there are no plans for those features in Thunderbird? Does Eudora only have implications for the Penelope project?
I think it would be a shame if all we got out of Qualcomm's Eudora are some very superficial changes (new buttons, etc). Then again, maybe I have an overly rosey memory of Eudora and it really didn't have much to contribute.
While I have my little soap-box, how come Thunderbird doesn't start off with a Junk email folder so that I can mark something as Junk and have it go to that folder? Apparently, there are people out there who don't get Junk email!
The best thing this church could do is call the NFL's bluff and play the game anyway!
Let's consider the worst scenario, the NFL does sue. So what?!?! Odds are that the NFL will lose and then there is a good chance the church could counter-sue and reclaim any costs incurred.
But, let's be realistic, it would be a PR suicide attempt for the NFL to sue a church. The only thing the church could do better then simply showing the game would be to bus in a load of poor, handicapped, cancer-inflicted children from broken homes. I'd like to see the NFL sue that!!