I would say "not having a cs, engineering or hard science degree" probably correlates very highly with "not being able to program". Obviously lack of a degree doesn't mean a given individual can't program, but when looking at the issue on a large scale, I'd say "programming ability" is WAY more prevalent among those with "relevant" degrees than among those without.
I'm with you on the "kids these days" thesis. On the other hand, I cheated pretty regularly on "small stuff" in high school, but never (at all) in college. I had an interesting set of "rules" to govern my high school behavior. Basically I would never cheat on a test or a paper, or anything that required "creative" output, even if that just meant working out math problems or writing a paragraph of text. I would, however, cheat on "busy work" type assignments where I was reasonably sure of two things: I could do the work myself, and doing the work wouldn't actually teach my anything about the subject matter.
20%? Yeesh. That makes me think every CS program should have a mandatory intro course that's heavy on programming assignments, for no other reason than the eject that 20% from the degree program as early as possible.
The "end" may be to earn a diploma with as little effort as possible, but using the "means" of cheating requires a certain threshold of dishonesty. I also wanted to get a diploma with as little effort as possible, and yet I didn't cheat.
I TA'd an intro CS course that was taught in Pascal. On one of the exams, which specifically asked for Pascal code, one student answered with code written in C. He couldn't fathom why I gave him no points, since his C syntax was correct and the code did what it was supposed to do. He clearly knew what he was doing and didn't belong in the intro class, so I guess he figured he could get an easy A without attending or bothering to learn ANY Pascal syntax.
Why would you have a problem with Apple pursuing a political agenda? After all, it could "help their bottom line" -- which seems to be the primary criteria for public approval among some here.
Because, for Apple, it would strike me as an ulterior motive. Profit being the obvious motive. So in that sense it would be deceptive, and I don't like it when companies are deceptive. If MoveOn.org came out with their own smart phone and admitted apps based on political criteria then I wouldn't raise any objections, since it would be obvious they have a political axe to grind.
Didn't slaughter any sacred cows, but it did seem a little presumptuous when you wrote, "I believe we can all agree..."
I really don't have a problem with Apple keeping their app environment "family friendly" and "politically neutral" if they think that's going to help their bottom line. There is no "right" to have one's work published anywhere and everywhere one chooses.
Now I would have a problem with it if it were the govt. censoring Fiore, or if Apple was pursuing some sort of political agenda in choosing which apps to reject. But neither seems to be the case here.
I believe we can all agree that the censorship of his work should be denigrated.
Not me. If they were specifically targeting Fiore because of his politics, then yeah. But that's not what they're doing. They're prohibiting anything that might be "contentious" on either side of the political spectrum. That's entirely their prerogative as a company, and it seems they're applying that standard "fairly" (such as it is). If you don't like it then vote with your wallet- don't buy any Apple products.
I thought one of the problems with Ogg (vs the competition) was that its decoding process is floating point intensive and thus unworkable on cheap/portable/limited hardware. Am I imagining that? If not, does VP8 suffer that same flaw?
That's because those people are paying for access to Blizzard's WoW servers, not for the game software per se. IMO this will (possibly "has") become the new model for making money off PC games. People won't or can't share "characters" or "accounts" like they do software, so no DRM is needed. All the pretty graphics and such just becomes a client application enabling one to access a server on which one has a paid account.
In this set up, successful "piracy" would be for someone to steal or reverse engineer the actual game servers, then open their own and allow people free access. But there are a number of reasons that's unlikely to succeed, and so its not a great concern for them.
I like reading a newspaper more than reading news online. I like reading paper books more than ebooks. To be honest, while I do read online news, I'd never really consider buying an e-reader, unless I was going on a hiking trip or something where I expected to read 3-4 books and didn't have the space to pack them.
"Conventional wisdom" depends on who you ask. The convention wisdom I've heard is that OSS is actually more secure. More eyes, etc. The flip side of his analysis is that while OSS was no more vulnerable than closed source it was also no less vulnerable, which would suggest the closed source model is equally capable of producing secure code.
What I find interesting is the overall lack of game-changing progress when it comes to non-3d-or-hd-video-related tasks. In March 2000, i.e. ten years ago, top of the line CPU would be a Pentium III coppermine, potentially topping out around 1 Ghz. I could put Windows XP on one of those (with enough RAM) and do most office / browsing tasks about as fast as I could with today's top of the line CPU. Heck, it would probably handle Win7 okay. Contrast the period 2000-2010 with the period 1990-2000. In 1990 you would be looking at a 25mhz 486DX.
I mentioned two things: cell phones and wired broadband. Pop. density is most certainly not a lie with regard to cell phones. I'd argue the same is true for wired broadband to a degree because of cost. Have countries with lower population density than the U.S. surpassed U.S. wired broadband deployment? Obviously yes. You mention Sweden. I'm sure they also subsidized the hell out of it in order to make that happen. That's a solution many in the U.S. aren't willing to adopt.
You also mention AT&T's iPhone coverage in NYC, which is clearly pretty population dense. If AT&T's entire coverage area, nationwide, were as dense as NYC it would present them an entirely different business model. That's the reality Japanese cell companies operate in.
Are there reasons broadband speeds, especially upload speeds, haven't changed in nearly a decade?
Mine have.
As an addendum on Sweden, perhaps "percent urban population" is a better measure. Rural populations (which are less dense) are always going to be more expensive to serve. Sweden's urban population = 84%. U.S. = 79%.
http://www.globalhealthfacts.org/topic.jsp?i=85
If you look at "first world" countries ranked in descending order by % urban population you get:
Singapore
Belgium
Iceland
Israel
Japan
New Zealand
Sweden
Australia
Luxembourg
South Korea
Canada
Norway
United Kingdom
United States
France
If your goal is to serve everyone with the highest speed broadband, then the "cost" of that effort will be directly related to the % rural population. At least I'd expect it to be. Some governments (and citizens) are more (or less) willing to subsidize that cost.
It's why Japan gets all the cool phones. Its also why average U.S. broadband speeds will likely never match those in places like South Korea and Japan. And, to a lesser extent, the U.K. It's not that its impossible; it's just way more expensive.
I guess the beauty of Closed Source, then, is that the OS supports it out of the box, without some user having to notice the problem, benchmark the performance hit, figure out (more or less) why its happening, make a big blog post, then wait for a qualified dev to fix the problem and for the major distros to pick up the fix?
...then I find this to be somewhat of an indictment against the open source model when applied to OS development. The default seems to be to fix fires as they arise. If there are no drives with 4k sectors then we don't need to support drives with 4k sectors. Once drives with 4k sectors arrive its up the individual maintainers of each affected tool (fdisk, et. al.) to update their code. Contrast this with a dictatorial model used by Microsoft, where they said, basically, "We know these are going to arrive sometime in the next couple years and we want to be ready when they do. So all you subsystem maintainers whose code is affected by it better build in support now, ahead of time."
Of course, if the Win7 support is crappy or only partially works, then its no indictment at all. Not having used one of these new drives in conjunction with a recent version of Windows, I can't really say one way or the other.
Figure out the "real cost" of maintaining a separate, local mail system in addition to Gmail. Hardware, software, maintenance, and the salaries and benefits of any staff needed just to maintain the local system. Then give people the option of using the local one instead of gmail, and charge them their share of the total cost minus whatever Google is charging per Gmail account. Since most people will go with Gmail, the local accounts will likely end up being absurdly expensive. But if you REALLY want one, its there for you.
Some people did some pretty dumb cheating. Dumb as in easily caught. But it was a intro class that was mainly taken by non-CS majors, so maybe that's to be expected. One guy submitted a programming assignment that was identical to another student's except for the variable names. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe he didn't even change those. Then he had the gall to argue with me about how it was legit.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say "not having a cs, engineering or hard science degree" probably correlates very highly with "not being able to program". Obviously lack of a degree doesn't mean a given individual can't program, but when looking at the issue on a large scale, I'd say "programming ability" is WAY more prevalent among those with "relevant" degrees than among those without.
I'm with you on the "kids these days" thesis. On the other hand, I cheated pretty regularly on "small stuff" in high school, but never (at all) in college. I had an interesting set of "rules" to govern my high school behavior. Basically I would never cheat on a test or a paper, or anything that required "creative" output, even if that just meant working out math problems or writing a paragraph of text. I would, however, cheat on "busy work" type assignments where I was reasonably sure of two things: I could do the work myself, and doing the work wouldn't actually teach my anything about the subject matter.
20%? Yeesh. That makes me think every CS program should have a mandatory intro course that's heavy on programming assignments, for no other reason than the eject that 20% from the degree program as early as possible.
The "end" may be to earn a diploma with as little effort as possible, but using the "means" of cheating requires a certain threshold of dishonesty. I also wanted to get a diploma with as little effort as possible, and yet I didn't cheat.
I TA'd an intro CS course that was taught in Pascal. On one of the exams, which specifically asked for Pascal code, one student answered with code written in C. He couldn't fathom why I gave him no points, since his C syntax was correct and the code did what it was supposed to do. He clearly knew what he was doing and didn't belong in the intro class, so I guess he figured he could get an easy A without attending or bothering to learn ANY Pascal syntax.
Because, for Apple, it would strike me as an ulterior motive. Profit being the obvious motive. So in that sense it would be deceptive, and I don't like it when companies are deceptive. If MoveOn.org came out with their own smart phone and admitted apps based on political criteria then I wouldn't raise any objections, since it would be obvious they have a political axe to grind.
Didn't slaughter any sacred cows, but it did seem a little presumptuous when you wrote, "I believe we can all agree..."
I really don't have a problem with Apple keeping their app environment "family friendly" and "politically neutral" if they think that's going to help their bottom line. There is no "right" to have one's work published anywhere and everywhere one chooses.
Now I would have a problem with it if it were the govt. censoring Fiore, or if Apple was pursuing some sort of political agenda in choosing which apps to reject. But neither seems to be the case here.
Not me. If they were specifically targeting Fiore because of his politics, then yeah. But that's not what they're doing. They're prohibiting anything that might be "contentious" on either side of the political spectrum. That's entirely their prerogative as a company, and it seems they're applying that standard "fairly" (such as it is). If you don't like it then vote with your wallet- don't buy any Apple products.
I thought one of the problems with Ogg (vs the competition) was that its decoding process is floating point intensive and thus unworkable on cheap/portable/limited hardware. Am I imagining that? If not, does VP8 suffer that same flaw?
That's because those people are paying for access to Blizzard's WoW servers, not for the game software per se. IMO this will (possibly "has") become the new model for making money off PC games. People won't or can't share "characters" or "accounts" like they do software, so no DRM is needed. All the pretty graphics and such just becomes a client application enabling one to access a server on which one has a paid account.
In this set up, successful "piracy" would be for someone to steal or reverse engineer the actual game servers, then open their own and allow people free access. But there are a number of reasons that's unlikely to succeed, and so its not a great concern for them.
The IE9 benchmarks also show it having faster JS performance. The JS engine could be backported to IE8 if they really wanted.
I like reading a newspaper more than reading news online. I like reading paper books more than ebooks. To be honest, while I do read online news, I'd never really consider buying an e-reader, unless I was going on a hiking trip or something where I expected to read 3-4 books and didn't have the space to pack them.
"Conventional wisdom" depends on who you ask. The convention wisdom I've heard is that OSS is actually more secure. More eyes, etc. The flip side of his analysis is that while OSS was no more vulnerable than closed source it was also no less vulnerable, which would suggest the closed source model is equally capable of producing secure code.
What I find interesting is the overall lack of game-changing progress when it comes to non-3d-or-hd-video-related tasks. In March 2000, i.e. ten years ago, top of the line CPU would be a Pentium III coppermine, potentially topping out around 1 Ghz. I could put Windows XP on one of those (with enough RAM) and do most office / browsing tasks about as fast as I could with today's top of the line CPU. Heck, it would probably handle Win7 okay. Contrast the period 2000-2010 with the period 1990-2000. In 1990 you would be looking at a 25mhz 486DX.
I mentioned two things: cell phones and wired broadband. Pop. density is most certainly not a lie with regard to cell phones. I'd argue the same is true for wired broadband to a degree because of cost. Have countries with lower population density than the U.S. surpassed U.S. wired broadband deployment? Obviously yes. You mention Sweden. I'm sure they also subsidized the hell out of it in order to make that happen. That's a solution many in the U.S. aren't willing to adopt.
You also mention AT&T's iPhone coverage in NYC, which is clearly pretty population dense. If AT&T's entire coverage area, nationwide, were as dense as NYC it would present them an entirely different business model. That's the reality Japanese cell companies operate in.
Mine have.
As an addendum on Sweden, perhaps "percent urban population" is a better measure. Rural populations (which are less dense) are always going to be more expensive to serve. Sweden's urban population = 84%. U.S. = 79%.
http://www.globalhealthfacts.org/topic.jsp?i=85
If you look at "first world" countries ranked in descending order by % urban population you get:
If your goal is to serve everyone with the highest speed broadband, then the "cost" of that effort will be directly related to the % rural population. At least I'd expect it to be. Some governments (and citizens) are more (or less) willing to subsidize that cost.
Burn 'em.
It's why Japan gets all the cool phones. Its also why average U.S. broadband speeds will likely never match those in places like South Korea and Japan. And, to a lesser extent, the U.K. It's not that its impossible; it's just way more expensive.
I guess the beauty of Closed Source, then, is that the OS supports it out of the box, without some user having to notice the problem, benchmark the performance hit, figure out (more or less) why its happening, make a big blog post, then wait for a qualified dev to fix the problem and for the major distros to pick up the fix?
...then I find this to be somewhat of an indictment against the open source model when applied to OS development. The default seems to be to fix fires as they arise. If there are no drives with 4k sectors then we don't need to support drives with 4k sectors. Once drives with 4k sectors arrive its up the individual maintainers of each affected tool (fdisk, et. al.) to update their code. Contrast this with a dictatorial model used by Microsoft, where they said, basically, "We know these are going to arrive sometime in the next couple years and we want to be ready when they do. So all you subsystem maintainers whose code is affected by it better build in support now, ahead of time."
Of course, if the Win7 support is crappy or only partially works, then its no indictment at all. Not having used one of these new drives in conjunction with a recent version of Windows, I can't really say one way or the other.
Figure out the "real cost" of maintaining a separate, local mail system in addition to Gmail. Hardware, software, maintenance, and the salaries and benefits of any staff needed just to maintain the local system. Then give people the option of using the local one instead of gmail, and charge them their share of the total cost minus whatever Google is charging per Gmail account. Since most people will go with Gmail, the local accounts will likely end up being absurdly expensive. But if you REALLY want one, its there for you.
Some people did some pretty dumb cheating. Dumb as in easily caught. But it was a intro class that was mainly taken by non-CS majors, so maybe that's to be expected. One guy submitted a programming assignment that was identical to another student's except for the variable names. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe he didn't even change those. Then he had the gall to argue with me about how it was legit.
What kind of site has fewer than 5% of its visitors using IE? linuxrulez.de?
This seems pretty dang simple. If I didn't have a family, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I liked the 1984 version.
Point taken. Allow me to clarify:
Anyone who considers that "shouldn't be in university" implies "fucking retarded" is being an arrogant ass.
You, and the South Park writers, may or may not believe that; I have no way of knowing.