This sort of thing is by no means new - there are ample cases of facial prostheses in use today. It's not unknown to have cancer patients with similar, albeit less extensive, facial reconstruction necessary after surgery. The process is pretty similar, you implant magnets in the remaining bone structure, or attach them to a titanium superstructure implanted in the bone if the defect is very large, and attach a silicon prosthesis using those.
There really are some amazing feats being performed every day by the medical profession. People should read more or at least watch the Discovery Channel on occasion, then they wouldn't be as surprised by things like this make CNN.
However, it doesnt address the requirements of systems integration where the requirements are ill-defined, require extensive R&D, may only be tested on site, and may not be complete until the client determines that the solution does what they thought they wanted.
Unfortunately, if you can't eliminate that last bit (until the client determines that the solution does what they thought they wanted) then, to put it nicely, you're pretty much going to be stuck in an endless "stepwise refinement" process. Making changes to a mostly-complete application can be a nightmare; the key thing here is to do all of the "stepwise refinement" in the design phase, before you start doing any coding.
This is just Software Engineering 101. If you don't want projects to turn into a death march, you have to get firm requirements. Then you design your solution, and have design reviews with the client until both of you are satisfied that what you are designing is what they will want. Do not start coding anything until you've reached that point. Prototyping is fine, but starting to build a project before the client has signed off on the final design is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot.
The "extensive R&D" part and the "testing on site" part are just more work, that's life. But you have to get a commitment from clients that what you are building for them is what they need, and that once they've signed off on the design, change orders are going to be very expensive. If you know what you're building ahead of time, and the client knows what they're getting, you are going to have a lot fewer problems.
Can't say it enough, working in your chosen field during college gives you a huge advantage in this regard. I work in embedded development, and my work experience during school was invaluable in jumpstarting my professional career.
During my junior and senior years, I worked at a laser printer manufacturer, maintaining and upgrading code for older products. It wasn't super glamorous, but I also wasn't just getting coffee for people, and I learned more in that year and a half than I did in the entire rest of my academic career.
After graduation, I had no trouble getting exactly the kind of work I wanted. I went to work on transportation projects at a major defense contractor for a few years, went back into the printer industry for a few years after that, and am now a senior engineer at a consulting firm working on several traffic management and wireless messaging solutions.
When I graduated in 1994 the market was already fairly competitive, and someone who had real experience working in a team with other engineers, burning ROMs, documenting software, and producing embedded code which ran in real products, had an obvious advantage over someone whose experience consisted solely of implementing linked lists and writing papers on finite automata. With today's large numbers of out of work developers, and the proportionately larger number of CS graduates entering the market, it's incredibly important to distinguish yourself.
Linux supports pci-to-pci bridges, which is what these devices use.
The bigger problem is that the BIOS on your PC must support at least 3 levels of PCI bridging for these devices to work. Most of these types of chassis use one bridge chip on the PCI card that plugs into your PC, then the box itself has several more bridge chips, each of which control a number of the PCI slots.
When all providers adopt similar strategies, you will have no choice.
Right, and that's the point at which I'll just not bother with the internet at home.
Currently, I have several broadband options. I can get cable modem from @home, or DSL from the local telco with their horrendous ISP, or get DSL from the local telco but with a smaller third-party ISP. I'm doing the third option right now because the service is better and they actually have to care about their customers in order to keep up their revenue.
If eventually the smaller ISPs are choked out of existence and the big providers all do this sort of anti-NAT scheme, then I'll just pull the plug.
Hmm, sounds like someone is writing "tech" articles without really knowing anything about IP. NAT isn't all that easy to detect now, and it certainly wouldn't be hard to change any free IP stack to hide anything in packet headers that might give it away.
There is nothing here to stop me plugging oh say a Linux PC into whatever fancy device they want, and having a second NIC running to my plain old hub and doing IP Masquerade for my whole LAN. The only way they can enforce this is if they require you to use binary-only drivers for some specific OS which is then broken to defeat such routing over the proprietary interface.
At which point, I wouldn't want to pay anything for the service anyway.
Knights said PARC has been working on the Gyricon concept since 1978. Until recently, the project had been a low priority, partly because its applications didn't look as lucrative 20
years ago.
You really should have at least skimmed it before commenting.
I notice a lot of the replies in this thread are about becoming an IT person or writing Web apps or whatever. I would have left this field long ago if I was stuck doing admin or web development or creating client-server apps.
I was lucky enough to get a co-op job at a printer company my Junior year, where I got to do actual real-world programming "close to the hardware". This was a lot more fun than any project I ever had in any course, and pretty much put me on the track I'm still on today - embedded and realtime development on Unix-based platforms.
I've always enjoyed my career precisely because the stuff I've worked on is actually useful - and because the projects I've worked on are most successful when the users don't even know there's a computer involved. This is definitely not the same old boring programming garbage; you have a huge problem to solve and not a lot of money or time to solve it in. There is no boilerplate code to do these kinds of jobs.
Doing the same old repetitious programming assignments is not the greatest teaching tool and is certainly not the way to develop enthusiasm for your profession. But if you think outside the box just a bit and find a job that lets you use your CS skills in real-world applications, you may well find it very rewarding.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't really see how a company can make money at being purely an open source software vendor. The idea behind open source is that good software should be freely available to everyone. Selling software for the sake of software is sort of missing the point.
The company I work for develops embedded and realtime systems. Some are sold as products, others are custom developed for clients. We use Linux and other open-source software in our products. And we make plenty of money at it. But we don't make money from the software, we make money from the hardware and from our expertise at systems integration.
We support open source because we don't have to pay someone for basic things like operating systems. We contribute things like device drivers back into the open source community because they improve the OS, even if the drivers are for hardware which is too specialized for most people to care. Someone might have a need for this stuff and find it useful, and perhaps this someone might find a bug in it or add new features or expand it to be compatible with other, similar hardware.
And to me this is what open source is supposed to be all about. It's about people and enterprises with particular needs working together to solve common problems. As these problems are solved, the solutions get released back to the community and the software improves. Yes, this does make it rather difficult to simply be in the business of selling commodity software. In order to make money at it, you have to make the software do something useful.
And making software do something useful is what it's all about...
Sigh. More sickeningly pompous prose from ESR in a completely useless article. Building a $7000 personal computer is a pointless exercise which almost nobody who reads Linux Journal could afford to do. All of his "insightful research" and "surprising discoveries" is stuff you could easily find out on Usenet or the various hardware enthusiast sites -- the last time I built a machine (well equipped Tbird 1.4 for under $1000, tyvfm), I researched all the bits and pieces before buying them and avoided all of the headaches he's complaining about. And he can't even build the stupid thing himself:
You could build the ULB yourself from scratch. But unless you're either a very experienced hardware hacker or seriously interested enough in having a learning experience to accept possibly trashing some expensive parts, maybe you shouldn't. I wouldn't.
Way to encourage the hacker ethic! Yeah! Let's all run out and pay someone to do stuff for us, because everyone knows work is hard. With hardware prices as low as they are, it's a perfect time for people to "hack" their own hardware and build a powerful machine on a budget even a college student can afford. That would make an interesting article, but this one is simply, to use a phrase ESR seems to enjoy, an exercise in mental masturbation.
This is just more hype about how the Net and everything appearing on it is cool and hip and important, while the dinosaur of old media is dying. It's still not true.
My main use for the Internet on September 11 was communications. I don't have a television or a radio in my office at work, so what I did was SSH into my tv-card-equipped machine at home and fire up XawTV and view screen grabs from ABC and CNN. I was on the CNN.com IRC server reading their closed-captioning server so I had a basically real time transcript to go with the pictures. I was also on EFNet talking to people. The Net allowed me to circumvent the physical barriers blocking my access to non-Net-based information, but I was still getting my news from traditional sources. Most Web-based news sites were terribly behind the curve; those that weren't were overloaded and unreachable.
As for reporting since September 11, the Net isn't that great. The only sites that are terribly informative are ones run by big media outlets. It's true that the Net allows you a much wider perspective, since you can get news from all over the world. But it's not the chaotic rumor mongering and pontification of most independent web sites which is interesting; it's the well researched and disciplined reporting that happens at major media organizations.
You argue that old media is monolithic and overly consolidated. But the Web allows you to get around that easily. It's not the independent news sites that allow this; it's the fact that every major news organization on the planet has a presence on the Web. Don't believe the New York Times? See what the South China Morning Post has to say instead.
The problem, Jon, is that you seem to believe that just because something is on the Net, it's automatically great. But most people who write on the Web aren't particularly skillful or talented or well informed; they're just people. You still need money and resources to gather news effectively. CNN and ABC News and whatnot may not be as hip and cool as LeetNews.com, but they have the resources to do the "serious" reporting. The Net is great because it makes more of this sort of information available, more quickly. But it doesn't empower anyone to suddenly become well informed and interesting.
That's pretty unlikely considering that China recently signed a pact with several other nations to fight Islamic extremists like the Taliban, and that China has been fighting Islamic Uighur separatists on its own soil. China sees Islamic militants as a serious threat and groups like the Taliban, with their practice of training and exporting terrorists, are pretty unlikely to gain any Chinese support.
I could certainly see China sending troops in that direction to prevent people crossing its borders during this conflict, but they hardly have an interest in siding with the Taliban.
All of these people bashing the U.S. and claiming it's our expansionist foreign policy to blame for all this need to get a clue. If the U.S. wasn't around, you wouldn't be here to complain about it. Are you European? You'd be speaking German, and not speaking your mind. Are you from Asia or Australia? Welcome to the Japanese empire. Fifty years ago, Americans went and fought and died to keep your countries free. There wasn't a whole lot of complaining about American interventionism then.
And as for all of this supposed interventionism. Who created Israel? Who invaded Africa and China and India and Viet Nam and the Middle East and established colonies and set the stage for all of this hatred of the West? It was European colonialism, not American, that got these messes started. Yes, it's ancient history, and it really doesn't matter any more, but before you go pointing fingers at the U.S. be sure to look at your own hands. They aren't clean.
For nearly the entire twentieth century, America has sent its soldiers to fight and die to support its friends. These wars were never started by us, but it was up to us to finish them. The current conflict is no different. Once again Americans are dying for the sins of other countries. And once again, we're going to end the wars that someone else has started.
Sadly, in the real world most projects are really written largely by one or a small group of "hero" programmers with the rest of the cast and crew along for the ride. My guess is that the people who are the "heroes" were the ones who actually did their assignments, while the idlers are the ones who copied their homework from others.
Realistically, you have to have both: individual projects where sharing is prohibited, so that you can hone and demonstrate your own skills ; and group projects later on, where you can learn to effectively coordinate and work on parts of a larger system. It's no use having group projects in beginning level courses, since really the students don't know enough to accomplish anything and putting them together just increases the confusion. Later on when everyone has mastered basic skills and design concepts, you can benefit a lot from a group project.
form following function (i.e., an evolutionary design with similar mission profiles)
Uh? The Akira is a result of the Perimeter Defence Initiative, a ship built basically solely for war fighting purposes. It is as much a fighter/shuttle carrier as it is a warship in its own right. On the other hand, the Enterprise is a testbed for high warp technology (at the time) and an exploration vessel.
The real reason they look the same is that the same person designed them both (he also designed the NCC-1701-E). This guy (whose name escapes me at the moment, sorry) goes for "cool" rather than "canonical". His ships look really neat, but don't really fit into the mythos very well.
Really, I liked the pilot. It's far and away the best pilot episode of any Trek yet. Nice sort of adventure story, promising characters, setting actually seems to have lots of potential. The whole "fledgeling steps into the interstellar neighborhood thing" reminded me of the Babylon Five movie where the Earth first meets the Minbari. But I liked all that.
The thing I don't like is the ship. Its design is way too advanced -- other than the warp nacelles, it looks like a ship from the Voyager era. Worse, it's a ripoff of a design they've already used. Compare the ship from the new series with the Akira class from First Contact and Voyager (another set of views is here).
I know I'm sort of nitpicking here, but really this is terribly inconsistent with the look and feel of later shows and movies. Yes, it does look really cool, but in the overall Trek context it really doesn't work for me. Oh well, I'll get used to it I guess.
Man, those professors are living in the past. They must think you're actually supposed to listen and even participate in the courses they teach. God, they're so backward.
Most of the slashdot readship probably falls within the top most 1% of the population in terms of intelligence.
Based on most of the comments on this article, it's clear the slashdot readership thinks so too. Likewise based on those same comments, Jesus H. Christ I hope you're wrong.
Cryptography as a weapon
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While the replies to this thread are all sarcastic and full of self-righteous indignation, let's not forget that a big part of why the US and its allies won World War II was the fact that we were able to break the enemy's encryption like the German Enigma -- and that they were unable to break ours.
We're all yelling and screaming about "what's next", taking away "more of our freedoms" and such like. Someone raised the point that the freedom to assemble in private, to learn to fly aircraft, to be free from random searches of houses, were also contributing factors to these terrorist acts. The problem is, if the government was able to monitor communications, restrictions on those activities wouldn't even be talked about -- the activities themselves are innocuous, but in the right combination they could indicate something sinister. This is the reason that people buying huge quantities of nitrogen-rich fertilizer are monitored because of its bomb making potential.
I'm not advocating "back doors" in encryption products, mainly because it's too late for those to be useful when perfectly effective encryption is already out there for terrorists and anyone else to use. But the fact remains that the ability of people to unbreakably encrypt their grocery lists does have consequences beyond merely ensuring their privacy.
Bin Laden and company are better known for using steganography. There's no indication that they use PGP in email; apparently their favorite method is to get free websites at e.g. GeoCities and embed messages in image files.
You do realize that even if they provided the source code to all this misbehaving software (which you can get anyway, unless they've modified it beyond simply stripping out copyright information) you would still need the right hardware and/or software to reflash your device -- and the company is under no obligation to provide either.
I can't decide if this is the work of a sincere person who is sadly deluded, or a marketing ploy to flog a few more dollars out of investors. It's hard enough getting your foot in the door with a pure desktop operating system that is better than Windows (BeOS, OS/2), much less one whose entire goal is to play catch-up to Windows itself. There is nothing here to appeal to people who already know and like Windows, and it's certainly not going to appeal to people who don't like windows either.
Beyond that, the technical feasibility of it is questionable. Microsoft is well known for making its Win32 API, filesystems, etc, moving targets. It's taken the Wine and NTFS teams a long time to get where they have, and even then they're pretty far from complete compatibility. What makes these guys think they're going to get any closer?
Oh well. I guess it goes to show you, there's always someone trying to ice skate uphill.
To me, that was always the whole point of Lego. I don't like the special-purpose parts that come with the new "playsets", nor the sort of fixation with building "what's on the box" rather than building what you want from a collection of basically generic parts. The best thing about Lego was that if you imagined something, be it a giant fighting robot or a spaceship or a house, you could build it the way you wanted. The toys were intended to put you in the driver's seat and exercise your own imagination, not just to try and ape something designed by someone else. The newer stuff is designed with a "right" way to build it, and that just defeats the whole purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of thing is by no means new - there are ample cases of facial prostheses in use today. It's not unknown to have cancer patients with similar, albeit less extensive, facial reconstruction necessary after surgery. The process is pretty similar, you implant magnets in the remaining bone structure, or attach them to a titanium superstructure implanted in the bone if the defect is very large, and attach a silicon prosthesis using those.
There really are some amazing feats being performed every day by the medical profession. People should read more or at least watch the Discovery Channel on occasion, then they wouldn't be as surprised by things like this make CNN.
However, it doesnt address the requirements of systems integration where the requirements are ill-defined, require extensive R&D, may only be tested on site, and may not be complete until the client determines that the solution does what they thought they wanted.
Unfortunately, if you can't eliminate that last bit (until the client determines that the solution does what they thought they wanted) then, to put it nicely, you're pretty much going to be stuck in an endless "stepwise refinement" process. Making changes to a mostly-complete application can be a nightmare; the key thing here is to do all of the "stepwise refinement" in the design phase, before you start doing any coding.
This is just Software Engineering 101. If you don't want projects to turn into a death march, you have to get firm requirements. Then you design your solution, and have design reviews with the client until both of you are satisfied that what you are designing is what they will want. Do not start coding anything until you've reached that point. Prototyping is fine, but starting to build a project before the client has signed off on the final design is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot.
The "extensive R&D" part and the "testing on site" part are just more work, that's life. But you have to get a commitment from clients that what you are building for them is what they need, and that once they've signed off on the design, change orders are going to be very expensive. If you know what you're building ahead of time, and the client knows what they're getting, you are going to have a lot fewer problems.
Can't say it enough, working in your chosen field during college gives you a huge advantage in this regard. I work in embedded development, and my work experience during school was invaluable in jumpstarting my professional career.
During my junior and senior years, I worked at a laser printer manufacturer, maintaining and upgrading code for older products. It wasn't super glamorous, but I also wasn't just getting coffee for people, and I learned more in that year and a half than I did in the entire rest of my academic career.
After graduation, I had no trouble getting exactly the kind of work I wanted. I went to work on transportation projects at a major defense contractor for a few years, went back into the printer industry for a few years after that, and am now a senior engineer at a consulting firm working on several traffic management and wireless messaging solutions.
When I graduated in 1994 the market was already fairly competitive, and someone who had real experience working in a team with other engineers, burning ROMs, documenting software, and producing embedded code which ran in real products, had an obvious advantage over someone whose experience consisted solely of implementing linked lists and writing papers on finite automata. With today's large numbers of out of work developers, and the proportionately larger number of CS graduates entering the market, it's incredibly important to distinguish yourself.
Linux supports pci-to-pci bridges, which is what these devices use.
The bigger problem is that the BIOS on your PC must support at least 3 levels of PCI bridging for these devices to work. Most of these types of chassis use one bridge chip on the PCI card that plugs into your PC, then the box itself has several more bridge chips, each of which control a number of the PCI slots.
When all providers adopt similar strategies, you will have no choice.
Right, and that's the point at which I'll just not bother with the internet at home.
Currently, I have several broadband options. I can get cable modem from @home, or DSL from the local telco with their horrendous ISP, or get DSL from the local telco but with a smaller third-party ISP. I'm doing the third option right now because the service is better and they actually have to care about their customers in order to keep up their revenue.
If eventually the smaller ISPs are choked out of existence and the big providers all do this sort of anti-NAT scheme, then I'll just pull the plug.
"Pardon, NAT, what's that behind you?"
Hmm, sounds like someone is writing "tech" articles without really knowing anything about IP. NAT isn't all that easy to detect now, and it certainly wouldn't be hard to change any free IP stack to hide anything in packet headers that might give it away.
There is nothing here to stop me plugging oh say a Linux PC into whatever fancy device they want, and having a second NIC running to my plain old hub and doing IP Masquerade for my whole LAN. The only way they can enforce this is if they require you to use binary-only drivers for some specific OS which is then broken to defeat such routing over the proprietary interface.
At which point, I wouldn't want to pay anything for the service anyway.
From the article:
Ready After 20 Years
Knights said PARC has been working on the Gyricon concept since 1978. Until recently, the project had been a low priority, partly because its applications didn't look as lucrative 20
years ago.
You really should have at least skimmed it before commenting.
er that was supposed to read this article.
Not really. Xerox's Gyricon rewriteable paper has been in development since 1978, according to among many others. So even if you believe that Stephenson was the first science fiction author to use this concept - which is doubtful - the technology was in active development before he wrote about it.
I notice a lot of the replies in this thread are about becoming an IT person or writing Web apps or whatever. I would have left this field long ago if I was stuck doing admin or web development or creating client-server apps.
I was lucky enough to get a co-op job at a printer company my Junior year, where I got to do actual real-world programming "close to the hardware". This was a lot more fun than any project I ever had in any course, and pretty much put me on the track I'm still on today - embedded and realtime development on Unix-based platforms.
I've always enjoyed my career precisely because the stuff I've worked on is actually useful - and because the projects I've worked on are most successful when the users don't even know there's a computer involved. This is definitely not the same old boring programming garbage; you have a huge problem to solve and not a lot of money or time to solve it in. There is no boilerplate code to do these kinds of jobs.
Doing the same old repetitious programming assignments is not the greatest teaching tool and is certainly not the way to develop enthusiasm for your profession. But if you think outside the box just a bit and find a job that lets you use your CS skills in real-world applications, you may well find it very rewarding.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't really see how a company can make money at being purely an open source software vendor. The idea behind open source is that good software should be freely available to everyone. Selling software for the sake of software is sort of missing the point.
The company I work for develops embedded and realtime systems. Some are sold as products, others are custom developed for clients. We use Linux and other open-source software in our products. And we make plenty of money at it. But we don't make money from the software, we make money from the hardware and from our expertise at systems integration.
We support open source because we don't have to pay someone for basic things like operating systems. We contribute things like device drivers back into the open source community because they improve the OS, even if the drivers are for hardware which is too specialized for most people to care. Someone might have a need for this stuff and find it useful, and perhaps this someone might find a bug in it or add new features or expand it to be compatible with other, similar hardware.
And to me this is what open source is supposed to be all about. It's about people and enterprises with particular needs working together to solve common problems. As these problems are solved, the solutions get released back to the community and the software improves. Yes, this does make it rather difficult to simply be in the business of selling commodity software. In order to make money at it, you have to make the software do something useful.
And making software do something useful is what it's all about...
Sigh. More sickeningly pompous prose from ESR in a completely useless article. Building a $7000 personal computer is a pointless exercise which almost nobody who reads Linux Journal could afford to do. All of his "insightful research" and "surprising discoveries" is stuff you could easily find out on Usenet or the various hardware enthusiast sites -- the last time I built a machine (well equipped Tbird 1.4 for under $1000, tyvfm), I researched all the bits and pieces before buying them and avoided all of the headaches he's complaining about. And he can't even build the stupid thing himself:
You could build the ULB yourself from scratch. But unless you're either a very experienced hardware hacker or seriously interested enough in having a learning experience to accept possibly trashing some expensive parts, maybe you shouldn't. I wouldn't.
Way to encourage the hacker ethic! Yeah! Let's all run out and pay someone to do stuff for us, because everyone knows work is hard. With hardware prices as low as they are, it's a perfect time for people to "hack" their own hardware and build a powerful machine on a budget even a college student can afford. That would make an interesting article, but this one is simply, to use a phrase ESR seems to enjoy, an exercise in mental masturbation.
This is just more hype about how the Net and everything appearing on it is cool and hip and important, while the dinosaur of old media is dying. It's still not true.
My main use for the Internet on September 11 was communications. I don't have a television or a radio in my office at work, so what I did was SSH into my tv-card-equipped machine at home and fire up XawTV and view screen grabs from ABC and CNN. I was on the CNN.com IRC server reading their closed-captioning server so I had a basically real time transcript to go with the pictures. I was also on EFNet talking to people. The Net allowed me to circumvent the physical barriers blocking my access to non-Net-based information, but I was still getting my news from traditional sources. Most Web-based news sites were terribly behind the curve; those that weren't were overloaded and unreachable.
As for reporting since September 11, the Net isn't that great. The only sites that are terribly informative are ones run by big media outlets. It's true that the Net allows you a much wider perspective, since you can get news from all over the world. But it's not the chaotic rumor mongering and pontification of most independent web sites which is interesting; it's the well researched and disciplined reporting that happens at major media organizations.
You argue that old media is monolithic and overly consolidated. But the Web allows you to get around that easily. It's not the independent news sites that allow this; it's the fact that every major news organization on the planet has a presence on the Web. Don't believe the New York Times? See what the South China Morning Post has to say instead.
The problem, Jon, is that you seem to believe that just because something is on the Net, it's automatically great. But most people who write on the Web aren't particularly skillful or talented or well informed; they're just people. You still need money and resources to gather news effectively. CNN and ABC News and whatnot may not be as hip and cool as LeetNews.com, but they have the resources to do the "serious" reporting. The Net is great because it makes more of this sort of information available, more quickly. But it doesn't empower anyone to suddenly become well informed and interesting.
That's pretty unlikely considering that China recently signed a pact with several other nations to fight Islamic extremists like the Taliban, and that China has been fighting Islamic Uighur separatists on its own soil. China sees Islamic militants as a serious threat and groups like the Taliban, with their practice of training and exporting terrorists, are pretty unlikely to gain any Chinese support.
I could certainly see China sending troops in that direction to prevent people crossing its borders during this conflict, but they hardly have an interest in siding with the Taliban.
All of these people bashing the U.S. and claiming it's our expansionist foreign policy to blame for all this need to get a clue. If the U.S. wasn't around, you wouldn't be here to complain about it. Are you European? You'd be speaking German, and not speaking your mind. Are you from Asia or Australia? Welcome to the Japanese empire. Fifty years ago, Americans went and fought and died to keep your countries free. There wasn't a whole lot of complaining about American interventionism then.
And as for all of this supposed interventionism. Who created Israel? Who invaded Africa and China and India and Viet Nam and the Middle East and established colonies and set the stage for all of this hatred of the West? It was European colonialism, not American, that got these messes started. Yes, it's ancient history, and it really doesn't matter any more, but before you go pointing fingers at the U.S. be sure to look at your own hands. They aren't clean.
For nearly the entire twentieth century, America has sent its soldiers to fight and die to support its friends. These wars were never started by us, but it was up to us to finish them. The current conflict is no different. Once again Americans are dying for the sins of other countries. And once again, we're going to end the wars that someone else has started.
Sadly, in the real world most projects are really written largely by one or a small group of "hero" programmers with the rest of the cast and crew along for the ride. My guess is that the people who are the "heroes" were the ones who actually did their assignments, while the idlers are the ones who copied their homework from others.
Realistically, you have to have both: individual projects where sharing is prohibited, so that you can hone and demonstrate your own skills ; and group projects later on, where you can learn to effectively coordinate and work on parts of a larger system. It's no use having group projects in beginning level courses, since really the students don't know enough to accomplish anything and putting them together just increases the confusion. Later on when everyone has mastered basic skills and design concepts, you can benefit a lot from a group project.
form following function (i.e., an evolutionary design with similar mission profiles)
Uh? The Akira is a result of the Perimeter Defence Initiative, a ship built basically solely for war fighting purposes. It is as much a fighter/shuttle carrier as it is a warship in its own right. On the other hand, the Enterprise is a testbed for high warp technology (at the time) and an exploration vessel.
The real reason they look the same is that the same person designed them both (he also designed the NCC-1701-E). This guy (whose name escapes me at the moment, sorry) goes for "cool" rather than "canonical". His ships look really neat, but don't really fit into the mythos very well.
Really, I liked the pilot. It's far and away the best pilot episode of any Trek yet. Nice sort of adventure story, promising characters, setting actually seems to have lots of potential. The whole "fledgeling steps into the interstellar neighborhood thing" reminded me of the Babylon Five movie where the Earth first meets the Minbari. But I liked all that.
The thing I don't like is the ship. Its design is way too advanced -- other than the warp nacelles, it looks like a ship from the Voyager era. Worse, it's a ripoff of a design they've already used. Compare the ship from the new series with the Akira class from First Contact and Voyager (another set of views is here).
I know I'm sort of nitpicking here, but really this is terribly inconsistent with the look and feel of later shows and movies. Yes, it does look really cool, but in the overall Trek context it really doesn't work for me. Oh well, I'll get used to it I guess.
Man, those professors are living in the past. They must think you're actually supposed to listen and even participate in the courses they teach. God, they're so backward.
Most of the slashdot readship probably falls within the top most 1% of the population in terms of intelligence.
Based on most of the comments on this article, it's clear the slashdot readership thinks so too. Likewise based on those same comments, Jesus H. Christ I hope you're wrong.
While the replies to this thread are all sarcastic and full of self-righteous indignation, let's not forget that a big part of why the US and its allies won World War II was the fact that we were able to break the enemy's encryption like the German Enigma -- and that they were unable to break ours.
We're all yelling and screaming about "what's next", taking away "more of our freedoms" and such like. Someone raised the point that the freedom to assemble in private, to learn to fly aircraft, to be free from random searches of houses, were also contributing factors to these terrorist acts. The problem is, if the government was able to monitor communications, restrictions on those activities wouldn't even be talked about -- the activities themselves are innocuous, but in the right combination they could indicate something sinister. This is the reason that people buying huge quantities of nitrogen-rich fertilizer are monitored because of its bomb making potential.
I'm not advocating "back doors" in encryption products, mainly because it's too late for those to be useful when perfectly effective encryption is already out there for terrorists and anyone else to use. But the fact remains that the ability of people to unbreakably encrypt their grocery lists does have consequences beyond merely ensuring their privacy.
Bin Laden and company are better known for using steganography. There's no indication that they use PGP in email; apparently their favorite method is to get free websites at e.g. GeoCities and embed messages in image files.
You do realize that even if they provided the source code to all this misbehaving software (which you can get anyway, unless they've modified it beyond simply stripping out copyright information) you would still need the right hardware and/or software to reflash your device -- and the company is under no obligation to provide either.
I can't decide if this is the work of a sincere person who is sadly deluded, or a marketing ploy to flog a few more dollars out of investors. It's hard enough getting your foot in the door with a pure desktop operating system that is better than Windows (BeOS, OS/2), much less one whose entire goal is to play catch-up to Windows itself. There is nothing here to appeal to people who already know and like Windows, and it's certainly not going to appeal to people who don't like windows either.
Beyond that, the technical feasibility of it is questionable. Microsoft is well known for making its Win32 API, filesystems, etc, moving targets. It's taken the Wine and NTFS teams a long time to get where they have, and even then they're pretty far from complete compatibility. What makes these guys think they're going to get any closer?
Oh well. I guess it goes to show you, there's always someone trying to ice skate uphill.
To me, that was always the whole point of Lego. I don't like the special-purpose parts that come with the new "playsets", nor the sort of fixation with building "what's on the box" rather than building what you want from a collection of basically generic parts. The best thing about Lego was that if you imagined something, be it a giant fighting robot or a spaceship or a house, you could build it the way you wanted. The toys were intended to put you in the driver's seat and exercise your own imagination, not just to try and ape something designed by someone else. The newer stuff is designed with a "right" way to build it, and that just defeats the whole purpose.