FLAMEBAIT make courses harder so that only few students survive END FLAMEBAIT.
According to a discussion on World of Warcraft yesterday, if they do exactly the opposite it can lead to students enjoying it SO MUCH that they will never want to stop. Also, why stop at Ph.D when they can invent a new maximum degree called the Worldly Master's Degree? After 4 years for a B.S., 2 years for an M.S., 5 years for a Ph.D, and 7 years trying to get their W.M.D., the kiddies will be close to 40 years old and ready to spawn the next generation of non-achievers.
if this case is any indication, expect the entrenched interests to fight you every step of the way.
What I don't understand is why don't the entrench providers shift gears from coal/nuclear/naturalgas and jump on the clean/safe wind & solar bandwagon? They HAVE the millions of dollars in capital needed to begin the transition from old technology to new technology. Unless they are waiting for specific advances in new technology that are around the corner, I think it is pure greed that they not evolve their businesses with the times.
Then again, most of the Northeast is powered by either a Canadian waterfall or nuclear plants... and as long as those plants are safe there is no reason to shut them down.
The industry could use a bit of thinning out if it means that we're left with actual bright and enthusiastic people who really do like doing this type of work.
All "hot" industries are effected by this. This is The Tragedy of the Commons. This caused the tech crash of 2001 and the real estate crash of 2005.
Ultimately, by guiding people into roles where they must "earn a living" even if they don't enjoy/understand their domain, it ruins economies. This is why I like the goal of paying them better to do (intellectually) easier work so they can stay off my lawn in the advanced technology arena. Of course, greed also ruins economies, so *allowing* people to take advantage of temporary economic booms in certain fields is bad, too.
For example nVidia has historically had very good OpenGL performance on Windows.
I am not familiar with the nVidia video card market, so this statement is purely speculation that others can discuss, confirm, deny, or mod into oblivion...
Is it possible that there are "Microsoft incentives" that helps convince nVidia to remain proprietary? It seems that it would hurt Microsoft really bad to lose any of their best partners, and a company that makes video cards would certainly qualify.
None of these analogies are any good. You have to imagine that you are driving to San Francisco in your car. You are planning on traveling alone, but your neighbor finds out where you are going and jumps into the passenger seat while you are pulling out of the driveway.
Also, your neighbor is wearing an invisibility cloak and doesn't talk through the trip so you basically don't know he is there.
In fact, the only point where his presence is remotely felt is when you are both downloading an uncompressed video stream and you become frustrated that the connection stops every 30 second to buffer.
I disagree with the suggestion for the Lockheed internship to gain experience. I have known people who have worked for Lockheed and their stories are similar to other work I've done in the "process heavy world of the CMMI" and have to say that the best practices are only as good as the practitioners who are applying them.
I also disagree with the suggestion that Open Source development experience will teach good design. The Open Source world isn't documented well enough to serve as an example for a PhD student in pursuit of the "best of the best".
I would stick to the latest and greatest theory that has come from veterans in academia. In another post within this article, I link to several examples of what I think the best of the best is. (click my username above, and then find the first response I made to this story).
You could try Trustworthy Systems by Bernstein. I own the book, but never actually read it because the lectures from Bernstein's associates at Stevens Institute of Technology did a sufficient job to explain the examples and concepts in the book.
Thanks for the link. When she refers to gender as "women" and "boys" it really makes it clear where her prejudices are.
As a young man, I have worked hard to mentally apply the words "women" and "ladies" in place of "girls" during recent years because I have found that many females have a reasonable personal preference not to be called "girl" ("chick" is also a bad choice).
In any case, seeing "boys" applied within an "anti-man" argument is a refreshing reminder that women also suffer the negative effects of sexism and bigotry.
In school, I learned that an idea/concept was garbage if you couldn't convincingly explain it in 4 pages or less.
In civil cases where there is a propensity for information to be buried like a needle in a haystack, it makes sense for the prosecution to be legally required to supply the haystack because it should be the defenses burden to find the needle.
In the patent office though? They should be held to a reasonable limit (100-200 pages?). In this case, the vastness of their "supporting documentation" should be enough evidence to throw away the claim.
Of course, the alternative for the patent examiners (if it was a logical world where reason prevails) is to find an instance where the mountains of documentation is internally inconsistent and then toss the claim out the window because of Amazon's arrogance to submit contradictory claims in regards to their potential patent.
Taking a car for a joy-ride and then parking it at a nearby gas station may not be the worst thing in the world, but the unnecessary reaction from the car's owner and the local police would put into perspective the seriousness of the crime. Imagine waking up and getting news that something you own that is important to you is missing.... That's a sucky feeling.
Falling home prices hurt everyone, not just people who took out bad loans - often while being tricked in to thinking they were agreeing to different terms. If you need to move for a job and find that your home is now worth significantly less than you paid for it, you are screwed.
Both falling and rising home prices are harmful - it mainly depends on when you are buying. You may feel like you have gotten screwed because you were forced to sell into a "losing" market. I have some sympathy for you, but if you look at housing prices in top markets as a function of time dating back to the 1960s, you'll see a compound interest curve that went crazy from 2003-2006. Historically, the value of your house *should* double every 7-10 years (for an 8-12% ROI). During the real estate boom, prices got WAY ahead of their historical markers.
Anybody who owned a home in 2003 is being hurt more by the rising gas prices than the real estate slump. The only people who really "got hurt" by the current real estate market are first-time buyers between 2005-2010 as the market adjusts to its historical rates.***
So, please, don't make broad generalizations about the real estate market without any historical perspective. You'll see that MOST PEOPLE are unaffected.
Footnote:
*** Also, people who bought multiple properties late in the game with the intention of *flipping* them, but those people were simply GODDAMNED MORONS who deserve what they got.
Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 1
If things are stagnant and they need to recruit new developers, then the title of this article should be "Devs needed to contribute to X.org for Critical Design Improvements". Until I see *that* on the/. headline, I am content to assume that the stability of the project has enabled the old group of developers to work on projects that are currently more deserving of there time.
Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree wholeheartedly. The current release of X is suitable and works well for me.
The "upgrade every year" mentality is the wrong one to have. They missed their date? Okay, that's fine. As long as they don't buckle under the "release schedule" mentality compromise quality. I may be naive, but I don't know any reason they would want to push/rush their next release.
Liberals might make you free in the Khmer Rouge sense of the word, but, ultimately, they make you poor.
Liberals want a totalitarian, murderous regime that destroys wealth for the population? No thanks, buddy. We value American freedoms, foremost. Pursuit of happiness is tantamount. Somebody born from individuals who squandered their happiness rights by becoming derelict deserves the upward class mobility to be successful. By not having the "social programs" that you seem to think "make you poor", we do a disservice to the disenfranchised but otherwise capable lower class.
Conversely, there are derelicts who are born into privilege but do NOT deserve the right to be happy because of their negative effects on the rest of the population. I think you would agree that the "Paris Hiltons" and "Kenneth Lays" of the world don't deserve the success that they enjoyed at their peaks.
But like everything else, the issue isn't black&white and there is no silver bullet that can create a balance to fairly unite the various American social classes.
Not only are we richer, but we are less likely to be put in a situation where fragmentation in the tools-development department causes our projects to be late.
Having worked with at least three major source code repository tools (CVS, ClearCase, and PVCS/Dimensions) I could give an entire rant about how they each give the top-level objects that you checkout different names (Modules, VOBs, and Products).
If you want an honest opinion, I think every developer should know how to work with CVS/Subversion just because of its simplicity and freedom. But I think for huge projects (~50+ developers) I would recommend the added control that ClearCase provides to make it easier for people to work collaboratively.
However, 50 licenses of ClearCase (and by-the-way... you need to buy ClearQuest (to manage problem reports) and MultiSite (to manage distributed development)) costs about half a million dollars. Is that worth it? You could pay 5 or 6 additional developers for that kind of money.
I read the earlier story, but it only now just occurred to me that another prime candidate for this is YouTube. The freedom to "Broadcast Yourself" is scary in a lot of general contexts that have already led to a number of government agency censorships around the world.
Also, giving Google the ability to self-censor the content posted (currently, I believe objectionable violence and pornography is banned by the TOS) provides for a bias on the site.
why settle for a logo mounted in the night sky when you can use LED lights to display the logo in full color? Of course, it would cost a little extra but you could make up the costs by splurging on LED lights that could be programmed to display different colors so you could rent out the ad space for $100 Million per night.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live.
Can't we have both? Seriously, though, I enjoyed your justifications for establishing a space colony. However, there is a current space station with modules from Russia, Japan, Canada, USA, and Europe which has already taken a decade to construct and won't be done for another two years. The crew of 2-3 comes back from their missions with severe atrophy, and they require supply missions (food, etc...) every 6 months in order to survive.
I've not saying it isn't possible, but establishing a colony within another planets gravity-well is likely going to be *easier* than a space colony in the Earth's orbit.
Ultimately, I think it would be worthwhile to pursue both projects.
Quoting an e-mail distributed by the Mars Society in reference to a McCain speech from within the current week:
"I am intrigued by a man on Mars and I think that it would excite the imagination of the American people," said McCain. He argued that NASA needs to do a better job of inspiring the American public, as was the case during the race to the Moon in the 1960's. "I'd be willing to spend more taxpayers dollars [to support NASA]," he said.
This is good news for pro-exploration voters, but I believe this is political posturing. He was in Florida while he gave the speech, and NASA is big business there. Until I am convinced that McCain has intentions to spend less on military conflicts, I cannot bring myself to even consider giving him my vote.
I couldn't agree more. But like I said, out-of-control real estate prices are a major urban concern. Also, another reader mentioned that cheap housing has a significant impact on local crime. High-crime areas are definitely not good for families.
So in addition to parks, I think urban schools that are hands-down better than suburban options would be a boon for the "family-friendly" cities that you speak of.
Dallas is an up-and-coming technology center. This has been widely reported. There has been a TON of new technology businesses that have setup shop in Dallas in the last decade. If you want to attribute that to deregulation, that's fine.
It takes collective wisdom in form of people exchanging resources freely with the price system transmitting the information to get the most productivity out of a resource.
Agreed. But consolidation in the last decade has hurt the abilities of the markets to function the way they are supposed to. Oil prices are a sign of this. However, I view the high oil prices as a means to justify investment in next-generation energy. Solar and wind businesses are booming these days - and fortunately the USA has an ample supply of these resources to compete for money in these next-generation markets.
The thing is, more and more businesses are actually located in those suburbs you seem to hate so much.
I grew up in a suburb of NYC, and have spent the last year living within biking distance of downtown Boston. The thing isn't that I hate suburbs specifically. I am a huge supporter of the ability to choose family-friendly suburban life over city-living.
What I think is broken is the insane housing markets in cities. On the one hand, it is a supply-and-demand problem. On the other hand, cities should be tasked to provide a safe-and-affordable place for their citizens to live.
Meanwhile, suburbs NEED to improve public transportation options to connect the suburban grid in a way that lowers the burden for commuters.
Slashdot Mirror
According to a discussion on World of Warcraft yesterday, if they do exactly the opposite it can lead to students enjoying it SO MUCH that they will never want to stop. Also, why stop at Ph.D when they can invent a new maximum degree called the Worldly Master's Degree? After 4 years for a B.S., 2 years for an M.S., 5 years for a Ph.D, and 7 years trying to get their W.M.D., the kiddies will be close to 40 years old and ready to spawn the next generation of non-achievers.
What I don't understand is why don't the entrench providers shift gears from coal/nuclear/naturalgas and jump on the clean/safe wind & solar bandwagon? They HAVE the millions of dollars in capital needed to begin the transition from old technology to new technology. Unless they are waiting for specific advances in new technology that are around the corner, I think it is pure greed that they not evolve their businesses with the times.
Then again, most of the Northeast is powered by either a Canadian waterfall or nuclear plants... and as long as those plants are safe there is no reason to shut them down.
All "hot" industries are effected by this. This is The Tragedy of the Commons. This caused the tech crash of 2001 and the real estate crash of 2005.
Ultimately, by guiding people into roles where they must "earn a living" even if they don't enjoy/understand their domain, it ruins economies. This is why I like the goal of paying them better to do (intellectually) easier work so they can stay off my lawn in the advanced technology arena. Of course, greed also ruins economies, so *allowing* people to take advantage of temporary economic booms in certain fields is bad, too.
It is amazing how easily "procreation" and "procrastination" can be confused when you don't have your morning coffee.
In either case, I agree!
I found a few searches that make orgies seem utterly unpopular.
I am not familiar with the nVidia video card market, so this statement is purely speculation that others can discuss, confirm, deny, or mod into oblivion...
Is it possible that there are "Microsoft incentives" that helps convince nVidia to remain proprietary? It seems that it would hurt Microsoft really bad to lose any of their best partners, and a company that makes video cards would certainly qualify.
None of these analogies are any good. You have to imagine that you are driving to San Francisco in your car. You are planning on traveling alone, but your neighbor finds out where you are going and jumps into the passenger seat while you are pulling out of the driveway.
Also, your neighbor is wearing an invisibility cloak and doesn't talk through the trip so you basically don't know he is there.
In fact, the only point where his presence is remotely felt is when you are both downloading an uncompressed video stream and you become frustrated that the connection stops every 30 second to buffer.
I disagree with the suggestion for the Lockheed internship to gain experience. I have known people who have worked for Lockheed and their stories are similar to other work I've done in the "process heavy world of the CMMI" and have to say that the best practices are only as good as the practitioners who are applying them.
I also disagree with the suggestion that Open Source development experience will teach good design. The Open Source world isn't documented well enough to serve as an example for a PhD student in pursuit of the "best of the best".
I would stick to the latest and greatest theory that has come from veterans in academia. In another post within this article, I link to several examples of what I think the best of the best is. (click my username above, and then find the first response I made to this story).
You could try Trustworthy Systems by Bernstein. I own the book, but never actually read it because the lectures from Bernstein's associates at Stevens Institute of Technology did a sufficient job to explain the examples and concepts in the book.
Another favorite of mine is the work of Nancy Levenson and her students at MIT.
This is why you can't have your breast milk.
Thanks for the link. When she refers to gender as "women" and "boys" it really makes it clear where her prejudices are.
As a young man, I have worked hard to mentally apply the words "women" and "ladies" in place of "girls" during recent years because I have found that many females have a reasonable personal preference not to be called "girl" ("chick" is also a bad choice).
In any case, seeing "boys" applied within an "anti-man" argument is a refreshing reminder that women also suffer the negative effects of sexism and bigotry.
In school, I learned that an idea/concept was garbage if you couldn't convincingly explain it in 4 pages or less.
In civil cases where there is a propensity for information to be buried like a needle in a haystack, it makes sense for the prosecution to be legally required to supply the haystack because it should be the defenses burden to find the needle.
In the patent office though? They should be held to a reasonable limit (100-200 pages?). In this case, the vastness of their "supporting documentation" should be enough evidence to throw away the claim.
Of course, the alternative for the patent examiners (if it was a logical world where reason prevails) is to find an instance where the mountains of documentation is internally inconsistent and then toss the claim out the window because of Amazon's arrogance to submit contradictory claims in regards to their potential patent.
Taking a car for a joy-ride and then parking it at a nearby gas station may not be the worst thing in the world, but the unnecessary reaction from the car's owner and the local police would put into perspective the seriousness of the crime. Imagine waking up and getting news that something you own that is important to you is missing.... That's a sucky feeling.
Both falling and rising home prices are harmful - it mainly depends on when you are buying. You may feel like you have gotten screwed because you were forced to sell into a "losing" market. I have some sympathy for you, but if you look at housing prices in top markets as a function of time dating back to the 1960s, you'll see a compound interest curve that went crazy from 2003-2006. Historically, the value of your house *should* double every 7-10 years (for an 8-12% ROI). During the real estate boom, prices got WAY ahead of their historical markers.
Anybody who owned a home in 2003 is being hurt more by the rising gas prices than the real estate slump. The only people who really "got hurt" by the current real estate market are first-time buyers between 2005-2010 as the market adjusts to its historical rates.***
So, please, don't make broad generalizations about the real estate market without any historical perspective. You'll see that MOST PEOPLE are unaffected.
Footnote:
*** Also, people who bought multiple properties late in the game with the intention of *flipping* them, but those people were simply GODDAMNED MORONS who deserve what they got.
If things are stagnant and they need to recruit new developers, then the title of this article should be "Devs needed to contribute to X.org for Critical Design Improvements". Until I see *that* on the /. headline, I am content to assume that the stability of the project has enabled the old group of developers to work on projects that are currently more deserving of there time.
I agree wholeheartedly. The current release of X is suitable and works well for me.
The "upgrade every year" mentality is the wrong one to have. They missed their date? Okay, that's fine. As long as they don't buckle under the "release schedule" mentality compromise quality. I may be naive, but I don't know any reason they would want to push/rush their next release.
Liberals want a totalitarian, murderous regime that destroys wealth for the population? No thanks, buddy. We value American freedoms, foremost. Pursuit of happiness is tantamount. Somebody born from individuals who squandered their happiness rights by becoming derelict deserves the upward class mobility to be successful. By not having the "social programs" that you seem to think "make you poor", we do a disservice to the disenfranchised but otherwise capable lower class.
Conversely, there are derelicts who are born into privilege but do NOT deserve the right to be happy because of their negative effects on the rest of the population. I think you would agree that the "Paris Hiltons" and "Kenneth Lays" of the world don't deserve the success that they enjoyed at their peaks.
But like everything else, the issue isn't black&white and there is no silver bullet that can create a balance to fairly unite the various American social classes.
Not only are we richer, but we are less likely to be put in a situation where fragmentation in the tools-development department causes our projects to be late.
Having worked with at least three major source code repository tools (CVS, ClearCase, and PVCS/Dimensions) I could give an entire rant about how they each give the top-level objects that you checkout different names (Modules, VOBs, and Products).
If you want an honest opinion, I think every developer should know how to work with CVS/Subversion just because of its simplicity and freedom. But I think for huge projects (~50+ developers) I would recommend the added control that ClearCase provides to make it easier for people to work collaboratively.
However, 50 licenses of ClearCase (and by-the-way... you need to buy ClearQuest (to manage problem reports) and MultiSite (to manage distributed development)) costs about half a million dollars. Is that worth it? You could pay 5 or 6 additional developers for that kind of money.
I read the earlier story, but it only now just occurred to me that another prime candidate for this is YouTube. The freedom to "Broadcast Yourself" is scary in a lot of general contexts that have already led to a number of government agency censorships around the world.
Also, giving Google the ability to self-censor the content posted (currently, I believe objectionable violence and pornography is banned by the TOS) provides for a bias on the site.
why settle for a logo mounted in the night sky when you can use LED lights to display the logo in full color? Of course, it would cost a little extra but you could make up the costs by splurging on LED lights that could be programmed to display different colors so you could rent out the ad space for $100 Million per night.
Can't we have both? Seriously, though, I enjoyed your justifications for establishing a space colony. However, there is a current space station with modules from Russia, Japan, Canada, USA, and Europe which has already taken a decade to construct and won't be done for another two years. The crew of 2-3 comes back from their missions with severe atrophy, and they require supply missions (food, etc...) every 6 months in order to survive.
I've not saying it isn't possible, but establishing a colony within another planets gravity-well is likely going to be *easier* than a space colony in the Earth's orbit.
Ultimately, I think it would be worthwhile to pursue both projects.
Quoting an e-mail distributed by the Mars Society in reference to a McCain speech from within the current week:
"I am intrigued by a man on Mars and I think that it would excite the imagination of the American people," said McCain. He argued that NASA needs to do a better job of inspiring the American public, as was the case during the race to the Moon in the 1960's. "I'd be willing to spend more taxpayers dollars [to support NASA]," he said.This is good news for pro-exploration voters, but I believe this is political posturing. He was in Florida while he gave the speech, and NASA is big business there. Until I am convinced that McCain has intentions to spend less on military conflicts, I cannot bring myself to even consider giving him my vote.
I couldn't agree more. But like I said, out-of-control real estate prices are a major urban concern. Also, another reader mentioned that cheap housing has a significant impact on local crime. High-crime areas are definitely not good for families.
So in addition to parks, I think urban schools that are hands-down better than suburban options would be a boon for the "family-friendly" cities that you speak of.
Dallas is an up-and-coming technology center. This has been widely reported. There has been a TON of new technology businesses that have setup shop in Dallas in the last decade. If you want to attribute that to deregulation, that's fine.
It takes collective wisdom in form of people exchanging resources freely with the price system transmitting the information to get the most productivity out of a resource.Agreed. But consolidation in the last decade has hurt the abilities of the markets to function the way they are supposed to. Oil prices are a sign of this. However, I view the high oil prices as a means to justify investment in next-generation energy. Solar and wind businesses are booming these days - and fortunately the USA has an ample supply of these resources to compete for money in these next-generation markets.
I grew up in a suburb of NYC, and have spent the last year living within biking distance of downtown Boston. The thing isn't that I hate suburbs specifically. I am a huge supporter of the ability to choose family-friendly suburban life over city-living.
What I think is broken is the insane housing markets in cities. On the one hand, it is a supply-and-demand problem. On the other hand, cities should be tasked to provide a safe-and-affordable place for their citizens to live.
Meanwhile, suburbs NEED to improve public transportation options to connect the suburban grid in a way that lowers the burden for commuters.