Oh yeah... Novell NetWare 4.12 and previous. You booted the computer using MS-DOS (or DR-DOS...), then after the NOS was running, you unloaded to bootloader. This was fixed in NetWare 5.0 (did anyone actually use it?). This rumor should scare the market nicely. Then I expect VMWare to release their own bootloader. Whether it will be "too late" by then or not is an open question. Of course, I still wonder, from a business-sense, what VMWare is doing as a separate company. It seems to me a miracle that some server OS company (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) didn't scoop them up and incorporate so that Windows Server 2008 could, in fact, run a half-dozen instances of Windows Server 2003, for example. But what do I know... I'm just a theoretician.
But if they were bad at their job, or did something outrageous that got them fired, about all you can say is that you wouldn't recommend them for rehire.
Yes, this is exactly the line you have to give. And it is for legal reasons. Unless you can point to publicly available documentation, even saying someone was bad at their job is a form of slander and the person begin slandered can sue.
... so no one's going to read this, and it's slightly off-topic anyway. I'm prepared to take the Karma hit.
I posit that the causes of global warming doesn't matter. What does matter is entirely economic: a move away from non-renewable fossil fuels, the raise in standard of living world-wide by instituting pollution controls, and the leveling of the economic playing field by putting the same pollution controls in country X as in country Y.
This article says that the sun causes global warming. Well no shit. Of course it does. And a fluctuation of the solar output would spike temperatures on Earth and Mars. This still doesn't excuse our society from the fact that in the past century+ of industrial growth, we have been wasteful and that the continuing argument for that wastefulness is the fact that in the short term the costs of using and developing new technologies is more expensive using a cost-benefit analysis. What happens when fuel becomes too expensive and the technology isn't on-line to provide a cost-efficient alternative?
In brief, I'm tired of the argument on whether or not global warming is cause by human beings. It's a moot point. The important point is that current fuel usage is non-renewable and wasteful. Everything else is just published results.
Actually, I would say that CS programmes need MORE math and theory classes.
That, I'll agree with. I started my CS degree in 1992. After a lot of delay, real-life job, and life, I finished my degree in 2005. My professors reads like a list of old guard Computer Scientists. Hofstadter and Friedman left an indelible mark on me. Now, the Computer Science department has, for political reasons, merged with the Informatics department. The work now emphasizes boxed solutions and applying CS theory to science. I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, I am employed in biotech, mining data and building systems to convert mass spec data into a sell able product. As a professional, I have no problem applying a boxed solution as part of an overall solution. However, the "box" is not opaque to me. I understand exactly how it works and treat it as less code that I have to write. My fear is that in a few years, too many students will be graduated that do not know how to step through levels of abstraction and will simply buy "magic boxes" from whatever bass-ackward country that can provide the solution by leveraging and re-educating their work force. This leads directly to workers that cannot create. This looks a lot like the Eloi vs the Morlocks, with the Western World being the Eloi and the Morlocks eating us for lunch.
A lot has changed in the past 20 years with the adoption of pervasive technologies. Yes, e-mail and instant messaging and forums have been around a lot longer. I'm enough of a geek to acknowledge that. What has changed, however, is the adoption and ubiquitousness of the technology.
What hasn't changed, however, are people. People, in the US especially, differentiate themselves from The Other. Be it a "geeky" kid, two guys or two girls kissing in public, people who have (or lack) skin pigmentation, anything. All we're seeing here is a new type of differentiation of "The Other".
To solve the problem requires striking at the root of this all-too-human drive to be xenophobic. The real problem is: How do we (individually or as a society) bridge the divide and create, if not xenophiles, people with an educated understanding and lack of fear or hostility from those that are different from themselves?
Or, put another way, SSDD. Just with cooler technology and different leverage.
You mean like is already happening? Works something like this: Your ISP buys a chunk of bandwidth from whomever via a peering agreement. The then parcel that out over their subscribers, betting that most of the time (viewed in terms of microseconds) the bandwidth usage will be idle. This means that the aggregate usage for all "high bandwidth" subscribers is actually equal to the same number of subscribers at dial-up speeds.
Now let's play with it. You have (for argument's sake) 1000 customers using 1000 MB of bandwidth.(I'm throwing out numbers to provide clarity. Real numbers would be bigger.) 90% of the users are "normal" users (porn, email, MORPGS, web...) and use 20% of the bandwidth available, or 200 MB. The rest belongs to the other 10%, the 100 or so users setting up P2P peering and sending out movies, radio stream, and so forth. The ISP *hates* these users as they clog the bandwidth for 90% of their *overpaying* customers. They are looking for any way possible to squelch their usage. Hence why they back legislation that allows them to ID certain types of traffic and throttle them. And this is simply *one* use of said ability to typify net traffic.
My point in bringing this up is that Net Neutrality is a slogan, endemic to the current all-or-nothing point of view. There are a lot of gray arguments that calls for a balance in how network traffic routing and monitoring is allowed. It becomes a question of how and how much the government should be involved. Do we say "Private network, do what you like, but be prepared to be sued?" That's one option. Another is to granularly legislate what types of traffic can be monitored. And none of this even comes close to talking about the various ways of making one type of traffic look like another. It's a nasty can of worms.
Myself, I hope this is viewed as a case of dangerous lawmaking and is handled as such, is given significant public discussion and is open to review from everyone. A law seems to be needed as internetworking merges with telephony (do you really want lag on an e-911 call? And what happens when a storm knocks out the LAN, but emergency communication is needed?). If a law is passed, it will need vigorous and periodic review as the technology changes.
...utilizing your concrete understanding of CS concepts, algorithms, data structures, and the problem domain in order to synthesize a solution to the problem. I really don't think colleges teach this at all. But then again, how can you? Problem solving skills are something that you just have to "get" on your own (in my opinion) via challenging yourself with increasingly hard problems.
Colleges can teach this, but usually by the time you get to the point where such a class would be feasible, the degree requirements are almost done. There is only so much time in an undergrad degree, after all. My school offered a two-semester software engineering sequence where a problem was assigned (usually from an outside company that needed at real-world solution). The design of such a course is that it takes up about half of your senior year credit hours. By the time I got there, I was more interested in theoretical work and already had a day-job doing software engineering.
The seeker here wonders where to get started. Everyone is basically saying "jmp #in". I wouldn't go blaming his hesitance on his school, but on the seeker. We's jumped into the cubical world of C/C++ hacking and wants to have some fun. My suggestion is that he poke around and find something that interests him. Otherwise he might as well go back to school.
I'm sure this is something everyone on Slashdot already knew, but it's nice to see the business press stating the obvious on the eve of the third and final "next gen" console launch. For me, personally? I'll look at the consoles come April and decide if I want to buy one then. In the meantime, my PS2, GameCube, and PC will "hold" me in terms of gaming.
It's an alternative theory of global warming: The earth is heating up, not just because of pollution, but because of the massive amounts of concrete (rather than grass, trees, and dirt) that cover the ground in "civilized" areas. There is correlation, as well. The amount of concrete in-use has skyrocketed since the beginning of the 20th century. Over the same time period, the average global temperature has risen.
Slightly off-topic, perhaps, but didn't Cameron Crowe drop such a discussion about cassette tapes in his 2001 movie Almost Famous? So the question is, did he do it as a nod-and-wink to the then-current of music fan downloaders using Napster?
For a change, Microsoft's IE team was showing a bit of class and acknowledging that without the competition and innovation from Mozilla Firefox, there (probably) wouldn't have been an IE 7 project. It also hints that there might be some subtle changes in Microsoft's old Cult of Bill approach. At the end of the day, software developers are just people, and political football aside, there really is no reason for animosity. Kudos to Microsoft's IE 7 team for being good sports.
Perhaps you can explain how ordinary police work will be effective against large groups of insurgents roaming the back roads of Afghanistan and the back alleys of Baghdad armed to teeth with automatic weapons, rocket propelled grenades, and suicide truck bombers.
I'll conceed your point if you'll condeed my point: Those people are not here. And that was the point of the Schneier opinion. It would be very difficult to find large groups of insurgents in the US, Canada, or the rest of the Western world.
I will go one step further. What would happen if the US, in bits and pieces, withdrew to the borders of Iraq? Have the US keep enough troops in place to ensure that Iran doesn't invade and let the Iraqi government know that the training wheels are off, but we'll be back to help if needed.
Yes, the war is real, but it is not a war on terrorism. It is a war created by unbalancing a region of the world and failing in the attempt to re-create the balance of power to suit US interests. It is an now open question as to whether or not said war is really in the national interest of the United States. Stability in the region is, but quite possibly not "winning the war".
It is too late to ask whether Iraq was a mistake. Mistake or not is of no consequence. What matters is what We (as in the Western World, not just the United States) do about creating a balance of power in the created vacuum.
Point. But for clarification, YouTube has universal re-distribution rights. This means that a revenue stream can be created from what is submitted via packaged product and higher-res re-distribution. It's like selling an article to a magazine. You retain the copyright, but a publisher can insert into the print release contract a stipulation that the publisher can re-print your submission at a set royalty in another forum. So while you keep your ownership rights, as in you can place your video anyplace you please including competing services or on your own server, YouTube reserves the right to sell your video in another form (as a compilation, for example) and not pay anything.
More importantly, we now have a slight glimpse as to how YouTube will make money. Follow my logic:
YouTube owns all amateur submissions (read the TOS)
YouTube can charge a fee to the record companies for advertising
This means that there are now two revenue streams. The first one is potential: YouTube can sell higher-res clips to media outlets when a viral video becomes newsworthy. YouTube can also sell DVDs of content (a "best of" compilation, for example). The second one is realised: Content outlet in terms of infrastructure and a "difficult-for-lay-person-to-copy" format. YouTube can sell this broadcast outlet to host copyrighted material. That's what they are doing with the music vids and the model can easily spread to other media (like, say, re-runs and cult-hit shows that tend to moulder in neglect in studio vaults due to margins not quite being high enough for DVD sales or syndication).
What this means is we now know where the "free lunch" of YouTube leads: First-to-market Internet video-on-demand broadcasts. If, that is, YouTube can pull in enough revenue to keep buying bandwidth and storage space.
Writing isn't all that hard, though doing it while fronting a day-job will make it interesting. My problem is that I won't be able to write bleeding-edge reviews. All the stuff I can afford (and have a taste for) is a few months to a few years old. The real issue is venue. We've passed the age of 'zines. And Blogs won't really work for this. We need good old-fashioned paper publication. Something suitable for reading while making your ears bleed with an iPod at eleven on the subway. Rolling Stone should step up and see if they can do something with this. Not a "regular feature", but a bizarre and off-the-wall featurette that gloriously bathes in product placement and craptastic subject matter.
Question is... will it happen? Probably not. It's just too Boomer-esque to explain video games and tech as the drug of a new generation.
You have to basically be two-faced about any development. Be gung-ho to management types, show them what they want to see, but once they are gone, do the development right. It can seem like a pirate-type undertaking sometimes. You have to sneak out and interview users while they are on break. Take up smoking. You'll gather the best information that way. Gather real usage details. People like to talk about their work, so this isn't really all that hard, but it seems non-productive to management types.
Okay, being a bit more serious, it's up to you as a programmer to decide how you want to approach any project. Never mind the micro-managing boss. He probably doesn't know what he's doing, either. Decide for yourself what effort needs to be done and if it makes you feel better laying down a decent foundation from the start, do it. If you've got crap to work with, refactor and repurpose.
Toolsets, in and of themselves, don't solve problems. The fundamentals of designing, and more importantly, not over-designing, your project does. Read Cooper's book. Seek out books by Raskin, Thomas, and Hunt. They all say the same thing, if in different ways. Doing the work right the first time will make you money in the long run. Actively fight back against management that keeps wanting to change the requirements and doesn't know what they are doing. Be passionate about what you do. And if you get fired, it will be for a damn good reason. Don't play their game, play yours. Most importantly, enjoy what you do. If you don't like it, go do something else.
This is simply a fact of life. Sure, you can come up with a really long and hard to guess password, but beyond a certain point, you end up with something obnoxious, hard to remeber, or something that simply gets cycled about a bunch of places.
Real (cheap and reasonably strong) security requires a mix of keys. For example, a synchronized pseudorandom number generator, a hashed passfile, followed by the standard text password. Still not perfect because the pseudorandom number sequence can be cracked and the hashed passfile (both stored, stored, say, on a USB drive) can be compromised, but a layered approach provides the best blend of ease-of-use and security.
The problem is (especially on a free project like Debian), how do you pay for the (physical) keys and who issues them? Can it be done without unfairly creating a barrier to participation?
The question is too broad and essentially meaningless. It is, at best, an unanswerable rhetorical question.
That said, the question is still important. Not because there is an answer (there are, in fact, several correct answers), but because by asking it, Dr Hawking is using his stature to attempt to raise social consciousness just a tiny bit. This is a case where the act of asking the question is more important that obtaining an answer. It's like asking, "What is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything?" Yeah, yeah... the answer is 42. A non-sensical answer to a non-sensical question. But by asking the question, movement is created. Some paths lead towards suicide (or, if you're pessimistic, all paths lead towards suicide) but asking the question causes people to move about, discover things, and make changes.
So how will the human race survive the next 100 years? I don't know. I do not even know that we will. But by asking the question, a certain amount of energy is introducd to the system that could very well create a path for the survival of our species....for just a bit longer.
"If someone in Cuba has something to sell me, and I want to buy it, what business has anyone stopping us? Anything else is simply coercing us.... the evil companies of course, they are going to pass all the savings along to the CEOs, those rich evil bastards. In a truly free market, though, another company will gladly spring up doing the exact same thing, but NOT pay the CEOs a bunch of money, until the other company goes out of business (or changes)."
Good point. On paper (and in practice) a truely free market is wickedly efficient. It drives down the cost of a good or service to the lowest price it could possibly be produced. And that, I would argue, is exactly why The Company (any company) really doesn't like the free market, even if they all pay lip-service to it. Every business wants to be a monopoly. That way they can name their prices and have the best control of their expenditures.
Add in a good dose of politics and you get, effectively, the same practice: Cartels. OPEC, SIIA... they may not do it out in the open, but businesses that compete against each other often argue together to get regulations and favors from their government. No business spends their money when they can spend someone elses (I'd argue that this is a lemma of my above point).
Back on-topic, though, H1-B visas aren't the problem. Foriegn workers aren't the problem. In fact, America needs foriegn workers. Half the successful businesses in Silicon Valley were started by immigrants. In fact, the current US foriegn policy keeps a lot of the best and brightest out, forcing them to live under oppression in their country of origin (I'm referring to the Islamic world). The problem is a system that is unfairly balanced to help The Cartel get cheap labor, rather than forcing the bits and pieces of said cartel to compete on the free market for labor. This leads to collusion (as noted in previous comments above in detail) that circumvents the protections put in place to attempt to keep the monopolistic tendencies of The Comapny in check.
"Allowing TV/Voice/other-real-time-traffic to be prioritized above less time-sensative material makes a lot of sense. Allowing SBC TV traffic to be prioritized above Google TV traffic will mean consumers continue to have little to no choice of providers."
You raise a good point, and it is this level of compromise that Congress has been entrusted to make. Good legislation is compromise. A compromise that take in equal parts all competing points of view, performs a weighted mean of sorts, and comes out as something that no interest likes, but all can live with.
This is pretty much what we need: 'net grading in the technical sense, but neutrality in the pragmatic sense.
"At this point, you will have helped the U.S. economy, you will have created jobs, you will have grown the company into something successful and long lasting, and you will be at a high position at the top, earning a high salary, and no doubt owning a good portion of the stock."
And then, if you are any good at all, you leave the company and do it all over again. Or maybe you start your own company. Still, aren't you (and myself) getting a bit off-topic?
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
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The Living Dilbert?
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"Many will argue against what I just said, but they likely "drank the Kool-Aid" and got the degrees or certs."
The problem with degrees and certs is that they signal finality. However, as anyone in the Real World will tell you, any certification (no matter which one you get) is nothing more than a starting point. I'd think long and hard before taking any job that looked at me solely based on my certifications (I have a few... Some are for technology that doesn't even exist any more).
Military or Civilian, what counts when hiring someone is how well their personality and motivation fits in with the group that you are trying to form. If they fit in well, the motivation is there and the lack of skills beyond a certain point doesn't matter. They will be motivated enough to learn the rest and, in fact, will be happier in the job because they will be forced to think creatively everyday while they solve problems and learn something new.
This one's easy. It all comes down to political speech.
The argument on the ISP side is that certain types of traffic require more bandwidth than others and that the pipes are full. They've put themselves in a trap by flat-fee charging for bandwidth and now they are trying to get out of it. Problem is, they are spinning the argument in language that is imprecise. ISPs have always had tiered bandwidth.
Right now, your Republican father has "his boys" in office. Great for him. That will not always be the case. Political whims wax and wane and what is popular speech one day (the 4/5 compromise, all Men are created equal, and so forth) becomes not so popular the next.
So here's what happens (example). 5 years from now, politics shifts. The Republicans are out of office and are forced to re-group and re-define who they are (like the Democrats should be doing, but I'm getting off-topic). One of the most effective ways of doing such is with technology. This is where the concept of "net neutrality" comes in.
Your father wants to hear the latest from "his boys". He attempts to go to their website, but because of a political beef, his ISP won't take their money to get the high-band service. Or worse yet, their sites addresses are out-right blocked because the ISP won't except their money to be listed at the DNS server. What we should be protecting is the ability to prevent anyone from putting arbitrary filters on a publically accessable network and providing a legal recourse for those that are harmed by such actions.
Otherwise, I fully expect to see ISPs get sued for allowing pornography (the definition of which varied from local region to local region). It is illogical for the IPSs to ask for the ability to throttle bandwidth, and therefore theoretically be able to censor it, without opening up the legal plating that protects them from getting sued. Suddenly, they will have control over what flows across their network. This is the end-game. If Net Neutrality doesn't pass, then fall back to the courts and show the ISP that they have made a critical error.
Anyhow, your bullet points:
Freedom of political speech - Without Network Neutrality, what's to stop your ISP (or the government) from filtering what political views you see?
Tiered structure - The Internet is already tiered. Don't believe me? Try leasing an OC-12 for $29.95 a month, unlimited usage.
Okay... You were very fortunate and went to a school with a decent AP program and gifted teachers. So did I. However, that is not the point of TFA. The point of TFA is to look at the bottom students, not the top.
What is very likely to happen to you is that you will go into college and wonder why you are spending the first two years repeating everything you did in high school. Then, perhaps, you will understand just how "bad" other schools can be. This is what happened to me (though I'm doing quite well now with my dream job crunching data from mass spectrometry experiments). Smart people like you aren't the issue. Chances are good that you will do well for yourself because you have learned self-motivation.
The bottom, in this case, is what is important. Through a systematic chain of faults, America is raising a generation of lost souls, fit only to shop at Wal-Mart and do meaningless service jobs. Their curiosity and creativity is being dragged out of them by the soulless crunch of a paint-by-numbers curriculum.
Education is important, but even more important is to get rid of the ability to "drift" through the system. Myself, I back a blend of tests and portfolio-driven measurments. What I'm suggesting here are qualifying exams to exit High School that aren't just based upon some standardized list of questions, but demonstration of skills. It seems to me that even if you cannot remember the stupid trivia on the test that if you can demonstrate the ablility to read and understand an apartment lease agreement, balance your checkbook, and interpret current events on your own that our educational system is "good enough". Problem is, depending upon what metric you look at, a larger-than-comfortable percentage cannot even do these survival-oriented tasks.
You've done well in school. Good for you. Now show some leadership and walk amongst the people. Try and understand that they got sold a raw deal because no one ever told them what and why they needed to know things. Watch as they end up in debt, working McJobs, and dying too young as their very souls are crushed. It doesn't have to be like this, but these are what the past generation of factory overseers wanted: People whos jobs they could package and send to places where the work could be done cheaper.
The current generation is lost. Their children, however, do not have to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah... Novell NetWare 4.12 and previous. You booted the computer using MS-DOS (or DR-DOS...), then after the NOS was running, you unloaded to bootloader. This was fixed in NetWare 5.0 (did anyone actually use it?). This rumor should scare the market nicely. Then I expect VMWare to release their own bootloader. Whether it will be "too late" by then or not is an open question. Of course, I still wonder, from a business-sense, what VMWare is doing as a separate company. It seems to me a miracle that some server OS company (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) didn't scoop them up and incorporate so that Windows Server 2008 could, in fact, run a half-dozen instances of Windows Server 2003, for example. But what do I know... I'm just a theoretician.
Yes, this is exactly the line you have to give. And it is for legal reasons. Unless you can point to publicly available documentation, even saying someone was bad at their job is a form of slander and the person begin slandered can sue.
... so no one's going to read this, and it's slightly off-topic anyway. I'm prepared to take the Karma hit.
I posit that the causes of global warming doesn't matter. What does matter is entirely economic: a move away from non-renewable fossil fuels, the raise in standard of living world-wide by instituting pollution controls, and the leveling of the economic playing field by putting the same pollution controls in country X as in country Y.
This article says that the sun causes global warming. Well no shit. Of course it does. And a fluctuation of the solar output would spike temperatures on Earth and Mars. This still doesn't excuse our society from the fact that in the past century+ of industrial growth, we have been wasteful and that the continuing argument for that wastefulness is the fact that in the short term the costs of using and developing new technologies is more expensive using a cost-benefit analysis. What happens when fuel becomes too expensive and the technology isn't on-line to provide a cost-efficient alternative?
In brief, I'm tired of the argument on whether or not global warming is cause by human beings. It's a moot point. The important point is that current fuel usage is non-renewable and wasteful. Everything else is just published results.
That, I'll agree with. I started my CS degree in 1992. After a lot of delay, real-life job, and life, I finished my degree in 2005. My professors reads like a list of old guard Computer Scientists. Hofstadter and Friedman left an indelible mark on me. Now, the Computer Science department has, for political reasons, merged with the Informatics department. The work now emphasizes boxed solutions and applying CS theory to science. I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, I am employed in biotech, mining data and building systems to convert mass spec data into a sell able product. As a professional, I have no problem applying a boxed solution as part of an overall solution. However, the "box" is not opaque to me. I understand exactly how it works and treat it as less code that I have to write. My fear is that in a few years, too many students will be graduated that do not know how to step through levels of abstraction and will simply buy "magic boxes" from whatever bass-ackward country that can provide the solution by leveraging and re-educating their work force. This leads directly to workers that cannot create. This looks a lot like the Eloi vs the Morlocks, with the Western World being the Eloi and the Morlocks eating us for lunch.
A lot has changed in the past 20 years with the adoption of pervasive technologies. Yes, e-mail and instant messaging and forums have been around a lot longer. I'm enough of a geek to acknowledge that. What has changed, however, is the adoption and ubiquitousness of the technology.
What hasn't changed, however, are people. People, in the US especially, differentiate themselves from The Other. Be it a "geeky" kid, two guys or two girls kissing in public, people who have (or lack) skin pigmentation, anything. All we're seeing here is a new type of differentiation of "The Other".
To solve the problem requires striking at the root of this all-too-human drive to be xenophobic. The real problem is: How do we (individually or as a society) bridge the divide and create, if not xenophiles, people with an educated understanding and lack of fear or hostility from those that are different from themselves?
Or, put another way, SSDD. Just with cooler technology and different leverage.
You mean like is already happening? Works something like this: Your ISP buys a chunk of bandwidth from whomever via a peering agreement. The then parcel that out over their subscribers, betting that most of the time (viewed in terms of microseconds) the bandwidth usage will be idle. This means that the aggregate usage for all "high bandwidth" subscribers is actually equal to the same number of subscribers at dial-up speeds.
.(I'm throwing out numbers to provide clarity. Real numbers would be bigger.) 90% of the users are "normal" users (porn, email, MORPGS, web...) and use 20% of the bandwidth available, or 200 MB. The rest belongs to the other 10%, the 100 or so users setting up P2P peering and sending out movies, radio stream, and so forth. The ISP *hates* these users as they clog the bandwidth for 90% of their *overpaying* customers. They are looking for any way possible to squelch their usage. Hence why they back legislation that allows them to ID certain types of traffic and throttle them. And this is simply *one* use of said ability to typify net traffic.
Now let's play with it. You have (for argument's sake) 1000 customers using 1000 MB of bandwidth
My point in bringing this up is that Net Neutrality is a slogan, endemic to the current all-or-nothing point of view. There are a lot of gray arguments that calls for a balance in how network traffic routing and monitoring is allowed. It becomes a question of how and how much the government should be involved. Do we say "Private network, do what you like, but be prepared to be sued?" That's one option. Another is to granularly legislate what types of traffic can be monitored. And none of this even comes close to talking about the various ways of making one type of traffic look like another. It's a nasty can of worms.
Myself, I hope this is viewed as a case of dangerous lawmaking and is handled as such, is given significant public discussion and is open to review from everyone. A law seems to be needed as internetworking merges with telephony (do you really want lag on an e-911 call? And what happens when a storm knocks out the LAN, but emergency communication is needed?). If a law is passed, it will need vigorous and periodic review as the technology changes.
Colleges can teach this, but usually by the time you get to the point where such a class would be feasible, the degree requirements are almost done. There is only so much time in an undergrad degree, after all. My school offered a two-semester software engineering sequence where a problem was assigned (usually from an outside company that needed at real-world solution). The design of such a course is that it takes up about half of your senior year credit hours. By the time I got there, I was more interested in theoretical work and already had a day-job doing software engineering.
The seeker here wonders where to get started. Everyone is basically saying "jmp #in". I wouldn't go blaming his hesitance on his school, but on the seeker. We's jumped into the cubical world of C/C++ hacking and wants to have some fun. My suggestion is that he poke around and find something that interests him. Otherwise he might as well go back to school.
I'm sure this is something everyone on Slashdot already knew, but it's nice to see the business press stating the obvious on the eve of the third and final "next gen" console launch. For me, personally? I'll look at the consoles come April and decide if I want to buy one then. In the meantime, my PS2, GameCube, and PC will "hold" me in terms of gaming.
It's an alternative theory of global warming: The earth is heating up, not just because of pollution, but because of the massive amounts of concrete (rather than grass, trees, and dirt) that cover the ground in "civilized" areas. There is correlation, as well. The amount of concrete in-use has skyrocketed since the beginning of the 20th century. Over the same time period, the average global temperature has risen.
Slightly off-topic, perhaps, but didn't Cameron Crowe drop such a discussion about cassette tapes in his 2001 movie Almost Famous? So the question is, did he do it as a nod-and-wink to the then-current of music fan downloaders using Napster?
For a change, Microsoft's IE team was showing a bit of class and acknowledging that without the competition and innovation from Mozilla Firefox, there (probably) wouldn't have been an IE 7 project. It also hints that there might be some subtle changes in Microsoft's old Cult of Bill approach. At the end of the day, software developers are just people, and political football aside, there really is no reason for animosity. Kudos to Microsoft's IE 7 team for being good sports.
I'll conceed your point if you'll condeed my point: Those people are not here. And that was the point of the Schneier opinion. It would be very difficult to find large groups of insurgents in the US, Canada, or the rest of the Western world.
I will go one step further. What would happen if the US, in bits and pieces, withdrew to the borders of Iraq? Have the US keep enough troops in place to ensure that Iran doesn't invade and let the Iraqi government know that the training wheels are off, but we'll be back to help if needed.
Yes, the war is real, but it is not a war on terrorism. It is a war created by unbalancing a region of the world and failing in the attempt to re-create the balance of power to suit US interests. It is an now open question as to whether or not said war is really in the national interest of the United States. Stability in the region is, but quite possibly not "winning the war".
It is too late to ask whether Iraq was a mistake. Mistake or not is of no consequence. What matters is what We (as in the Western World, not just the United States) do about creating a balance of power in the created vacuum.
Point. But for clarification, YouTube has universal re-distribution rights. This means that a revenue stream can be created from what is submitted via packaged product and higher-res re-distribution. It's like selling an article to a magazine. You retain the copyright, but a publisher can insert into the print release contract a stipulation that the publisher can re-print your submission at a set royalty in another forum. So while you keep your ownership rights, as in you can place your video anyplace you please including competing services or on your own server, YouTube reserves the right to sell your video in another form (as a compilation, for example) and not pay anything.
More importantly, we now have a slight glimpse as to how YouTube will make money. Follow my logic:
This means that there are now two revenue streams. The first one is potential: YouTube can sell higher-res clips to media outlets when a viral video becomes newsworthy. YouTube can also sell DVDs of content (a "best of" compilation, for example). The second one is realised: Content outlet in terms of infrastructure and a "difficult-for-lay-person-to-copy" format. YouTube can sell this broadcast outlet to host copyrighted material. That's what they are doing with the music vids and the model can easily spread to other media (like, say, re-runs and cult-hit shows that tend to moulder in neglect in studio vaults due to margins not quite being high enough for DVD sales or syndication).
What this means is we now know where the "free lunch" of YouTube leads: First-to-market Internet video-on-demand broadcasts. If, that is, YouTube can pull in enough revenue to keep buying bandwidth and storage space.
Writing isn't all that hard, though doing it while fronting a day-job will make it interesting. My problem is that I won't be able to write bleeding-edge reviews. All the stuff I can afford (and have a taste for) is a few months to a few years old. The real issue is venue. We've passed the age of 'zines. And Blogs won't really work for this. We need good old-fashioned paper publication. Something suitable for reading while making your ears bleed with an iPod at eleven on the subway. Rolling Stone should step up and see if they can do something with this. Not a "regular feature", but a bizarre and off-the-wall featurette that gloriously bathes in product placement and craptastic subject matter.
Question is... will it happen? Probably not. It's just too Boomer-esque to explain video games and tech as the drug of a new generation.
Yes, I'm stealing the title of Alan Cooper's book
You have to basically be two-faced about any development. Be gung-ho to management types, show them what they want to see, but once they are gone, do the development right. It can seem like a pirate-type undertaking sometimes. You have to sneak out and interview users while they are on break. Take up smoking. You'll gather the best information that way. Gather real usage details. People like to talk about their work, so this isn't really all that hard, but it seems non-productive to management types.
Okay, being a bit more serious, it's up to you as a programmer to decide how you want to approach any project. Never mind the micro-managing boss. He probably doesn't know what he's doing, either. Decide for yourself what effort needs to be done and if it makes you feel better laying down a decent foundation from the start, do it. If you've got crap to work with, refactor and repurpose.
Toolsets, in and of themselves, don't solve problems. The fundamentals of designing, and more importantly, not over-designing, your project does. Read Cooper's book. Seek out books by Raskin, Thomas, and Hunt. They all say the same thing, if in different ways. Doing the work right the first time will make you money in the long run. Actively fight back against management that keeps wanting to change the requirements and doesn't know what they are doing. Be passionate about what you do. And if you get fired, it will be for a damn good reason. Don't play their game, play yours. Most importantly, enjoy what you do. If you don't like it, go do something else.
This is simply a fact of life. Sure, you can come up with a really long and hard to guess password, but beyond a certain point, you end up with something obnoxious, hard to remeber, or something that simply gets cycled about a bunch of places.
Real (cheap and reasonably strong) security requires a mix of keys. For example, a synchronized pseudorandom number generator, a hashed passfile, followed by the standard text password. Still not perfect because the pseudorandom number sequence can be cracked and the hashed passfile (both stored, stored, say, on a USB drive) can be compromised, but a layered approach provides the best blend of ease-of-use and security.
The problem is (especially on a free project like Debian), how do you pay for the (physical) keys and who issues them? Can it be done without unfairly creating a barrier to participation?
The question is too broad and essentially meaningless. It is, at best, an unanswerable rhetorical question.
That said, the question is still important. Not because there is an answer (there are, in fact, several correct answers), but because by asking it, Dr Hawking is using his stature to attempt to raise social consciousness just a tiny bit. This is a case where the act of asking the question is more important that obtaining an answer. It's like asking, "What is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything?" Yeah, yeah... the answer is 42. A non-sensical answer to a non-sensical question. But by asking the question, movement is created. Some paths lead towards suicide (or, if you're pessimistic, all paths lead towards suicide) but asking the question causes people to move about, discover things, and make changes.
So how will the human race survive the next 100 years? I don't know. I do not even know that we will. But by asking the question, a certain amount of energy is introducd to the system that could very well create a path for the survival of our species. ...for just a bit longer.
Good point. On paper (and in practice) a truely free market is wickedly efficient. It drives down the cost of a good or service to the lowest price it could possibly be produced. And that, I would argue, is exactly why The Company (any company) really doesn't like the free market, even if they all pay lip-service to it. Every business wants to be a monopoly. That way they can name their prices and have the best control of their expenditures.
Add in a good dose of politics and you get, effectively, the same practice: Cartels. OPEC, SIIA... they may not do it out in the open, but businesses that compete against each other often argue together to get regulations and favors from their government. No business spends their money when they can spend someone elses (I'd argue that this is a lemma of my above point).
Back on-topic, though, H1-B visas aren't the problem. Foriegn workers aren't the problem. In fact, America needs foriegn workers. Half the successful businesses in Silicon Valley were started by immigrants. In fact, the current US foriegn policy keeps a lot of the best and brightest out, forcing them to live under oppression in their country of origin (I'm referring to the Islamic world). The problem is a system that is unfairly balanced to help The Cartel get cheap labor, rather than forcing the bits and pieces of said cartel to compete on the free market for labor. This leads to collusion (as noted in previous comments above in detail) that circumvents the protections put in place to attempt to keep the monopolistic tendencies of The Comapny in check.
"Allowing TV/Voice/other-real-time-traffic to be prioritized above less time-sensative material makes a lot of sense. Allowing SBC TV traffic to be prioritized above Google TV traffic will mean consumers continue to have little to no choice of providers."
You raise a good point, and it is this level of compromise that Congress has been entrusted to make. Good legislation is compromise. A compromise that take in equal parts all competing points of view, performs a weighted mean of sorts, and comes out as something that no interest likes, but all can live with.
This is pretty much what we need: 'net grading in the technical sense, but neutrality in the pragmatic sense.
IIRC, University of Amsterdam. But I could be wrong.
And then, if you are any good at all, you leave the company and do it all over again. Or maybe you start your own company. Still, aren't you (and myself) getting a bit off-topic?
"Many will argue against what I just said, but they likely "drank the Kool-Aid" and got the degrees or certs."
The problem with degrees and certs is that they signal finality. However, as anyone in the Real World will tell you, any certification (no matter which one you get) is nothing more than a starting point. I'd think long and hard before taking any job that looked at me solely based on my certifications (I have a few... Some are for technology that doesn't even exist any more).
Military or Civilian, what counts when hiring someone is how well their personality and motivation fits in with the group that you are trying to form. If they fit in well, the motivation is there and the lack of skills beyond a certain point doesn't matter. They will be motivated enough to learn the rest and, in fact, will be happier in the job because they will be forced to think creatively everyday while they solve problems and learn something new.
This one's easy. It all comes down to political speech.
The argument on the ISP side is that certain types of traffic require more bandwidth than others and that the pipes are full. They've put themselves in a trap by flat-fee charging for bandwidth and now they are trying to get out of it. Problem is, they are spinning the argument in language that is imprecise. ISPs have always had tiered bandwidth.
Right now, your Republican father has "his boys" in office. Great for him. That will not always be the case. Political whims wax and wane and what is popular speech one day (the 4/5 compromise, all Men are created equal, and so forth) becomes not so popular the next.
So here's what happens (example). 5 years from now, politics shifts. The Republicans are out of office and are forced to re-group and re-define who they are (like the Democrats should be doing, but I'm getting off-topic). One of the most effective ways of doing such is with technology. This is where the concept of "net neutrality" comes in.
Your father wants to hear the latest from "his boys". He attempts to go to their website, but because of a political beef, his ISP won't take their money to get the high-band service. Or worse yet, their sites addresses are out-right blocked because the ISP won't except their money to be listed at the DNS server. What we should be protecting is the ability to prevent anyone from putting arbitrary filters on a publically accessable network and providing a legal recourse for those that are harmed by such actions.
Otherwise, I fully expect to see ISPs get sued for allowing pornography (the definition of which varied from local region to local region). It is illogical for the IPSs to ask for the ability to throttle bandwidth, and therefore theoretically be able to censor it, without opening up the legal plating that protects them from getting sued. Suddenly, they will have control over what flows across their network. This is the end-game. If Net Neutrality doesn't pass, then fall back to the courts and show the ISP that they have made a critical error.
Anyhow, your bullet points:
Okay... You were very fortunate and went to a school with a decent AP program and gifted teachers. So did I. However, that is not the point of TFA. The point of TFA is to look at the bottom students, not the top.
What is very likely to happen to you is that you will go into college and wonder why you are spending the first two years repeating everything you did in high school. Then, perhaps, you will understand just how "bad" other schools can be. This is what happened to me (though I'm doing quite well now with my dream job crunching data from mass spectrometry experiments). Smart people like you aren't the issue. Chances are good that you will do well for yourself because you have learned self-motivation.
The bottom, in this case, is what is important. Through a systematic chain of faults, America is raising a generation of lost souls, fit only to shop at Wal-Mart and do meaningless service jobs. Their curiosity and creativity is being dragged out of them by the soulless crunch of a paint-by-numbers curriculum.
Education is important, but even more important is to get rid of the ability to "drift" through the system. Myself, I back a blend of tests and portfolio-driven measurments. What I'm suggesting here are qualifying exams to exit High School that aren't just based upon some standardized list of questions, but demonstration of skills. It seems to me that even if you cannot remember the stupid trivia on the test that if you can demonstrate the ablility to read and understand an apartment lease agreement, balance your checkbook, and interpret current events on your own that our educational system is "good enough". Problem is, depending upon what metric you look at, a larger-than-comfortable percentage cannot even do these survival-oriented tasks.
You've done well in school. Good for you. Now show some leadership and walk amongst the people. Try and understand that they got sold a raw deal because no one ever told them what and why they needed to know things. Watch as they end up in debt, working McJobs, and dying too young as their very souls are crushed. It doesn't have to be like this, but these are what the past generation of factory overseers wanted: People whos jobs they could package and send to places where the work could be done cheaper.
The current generation is lost. Their children, however, do not have to be.