And 64-bit Flash (Not that I really want such a thing), why is that taking so long? Sick of the 'blip' noise with every page I hit with 64-bit IE wanting me to install flash to see some lame ad. And you click on it and "There's no 64-bit Flash, but you can run Flash on a 32-browser running on your 64-bit OS" And Why The Fuck would I want to do that? No Flash on any webpages if I run 64-bit browsers? Where do I sign up?
I worked at one of these firms in India before. The common practice there is to file for a H-1B visa in anticipation of future onsite trips. Many hundreds go unused. A number of my collegues got their visas stamped, but never travelled. Some were never intended to be used at all. The project manager told me they are just a backup in case of emergency situations (e.g., an onsite contractor might have to go back to India within short notice etc.) I think this is the main reason behind the recent inflation in number of H1-B applicants. This is certainly abuse of the H1-B program!
I have friends from India who would confirm your what you said: the outsourcing companies apply for H1-B's for potential visits to the US. In that way they take up a huge amount of the available visas. So why don't we do the following:
- Introduce a new visa category for short term (1-2 months) business visits that you can get on short notice. This will make InfoSys happy.
- Make only US companies eligible for H1-B's so Microsoft or Google can get their skilled programmers.
Wouldn't that solve all of these problems? Why didn't Congress already do that?
You, sir, are an idiot. Der Spiegel is independently owned and has nothing to do with Springer (Germany's version of Murdoch's publishing empire). In fact it could probably not be further in their slant from Springer's media.
And if you would have read the article you would have also noticed that it does not favor "heavy oil and coal consumption". It simply states that some areas of the world might actually benefit from higher temperatures (mostly northern countries), and that some others would not. So RTFA!
Actually there is one list of criteria that is widely accepted in the quantum computing research community.
David DiVincenzo, of IBM, listed the following requirements for a practical quantum computer:
- scalable physically to increase the number of qubits
- qubits can be initialized to arbitrary values
- quantum gates faster than decoherence time
- Turing-complete gate set
- qubits can be read easily This is from wikipedia's quantum computer entry.
Unfortunately the article itself does not use that list, so their progress is hard to judge...
Either: She is obviously good at her job and should keep it.
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much. No, that's not the point: her (first) position did not require a degree at all. In this article from the Boston Globe MIT says
Because the administrative assistant job for which she was being considered in 1979 did not require a degree, the university did not check Jones's academic credentials, said MIT chancellor Phillip L. Clay. If it were any other position, she should maybe be forgiven because of her strong performance.
But since her job is to make sure that you do not lie on your application she was rightfully forced to quit.
I read the whole thing, because I feared the slashdot summary would be booby trapped! Guess I will have to wait for that until the submitter submits another three or four similar articles and decides to check whether anyone actually reads them...
There is a big difference between computer science and scientific computing. Scientific computing applies computer science skills to other disciplines, but it isn't computer science itself. When you are studying computer science, you study the aforementioned subdivisions above. When you study scientific computing, you know just enough CS to apply it to other disciplines, but it shouldn't be called CS.
I think you hit the nail on the head: all these applications are not really computer science per se. The problem is that most computer science professors do not realize that CS is mainly going to become a tool for other sciences (like math). Note that this is not bad: in the future nearly all of the other sciences will need knowledge of CS. But CS faculty should stop claiming that all these new applications are now part of computer science and just focus on teaching the core of CS (programming, algorithms, complexity theory, systems,...).
I think it is fair to say that most women are more interested in getting something done rather than playing with the tools (i.e. the newest linux distro, programming language of the month, etc.). And the suggestion to emphasize applications rather than tools will make CS more attractive to them. But why don't we keep the original computer science and collaborate with other departments? This will also attract more women to use CS. That should be our goal and not a higher number of women with CS majors.
The article says that the reason the numbers are so low is: "when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks [...] and a lifetime of [...] writing computer code." Instead the universities would prefer to see CS as "the intellectual challenge of applying the study of cognition and the tools of computation to medicine, ecology, law, chemistry -- virtually any kind of human endeavor."
In order to make computer science more attractive (especially to women) some universities have dropped programming experience as an admission criterion. Isn't this misleading advertising, since you will never be able to get around the programming requirements in the actual CS program? And if you are only interested in CS because of its applications in, e.g., medicine, wouldn't you be better off studying that and taking additional CS courses during your studies? In that way you will even be able to convince some women that CS is attractive to them, because they see what they can use it for. And maybe they will switch to CS or do another degree in it later.
If you want to read the actual study you can find it here (PDF warning).
Included are such gems as "American students are much more confident about their math abilities than Singaporean students" and "But even the least confident student in Singapore outscores the most confident American student!"
Food for thought.
Of course it had to be a music company. A music company that is part of a much bigger media conglomerate, but it is the subdivision that is suing. And they are suing because someone creates a new music video for an old song. This at least involves some work by the person posting it. Yet there is so much content on youtube that is blatantly ripped from TV, but nobody sued about that yet.
Youtube is going to become Napster 2.0: once wildly popular, then sued into oblivion.
Yes, I totally second this. Anyone remember Napster? They were bought by BMG and sued into oblivion. Must have been one of the worst investments ever.
Mod parent up!
One of the most interesting categories contains problems that are called NP-complete. These all have the feature that in order to solve the problem all possible solutions must be tried, and the number of possible solutions grows exponentially with the problem size.
An example is the Travelling Salesman Problem, although there are literally thousands of them. This category is a particularly interesting target from a commercial perspective because most real-life business problems are in it....
Quantum computers can be used to get approximate solutions to large NP-complete optimization problems much more quickly than the best known methods running on any supercomputer.
Sorry, but that is simply not true. If you have a classical NP complete problem (e.g. Travelling Salesman), you can solve it by trying out exponentially many steps, 2^n, and most people believe that you cannot find faster (classical) algorithms. With a quantum you can improve this to 2^(n/2) by the so-called Grover search algorithm. This is not nearly enough to make these problems tractable in practice. And to make things worse, this "speed-up" will most likely be eaten up by the necessary error correction.
Lance Fortnow posted a very nice summary of this on his blog:
But I'm not a physicist or an engineer and suppose we can overcome these obstacles and actually build a working machine. Then I can imagine the following conversation in 2025:
Quantum People: We now have a working quantum computer.
Public: Yes after 30 years and 50 billion dollars in total funding. What can it do?
Q: It can simulate quantum systems.
P: I'm happy for you. What can it do for the rest of us?
Q: It can factor numbers quickly.
P: Yes, I know. We've had to change all of our security protocols because of your machine. Does factoring have any purpose other than to break codes?
Q: Not really. But we can use Grover's algorithm for general search problems.
P: That sounds great! So we can really solve traveling salesperson and scheduling problems much faster than before?
Q: Not exactly. The quadratic speed-up we get from Grover's algorithm isn't enough the offset the slow-down by using a quantum computer combined with error correction. But we can solve Pell's equation, approximate the Jones polynomial and a few other things very quickly.
P: Are those algorithms particularly useful?
Q: No.
P: They why did you build a quantum computer?
Q: Because we could.
Yes, I second that. I want a phone that is simply the best phone, as in connecting you to the world. I.e. I want features like Bluetooth, it should synchronize its address book with my Mac, work worldwide (quad-band). And it would be even cooler if I could connect to high-speed data services (EDGE, UMTS, Wi-Fi, etc.).
But what I do not want is a camera, or a browser, or games, or ringtones or all the other crap phones come with nowadays. Do you think there is a single phone that actually does all this? There isn't. And don't tell me to just get the most expensive phone and ignore all the other bs features, because they just make the phone unstable and drain the battery.
So where do I click for the "none of the above" answer? Everyone who downloads screensavers, games,... or has turned ActiveX on in his browser just deserves to get infected with spyware!
And, what a surprise, the test is run by McAfee, who wants to sell me "protection" against spyware. Protection as in "catches 97% of the spyware that has been out for more than a month" (just made up those numbers). No thanks.
Word to the Wise
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
Great, I might become an Internet Explorer user again, now that it automatically includes a FlashBlock extension!
I think Eolas deserves an award for this...
Let me guess, this will be built on a proprietary standard and Yahoo users can only call other Yahoo users and landlines/cellphones. Why would they support open standards like asterisk, if they cannot even support jabber?
Slashdot Mirror
I worked at one of these firms in India before. The common practice there is to file for a H-1B visa in anticipation of future onsite trips. Many hundreds go unused. A number of my collegues got their visas stamped, but never travelled. Some were never intended to be used at all. The project manager told me they are just a backup in case of emergency situations (e.g., an onsite contractor might have to go back to India within short notice etc.) I think this is the main reason behind the recent inflation in number of H1-B applicants. This is certainly abuse of the H1-B program!
I have friends from India who would confirm your what you said: the outsourcing companies apply for H1-B's for potential visits to the US. In that way they take up a huge amount of the available visas. So why don't we do the following:
- Introduce a new visa category for short term (1-2 months) business visits that you can get on short notice. This will make InfoSys happy.- Make only US companies eligible for H1-B's so Microsoft or Google can get their skilled programmers.
Wouldn't that solve all of these problems? Why didn't Congress already do that?
You, sir, are an idiot. Der Spiegel is independently owned and has nothing to do with Springer (Germany's version of Murdoch's publishing empire). In fact it could probably not be further in their slant from Springer's media.
And if you would have read the article you would have also noticed that it does not favor "heavy oil and coal consumption". It simply states that some areas of the world might actually benefit from higher temperatures (mostly northern countries), and that some others would not. So RTFA!
- scalable physically to increase the number of qubits
- qubits can be initialized to arbitrary values
- quantum gates faster than decoherence time
- Turing-complete gate set
- qubits can be read easily
This is from wikipedia's quantum computer entry.
Unfortunately the article itself does not use that list, so their progress is hard to judge...
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much. No, that's not the point: her (first) position did not require a degree at all. In this article from the Boston Globe MIT says Because the administrative assistant job for which she was being considered in 1979 did not require a degree, the university did not check Jones's academic credentials, said MIT chancellor Phillip L. Clay. If it were any other position, she should maybe be forgiven because of her strong performance. But since her job is to make sure that you do not lie on your application she was rightfully forced to quit.
I think it is fair to say that most women are more interested in getting something done rather than playing with the tools (i.e. the newest linux distro, programming language of the month, etc.). And the suggestion to emphasize applications rather than tools will make CS more attractive to them. But why don't we keep the original computer science and collaborate with other departments? This will also attract more women to use CS. That should be our goal and not a higher number of women with CS majors.
The article says that the reason the numbers are so low is: "when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks [...] and a lifetime of [...] writing computer code." Instead the universities would prefer to see CS as "the intellectual challenge of applying the study of cognition and the tools of computation to medicine, ecology, law, chemistry -- virtually any kind of human endeavor."
In order to make computer science more attractive (especially to women) some universities have dropped programming experience as an admission criterion. Isn't this misleading advertising, since you will never be able to get around the programming requirements in the actual CS program? And if you are only interested in CS because of its applications in, e.g., medicine, wouldn't you be better off studying that and taking additional CS courses during your studies? In that way you will even be able to convince some women that CS is attractive to them, because they see what they can use it for. And maybe they will switch to CS or do another degree in it later.
If you want to read the actual study you can find it here (PDF warning). Included are such gems as "American students are much more confident about their math abilities than Singaporean students" and "But even the least confident student in Singapore outscores the most confident American student!"
Food for thought.
Of course it had to be a music company. A music company that is part of a much bigger media conglomerate, but it is the subdivision that is suing. And they are suing because someone creates a new music video for an old song. This at least involves some work by the person posting it. Yet there is so much content on youtube that is blatantly ripped from TV, but nobody sued about that yet.
Youtube is going to become Napster 2.0: once wildly popular, then sued into oblivion.
Yes, I totally second this. Anyone remember Napster? They were bought by BMG and sued into oblivion. Must have been one of the worst investments ever.
Mod parent up!
Lance Fortnow posted a very nice summary of this on his blog:
Yes, I second that. I want a phone that is simply the best phone, as in connecting you to the world. I.e. I want features like Bluetooth, it should synchronize its address book with my Mac, work worldwide (quad-band). And it would be even cooler if I could connect to high-speed data services (EDGE, UMTS, Wi-Fi, etc.).
But what I do not want is a camera, or a browser, or games, or ringtones or all the other crap phones come with nowadays. Do you think there is a single phone that actually does all this? There isn't. And don't tell me to just get the most expensive phone and ignore all the other bs features, because they just make the phone unstable and drain the battery.
So where do I click for the "none of the above" answer? Everyone who downloads screensavers, games, ... or has turned ActiveX on in his browser just deserves to get infected with spyware!
And, what a surprise, the test is run by McAfee, who wants to sell me "protection" against spyware. Protection as in "catches 97% of the spyware that has been out for more than a month" (just made up those numbers). No thanks.
They had to rub it in...
Great, I might become an Internet Explorer user again, now that it automatically includes a FlashBlock extension! I think Eolas deserves an award for this...
Let me guess, this will be built on a proprietary standard and Yahoo users can only call other Yahoo users and landlines/cellphones. Why would they support open standards like asterisk, if they cannot even support jabber?