There's absolutely nothing wrong with text file configuration.
I call BS. There's plenty wrong with text file configuration. One example is the free form syntax that you have to learn for every piece of software. It is rarely consistent and sometimes there are options are not even documented.
Another annoying issue is how many config files there are. For some pieces of software it is all piled into one configuration file, for others it is separated into multiple files scattered in different places. Sure, to some degree it is up to the distro to determine how they want to organized everything, but half the time I find myself trying to hunt down a config file in some awkward place in/etc.
Also there is no feedback to you if you did something wrong until you try to start the software. Even then, it is up to the software to determine if the error was truly an error and whether or not to tell you about it. For example if I have a config file that has the line Option="off" and I happen to want to change it to Option="on" but fat finger it to Option="om" when will I find out that I've made a mistake? Lucky for me I can touch type so I can read what I'm typing on the screen. But I've seen many people glance down at the keyboard, type what they want, and move on without knowing that they've made a mistake. Just read Slashdot to find a good percentage of the geek population making these errors.
How many times have you blown up your X configuration and got tired of restarting X to fix it?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are many good points to text config files and in some cases I would prefer it to a GUI. But to say there's absolutely nothing wrong with it is stupid. You also cannot ignore the benefits of GUI configuration (preventing "wrong" options from being chosen, providing some documentation right next to the configuration option, very little learning curve, etc). Text file configuration has its advantages and disadvantages. GUI configuration has its advantages and disadvantages. I think we can still do better than both. But if everyone just sits around and thinks to himself "text is better than GUI" or "GUI is better than text" then we get no innovation.
One really simple solution is simply to provide both interfaces! For example I see no reason Apache can't start itself with a default configuration just for apache configuration purposes. It would tell the user to browse to localhost:888 where the user is presented with a web interface. Now we have a simple graphical html forms interface for configuring apache. Once the configuration is complete, the settings would be saved in a valid httpd.conf or whatever it was file and when the user does/etc/init.d/httpd start everything works. If you still felt you wanted to edit the config file by hand, you could still do it. If you wanted to archive the config file you could still do it. Also, most web browsers (even lynx) have a "search" feature built-in to the browser. So voila, searchable GUI interface!
Steve Jobs can't come right out and say this, as it can be seen as tantamount to saying that users are stupid. Security. Not on the cell network, but the iPhone as a new platform. User's can't be trusted to install their own apps!
So you're putting the blame on the user rather than the engineer? I thought we like to put the blame on the engineer around here (example: Microsoft).
I honestly do not think that the reason why the iphone is closed is simply due to security concerns. The reason why the iphone is closed is because cellular networks in the United States have enjoyed a monopolized control over their networks. Their biggest fear is that the cellular networks become more like the internet as it is now; a network where they are only seen as the provider to everyone else's services. Cellular networks have enjoyed making extra business by doing stupid things like selling ring tones, restricting accessible services (unless an additional cost is paid), and locking phones to their services. The basic deal with a cell phone is if you want to sell your service or software on the network, you either pay the provider or the provider hires you and pays you in a contract basis. Furthermore, once you're in, you play by the provider's rules. They dictate to you want you can or can't do.
Consider: OLED has shorter pixel life and wastes less power than LCD+light. Where is this useful? Laptops (limited energy and no constant use). Where is it harmful? TV-s (constant use and unlimited AC power).
I'd say laptops get more use than TVs. Most laptops are used in a business environment where people use them at least 8 hours of the day. Home TVs on the other hand are only on when the family/person is there to watch it. So in order to match the 40 hour work week for a business laptop, a TV would need to be on just more than 5.7 hours per a day for 7 days out of the week.
A better metric is the average usable lifespan of the equipment. Most laptops tend to get outdated quickly or break quicker due to more parts or physical damage. TVs on the other hand are used until they break and generally sit in the same spot for their entire lifespan. In that sense it makes much more sense to put a technology that will eventually break in a laptop because 5 years out, the laptop will probably be outdated as a whole.
I'm not sure, but it would seem to me that Google would have thought of spoofing it's IPs long ago, to avoid people being able to track them, though I can't say how you'd go about that.
That's so simple!
Create free "accelerator" application/browser plug-in to gather web site stats.
In my younger days, my dad used to work at a Pepsi distribution plant. There, they would maintain the machines that filled the cans and bottles with soda and package them for delivery to the local businesses. The materials came to the plant and one of the materials was the syrup that was mixed with the carbinated water to form the soda.
While he worked there we basically had an unlimited and free supply of Pepsi. Drinking Pepsi was basically cheaper than drinking our own tap water.
And I'll tell you, after a year of drinking Pepsi like water, there is a huge difference in the tastes of Pepsi and Coke! I still taste it up till this day. If it was simply a trick to adding enough sugar or caffeine, I would buy your argument. But I'd say the real answer lies in the artificial flavors since Pepsi actually has more sugar and caffeine than Coke.
MBAs are not cheap. They are not really a good investment for the engineer undergrad who can get around a 60k starting salary with just an undergraduate engineering degree. Of all my engineer friends who have gone off to get MBAs, they've all done it in order to facilitate a career change out of engineering not to simply increase their salary. I did the calculations for myself and found that if I went and got an MBA without working for 2 years, it would take more than 10 years for the degree to start paying off assuming my salary as an software engineer will not increase. There are MBA programs that allow you to work 30 hours a week and take night classes but I'm not so sure I'm up for that sort of torture.
Engineers in the US are actually paid really well for their degrees. I also find that most of my social science major friends need to seek other forms of education (real estate license, tax license, MBAs) in order to even come close to engineer salaries.
I disagree. The problem with Vista has always been scope. It was doomed from the start because they had too many things they were trying to do at the same time. Anytime you revamp everything AND add billion new features you're going to have some really horrendous integration issues, and your scheduling estimates will be very unreliable. The trick in software engineering has always been small incremental improvements.
I was pretty happy with my salary until I realized I lived in the US. I'd say the unhappiness with salaries is a cause of cultural beliefs and influences like the "American Dream." In a nutshell, the American dream is to make lots of money so you can live a glamorous lifestyle. Many of the cultural influences and US laws also force people to working harder and making more money.
For example take the way the US is built and real estate. Most places in the US build outwards rather than upwards. Because there is so much space, most Americans feel like they need to own a piece of land and the lot has to be a certain size to fit all of their belongings. But the up front costs in owning real estate are higher than renting. Furthermore the infrastructure does not give very many benefits to those who rent in the US. Most places require a car in order for the person to have transportation. Some of the big cities don't require a car but those are few. So in order to support the car purchases and real estate purchases, more money is necessary. And it all fits within the American dream because by owning your own car and house, you've effectively shown your monetary success or your buying power.
Another thing to look at is how Americans actually think when they buy something. In the US, more = better. So say you have a vending machine that sells cokes with a regular size and a large size. Both are priced equally, and for most people the regular size is more than satisfying. Most Americans regardless of how hungry or thirsty they are will look at the vending machine and think, "Why would I get the regular size if the larger size is the same price; I'm getting more for my money if I buy the larger size." So the American will always buy the larger size even if he knows he will not finish the coke. But having the ability to buy the larger sizes requires more money.
The funny thing is that this sort of American logic works even as long as the larger size is not equal in cost per a unit to the regular size. If the larger size was 2x larger, the American would still buy it as long as the price is lower than 2x the cost of the regular size. In the example, I used cokes, but if you go to any American grocery store you will see this phenomenon in all of the products (large sizes priced at just above the regular/smaller sizes). In fact, I often find that for single people, the grocery store is very inconvenient because they always sell sizes that are too large.
It depends on the encoder. Many older mp3 encoders caused that type of artifact to come in if the bitrate was too low. These days LameMP3 encoder is available so there's very little excuse for any service to have poorly encoded mp3s. LameMP3 can still cause that artifact to show up (surprisingly in the highest quality setting I notice it more than in the default high quality setting). But with the right settings (mainly the defaults) in LameMP3 128abr/vbr works wonders.
The other problem with other formats like vorbis is many portable players don't support the format. AAC is getting more support with the top players (ipod) but not all. So unfortunately for now, mp3 it is.
You can also say that the internet "changes too fast" and is "too large, for it to be stored locally" yet we don't have a single service provider solution for the internet as a whole. Rather it is a network or a collection of systems.
One alternative is to try the peer approach. It works exactly as it does in real life. You often find people asking friends about recommendations and experiences with various things like restaurants. The same concept can be applied to websites but done internally by the software. The only issues are a peer network needs to exist and a method of establishing trust between peers must also exist.
Also I don't think such a blacklist database of domain names would be that large to maintain locally. Each domain name is at most 63 characters long between the dots and an additional 5 characters for the end. So in 1 megabyte, you can store more than 15,000 blacklisted entries without compression. Each client would also only need recent additions and deletions to the list to maintain consistency and the list could be maintained reasonably well for most if it is updated weekly.
Doctors complaining about how little they make as residents are whiny little babies that I want to backhand. First, all the poor little doctors say that they didn't enter the field to make money--then immediately start complaining about how little money they make. Then they complain about how they make only $55,000 a year right out of medical school and how that's nothing compared to the 80 hour work-weeks they have to maintain.
Any doctor would tell you that that habit is unhealthy. It isn't even simply 16 hour days. It's more like 48 hour weekly shifts with 1 day to recover before going back to 12 hour daily shifts, and the illusory 80 hour limit doesn't actually exist. Doctors have no time for themselves, are stressed out, and often are not performing their jobs 100% correctly at the end of the very long shifts. But they want to be a doctor right? So why should that mean they have to screw over their health just to do so? Finally, the patients often complain that their medical bills are too expensive. Well shit, would you rather die?
But they ignore the fact that after they complete their residencies, they're basically guaranteed over $200,000 for the rest of their lives. Unlike law or banking, doctors have job security and high-paying jobs. Furthermore, the government pays the hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars for each resident they take to offset training costs. That's right, we pay for their education.
What job security? Any doctor can easily get into a malpractice by some angry patient that actually has money. The doctor will be forced to fight it to save his record but in the end it'll just be a sunk cost in lawyer fees. Nobody is going to go to a doctor that happened to make one mistake because a nurse called him in in the middle of the night.
And we better pay for their education. Otherwise, your medical bill would be even higher. Either way, you pay for the doctor whether it is through taxes or medical bills. You make doctors out to be some kind of simple job when it is actually a very necessary portion of a functioning society. I suppose if you had things your way we could go back to the poor and middle classes croaking whenever a petty disease came along with only the wealthy maintaining healthy lives.
I agree! Except I can't fully blame firefox. I also have a lot of blame on websites and the direction some sites have gone. Take for instance, slashdot and even more annoying digg. The weight of the website has gotten considerably higher for no good purpose other than to look better. I can't argue against looks. Looks sell. But on the other hand it hinders the general experience as websites keep adding more and more layers making the browser's job more and more complex. Websites and website developers are equally responsible for degradation of performance of the web.
I'm not sure the problem or tension will ever be resolved either. Web developers always want to offer the next new fancy feature and browsers will always be one (or a few) step(s) behind implementing the next spec. The result is a tool pushed beyond its original intentions at the cost of performance.
utorrent is fairly light weight and easy to use because of its performance characteristics
I call bs. utorrent is not easy to use because of performance characteristics. In some ways I find it stupid to use. Why do I have to use a 2nd level context menu to set a specfic upload/download rate maximum for a specific item? Where are my keyboard shortcuts? utorrent only wins on usability by copying what already exists. It's not a bad strategy, but I'm not sure I've seen anything greatly innovative in terms of UI in utorrent.
Re:The editor of Forbes would agree...
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MIT's SAT Math Error
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ahh, parent poster is a Troll, eh?
Yes, he is a troll. Education does not promise you money, it only promises to educate you if you are willing to be educated. In all of my classes my professors never claimed that after passing the class I would be blessed with high paying jobs. Instead, their claim was, "these are the topics we will cover." How well they covered those topics varied, and obviously some professors did poorly while others did well. But nobody ever said, "learn this and you will make money." As a student, you choose your degree, and you choose what classes you will take. There is no reason to come crying after you graduated to claim that your degree did nothing for you when it was practically your choice all along.
Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard would probably agree with AC. Is he a troll too?
The article you linked to makes no claims that school is worthless. In fact, the article is brining up a major point that you and the parent missed: if you only are thinking in terms of costs and how much the degree with return in terms of money, then you have to think in terms of return on investment on the degree and the following job because of it compared to whatever alternative plan you have in mind. The option that has the highest return is obviously the option you should take if your only goal is money.
I saw far too many kids there for the party myself... the 'life experience' they called it. We even have online encyclopedias citing which schools paaar-tay the hardest.
I saw a lot of kids partying. But I also saw a lot of those kids failing their classes, dropping out, staying for as long as 6 to 7 years, or ultimately getting a crappy job as a result. The question here is did they turn out better than they would have if they did not go to college? Maybe maybe not. But ultimately, who ever made the choices (parents and the child) are responsible. I'm not going to feel sorry or feel like it is a problem if a kid's parents are uninformed about their kid's choices or the kid does not have the motivation to utilize his resources. That's their business and as far as I can tell that's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.
College is big business. So big in fact that university finances have begun drawing the scrutiny of congress.
Oh, another Harvard, Yale, and Stanford article. What about public schools?
We've even begun exporting American-style higher education.
I don't see anything wrong with it. There are already a lot of international students enrolled everywhere throughout the country. In the same way, there are a lot of American students participating in foreign schools.
In the meantime, there's a lot of kids leaving college with a worthless degree and lots of debt.
I had a friend in college that happened to be a computer science major. But the big thing about her was that she was a girl and she was cute. Her personality was nothing like a geek and she could have easily done something else or fit in with other social groups. Naturally, the question came up, "Why computer science?" Her answer was, "I initially thought about getting another degree but my parents disagreed and said I needed to get something more 'useful.'" In the context she was speaking of, "useful" was a degree that would guarantee a higher salary. Indeed, she did get a job that she didn't mind doing in the software industry and did hit a higher salary. Unlike most people, she actually made the choice based on money and it paid off.
Others do not think like that. Instead they either think college is one of those necessary things or something their parents forced them into. The end result is a kid that partied too much barely finished his degree, and most of all did not learn anything or put the degree to use. I do not think that issue will ever be fixed because some people are that stupid. Ultimately for those people it may not matter because their parents m
When I read the summary it immediately reminded me of Section 9 in Ghost in the Shell. While we don't have all the cool technology or cyborgs yet, it is interesting to see how technology is burying itself deeper and deeper into our everyday lives.
I believe the "real" usage of a curve is when the distribution of scores are taken and only the top x% get As the next y% get Bs etc. all the way down to Fs so no matter how hard or easy a test is, someone is guaranteed to get an A and someone is guaranteed to get an F.
Almost there. A real curve is where the average is exactly that, the average. Most grade distributions come out looking sorta like a bell curve or a normal distribution (actually they tend to have 2 'bumps' rather than just one). That means most people will fall right around the average with half to the left and half to the right. At the average point is supposed to be the bare minimum passing grade which in college undergrad is usually a C while a C- is failing. So the average is placed right between a C- and a C. The grades are then distributed evenly across the quantities of a students (next higher cut get a C, next lower cut get a C-, etc) OR they are distributed some exact distance from the average (making most people get C and C- and very few or none at all getting A. C- and below didn't matter because you failed anyway).
I never had a professor who actually graded like that but there were a couple in the Engineering department (and the obvious smart choice for students was to drop the class). It turned out the professor purposely did that and openly told his students that half would fail because he did not want to teach. After failing half the class, he would be put on probation for a few years before teaching again but he could still continue his research.
Most of my past professors instead used the curve, but changed the midpoint for assigning grades. So instead of centering the average on C/C-, they move it up to B-. That caused a good portion of the students to pass, but it also caused a few failures. This is actually good because it does make students more willing to actually student when the possibility of failure is there. It also forces students who honestly do not care but are taking the class for secondary reasons (parents advice, needed to graduate, etc.) to fail. However, two really negative effects are cheating and too smart or too dumb classes. Some students come in never having failed ever and are forced to cheat to maintain their clean record. In the other case sometimes the class becomes too easy because the smartest student isn't actually that smart so the curve is lowered whereas if the entire class is very smart, the competition is fierce.
The usual claim by these professors when you ask them about grading is "I can't guarantee there will not be any failures, but most people tend to pass." That's because their grading scheme forces a small percentage to actually fail. That was usually a good sign to dig into your social bank to see how many smart kids were in the class. If there were a bunch and you cared about your GPA, it was a good sign you should either drop or you'll have to spend lots of hours studying to make your grade.
Another thing professors like to do is reserve A+ since in many college systems, A = 4.0 as well as A+ = 4.0. So in some classes where the professor believed nobody deserved the A+, he would just give out A only. If he did feel a student was truly worthy of the A+, then he would give it out specifically (hand picked of course). Once grades were posted on the window, the typical thing to do in these cases would be to see how many A+ where there. That usually hinted to you if you had someone (or someones) incredibly smart in the class that was pushing up the curve (that was a hint to make "friends" with those someones if they weren't you).
"- The whole design of GCC is perverted so that someone cannot easily extract a front-end or back-end. This is broken by design, as the GPL people do believe this would make it easier for commercial entities to `steal' a front-end or back-end and attach it to a proprietary code-generator (or language). This is probably true. This also makes it impossible to write interesting tools, such as intermediate analyzers. This also makes it impossible to plug old legacy back-ends for old architectures into newer compilers."
Well that explains a lot. And here I was thinking that all modern compilers were designed correctly with a front-end and back-end. So much for academics.
You don't get extra credit for not fucking up. Running "beautifully fast" on modern hardware is somewhere between "I've never been to jail" and "I shower daily" on the list of human accomplishment. Not that bragworthy.
Oh, it is bragworthy but many slashdotters talk from using vista at a store or reading about it on slashdot. I've never seen better advanced power feature integration than on vista. In all prior versions of windows and other OSes, suspend was always stupid and never quite worked. My laptop still has suspend quirks in it being a later XP-SP2 OS install. Furthermore the suspend isn't even worth it because the battery still gets drained quite a bit. However, my parent's dell desktop with Vista suspends perfectly. At the plug I measured 2-3 watts while the computer was sleeping. When I hit a key on the keyboard to wake up the computer, it shows the desktop in seconds. When I tell it to sleep it sleeps in 2 seconds. That new power state basically blows hibernation out of the water (at least for desktops) and it always works.
By the same token, it was years after XP came out that it was worthwhile to switch from Windows 2000. Maybe Vista will be worthwhile around the time Windows 7 comes out.
Win2k to WinXP was more like Win98 to Win98se. The new features were minimal and for most reasons, XP was almost exactly the same as 2k. The only major thing I remember being an issue was usb 2.0. Vista on the other hand is more like Windows 98se to Win2k. Early adopters of Win2k were pretty much left in the dark as far as driver support and legacy software support which is the same exact problem with Vista.
No because cable TV service can't even provide reliable, high quality digital content, and cable box free service to begin with. Because of that I specifically pay for analog service from the cable company because then I don't have to rent their stupid cable box and deal with their crappy digital service. And guess what, when I change the channel on the TV, it actually changes and doesn't wait 10 seconds and display some BS over half the screen every time I do it. I also don't see their crappy compression scheme (blockyness) and occasional cuts in the stream. I can also split the signal a billion times if I want to and have a billion TVs for the same cost. With digital I have to buy more of their BS equipment and pay for more of their lame techs to come and fart on my property.
I have an issue with OO's PDF generation. For some reason the PDFs it generates are larger than they need to be. All you need to do to test this is write a couple plain paragraphs, maybe add a style or two, then use the PDF export. For the second PDF you will instead print using a post script printer driver and set the print dialog or driver to output to a postscript file rather than the printer. Then take the postscript file and feed it through ghostscript to convert it to a PDF. On a one page document, OO's pdf is 64kb while for the other method it is 4kb! What's going on?
Slashdot Mirror
There must be plenty of Japanese/English translators who can manage better than that. Why don't they hire one?
They're all busy translating the latest manga and anime for free.
Would you mind running and sharing a few quick benchmarks like hdparm -Tt?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with text file configuration.
I call BS. There's plenty wrong with text file configuration. One example is the free form syntax that you have to learn for every piece of software. It is rarely consistent and sometimes there are options are not even documented.
Another annoying issue is how many config files there are. For some pieces of software it is all piled into one configuration file, for others it is separated into multiple files scattered in different places. Sure, to some degree it is up to the distro to determine how they want to organized everything, but half the time I find myself trying to hunt down a config file in some awkward place in /etc.
Also there is no feedback to you if you did something wrong until you try to start the software. Even then, it is up to the software to determine if the error was truly an error and whether or not to tell you about it. For example if I have a config file that has the line Option="off" and I happen to want to change it to Option="on" but fat finger it to Option="om" when will I find out that I've made a mistake? Lucky for me I can touch type so I can read what I'm typing on the screen. But I've seen many people glance down at the keyboard, type what they want, and move on without knowing that they've made a mistake. Just read Slashdot to find a good percentage of the geek population making these errors.
How many times have you blown up your X configuration and got tired of restarting X to fix it?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are many good points to text config files and in some cases I would prefer it to a GUI. But to say there's absolutely nothing wrong with it is stupid. You also cannot ignore the benefits of GUI configuration (preventing "wrong" options from being chosen, providing some documentation right next to the configuration option, very little learning curve, etc). Text file configuration has its advantages and disadvantages. GUI configuration has its advantages and disadvantages. I think we can still do better than both. But if everyone just sits around and thinks to himself "text is better than GUI" or "GUI is better than text" then we get no innovation.
One really simple solution is simply to provide both interfaces! For example I see no reason Apache can't start itself with a default configuration just for apache configuration purposes. It would tell the user to browse to localhost:888 where the user is presented with a web interface. Now we have a simple graphical html forms interface for configuring apache. Once the configuration is complete, the settings would be saved in a valid httpd.conf or whatever it was file and when the user does /etc/init.d/httpd start everything works. If you still felt you wanted to edit the config file by hand, you could still do it. If you wanted to archive the config file you could still do it. Also, most web browsers (even lynx) have a "search" feature built-in to the browser. So voila, searchable GUI interface!
Steve Jobs can't come right out and say this, as it can be seen as tantamount to saying that users are stupid. Security. Not on the cell network, but the iPhone as a new platform. User's can't be trusted to install their own apps!
So you're putting the blame on the user rather than the engineer? I thought we like to put the blame on the engineer around here (example: Microsoft).
I honestly do not think that the reason why the iphone is closed is simply due to security concerns. The reason why the iphone is closed is because cellular networks in the United States have enjoyed a monopolized control over their networks. Their biggest fear is that the cellular networks become more like the internet as it is now; a network where they are only seen as the provider to everyone else's services. Cellular networks have enjoyed making extra business by doing stupid things like selling ring tones, restricting accessible services (unless an additional cost is paid), and locking phones to their services. The basic deal with a cell phone is if you want to sell your service or software on the network, you either pay the provider or the provider hires you and pays you in a contract basis. Furthermore, once you're in, you play by the provider's rules. They dictate to you want you can or can't do.
Consider: OLED has shorter pixel life and wastes less power than LCD+light. Where is this useful? Laptops (limited energy and no constant use). Where is it harmful? TV-s (constant use and unlimited AC power).
I'd say laptops get more use than TVs. Most laptops are used in a business environment where people use them at least 8 hours of the day. Home TVs on the other hand are only on when the family/person is there to watch it. So in order to match the 40 hour work week for a business laptop, a TV would need to be on just more than 5.7 hours per a day for 7 days out of the week.
A better metric is the average usable lifespan of the equipment. Most laptops tend to get outdated quickly or break quicker due to more parts or physical damage. TVs on the other hand are used until they break and generally sit in the same spot for their entire lifespan. In that sense it makes much more sense to put a technology that will eventually break in a laptop because 5 years out, the laptop will probably be outdated as a whole.
I'm not sure, but it would seem to me that Google would have thought of spoofing it's IPs long ago, to avoid people being able to track them, though I can't say how you'd go about that.
That's so simple!
In my younger days, my dad used to work at a Pepsi distribution plant. There, they would maintain the machines that filled the cans and bottles with soda and package them for delivery to the local businesses. The materials came to the plant and one of the materials was the syrup that was mixed with the carbinated water to form the soda.
While he worked there we basically had an unlimited and free supply of Pepsi. Drinking Pepsi was basically cheaper than drinking our own tap water.
And I'll tell you, after a year of drinking Pepsi like water, there is a huge difference in the tastes of Pepsi and Coke! I still taste it up till this day. If it was simply a trick to adding enough sugar or caffeine, I would buy your argument. But I'd say the real answer lies in the artificial flavors since Pepsi actually has more sugar and caffeine than Coke.
MBAs are not cheap. They are not really a good investment for the engineer undergrad who can get around a 60k starting salary with just an undergraduate engineering degree. Of all my engineer friends who have gone off to get MBAs, they've all done it in order to facilitate a career change out of engineering not to simply increase their salary. I did the calculations for myself and found that if I went and got an MBA without working for 2 years, it would take more than 10 years for the degree to start paying off assuming my salary as an software engineer will not increase. There are MBA programs that allow you to work 30 hours a week and take night classes but I'm not so sure I'm up for that sort of torture.
Engineers in the US are actually paid really well for their degrees. I also find that most of my social science major friends need to seek other forms of education (real estate license, tax license, MBAs) in order to even come close to engineer salaries.
I disagree. The problem with Vista has always been scope. It was doomed from the start because they had too many things they were trying to do at the same time. Anytime you revamp everything AND add billion new features you're going to have some really horrendous integration issues, and your scheduling estimates will be very unreliable. The trick in software engineering has always been small incremental improvements.
The general rule for the internet is: male until proven female.
I was pretty happy with my salary until I realized I lived in the US. I'd say the unhappiness with salaries is a cause of cultural beliefs and influences like the "American Dream." In a nutshell, the American dream is to make lots of money so you can live a glamorous lifestyle. Many of the cultural influences and US laws also force people to working harder and making more money.
For example take the way the US is built and real estate. Most places in the US build outwards rather than upwards. Because there is so much space, most Americans feel like they need to own a piece of land and the lot has to be a certain size to fit all of their belongings. But the up front costs in owning real estate are higher than renting. Furthermore the infrastructure does not give very many benefits to those who rent in the US. Most places require a car in order for the person to have transportation. Some of the big cities don't require a car but those are few. So in order to support the car purchases and real estate purchases, more money is necessary. And it all fits within the American dream because by owning your own car and house, you've effectively shown your monetary success or your buying power.
Another thing to look at is how Americans actually think when they buy something. In the US, more = better. So say you have a vending machine that sells cokes with a regular size and a large size. Both are priced equally, and for most people the regular size is more than satisfying. Most Americans regardless of how hungry or thirsty they are will look at the vending machine and think, "Why would I get the regular size if the larger size is the same price; I'm getting more for my money if I buy the larger size." So the American will always buy the larger size even if he knows he will not finish the coke. But having the ability to buy the larger sizes requires more money.
The funny thing is that this sort of American logic works even as long as the larger size is not equal in cost per a unit to the regular size. If the larger size was 2x larger, the American would still buy it as long as the price is lower than 2x the cost of the regular size. In the example, I used cokes, but if you go to any American grocery store you will see this phenomenon in all of the products (large sizes priced at just above the regular/smaller sizes). In fact, I often find that for single people, the grocery store is very inconvenient because they always sell sizes that are too large.
It depends on the encoder. Many older mp3 encoders caused that type of artifact to come in if the bitrate was too low. These days LameMP3 encoder is available so there's very little excuse for any service to have poorly encoded mp3s. LameMP3 can still cause that artifact to show up (surprisingly in the highest quality setting I notice it more than in the default high quality setting). But with the right settings (mainly the defaults) in LameMP3 128abr/vbr works wonders.
The other problem with other formats like vorbis is many portable players don't support the format. AAC is getting more support with the top players (ipod) but not all. So unfortunately for now, mp3 it is.
You can also say that the internet "changes too fast" and is "too large, for it to be stored locally" yet we don't have a single service provider solution for the internet as a whole. Rather it is a network or a collection of systems.
One alternative is to try the peer approach. It works exactly as it does in real life. You often find people asking friends about recommendations and experiences with various things like restaurants. The same concept can be applied to websites but done internally by the software. The only issues are a peer network needs to exist and a method of establishing trust between peers must also exist.
Also I don't think such a blacklist database of domain names would be that large to maintain locally. Each domain name is at most 63 characters long between the dots and an additional 5 characters for the end. So in 1 megabyte, you can store more than 15,000 blacklisted entries without compression. Each client would also only need recent additions and deletions to the list to maintain consistency and the list could be maintained reasonably well for most if it is updated weekly.
Doctors complaining about how little they make as residents are whiny little babies that I want to backhand. First, all the poor little doctors say that they didn't enter the field to make money--then immediately start complaining about how little money they make. Then they complain about how they make only $55,000 a year right out of medical school and how that's nothing compared to the 80 hour work-weeks they have to maintain.
Any doctor would tell you that that habit is unhealthy. It isn't even simply 16 hour days. It's more like 48 hour weekly shifts with 1 day to recover before going back to 12 hour daily shifts, and the illusory 80 hour limit doesn't actually exist. Doctors have no time for themselves, are stressed out, and often are not performing their jobs 100% correctly at the end of the very long shifts. But they want to be a doctor right? So why should that mean they have to screw over their health just to do so? Finally, the patients often complain that their medical bills are too expensive. Well shit, would you rather die?
But they ignore the fact that after they complete their residencies, they're basically guaranteed over $200,000 for the rest of their lives. Unlike law or banking, doctors have job security and high-paying jobs. Furthermore, the government pays the hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars for each resident they take to offset training costs. That's right, we pay for their education.
What job security? Any doctor can easily get into a malpractice by some angry patient that actually has money. The doctor will be forced to fight it to save his record but in the end it'll just be a sunk cost in lawyer fees. Nobody is going to go to a doctor that happened to make one mistake because a nurse called him in in the middle of the night.
And we better pay for their education. Otherwise, your medical bill would be even higher. Either way, you pay for the doctor whether it is through taxes or medical bills. You make doctors out to be some kind of simple job when it is actually a very necessary portion of a functioning society. I suppose if you had things your way we could go back to the poor and middle classes croaking whenever a petty disease came along with only the wealthy maintaining healthy lives.
I agree! Except I can't fully blame firefox. I also have a lot of blame on websites and the direction some sites have gone. Take for instance, slashdot and even more annoying digg. The weight of the website has gotten considerably higher for no good purpose other than to look better. I can't argue against looks. Looks sell. But on the other hand it hinders the general experience as websites keep adding more and more layers making the browser's job more and more complex. Websites and website developers are equally responsible for degradation of performance of the web.
I'm not sure the problem or tension will ever be resolved either. Web developers always want to offer the next new fancy feature and browsers will always be one (or a few) step(s) behind implementing the next spec. The result is a tool pushed beyond its original intentions at the cost of performance.
utorrent is fairly light weight and easy to use because of its performance characteristics
I call bs. utorrent is not easy to use because of performance characteristics. In some ways I find it stupid to use. Why do I have to use a 2nd level context menu to set a specfic upload/download rate maximum for a specific item? Where are my keyboard shortcuts? utorrent only wins on usability by copying what already exists. It's not a bad strategy, but I'm not sure I've seen anything greatly innovative in terms of UI in utorrent.
Ahh, parent poster is a Troll, eh?
Yes, he is a troll. Education does not promise you money, it only promises to educate you if you are willing to be educated. In all of my classes my professors never claimed that after passing the class I would be blessed with high paying jobs. Instead, their claim was, "these are the topics we will cover." How well they covered those topics varied, and obviously some professors did poorly while others did well. But nobody ever said, "learn this and you will make money." As a student, you choose your degree, and you choose what classes you will take. There is no reason to come crying after you graduated to claim that your degree did nothing for you when it was practically your choice all along.
Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard would probably agree with AC. Is he a troll too?
The article you linked to makes no claims that school is worthless. In fact, the article is brining up a major point that you and the parent missed: if you only are thinking in terms of costs and how much the degree with return in terms of money, then you have to think in terms of return on investment on the degree and the following job because of it compared to whatever alternative plan you have in mind. The option that has the highest return is obviously the option you should take if your only goal is money.
I saw far too many kids there for the party myself... the 'life experience' they called it. We even have online encyclopedias citing which schools paaar-tay the hardest.
I saw a lot of kids partying. But I also saw a lot of those kids failing their classes, dropping out, staying for as long as 6 to 7 years, or ultimately getting a crappy job as a result. The question here is did they turn out better than they would have if they did not go to college? Maybe maybe not. But ultimately, who ever made the choices (parents and the child) are responsible. I'm not going to feel sorry or feel like it is a problem if a kid's parents are uninformed about their kid's choices or the kid does not have the motivation to utilize his resources. That's their business and as far as I can tell that's a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives.
College is big business. So big in fact that university finances have begun drawing the scrutiny of congress.
Oh, another Harvard, Yale, and Stanford article. What about public schools?
We've even begun exporting American-style higher education.
I don't see anything wrong with it. There are already a lot of international students enrolled everywhere throughout the country. In the same way, there are a lot of American students participating in foreign schools.
In the meantime, there's a lot of kids leaving college with a worthless degree and lots of debt.
I had a friend in college that happened to be a computer science major. But the big thing about her was that she was a girl and she was cute. Her personality was nothing like a geek and she could have easily done something else or fit in with other social groups. Naturally, the question came up, "Why computer science?" Her answer was, "I initially thought about getting another degree but my parents disagreed and said I needed to get something more 'useful.'" In the context she was speaking of, "useful" was a degree that would guarantee a higher salary. Indeed, she did get a job that she didn't mind doing in the software industry and did hit a higher salary. Unlike most people, she actually made the choice based on money and it paid off.
Others do not think like that. Instead they either think college is one of those necessary things or something their parents forced them into. The end result is a kid that partied too much barely finished his degree, and most of all did not learn anything or put the degree to use. I do not think that issue will ever be fixed because some people are that stupid. Ultimately for those people it may not matter because their parents m
So you're saying we didn't need to send couple $200 million dollar RC cars, but instead we could've just sent you?!?
It's going to be pretty hard to adjust your glasses or fix your contact lens while you have a space suit on.
When I read the summary it immediately reminded me of Section 9 in Ghost in the Shell. While we don't have all the cool technology or cyborgs yet, it is interesting to see how technology is burying itself deeper and deeper into our everyday lives.
I believe the "real" usage of a curve is when the distribution of scores are taken and only the top x% get As the next y% get Bs etc. all the way down to Fs so no matter how hard or easy a test is, someone is guaranteed to get an A and someone is guaranteed to get an F.
Almost there. A real curve is where the average is exactly that, the average. Most grade distributions come out looking sorta like a bell curve or a normal distribution (actually they tend to have 2 'bumps' rather than just one). That means most people will fall right around the average with half to the left and half to the right. At the average point is supposed to be the bare minimum passing grade which in college undergrad is usually a C while a C- is failing. So the average is placed right between a C- and a C. The grades are then distributed evenly across the quantities of a students (next higher cut get a C, next lower cut get a C-, etc) OR they are distributed some exact distance from the average (making most people get C and C- and very few or none at all getting A. C- and below didn't matter because you failed anyway).
I never had a professor who actually graded like that but there were a couple in the Engineering department (and the obvious smart choice for students was to drop the class). It turned out the professor purposely did that and openly told his students that half would fail because he did not want to teach. After failing half the class, he would be put on probation for a few years before teaching again but he could still continue his research.
Most of my past professors instead used the curve, but changed the midpoint for assigning grades. So instead of centering the average on C/C-, they move it up to B-. That caused a good portion of the students to pass, but it also caused a few failures. This is actually good because it does make students more willing to actually student when the possibility of failure is there. It also forces students who honestly do not care but are taking the class for secondary reasons (parents advice, needed to graduate, etc.) to fail. However, two really negative effects are cheating and too smart or too dumb classes. Some students come in never having failed ever and are forced to cheat to maintain their clean record. In the other case sometimes the class becomes too easy because the smartest student isn't actually that smart so the curve is lowered whereas if the entire class is very smart, the competition is fierce.
The usual claim by these professors when you ask them about grading is "I can't guarantee there will not be any failures, but most people tend to pass." That's because their grading scheme forces a small percentage to actually fail. That was usually a good sign to dig into your social bank to see how many smart kids were in the class. If there were a bunch and you cared about your GPA, it was a good sign you should either drop or you'll have to spend lots of hours studying to make your grade.
Another thing professors like to do is reserve A+ since in many college systems, A = 4.0 as well as A+ = 4.0. So in some classes where the professor believed nobody deserved the A+, he would just give out A only. If he did feel a student was truly worthy of the A+, then he would give it out specifically (hand picked of course). Once grades were posted on the window, the typical thing to do in these cases would be to see how many A+ where there. That usually hinted to you if you had someone (or someones) incredibly smart in the class that was pushing up the curve (that was a hint to make "friends" with those someones if they weren't you).
"- The whole design of GCC is perverted so that someone cannot easily extract a front-end or back-end. This is broken by design, as the GPL people do believe this would make it easier for commercial entities to `steal' a front-end or back-end and attach it to a proprietary code-generator (or language). This is probably true. This also makes it impossible to write interesting tools, such as intermediate analyzers. This also makes it impossible to plug old legacy back-ends for old architectures into newer compilers."
Well that explains a lot. And here I was thinking that all modern compilers were designed correctly with a front-end and back-end. So much for academics.
You don't get extra credit for not fucking up. Running "beautifully fast" on modern hardware is somewhere between "I've never been to jail" and "I shower daily" on the list of human accomplishment. Not that bragworthy.
Oh, it is bragworthy but many slashdotters talk from using vista at a store or reading about it on slashdot. I've never seen better advanced power feature integration than on vista. In all prior versions of windows and other OSes, suspend was always stupid and never quite worked. My laptop still has suspend quirks in it being a later XP-SP2 OS install. Furthermore the suspend isn't even worth it because the battery still gets drained quite a bit. However, my parent's dell desktop with Vista suspends perfectly. At the plug I measured 2-3 watts while the computer was sleeping. When I hit a key on the keyboard to wake up the computer, it shows the desktop in seconds. When I tell it to sleep it sleeps in 2 seconds. That new power state basically blows hibernation out of the water (at least for desktops) and it always works.
By the same token, it was years after XP came out that it was worthwhile to switch from Windows 2000. Maybe Vista will be worthwhile around the time Windows 7 comes out.
Win2k to WinXP was more like Win98 to Win98se. The new features were minimal and for most reasons, XP was almost exactly the same as 2k. The only major thing I remember being an issue was usb 2.0. Vista on the other hand is more like Windows 98se to Win2k. Early adopters of Win2k were pretty much left in the dark as far as driver support and legacy software support which is the same exact problem with Vista.
Isn't this now an unfair double-standard?
No because cable TV service can't even provide reliable, high quality digital content, and cable box free service to begin with. Because of that I specifically pay for analog service from the cable company because then I don't have to rent their stupid cable box and deal with their crappy digital service. And guess what, when I change the channel on the TV, it actually changes and doesn't wait 10 seconds and display some BS over half the screen every time I do it. I also don't see their crappy compression scheme (blockyness) and occasional cuts in the stream. I can also split the signal a billion times if I want to and have a billion TVs for the same cost. With digital I have to buy more of their BS equipment and pay for more of their lame techs to come and fart on my property.
I have an issue with OO's PDF generation. For some reason the PDFs it generates are larger than they need to be. All you need to do to test this is write a couple plain paragraphs, maybe add a style or two, then use the PDF export. For the second PDF you will instead print using a post script printer driver and set the print dialog or driver to output to a postscript file rather than the printer. Then take the postscript file and feed it through ghostscript to convert it to a PDF. On a one page document, OO's pdf is 64kb while for the other method it is 4kb! What's going on?