I agree it's got a damn good chance, and I'll certainly be picking one up. But it's not a "hell of a lot cheaper than the competition" - it's likely to be less than $100 cheaper than a 360. The PS3, well that's another matter of course:)
If you ask a particular professor in his area of expertise (which is much more narrow than "Technology" or "Science"), to name the top 20 schools doing research in his area... and see what his response his. There may be 2 or 3 international universities on the list. For one, I fail to see what research has to do with it (other than that's what the original, flawed, article seemed to consider the sole measure of a university's worth). Secondly, I think it would depend a lot on whether the professor I asked was american or not. Thirdly, what you seem to be saying (unless I'm misunderstanding) is that the US would dominate every single specific-subject list, and yet fail to dominate the more general ones, which must - by definition - be an aggregate of those specific ones. Huh?
Finally you start talking about broadening the scope out of the world top 10. OK, look at the page I linked to and take the top 24 - still only half US. Whilst I am perfectly happy to consider the possibility that for whatever specific subject you have in mind there is a strong US-centric skew, I fail to see you presenting any actual evidence for your assertion that this is true for ALL subjects. Specific example - for my degree subject (we in the UK don't call them "majors" because there are no "minors") the university I attended is in the top 5 in the world, with at least one other of the top 5 also outside the US. Expand that to the top 20 and I can assure you there would be plenty more.
Except that the "number of citations per faculty member" that a given university has nothing whatsoever to do with startups. The quality of graduate output seems much more relevant to me.
Minor point - that's 7, not 8 out of 10. You missed ETH Zurich (plus, that's the 2004 list, in 2005 ETH was replaced at position 10 by Ecole Polytechnique). In technology however, the US only has 4 out of 10.
There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
OK, I'll bite. From the TimesEd 2005 annual survey of the best universities in the world (and don't even think of questioning the source, if there is an authority on ranking universities they're it).
Top 10 Arts/Humanities: 4 US, 6 non US Top 10 BioMed: 4 US, 6 non US Top 10 Science: 6 US, 4 non US Top 10 Social Science: 7 US, 3 non US Top 10 Technology: 4 US, 6 non US
So not as clear cut as you seem to think. There's no doubt there are some great schools in the US, but there are great schools in lots of other places too:)
TimesEd publishes lists of the best universities (as decided by their very exhaustive and independent criteria) in various categories. For 2005, the Top 10 overall for europe are:
University of Cambridge University of Oxford École Polytechnique London School of Economics Imperial College London ETH Zurich École Normale Supérieure University College London University of Edinburgh École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Interestingly, of the 2005 worldwide Top 10 (all subjects) only 3 are non-US, whereas for Technology specifically only 4 are US and 6 are non-US.
Now if you go to any school at all and study: Art, 18th Century French Literature, Physical Education, Nature Studies, or my favorite, Art History...well you really can't blame any school if you are subsequently useless to society. Those are degrees for athletes with pro-sponsorship, or prospective house wives.
Screw you. The world needs more culture, not less. I personally know several Art, Art History & Literature majors, all usefully employed making society a better place. Can you say you're doing the same? Or are you just churning out more code like me?
Two things - firstly the call center staff are probably not bank employees. They may be employed by a third party services company and the bank simply stopped using them and switched to an Indian equivalent. Secondly, they are probably on a part-time contract, and it's much easier to get rid of part-time people than full time.
It's similar in the UK - you can be fired for something like gross misconduct (i.e. you have to do something wrong) or you can be made redundant (laid off). If you're made redundant, the company is not allowed to hire someone to replace you - they've basically said that job no longer needs to be done. So you can be made redundant by downsizing, or by new technology or processes, but not by outsourcing.
Which is all fine if you accept that a majority of terrorists fit into any specific ethnic group. You seem to think that's the case and I'd love to see some statistics to back that up, because I simply don't believe it. The USA seems to believe terrorism is a very new thing which is only done by certain groups of people. Residents of other areas of the world know that to be entirely wrong - from the IRA and UDA to the Chechens to ETA it's all ethnic groups and all religions.
To be honest, if I were in charge the only people I'd exclude from higher security would be Buddhists and Atheists. But seeing as you can't tell religon by appearance (remember the "shoe bomber"? He was a non-arab muslim) that's not really possible.
but the fact is that most of the terrorists are Arabs
Crap. Most of the terrorists I've had to worry about during my life have been Irish Catholics. Many of the terrorist attacks on US soil have been at the hands of white Christians. Racial profiling is bad because it doesn't work more than for any other reason.
You can never block all attack vectors, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't block those you can. Sure education helps, but it's not an either/or situation - we can educate _and_ minimize opportunity.
FUD. You can do the same thing in Windows, it's just the lazy admins didn't. What makes you think they'd me any more diligent with a different OS installed? And how on earth is editing fstab any less complicated than firing up the security policy manager and unclicking a few check boxes?
Why the hell does an office worker need cds, floppies, card readers or usb devices? They don't. I work for a company with ~50,000 desktops and none of them have a floppy drive, all the usb ports are disabled and applications cannot be executed from the cd drive unless you're admin (we use the cds for cloning). Email is handled easily with scanners & filters.
And we're pretty damn productive & profitable, thanks. I can't think of a single good reason for enabling any of those things on our machines, if people need to take stuff home with them they do it on a company laptop or via vpn. No company files leave our network - period.
Windows will let you enable USB HID (mice, keyboards) but keep everything else (MSC etc) disabled. At our office however we just block all USB and use PS2 keyboards.
Ours don't, or rather they do have USB ports but they're all disabled. Useful for charging my ipod but nothing else. There's also a blanket rule against ever putting any company data on any non-company machine, so if you want to work at home you either take a company laptop home or connect via vpn and use remote desktop to your work machine.
There's this little thing called virtual memory, and a really great module or two for memory management. No shit. But however much you manage your memory, you can still run out. It happens, memory is not infinite. Even virtual memory is not infinite, unless your disks are. Personally, I'm still waiting for Maxtor to come out with that particular feature.
Re:Exploring new levels of geekyness
on
DDO Goes Solo
·
· Score: 1
Q: What's geekier than playing Dungeons & Dragons alone, online? A: Posting on Slashdot about playing Dungeons & Dragons alone, online.:)
The problem is probably not with IIS here, but with the wonderful OS sitting beneath it(which doesn't know what to do when out of RAM). Wow - is there now a Linux kernal mod to have the server automatically install more DIMMs? When you're out of memory you're out of memory, end of story.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree it's got a damn good chance, and I'll certainly be picking one up. But it's not a "hell of a lot cheaper than the competition" - it's likely to be less than $100 cheaper than a 360. The PS3, well that's another matter of course :)
If you ask a particular professor in his area of expertise (which is much more narrow than "Technology" or "Science"), to name the top 20 schools doing research in his area... and see what his response his. There may be 2 or 3 international universities on the list.
For one, I fail to see what research has to do with it (other than that's what the original, flawed, article seemed to consider the sole measure of a university's worth). Secondly, I think it would depend a lot on whether the professor I asked was american or not. Thirdly, what you seem to be saying (unless I'm misunderstanding) is that the US would dominate every single specific-subject list, and yet fail to dominate the more general ones, which must - by definition - be an aggregate of those specific ones. Huh?
Finally you start talking about broadening the scope out of the world top 10. OK, look at the page I linked to and take the top 24 - still only half US. Whilst I am perfectly happy to consider the possibility that for whatever specific subject you have in mind there is a strong US-centric skew, I fail to see you presenting any actual evidence for your assertion that this is true for ALL subjects. Specific example - for my degree subject (we in the UK don't call them "majors" because there are no "minors") the university I attended is in the top 5 in the world, with at least one other of the top 5 also outside the US. Expand that to the top 20 and I can assure you there would be plenty more.
Except that the "number of citations per faculty member" that a given university has nothing whatsoever to do with startups. The quality of graduate output seems much more relevant to me.
Minor point - that's 7, not 8 out of 10. You missed ETH Zurich (plus, that's the 2004 list, in 2005 ETH was replaced at position 10 by Ecole Polytechnique). In technology however, the US only has 4 out of 10.
There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
:)
OK, I'll bite. From the TimesEd 2005 annual survey of the best universities in the world (and don't even think of questioning the source, if there is an authority on ranking universities they're it).
Top 10 Arts/Humanities: 4 US, 6 non US
Top 10 BioMed: 4 US, 6 non US
Top 10 Science: 6 US, 4 non US
Top 10 Social Science: 7 US, 3 non US
Top 10 Technology: 4 US, 6 non US
So not as clear cut as you seem to think. There's no doubt there are some great schools in the US, but there are great schools in lots of other places too
TimesEd publishes lists of the best universities (as decided by their very exhaustive and independent criteria) in various categories. For 2005, the Top 10 overall for europe are:
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
École Polytechnique
London School of Economics
Imperial College London
ETH Zurich
École Normale Supérieure
University College London
University of Edinburgh
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Interestingly, of the 2005 worldwide Top 10 (all subjects) only 3 are non-US, whereas for Technology specifically only 4 are US and 6 are non-US.
Now if you go to any school at all and study: Art, 18th Century French Literature, Physical Education, Nature Studies, or my favorite, Art History...well you really can't blame any school if you are subsequently useless to society. Those are degrees for athletes with pro-sponsorship, or prospective house wives.
Screw you. The world needs more culture, not less. I personally know several Art, Art History & Literature majors, all usefully employed making society a better place. Can you say you're doing the same? Or are you just churning out more code like me?
Miles per gallon are hardly constant either. Uphill? Downhill? 10mph or 100? Highway or city? Same difference.
Two things - firstly the call center staff are probably not bank employees. They may be employed by a third party services company and the bank simply stopped using them and switched to an Indian equivalent. Secondly, they are probably on a part-time contract, and it's much easier to get rid of part-time people than full time.
It's similar in the UK - you can be fired for something like gross misconduct (i.e. you have to do something wrong) or you can be made redundant (laid off). If you're made redundant, the company is not allowed to hire someone to replace you - they've basically said that job no longer needs to be done. So you can be made redundant by downsizing, or by new technology or processes, but not by outsourcing.
Which is all fine if you accept that a majority of terrorists fit into any specific ethnic group. You seem to think that's the case and I'd love to see some statistics to back that up, because I simply don't believe it. The USA seems to believe terrorism is a very new thing which is only done by certain groups of people. Residents of other areas of the world know that to be entirely wrong - from the IRA and UDA to the Chechens to ETA it's all ethnic groups and all religions.
To be honest, if I were in charge the only people I'd exclude from higher security would be Buddhists and Atheists. But seeing as you can't tell religon by appearance (remember the "shoe bomber"? He was a non-arab muslim) that's not really possible.
but the fact is that most of the terrorists are Arabs
Crap. Most of the terrorists I've had to worry about during my life have been Irish Catholics. Many of the terrorist attacks on US soil have been at the hands of white Christians. Racial profiling is bad because it doesn't work more than for any other reason.
You can never block all attack vectors, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't block those you can. Sure education helps, but it's not an either/or situation - we can educate _and_ minimize opportunity.
FUD. You can do the same thing in Windows, it's just the lazy admins didn't. What makes you think they'd me any more diligent with a different OS installed? And how on earth is editing fstab any less complicated than firing up the security policy manager and unclicking a few check boxes?
Why just Linux? Windows lets you do the exact same thing.
Are you going to disable CD and floppy drives?
Of course, why not? In fact better yet, just take them out. Totally unneeded in a modern office environment.
Why the hell does an office worker need cds, floppies, card readers or usb devices? They don't. I work for a company with ~50,000 desktops and none of them have a floppy drive, all the usb ports are disabled and applications cannot be executed from the cd drive unless you're admin (we use the cds for cloning). Email is handled easily with scanners & filters.
And we're pretty damn productive & profitable, thanks. I can't think of a single good reason for enabling any of those things on our machines, if people need to take stuff home with them they do it on a company laptop or via vpn. No company files leave our network - period.
Windows will let you enable USB HID (mice, keyboards) but keep everything else (MSC etc) disabled. At our office however we just block all USB and use PS2 keyboards.
Ours don't, or rather they do have USB ports but they're all disabled. Useful for charging my ipod but nothing else. There's also a blanket rule against ever putting any company data on any non-company machine, so if you want to work at home you either take a company laptop home or connect via vpn and use remote desktop to your work machine.
It will either mean cheaper Macs, or Macs with more features for the same price.
Or another yacht for Steve.
There's this little thing called virtual memory, and a really great module or two for memory management.
No shit. But however much you manage your memory, you can still run out. It happens, memory is not infinite. Even virtual memory is not infinite, unless your disks are. Personally, I'm still waiting for Maxtor to come out with that particular feature.
Q: What's geekier than playing Dungeons & Dragons alone, online? :)
A: Posting on Slashdot about playing Dungeons & Dragons alone, online.
The problem is probably not with IIS here, but with the wonderful OS sitting beneath it(which doesn't know what to do when out of RAM).
Wow - is there now a Linux kernal mod to have the server automatically install more DIMMs? When you're out of memory you're out of memory, end of story.
You can buy games from the Xbox Arcade without a subscription. You only need to pay to play online.
Sounds like my PDA....