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theodp writes "After having taught introductory programming (CS 1) for the past six years,' writes GVSU's Zack Kurmas, 'and having watched many students struggle through this course and the subsequent course (CS 2), I have come to the conclusion that it is absurd to expect students who don't have any prior programming experience to be well prepared to study Computer Science after a single 15-week course (i.e., CS 1). I believe that expecting a student to learn to program well enough to study Computer Science in a single 15-week course is almost as absurd as expecting a student with no instrumental musical experience to be ready to join the university orchestra after 15 weeks.' Kurmas' frustrations are not unlike those voiced by Physics professor Dr. Yung Tae Kim, who argues the up-or-out, one-size-fits-all rigid pace approach to learning set by teachers and administrators is as absurd as telling a toddler, 'You have ten weeks to walk, and if you can't, you get an F and you're not allowed to try to walk anymore."

Lets start things off with a thing of beauty: ChazeFroy notes that Malin Space Science Systems has tons of really excellent images from the Mars Global Surveyor. Now something of evil: TsEA sends us HTML magic: a true guideline for HTML usage. 3 things that prove that The net Will destroy humanity: BlackNova sent us a Magic 8-ball powered by Lego Mindstorms, Cuban sent us the pantscam (which is exactly what it sounds like) and _martini_ noted an online thermostat where you can twiddle the temperature at some guys house. Its only a matter of time before technology fights back: NMerriam sent us the truth about what computers think of us in this weeks Onion. But let us not forget that science has given us many wonderful things, like for example, lunatik17 pointed us at a bit about shooting your lawn with lasers instead of mowing. However, science has also given us gmr2048's story about testicular implants for animals so I guess we're kinda even so far. I suspect the only way to defend ourselves from technology is to understand it, and who better to teach topics like ISDN then sent a great way to have celebreties like Alicia Silverstone. Or Mr. Rogers teaching the RS232 pinout, Tonya Harding explaining a Cisco 700, and best of all, Darva Conger on the configure register of Cisco routers (thanks Ex Machina who got it from Memepool) Ever want to be a female olympic marathon champ? Jaster this years winner believes hornet stomach juice is the secret, so get started! Of course, to much of that stuff could wind you up on sent us the the next Darwin Awards (from Gambit Thirty-Two) Ant sent us a pair of stories about poop! (what does this guy do with his time?) What happens when your space toilet doesn't flush? All I know is I hope that I have some custom printed toilet paper to keep things under control. Finally, many people noted that you should call 1-800-888-3999, and select option 7. No, really.

DoasFu writes "Screenshots is an odd art project depicting historical events in an isometric video game style, a la The Sims. Very strange."

ChazeFroy writes: "About 150 physicists gathered to discuss how Mars could become habitable. They suggested that by introducing PFCs (a cousin of CFCs) into the Martian atmosphere, they could transform the climate of Mars into something resembling Canada's climate (this would be enough to sustain lichens and algae). This process would take only 100 years, but they estimate it would take nearly 100,000 years for the oxygen levels to increase to a suitable level to sustain human life." Heh -- or you could say, "Soon, Canada could be almost like Mars."

Miles asks: "I'm planning to building a car MP3/DVD/Navigation/RealTimeAutomobileDiagnostic System. I've decided to use Windows95/98/ME as the OS, for the software I want to run. I've seen similar car computers that take 30 seconds or more to boot, however I want to get the boot time down to 10 seconds. I plan to use "suspend to disk" instead of just powering off the computer to achieve this and it'll just reload memory from the hard drive. I tried to search for HD's that have low spin-up times, but high transfer rates, and have come up empty. IBM's microdrive has a 0.5s spin up time, but only reads at 4MB/s. Another option is flash memory that simulates an IDE drive, but the maximum transfer rate I've seen is 8MB/s. Larger drives can read at 50MB/s, but take 8 seconds to spin up. Does anyone know of a storage medium that can be written to everytime the computer is shut off, and started up and read from in under 10 seconds (the less the better)?"

"Capacity is not an issue (as long as it is 64MB or more), because I'll have a separate conventional drive to store data. If there are better options than using suspend-to-disk, please tell me about them."

ChazeFroy writes: "A black hole with a mass of more than 2 million suns has been pinpointed at the center of the Milky Way. Scientists used triangulation based on the acceleration of infrared images of three stars and to find the center. CNN has the story here."

pi_rules asks: "I'm by no means an expert on EDI software (stuff used to communicate purchase orders, invoices, ship notices, etc., electronically) but from a programmer's point of view I'm dismayed at what the market for this stuff looks like right now. Looking at the specs to the documents it doesn't seem like an overly daunting task to implement a solution on a business-by-business basis; however the only commercial solutions out there are huge, expensive products. I'd like to know what other people who have worked with EDI software can tell me about what they need their software to do; and if they have a solution if they could give me a general over-view of how it even works. My intention here isn't to beat up on existing EDI solution providers really; it's just that I want to see a solution that's 'geek-friendly', and beneficial to businesses by setting up a system that will provide them software that not only functions, but does the job lickety split."

"After shelling out $10,000 for one of these products we found it to be: slow (incredibly slow), unintuitive, and it didn't even work! Of course, the company is clueless as to how to fix the problem. Granted we've only tried one vendor, but this was the one -recommended- to us by our customer. After asking around, it turns out that other businesses with similar needs had to hire in programmers to write their own custom solutions.

I'm entirely capable of writing the software to handle our situation here but I'd like to start a Free Software project out of whatever I make. The problem is that I know little about this massive standard and the Right Way to go about constructing software to do the task. The standard is absolutely HUGE, and can vary significantly from vendor to vendor I'm told."

Big_Joe wrote to us with the continuing story of Michael Chaney. Michael is the guy who paid the re-registration fee for the Hotmail domain name, after Microsoft had failed to over the Christmas holiday. He's auctioning the 500$ "thank you" check off on E*Bay and has pledged to donate the winning bid to charity, as well as matching up to $2,000 of that out of his own pocket.

DoasFu was the first of many people to write us about the Salon article currently running concerning User Friendly, Illiad, the rise of the strip, and the new book. Warm fuzzies for all.