1. Horrible public university student-teacher ratios making assistance...
...elided...
4. Rote assignments that are equally dull, unchallenging and time-consuming
I think there are a few possibilities here. First, this might actually all be true and characteristic of an entire department, in which case I would recommend that a person change schools immediately, even at high cost. If you find yourself in a situation where you are rationalizing cheating due to the quality of instruction, it's time to get out.
This might just refer to one class in an otherwise fine learning establishment in which case I recommmend just sucking it up, doing the work, and chalking it up to experience. It's hardly time to start gaming the system.
This is just whining that life is hard, classes are hard, accents are hard to understand, etc., in which case getting other people to do work assigned to you is the start of a long road.
Seriously, if you're so above the level of teaching and the work being assigned to you, you should be able to convince a better institution somewhere to take you, and you should do this instead of wasting time trying to survive the experience. This will not be the case at many, many half-decent universities.
5. True students seeking more elegant/better/high-graded solutions. How many times have you cobbled together something that was ugly, functional, but practically a monstrosity. Spend a few more hours on it, with 0 forward progress, or outsource the work, then analyze the solution to see a better algorithm and incorporate it? Why get a C, when you can outsource some superior work, get a better grade, and learn more in the process?
So it is a "true student" looking for "elegan[ce]" that "cobbled together something that was ugly, functional, but practically a monstrosity" in the first place? In my CS education, I found that implementation was a great way to fully grasp the details of any algorithm, be it simple or mind-bogglingly complex. Conversely, I found that the ability to implement an algorithm elegantly comes from understanding. The monstrosities come from people who wander in the dark trying to implement an algorithm they do not fully comprehend. If a person is unable to implement the base algorithm elegantly, I'm not sure that he should move on to trying to improve it just yet.
I do not doubt that a person can get superior work and a better grade by having someone else to do it for him, but I doubt that he will learn more in the process.
You are getting "procedural" programming confused with "functional" programming. Functional languages generally refer to languages that concentrate on the evaluation of expressions with no side-effects rather than statements that modify data. Examples of functional languages are:
Note that C and Pascal are decidedly not examples of programming languages designed for functional programming. Wikipedia's page is a decent starting point for learning about this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programmin g/
Up until the New Deal, the federal government had very little influence on the entirety of the country. Since no one alive ever really existed before then, it's hard to relate what the country would be like without agencies like the EPA, FDA, and others. Let me assure you, there were little, if any, widespread problems or issues.
At the end of the election, each of those cards is loaded onto one machine, designated as the zero machine. (I found it interesting that Diebold numbered the machines 0 through n-1, disproving my notion that they don't have anyone on board who knows anything about Computer Science.)
For people interested in an alternative to Safari, the Omni Group just released the first public beta of OmniWeb 5.0. It has some cool new features including a particularly nice tabs implementation, a (IMHO) more flexible interpretation of Apple's SnapBack, and site-specific preferences.
I don't mean to sound like an advertisement, and to be sure, OmniWeb has its quirks, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
You can get there by going to the iFP support page. There is a link at the bottom. It's in the same place as the link for the PC version under "Software Downloads". Oh, and by the way, they do have a Mac OS 9 version.
In any case, are these Mac compatible? If they can be setup as a universal-storage USB device (?), I would think so.
They are Mac compatible (at least with OS X) using software supplied by iRiver - iRiver Music Manager. They are not set up as USB mass storage devices. However, you can store arbitrary files on it. Note that the player prevents you from copying mp3s _off_ the device as a copy protection strategy[1].
[1] This, of course, may be easily circumventable, but I have had no reason to try so far.
All of this is in reference to an iFP-195. It may or may not extend to all of the players in their line.
Mail.app has never done this properly for me. I just tried:
1. Deleting and recreating my account. 2. Turning off SSL. 3. Checking the "Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes" 4. Adding an "inbox" prefix.
...in lots of combinations, and none of them work. It is still the case that if I get mail that ends up in my inbox and mail that is filtered to one of my folders, only the one in my inbox shows up when I click 'Get New Mail'.
I guess it works for some and not others. Here is me:
OS X 10.3.2 (never worked in any previous version either) FastMail
For those who were curious and hopeful (I was so hopeful I went and early adopted this update:-) ), Mail.app still does not check IMAP folders other than your primary inbox when automatically checking or when 'Get New Mail' is used. You still have to 'Synchronize' or go 'Offline' and 'Online' again to force it to check.
(Note that this is with Fastmail IMAP, though I don't think that it makes a difference).
Sigh - it's back to choosing between easy and automatic mail checking and automatic filtering.
Re:Inexcusable, /. should use open cache or .torre
on
3D Modelling From a Sketch
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You have to ask yourself what the intended audience and expected traffic of the website are. It's not RedHat posting.isos of its distribution. It's not a movie studio putting out a trailer that it wants to be seen by everyone. It's a university researcher who put up a website to give the curious someplace to go when they hear about his research. In fact, it's likely that he doesn't give a hoot about Slashdot. So why should anyone expect him to handle the Slashdot DDOS that comes his way? I expect that he's too busy working on his interesting research to deal with administering a bulletproof website.
Have you verified that you're actually seeing compiler bugs? It's quite possible that using a different compiler exposes bugs in the code itself - bugs that just happened to be treated differently with your original compiler. It may also be an issue of standards compliance. Either way, it seems that it would be worthwhile for you to explore _why_ you get the crashes you do. It may be enlightening.
Re:MacOS X : Use the keychain
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone know of any software that allows you to put the Mac OS X Keychain on a PDA (Palm, specifically)?
So why doesn't the developer just make a change to the software so the linked person has to confirm the connection?
You already have to confirm the connection. Any friend requests are not added unless you approve of them. However, most people like having as many friends as possible, even if they are nonsensical or fake, so I don't think the "approve/confirm everything" policy is very unusual.
That's another good one. In combination with FVWM's ability to bind keystrokes to mouse movements, I almost never have to context switch to take my hands off the keyboard:-).
There are several features of KDE and other X window managers that I miss now that I'm an OS X user (although I hope Expose addresses some of them).
1. Virtual screens. Having multiple desktops is great. When I was an FVWM user, having multiple _continuous_ desktops was even better.
2. Borders snapping to other windows and screen edges. This makes it easy for extremely anal people like me to squeeze out every pixel of screen real estate. It also makes everything look nice and neat, which I like.
3. Modifiers to move and resize windows without having to aim for title bars or borders. I love being able to hold Meta + Button 1 and grab any part of a window to move it. The same goes for Meta + Button 3 to resize. Yay.
4. Setting windows to always be on top.
This is just what I came up with in the past minute. If I thought harder, I could probably come up with more. I'm not saying that there aren't rough edges with KDE, but in my opinion the good outweighs the bad.
However, Dvorak is absolutely dreadful where the alternating left-right hands is concerned, which accounts for an awful lot of QWERTY's speed.
I'm curious what your source for this is. Everything I have read indicates that one of the goals of the Dvorak layout was to increase alternating hand typing. As an example, I dropped the text of your post into the applet here. For Dvorak, ~23% of characters were typed with the same hand. For QWERTY, ~35% of the characters were typed with the same hand. Try it with most English text, and you'll find similar results. Of course, I haven't audited the code for the applet (though I probably should).
If you do trust the applet (man, I should really verify the results to be sure:-)), here are some observations about the Dvorak layout:
1. You stay on the home row more. 2. You alternate hands more. 3. You change fingers more. 4. Your fingers don't travel as far.
Well, whatever the reason, I feel more comfortable typing on a Dvorak layout:-). Everyone else can do whatever they want:-).
Ergonomists point out that QWERTY's bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits (notably, that alternating hand sequences make for speedier typing).
There _is_ something amiss with the ergonomics of QWERTY. While it may not have been designed to "slow typists down", it is certainly not optimal. Layouts like Dvorak address the top-row overloading and unbalanced left-right loads.
The focus of the linked article is that QWERTY should not be held out as a "market failure" (that is, an example of "locking in"). However, it clearly states its point:
Which is all very interesting, but the point is this: if you have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the cost of retraining for Dvorak (however modest) is not worth paying. This implies, in turn, that the QWERTY standard is efficient.
All the article is saying is that the cost of retraining is not worth paying, which is the same reason why Windows is better than Linux. Remember that this is the opinion written in The Economist, not a study by ergonomists.
Get a real bike though, not that mountainbike shit. That's for sissies. A racing bike is a bit more expensive, but it's so much more fun to ride since you don't get exhausted from rubbing the asphalt all the time with those huge gripping tires.
The point of a mountain bike is to ride on trails and mountains, not on asphalt. That's why they call it a mountain bike. I can assure you that mountain biking can be just as good a workout (if not better) than road biking. As for mountain biking being for sissies, I highly recommend that you try riding a mountain bike down a rocky mountain trail at 35 mph and then reassessing your assertion. Then, if you think that riding downhill is for sissies, I recommend turning your bike around and trying to climb that same trail.
There are metal cases for PCs, but since the hot components are not bolted directly to the case, this doesn't help much for dissipating heat. It would take major design overhauls of motherboards, graphics cards, and cases to have cases act as huge heatsinks.
As it stands today, the "solution" of fans drawing cool air in and pushing hot air out is pretty good. Given the amount of heat being produced by current processors, it's hard to get away from fans (or some kind of moving fluid). For instance, your processor will likely run hotter with the case wide open than it would if you sealed it up and used fans to force air over the heat sink.
As for a passive cooling solution, remember the Apple G4 Cube? That used pure convection to draw heat up and out of the case. However, as processors get faster and faster, solutions like this will be harder and harder to come by.
I do not want to compete with someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country who, granted may have equal skills as I, but who's biggest asset to the American company is that they will work for less money.
But that is what competition is. Given two equal quality items, of course I choose to buy the cheaper one.[1]
If someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country was able to acquire the same skills as someone brought up in America, where presumably much more effort is exerted towards education, then the 3rd world counterpart has won the competition! As an American, we have much greater access to some terrific educational institutions. To me, the advantage of being an American is precisely this opportunity.
[1] Granted, there are cases where this is not true for me. The easy example is companies who _exploit_ people, violate basic human rights, etc.; there's a thick line between competition and exploitation. But I digress...
I'm very confused by this post. It sounds as though the author wants companies to give jobs and money to Americans simply because they are Americans, and while that is a perfectly valid belief, he goes on to say that he wants to compete based on skills. On top of that, his car example admits that the Japanese built cheaper, more fuel effecient cars. So which is it?
Economies are globalizing. It sounds to me that the author only wants to compete if he is going to win!
Although I'm not up on the current rules of Formula 1, there have definitely been F1 cars with ABS and traction control. In fact, these technologies are points of contention for racing purists, since, simply put, they allows drivers to stand on the brakes while entering corners and stand on the gas exiting corners with no worry for skidding, sliding, etc. It works so well it takes some of the skill out of driving.
Re:Nice!!
on
Corporate KDE
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't use KDE, so let me ask: are Korganizer and Kmail integrated so they can work together- within a same interface? Like that of Outlook?
There is a project called Kontact that is integrating the user interfaces of the various personal information management tools of KDE (KAddressBook, KMail, KOrganizer, etc.). It is scheduled for official release with KDE 3.2, but they have a release available now!
Now, the ESC key is nasty in vi -- generally, uppermost left key, but it also creeps on the keyboard.
FYI, you can use C-[ (Control-Open Bracket) instead of the Escape key. I find this infinitely easier, especially on a Sun keyboard (with Ctrl to the left of the 'a').
I'd like to point you at this applet. It calculates statistics on bodies of text for Qwerty, Dvorak, and Arensito layouts. I sent your comment through it and here are the stats:
Qwerty: 34.07% hit with the same hand (i.e. not alternating) with a finger distribution of: 7% 10% 16% 22% 21% 6% 11% 2%
Dvorak: 25.95% hit with the same hand (i.e. more alternating) with a finger distribution of: 6% 8% 11% 16% 16% 15% 12% 11%
That is, Dvorak alternates hands more and more evenly distributes finger use.
You'll see that statistics close to these hold for longer bodies of English text. Try pasting in a news article and you'll see. What do you have to back up your statements?
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are a few possibilities here. First, this might actually all be true and characteristic of an entire department, in which case I would recommend that a person change schools immediately, even at high cost. If you find yourself in a situation where you are rationalizing cheating due to the quality of instruction, it's time to get out.
This might just refer to one class in an otherwise fine learning establishment in which case I recommmend just sucking it up, doing the work, and chalking it up to experience. It's hardly time to start gaming the system.
This is just whining that life is hard, classes are hard, accents are hard to understand, etc., in which case getting other people to do work assigned to you is the start of a long road.
Seriously, if you're so above the level of teaching and the work being assigned to you, you should be able to convince a better institution somewhere to take you, and you should do this instead of wasting time trying to survive the experience. This will not be the case at many, many half-decent universities.
So it is a "true student" looking for "elegan[ce]" that "cobbled together something that was ugly, functional, but practically a monstrosity" in the first place? In my CS education, I found that implementation was a great way to fully grasp the details of any algorithm, be it simple or mind-bogglingly complex. Conversely, I found that the ability to implement an algorithm elegantly comes from understanding. The monstrosities come from people who wander in the dark trying to implement an algorithm they do not fully comprehend. If a person is unable to implement the base algorithm elegantly, I'm not sure that he should move on to trying to improve it just yet.
I do not doubt that a person can get superior work and a better grade by having someone else to do it for him, but I doubt that he will learn more in the process.
Note that C and Pascal are decidedly not examples of programming languages designed for functional programming. Wikipedia's page is a decent starting point for learning about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programmi
I can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic. How about the Great Depression? Or the conditions that spurred the civil rights movement?
Burn!
For people interested in an alternative to Safari, the Omni Group just released the first public beta of OmniWeb 5.0. It has some cool new features including a particularly nice tabs implementation, a (IMHO) more flexible interpretation of Apple's SnapBack, and site-specific preferences.
I don't mean to sound like an advertisement, and to be sure, OmniWeb has its quirks, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Here is a link.
Direct link.
You can get there by going to the iFP support page. There is a link at the bottom. It's in the same place as the link for the PC version under "Software Downloads". Oh, and by the way, they do have a Mac OS 9 version.
[1] This, of course, may be easily circumventable, but I have had no reason to try so far.
All of this is in reference to an iFP-195. It may or may not extend to all of the players in their line.
Did it work in 10.3.1?
...in lots of combinations, and none of them work. It is still the case that if I get mail that ends up in my inbox and mail that is filtered to one of my folders, only the one in my inbox shows up when I click 'Get New Mail'.
Mail.app has never done this properly for me. I just tried:
1. Deleting and recreating my account.
2. Turning off SSL.
3. Checking the "Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes"
4. Adding an "inbox" prefix.
I guess it works for some and not others. Here is me:
OS X 10.3.2 (never worked in any previous version either)
FastMail
For those who were curious and hopeful (I was so hopeful I went and early adopted this update :-) ), Mail.app still does not check IMAP folders other than your primary inbox when automatically checking or when 'Get New Mail' is used. You still have to 'Synchronize' or go 'Offline' and 'Online' again to force it to check.
(Note that this is with Fastmail IMAP, though I don't think that it makes a difference).
Sigh - it's back to choosing between easy and automatic mail checking and automatic filtering.
You have to ask yourself what the intended audience and expected traffic of the website are. It's not RedHat posting .isos of its distribution. It's not a movie studio putting out a trailer that it wants to be seen by everyone. It's a university researcher who put up a website to give the curious someplace to go when they hear about his research. In fact, it's likely that he doesn't give a hoot about Slashdot. So why should anyone expect him to handle the Slashdot DDOS that comes his way? I expect that he's too busy working on his interesting research to deal with administering a bulletproof website.
Have you verified that you're actually seeing compiler bugs? It's quite possible that using a different compiler exposes bugs in the code itself - bugs that just happened to be treated differently with your original compiler. It may also be an issue of standards compliance. Either way, it seems that it would be worthwhile for you to explore _why_ you get the crashes you do. It may be enlightening.
Does anyone know of any software that allows you to put the Mac OS X Keychain on a PDA (Palm, specifically)?
That's another good one. In combination with FVWM's ability to bind keystrokes to mouse movements, I almost never have to context switch to take my hands off the keyboard :-).
There are several features of KDE and other X window managers that I miss now that I'm an OS X user (although I hope Expose addresses some of them).
1. Virtual screens. Having multiple desktops is great. When I was an FVWM user, having multiple _continuous_ desktops was even better.
2. Borders snapping to other windows and screen edges. This makes it easy for extremely anal people like me to squeeze out every pixel of screen real estate. It also makes everything look nice and neat, which I like.
3. Modifiers to move and resize windows without having to aim for title bars or borders. I love being able to hold Meta + Button 1 and grab any part of a window to move it. The same goes for Meta + Button 3 to resize. Yay.
4. Setting windows to always be on top.
This is just what I came up with in the past minute. If I thought harder, I could probably come up with more. I'm not saying that there aren't rough edges with KDE, but in my opinion the good outweighs the bad.
If you do trust the applet (man, I should really verify the results to be sure
1. You stay on the home row more.
2. You alternate hands more.
3. You change fingers more.
4. Your fingers don't travel as far.
Well, whatever the reason, I feel more comfortable typing on a Dvorak layout
The focus of the linked article is that QWERTY should not be held out as a "market failure" (that is, an example of "locking in"). However, it clearly states its point: All the article is saying is that the cost of retraining is not worth paying, which is the same reason why Windows is better than Linux. Remember that this is the opinion written in The Economist, not a study by ergonomists.
There are metal cases for PCs, but since the hot components are not bolted directly to the case, this doesn't help much for dissipating heat. It would take major design overhauls of motherboards, graphics cards, and cases to have cases act as huge heatsinks.
As it stands today, the "solution" of fans drawing cool air in and pushing hot air out is pretty good. Given the amount of heat being produced by current processors, it's hard to get away from fans (or some kind of moving fluid). For instance, your processor will likely run hotter with the case wide open than it would if you sealed it up and used fans to force air over the heat sink.
As for a passive cooling solution, remember the Apple G4 Cube? That used pure convection to draw heat up and out of the case. However, as processors get faster and faster, solutions like this will be harder and harder to come by.
I do not want to compete with someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country who, granted may have equal skills as I, but who's biggest asset to the American company is that they will work for less money.
But that is what competition is. Given two equal quality items, of course I choose to buy the cheaper one.[1]
If someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country was able to acquire the same skills as someone brought up in America, where presumably much more effort is exerted towards education, then the 3rd world counterpart has won the competition! As an American, we have much greater access to some terrific educational institutions. To me, the advantage of being an American is precisely this opportunity.
[1] Granted, there are cases where this is not true for me. The easy example is companies who _exploit_ people, violate basic human rights, etc.; there's a thick line between competition and exploitation. But I digress...
I'm very confused by this post. It sounds as though the author wants companies to give jobs and money to Americans simply because they are Americans, and while that is a perfectly valid belief, he goes on to say that he wants to compete based on skills. On top of that, his car example admits that the Japanese built cheaper, more fuel effecient cars. So which is it?
Economies are globalizing. It sounds to me that the author only wants to compete if he is going to win!
s/he/she if appropriate.
Although I'm not up on the current rules of Formula 1, there have definitely been F1 cars with ABS and traction control. In fact, these technologies are points of contention for racing purists, since, simply put, they allows drivers to stand on the brakes while entering corners and stand on the gas exiting corners with no worry for skidding, sliding, etc. It works so well it takes some of the skill out of driving.
There is a project called Kontact that is integrating the user interfaces of the various personal information management tools of KDE (KAddressBook, KMail, KOrganizer, etc.). It is scheduled for official release with KDE 3.2, but they have a release available now!
FYI, you can use C-[ (Control-Open Bracket) instead of the Escape key. I find this infinitely easier, especially on a Sun keyboard (with Ctrl to the left of the 'a').
I'd like to point you at this applet. It calculates statistics on bodies of text for Qwerty, Dvorak, and Arensito layouts. I sent your comment through it and here are the stats:
Qwerty:
34.07% hit with the same hand (i.e. not alternating) with a finger distribution of:
7% 10% 16% 22% 21% 6% 11% 2%
Dvorak:
25.95% hit with the same hand (i.e. more alternating) with a finger distribution of:
6% 8% 11% 16% 16% 15% 12% 11%
That is, Dvorak alternates hands more and more evenly distributes finger use.
You'll see that statistics close to these hold for longer bodies of English text. Try pasting in a news article and you'll see. What do you have to back up your statements?