Yes, and I've seen plenty of awful database designs because whoever did the schema had no idea what normalization was, let alone basic principles of data modelling such as E-R or ODL. Those things actually work folks. If you have a local university in your area that offers a course (upper level CS, but in actuality if you are fairly intelligent you should be able to swing it) and are doing alot of DB work, then its a good idea to take it.
I graduated in the Spring of 2001 in CS from a good state university. I probably couldn't even get the jobs that people without degreess have. I'm going back to try my hand at something else, probably real science like chemistry, but I'm a little bit jilted by the whole experience. I almost feel like I wasted time.
Let me just take a wild guess - you work for a DoD contractor. They love hiring their ex-military buddies. At one shop I knew I was the only one not to have military experience, and this was back in '00 right before the bust when they still needed people. Not to knock the military - some fine individuals come out of their programs. Why couldn't you do the same thing going through ROTC at a good university though?
Re:I think we all owe a debt to D&D....
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand what was so great about that game. Even at its hardest level combat presented zero challenge, with the exception of maybe Darth Malak. Yes the graphics and cinematics were great and if you like that interactive movie thing then you would probably enjoy it, but other than that it was a cakewalk. I never had that gut feeling that my characters were under any real danger or got any type of rush after figuring out any puzzles. I mean when you have dozens of medipaks, grenades, thermal detonators and uber powerful jedi powers, a couple of stormtroopers stand zero chance against you.
I forgot to add that the 'df' is would be the range of frequencies you had. For instance if you were allocated 100.0 - 100.2 MHz then your df would be 0.2 MhZ, which works outa rate of about 157 kbps if you completely saturated the channel.
I believe that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would suggesti a upper bound for how fast data can be transmitted over a single channel using photons. Can any physicist give me a reason why teh following reasoning would not be correct?
Which any one with a undertanding of physics would know implies that:
dE*dt = h/2*PI
E = hf would be the energy of a photon of frequency f. Therefore dE = h*df.
h*df*dt = h/2*PI simplifies to dt = 1/2*PI*df.
If we have a two state device, than this would be teh minimum amount of time we would need to detect a single bit change. Simply invert the equation to get the number of bits/second you could transmit over a single channel.
I had internships with two separate companies in college. One was bought out by a huge company and basically and I got the impression that my former managers had zero say in who they were going to hire. The other fell on tough times and couldn't offer me anything.
Want ot know what I"m doing know? Tutoring part time for $10/hr, no benefits. Due to progressive hearing disability few career paths are open to me, such as military, law enforcement, teaching, medical school and even any type of salesmanship I would find difficult.
Right now I intend to take some undergrad classes at a local university, and see where it leads, possibility to a completely differnent area of study or maybe grad school. It depresses me quite a bit, because I've known people in grad school and they are basically slave labor. On top of that, I keep hearing stories where it basically doesn't work out for them. Even it if does work for me, by the time I might start making any decent amount of money, my best years will already be behind me. And its totally unclear whether it will improve my employability at all. And I like I mentioned before, if I don't make it, I have little to fall back on, but at this point I have little choice.
Having taught as a permanent substitute in public schools and having a close relative who is a teacher, I think I have some insight into this.
1) You take on the burden of society's failure to instill basic virtues in children like respect, patience, discipline, etc.
2) There is almost no "down time" on the job, you always have to be looking out for the kids to make sure that they aren't talking, fighting, vandalizing, cheating, etc. You do have a planning period but you almost always work through it to keep up. If you miss something, that makes you look bad.
3) Expect to work 12-14 hour days during the school year if you want to get everything done properly. Including after school meethings with , students that want free tutoring after not paying attention in class, and parents who think their kids deserve better grades. The "summers off" thing in s whole myth. You get maybe 2 weeks and they you have to start attending inservices and possibly classes (most of the time at your expense) if you don't want to look like a slacker.
4) For individuals with a college degree and the amount of work and stress involved, the pay is pretty measly
5) Unless they go into administration, there is just about no room for advancement Yeah, your pay increases by about 2% every year, regardless of how good or poor a job you do. Whoopdeedo.
6) The administration often kowtows to pushy parents - changing grades, not supporting disciplinary measures, etc.
7) You get blamed(maybe just collectively) for the education failures of public schools
I'm not sure what the solution to these problems are. I wouldn't advocate going to back to the 1950s with uniforms and switches etc. but I do believe that parents don't pay enough attention to their kids during the critical ages, probably because both parents now work, and for longer hours. And the school system pays the price. I wasn't perfect when I was younger, but if I tried to pull some of the stuff they try now I would have been whapped upside the head.
I hate 'centrifugal forces', because they don't really exist. Gravity + tension = acceleration of your counterweight, which happens to be v^2/r. Don't start introducing imaginary forces, its bad physics.
This is what I liked about Panzer General 3: Scorched Earth. It was a scenarion about the Eastern front during WWII. You were either fighting for the swastika or the hammer and sickle. You couldn't NOT be the bad guys:-)
1) totally unportable 2) impractical for all but small applications or fine tuning
Yes I agree with you that alot of software developers are lazy, but I don't believe its because they don't squeeze every last kilobyte out of their apps. Its because they design poorly and don't have a good understanding of algorithms
I'm unemployed and bored, so I formalized the proof a little bit(not exactly Peano-postulate formal). It's not very elegant and I'm sure there better proofs. Feel free to comment/correct:
The ages of the children are 3, 7, and 11. Assume then all have the same birthdays. Then their ages in terms of the youngest child can be expressed as:
a = x b = x + 4 c = x + 8
Question: Does there exist an x > 3 such that a, b, c are all prime?
Assume the statement is true. For some n in {0, 1, 2}, x mod 3 = n (For you non-math people out there: when you divide x by 3 you get a remainder of either 0, 1, or 2.)
Then(x+4) mod 3 = n + 4 and (x+8) mod 3 = n + 8
Which implies (x+4) mod 3 = n + 1 + 3
(x+8) mod 3 = n + 2 + 3*2
Therefore x mod 3 = n
(x+4) mod 3 = n + 1
(x+8) mod 3 = n + 2
Substituting a mod 3 = n b mod 3 = n + 1 c mod 3 = n + 2
If n = 0, then a mod 3 = 0,which implies a is divisible by 3. If n = 1, then c mod 3 = 3 which implies c mod 3 = 0, and c is divisible by 3 If n = 2, then b mod 3 = 3 which implies b mod 3 = 0, and b is divisible by 3
By exhaustion we can conclude that for all integers x, either x, x + 4 or x + 8 is divisible by three. If x is greater than 3, then either a, b, or c, must be divisible by a number other than itself or 1. Therefore a, b, c cannot all be prime for x >3.
From the article: "In a throwback to the DIVX days, the media is also intelligent, and the company is building in technology that will let content resellers, such as movie studios, limit the number of times the disc can be accessed. FMD-ROM would also have a different copy-protection scheme, which will keep out the DeCSS crowd. "
They just never learn, do they ?
"[C]omputers come down to one basic premise: They operate with a series of on and off switches, using two digits in the binary (base 2) number system--0 (for off) and 1 (for on). All data and instructions input to or contained in computers therefore must be reduced the numerals 1
and 0.
Some highly skilled human beings can reduce data and instructions to strings of 1's
and 0's and thus program computers to perform complex tasks by inputting commands and data in
that form.15 But it would be inconvenient, inefficient and, for most people, probably impossible to
do so. In consequence, computer science has developed programming languages. These languages,
like other written languages, employ symbols and syntax to convey meaning. The text of programs
written in these languages is referred to as source code.16 And whether directly or through the
medium of another program,17 the sets of instructions written in programming languages--the source
code--ultimately are translated into machine "readable" strings of 1's and 0's, known in the computer
Seems backwards to me... Edison always wanted DC for power distribution, but AC wond out because it is far less lossy. For a really long wire (i.e. power distribution line), the DC resistance is *way* higher than the AC impedance. The electrons have to travel from point A to point B for DC (let say 1000km for this example), while at 60 Hz, the electrons bounce back and forth, going far less distance and losing less of their potential energy (read: voltage) along the way.
A little clarification here. The electrons don't have to 'travel' from point A to point B. The 'average' electron drift speed for say, a 1 AMP circuit is on the order of centimeters per hour. What 'travels' is the signal, and it travels just as fast(the speed of light) for an AC or DC circuit.
And, IANEE, but one of the BIG reasons they use AC current is because its ALOT easier to transform. The huge big wires you see have a tremendously high potential at low current, which results in less loss over the line. The high potential can then be easily transformed to high potential/low current for domestic use. I don't think DC is any more 'naturally' lossy than AC, in terms of impedendance.
There theres all this stuff about the capacitative/inductive effects of the circuit, and I think that might be another reason why they use AC, but again IANEE.
So what's the solution? Well, obviously we can't just not treat people who have diseases which may be genetic in origin, but we could sterilize them as a condition of their treatment. Now I'm not advocating this by any means, but if people are so gung-ho about maintaining natural selection, that's what they'd have to do.
The problem is the very same gene that encode your sister's presumed predisposition to cancer could encoder some other resistance or survival trait.
As has been noted on another/. thread on this topic, you have the example of sickle cell disease among africans. It can be lethal but it also makes them immune to malaria.
The human genome is still a mystery and thats why I beleive no one should be allowed to 'tinker around' with it. Not to mention by creating these 'designer' babies they are complete disrespecting life in order to satisfy their own desires.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art faces the loss of a third of its annual budget, even eviction, because the mayor of New York City finds a painting in an exhibit offensive.
Which he is in he perfectly legal right to do so as Mayor of NY. Just because they have the right to say whatever they want doesn't mean we should be forced to fund them!
Katz, your argument works both ways. Those who called for the removal of Singer, Ventura, and Buchanan had just as much right to free speech. In the case of witholding funding, Singer doesn't have any 'right' to be a professor of Bioethics at Princeton, and Princeton has eveery right to dismiss him if they believe his values are directly opposed to the mission of the university.
Censorship is a government issue, not a social one. You have the right to free speech within certain bounds. You don't have the right to commit treason and claim you are protected under the first amendment. You can't threaten the president's life. You can't operate a radio station without a permit from the FCC. Yes, I'll probably get flamed for this one but I think all these limits on free speech are reasonable.
If there was absolute freedom, there would be chaos - Aristotle
Slashdot Mirror
If that is true then we should have annihilated ourselves by now.
Yes, and I've seen plenty of awful database designs because whoever did the schema had no idea what normalization was, let alone basic principles of data modelling such as E-R or ODL. Those things actually work folks. If you have a local university in your area that offers a course (upper level CS, but in actuality if you are fairly intelligent you should be able to swing it) and are doing alot of DB work, then its a good idea to take it.
I graduated in the Spring of 2001 in CS from a good state university. I probably couldn't even get the jobs that people without degreess have. I'm going back to try my hand at something else, probably real science like chemistry, but I'm a little bit jilted by the whole experience. I almost feel like I wasted time.
Let me just take a wild guess - you work for a DoD contractor. They love hiring their ex-military buddies. At one shop I knew I was the only one not to have military experience, and this was back in '00 right before the bust when they still needed people. Not to knock the military - some fine individuals come out of their programs. Why couldn't you do the same thing going through ROTC at a good university though?
I don't understand what was so great about that game. Even at its hardest level combat presented zero challenge, with the exception of maybe Darth Malak. Yes the graphics and cinematics were great and if you like that interactive movie thing then you would probably enjoy it, but other than that it was a cakewalk. I never had that gut feeling that my characters were under any real danger or got any type of rush after figuring out any puzzles. I mean when you have dozens of medipaks, grenades, thermal detonators and uber powerful jedi powers, a couple of stormtroopers stand zero chance against you.
I forgot to add that the 'df' is would be the range of frequencies you had. For instance if you were allocated 100.0 - 100.2 MHz then your df would be 0.2 MhZ, which works outa rate of about 157 kbps if you completely saturated the channel.
I believe that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would suggesti a upper bound for how fast data can be transmitted over a single channel using photons. Can any physicist give me a reason why teh following reasoning would not be correct?
dx*dp = h/2*PI (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle)
Which any one with a undertanding of physics would know implies that:
dE*dt = h/2*PI
E = hf would be the energy of a photon of frequency f. Therefore dE = h*df.
h*df*dt = h/2*PI simplifies to dt = 1/2*PI*df.
If we have a two state device, than this would be teh minimum amount of time we would need to detect a single bit change. Simply invert the equation to get the number of bits/second you could transmit over a single channel.
I had internships with two separate companies in college. One was bought out by a huge company and basically and I got the impression that my former managers had zero say in who they were going to hire. The other fell on tough times and couldn't offer me anything.
Want ot know what I"m doing know? Tutoring part time for $10/hr, no benefits. Due to progressive hearing disability few career paths are open to me, such as military, law enforcement, teaching, medical school and even any type of salesmanship I would find difficult.
Right now I intend to take some undergrad classes at a local university, and see where it leads, possibility to a completely differnent area of study or maybe grad school. It depresses me quite a bit, because I've known people in grad school and they are basically slave labor. On top of that, I keep hearing stories where it basically doesn't work out for them. Even it if does work for me, by the time I might start making any decent amount of money, my best years will already be behind me. And its totally unclear whether it will improve my employability at all. And I like I mentioned before, if I don't make it, I have little to fall back on, but at this point I have little choice.
Having taught as a permanent substitute in public schools and having a close relative who is a teacher, I think I have some insight into this.
1) You take on the burden of society's failure to instill basic virtues in children like respect, patience, discipline, etc.
2) There is almost no "down time" on the job, you always have to be looking out for the kids to make sure that they aren't talking, fighting, vandalizing, cheating, etc. You do have a planning period but you almost always work through it to keep up. If you miss something, that makes you look bad.
3) Expect to work 12-14 hour days during the school year if you want to get everything done properly. Including after school meethings with , students that want free tutoring after not paying attention in class, and parents who think their kids deserve better grades. The "summers off" thing in s whole myth. You get maybe 2 weeks and they you have to start attending inservices and possibly classes (most of the time at your expense) if you don't want to look like a slacker.
4) For individuals with a college degree and the amount of work and stress involved, the pay is pretty measly
5) Unless they go into administration, there is just about no room for advancement Yeah, your pay increases by about 2% every year, regardless of how good or poor a job you do. Whoopdeedo.
6) The administration often kowtows to pushy parents - changing grades, not supporting disciplinary measures, etc.
7) You get blamed(maybe just collectively) for the education failures of public schools
I'm not sure what the solution to these problems are. I wouldn't advocate going to back to the 1950s with uniforms and switches etc. but I do believe that parents don't pay enough attention to their kids during the critical ages, probably because both parents now work, and for longer hours. And the school system pays the price. I wasn't perfect when I was younger, but if I tried to pull some of the stuff they try now I would have been whapped upside the head.
I hate 'centrifugal forces', because they don't really exist. Gravity + tension = acceleration of your counterweight, which happens to be v^2/r. Don't start introducing imaginary forces, its bad physics.
This is what I liked about Panzer General 3: Scorched Earth. It was a scenarion about the Eastern front during WWII. You were either fighting for the swastika or the hammer and sickle. You couldn't NOT be the bad guys :-)
Except writing everything in assembler is
1) totally unportable
2) impractical for all but small applications or fine tuning
Yes I agree with you that alot of software developers are lazy, but I don't believe its because they don't squeeze every last kilobyte out of their apps. Its because they design poorly and don't have a good understanding of algorithms
I'm unemployed and bored, so I formalized the proof a little bit(not exactly Peano-postulate formal). It's not very elegant and I'm sure there better proofs. Feel free to comment/correct:
The ages of the children are 3, 7, and 11. Assume then all have the same birthdays. Then their ages in terms of the youngest child can be expressed as:
a = x
b = x + 4
c = x + 8
Question: Does there exist an x > 3 such that a, b, c are all prime?
Assume the statement is true. For some n in {0, 1, 2}, x mod 3 = n (For you non-math people out there: when you divide x by 3 you get a remainder of either 0, 1, or 2.)
Then(x+4) mod 3 = n + 4
and (x+8) mod 3 = n + 8
Which implies (x+4) mod 3 = n + 1 + 3
(x+8) mod 3 = n + 2 + 3*2
Therefore x mod 3 = n
(x+4) mod 3 = n + 1
(x+8) mod 3 = n + 2
Substituting
a mod 3 = n
b mod 3 = n + 1
c mod 3 = n + 2
If n = 0, then a mod 3 = 0,which implies a is divisible by 3.
If n = 1, then c mod 3 = 3 which implies c mod 3 = 0, and c is divisible by 3
If n = 2, then b mod 3 = 3 which implies b mod 3 = 0, and b is divisible by 3
By exhaustion we can conclude that for all integers x, either x, x + 4 or x + 8 is divisible by three. If x is greater than 3, then either a, b, or c, must be divisible by a number other than itself or 1. Therefore a, b, c cannot all be prime for x >3.
Q.E.D.
From the article: "In a throwback to the DIVX days, the media is also intelligent, and the company is building in technology that will let content resellers, such as movie studios, limit the number of times the disc can be accessed. FMD-ROM would also have a different copy-protection scheme, which will keep out the DeCSS crowd. " They just never learn, do they ?
Maybe we could ask the Martians for their space defense technology. They seem to be pretty good at shooting down all those NASA probles we sent them !
"[C]omputers come down to one basic premise: They operate with a series of on and off switches, using two digits in the binary (base 2) number system--0 (for off) and 1 (for on). All data and instructions input to or contained in computers therefore must be reduced the numerals 1 and 0.
Some highly skilled human beings can reduce data and instructions to strings of 1's and 0's and thus program computers to perform complex tasks by inputting commands and data in that form.15 But it would be inconvenient, inefficient and, for most people, probably impossible to do so. In consequence, computer science has developed programming languages. These languages, like other written languages, employ symbols and syntax to convey meaning. The text of programs written in these languages is referred to as source code.16 And whether directly or through the medium of another program,17 the sets of instructions written in programming languages--the source code--ultimately are translated into machine "readable" strings of 1's and 0's, known in the computer
Seems backwards to me... Edison always wanted DC for power distribution, but AC wond out because it is far less lossy. For a really long wire (i.e. power distribution line), the DC resistance is *way* higher than the AC impedance. The electrons have to travel from point A to point B for DC (let say 1000km for this example), while at 60 Hz, the electrons bounce back and forth, going far less distance and losing less of their potential energy (read: voltage) along the way.
A little clarification here. The electrons don't have to 'travel' from point A to point B. The 'average' electron drift speed for say, a 1 AMP circuit is on the order of centimeters per hour. What 'travels' is the signal, and it travels just as fast(the speed of light) for an AC or DC circuit.
And, IANEE, but one of the BIG reasons they use AC current is because its ALOT easier to transform. The huge big wires you see have a tremendously high potential at low current, which results in less loss over the line. The high potential can then be easily transformed to high potential/low current for domestic use. I don't think DC is any more 'naturally' lossy than AC, in terms of impedendance.
There theres all this stuff about the capacitative/inductive effects of the circuit, and I think that might be another reason why they use AC, but again IANEE.
So what's the solution? Well, obviously we can't just not treat people who have diseases which may be genetic in origin, but we could sterilize them as a condition of their treatment. Now I'm not advocating this by any means, but if people are so gung-ho about maintaining natural selection, that's what they'd have to do.
The problem is the very same gene that encode your sister's presumed predisposition to cancer could encoder some other resistance or survival trait.
As has been noted on another /. thread on this topic, you have the example of sickle cell disease among africans. It can be lethal but it also makes them immune to malaria.
The human genome is still a mystery and thats why I beleive no one should be allowed to 'tinker around' with it. Not to mention by creating these 'designer' babies they are complete disrespecting life in order to satisfy their own desires.
When headbangers ball got cancelled. Can't remember when, might have been like 95-96 Now all they show is that Backstreet boyz garbage.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art faces the loss of a third of its annual budget, even eviction, because the mayor of New York City finds a painting in an exhibit offensive.
Which he is in he perfectly legal right to do so as Mayor of NY. Just because they have the right to say whatever they want doesn't mean we should be forced to fund them!
Katz, your argument works both ways. Those who called for the removal of Singer, Ventura, and Buchanan had just as much right to free speech. In the case of witholding funding, Singer doesn't have any 'right' to be a professor of Bioethics at Princeton, and Princeton has eveery right to dismiss him if they believe his values are directly opposed to the mission of the university.
Censorship is a government issue, not a social one. You have the right to free speech within certain bounds. You don't have the right to commit treason and claim you are protected under the first amendment. You can't threaten the president's life. You can't operate a radio station without a permit from the FCC. Yes, I'll probably get flamed for this one but I think all these limits on free speech are reasonable.
If there was absolute freedom, there would be chaos - Aristotle