Performing and composing are different, but one's not "less" or "more" than the other.
Aside from the fact that a lot of forms of music are improvisational, which is a form of creating something new, performing itself requires skill and (in most cases) collaboration with others and is expressive, from the choice of music to the tempo, shaping of the phrases, and indeed individual notes.
Asimov, particularly the Foundation and early Robot series -- these are some of the most important works of early modern SF
Harry Turtledove -- the master of alternate history. His works are very readable and very thought-provoking and may help students learn more about OTL as well.
and it has probably been 30 years since I've written in cursive. My penmanship was always atrocious, in either print or cursive. I have decent enough motor control, but not for handwriting.
We learned typing in 8th or 9th grade. That was my salvation. After that, I think I wrote a few long letters to my parents in college, but that was about it for actually hand writing anything.
Personally, I think this is a completely negligible loss.
In the debate about concepts vs. specific languages, one thing is missing: the most important skills in the "real world" are communication skills. It hardly matters how good of a programmer you are; if you can't communicate, you're going nowhere. That means being able to speak clearly and coherently, write well, understand and respond to other people's communications, and so forth. You could be a god-like programmer, but if nobody can understand what you're doing, your code won't be of much use and you won't be asked to do anything of interest because nobody will know what you can do. One of the best CS classes I took at MIT, about 25 years ago, had no programming or even design component whatsoever. It was called Computer Systems Engineering, 6.033 if I recall correctly. The common joke about it was that it was a humanities class. That's because the work involved reading a substantial body of material each week (often some of the major foundation papers of the field) and writing critiques. There were in addition two term papers, which involved architecting a solution to a particular problem (no design work here -- just the architecture). My observation was that students either loved it or hated it. The ones who hated it were the ones who just wanted to get down and dirty with coding. The ones who liked it were the ones who had good communication skills who wanted to really understand the field.
As far as the language issue goes, are you looking for a trade school or a professional education? Languages will come and go. If you have a sound technical base, you can pick up the fundamentals of any new language quickly enough, and languages constantly evolve anyway (C++ today isn't what it was 10 years ago, and who knows what the language de l'heur will be in 2 years, anyway). I learned JavaScript a few years ago while hacking on an internal tool to generate bug reports (something I've used for years to assist me in managing projects) -- someone wanted a more interactive experience. I'm no JavaScript expert, but I picked up the basics quickly enough -- and more importantly, because of my basic background in interface design, algorithms and optimization, my reporting tool is very fast, and the JavaScript can be used by anyone else in the company who wants to do similar manipulations on HTML tables. Similarly, I learned Python about 6 months ago because a planning tool I wanted to use was written in Python, but I wanted to add some new features, speed it up, and fix some bugs. No classes, no books, just reading the code and doing some Google searches when I needed to learn more about wxPython. When I was an undergrad, the only programming classes offered by the CS department used Scheme and CLU -- two languages with no significant commercial value even then (at that time, the commercially interesting languages were Fortran, Cobol, and C). Why? Because those languages had features that were particularly good for teaching the desired concepts.
Also, learning programming isn't very expensive. As others have said, you can learn a lot on your own at the cost of the computer that you already have. Better yet, you can create or work on something useful in the FOSS world.
When I've interviewed candidates for engineering jobs (both as a manager and as an engineer), I've never been concerned with "what languages or libraries does this person know". Depending upon the seniority of the person, I'm looking for good reasoning capability, ability to execute, and ability to communicate. I hired a fantastic engineer out of school. What set her apart from everyone else was her ability to explain why she did something. She didn't merely recite her class projects, she explained why she made engineering choices that she did in a way that was more than enough to demonstrate her technical chops, and her explanations were clear, and she could answer questions in a way that showed real understanding. Since my group was distributed (most of the people were on the other side of the country), communication
I would absolutely not want a large (in angular dimension) display -- and a head-mounted display right in front of my eyes is almost certainly going to be very large in that regard -- at a low refresh rate. I suspect the combination of flicker and lack of motion as my head moves would make me violently ill.
People are used to the scene moving as their head moves and the vision system corrects for that. If I move my head from side to side, I don't have a sensation of my laptop screen moving -- the image does actually move on my vision receptor, but my brain corrects for it.
A head-mounted display, unless it were very clever and very high resolution, wouldn't do that. That means that whatever's being displayed would be perceived to be moving in sync with my head, which would probably be very confusing.
The combination of large angular dimension and low refresh rate would create flicker over much or all of my visual field. I suspect that that would make me quite ill. IMAX films at the Museum of Science in Boston are projected on a large dome that basically covers the entire visual field. They warn about nausea from the vividness of the experience, but I don't think that that alone is what triggers it -- I think it's the flicker from 24 Hz refresh rate (exacerbated by the blank intervals between frames). I have no proof, but the disorientation is worse when something on the screen (such as a spinning wheel on a car in a closeup) interacts with the refresh rate -- steady motion isn't as bad. There's some disorientation when the film is showing something from a high place (such as Everest), but it's not as bad as the motion-induced disorientation.
Agreed (granted, from 20 years out of date). For the record, I have a bachelor's but not a master's degree.
My most valuable experience in college -- and this was MIT -- was my undergraduate work experience (as a sysadmin and -- more importantly -- systems programmer at Project Athena). More than any of the classes I took. That's not to say that they weren't valuable -- algorithms helped me learn how to analyze different approaches (more so than just the specifics of different algorithms) -- but actually working as a systems programmer in a UNIX environment is what actually tied everything together.
When I hired people (I was a manager about 5 years ago), the least important thing on someone's resume was their academic background. I actually helped hire someone quite senior (but fairly young for the level we hired him for), and after the offer went out my manager and I realized he hadn't stated any academic qualifications at all on his resume or his application. We looked at each other and shrugged. Didn't make him any less able to do what we needed, and he worked out fine. We do have guidelines that a master's degree is worth ~2 years of job experience, but what happens in practice is that promotions are based on demonstrated ability to do the work at the next level, and after the first promotion the exact amount of work experience is meaningless.
My personal opinion -- and again, this is based on my experience 20 years ago -- is that a master's in computer science is all but worthless, with one exception. Even if you assume that the 2 years spent translates into 2 years of salary increases (and ignore the fact that right now salary increases are nonexistent), it isn't worth it -- you're giving up those 2 years of base pay and getting nothing more from it.
The only exception I can really see is a 5 year program with a structured internship, like the VI-A (6-A) program at MIT. But that's more for the internship (which is real work experience) than for the piece of paper, and it's only one year more rather than two. But if you already have a degree, getting a separate master's in computer science/engineering just isn't worth it. For academia you need that PhD anyway. I suppose it's possible that there are some organizations that specifically want the piece of paper, but that situation's likely to be so bureaucratic that I wouldn't want to be in it at all.
I plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet; it looks like power output is proportional to roughly D^2.5 (probably closer to 3 than to 2; I didn't do a best fit analysis). Cost is proportional to somewhere between D and D^1.5 (closer to D).
Note that the area is proportional to D^2, so bigger windmills actually extract more energy from the same amount of airflow.
Basically, the 1 meter windmill is a toy. It would be more practical to hook up a generator to a bike or rowing machine and use a battery or flywheel to store the energy -- that way you'd at least get some exercise out of it.
To me, "quirky" means someone who eats offbeat food for lunch, or works particularly strange hours, or wears ripped T-shirts and cutoffs in the dead of winter, or wears a suit and tie when not visiting a customer, or who consistently underestimates schedules by the same amount each time. These can either be ignored or worked around (the person who consistently underestimates his schedule by a factor of 3 is easy to plan around, just triple his time estimates and caution other people to do the same thing). That's harmless.
The prima donna is someone with mildly narcissistic tendencies whose ego needs some stroking, but who will get things done in a fashion that allows others to understand what's going on. I can handle that, up to a point. If when push really comes to shove the person works well with the team, OK, he or she is fundamentally a good person but has some insecurities. If the person insists on taking all the credit for a team effort, that's getting destructive.
A real narcissist is another matter altogether. Someone whose code is impenetrable, who refuses to document anything or tell anyone what they're doing, or who deliberately and maliciously offends people (wearing offensive T-shirts...I don't simply mean less than stellar personal hygiene) is another matter altogether. Doesn't matter how brilliant the person is, someone like this will destroy a team, and however clever their work, it's not going to be usable if anything changes.
If the salesperson makes it clear that s/he's simply going through the motions with the extended warranty because he's required to, but that he really understands that I know better, I will politely decline it. This actually happened at Tweeter a number of years ago when we bought a TV -- he even prefaced it by saying that he was required to ask us, even though he knew we knew it was a bad deal. If the person acts serious about it, I'll be rude -- cold, snarky, or just plain condescending depending upon my mood. My strategy is to make pushing this kind of warranty an unpleasant experience while rewarding sales people (at least emotionally) who treat me respectfully.
Someone at Radio Shaft sold my mother in law a "protection plan" on a $12 phone. I managed to convince her to go right back to the store and demand a refund on it, which she had no problem with.
It's very far west in its timezone already, and DST simply enhances that effect. It would be interesting to run the same experiment in, say, Massachusetts or Illinois (which are in the eastern part of their respective timezones) or New York (which is centrally located in its timezone).
There's nothing wrong with going at a steady pace, but at least what I've been led to believe is that if you want to improve your fitness you need to vary your workouts, do intervals (30-60 seconds all out, similar amount of time at a resting pace, or variations). The terrain variation lets you decide whether to gear down to spin at a steady pace or power over the top with a quick burst.
It was something like 1-2 tracks per level that are locked, out of a total of maybe 8 per level. That's no big deal.
Expresso S3 review (I've used one)
on
The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 4, Informative
We have one of these at work, and we're expecting another. It's a blast. And I'm not a gamer.
First, the downsides:
1) The shifter is not very well designed. It's a single lever mounted on the stem, which is an inconvenient spot. With 30 "gears" and very sharp changes of gradient, it's not uncommon to have to shift by 10 gears or more in a matter of seconds to avoid stalling out. The shifting doesn't seem all that responsive either, so there's a tendency to overshift, which usually leaves you moving too slowly. I'd rather have two shifters mounted on the bars, with the left shifter giving you 3-5 gears in one shot (i. e. something like front and rear derailleurs on a "real" bike). This is by far the weakest part of the setup. If they would fix that, it would be a much stronger product.
2) Every course I've tried has at least one very sharp downhill curve, which I find disorienting (maybe because I'm not a gamer). Shutting my eyes helps, but then I don't know what terrain is coming up, so I'm likely to be in the wrong gear in a hurry. One person at the gym tried it once and found that he just couldn't use it because of that.
3) The saddle simply isn't very good. It's adjustable in maybe 1/2" increments both vertically and front to back (which is OK for this purpose, but finer increments would be better). However, it's a wide, heavily cushioned saddle, which really isn't very comfortable for long rides. It would be nice if there were a couple of different saddles to pick from, and you could just plunk down the one you like at any given time. It's a much better saddle than the usual exercise bike saddle, but that's not saying much.
Good points:
1) There's just a lot more variety than any other exercise bike I've seen (not that I'm an expert). The changing terrain makes things interesting, much more so than any standard programs. That's a huge plus.
2) The pedals are "real", with toe clips on one side (yes, the old fashioned kind, but they work) and clip-in pedals on the other. I'm not sure which clip-in system; it's obviously one of the SPD variants, but I don't know which one. If your bike shoes have a different system, it's not likely to work. The system looks like it doesn't have any side to side or rotational play, which makes it hard for some folks (when I was riding, I absolutely needed that because of my overpronation and toe-out).
3) There's a good range of courses, everything from a 1 mile flat track course to a 20 miler that looks like a major mountain pass. They're divided into four groups (plus one more "ride over the monsters" type thing), for easy, moderate, hard, and extreme, and ranked from easy to harder within the groups. The pace rider rides slower on the easy ones and harder on the hard ones, and you can adjust the continuous output of the pace rider. There are a few courses that aren't available without a paid membership, but it's not worth $10 a month just to get those few courses.
4) The bike can be connected to the internet, with some additional features (I don't know what they all are; ours isn't connected yet).
Neutral points:
1) While your avatar responds to the steering, it doesn't really affect the riding in any way, except on the game course. It won't let you go off the course (if you try to steer off, or don't try to steer on, it just keeps you at the side of the course). You can also ride right through other riders, and they can ride through you if you're slower. It doesn't really feel natural, but without actual movement, it would be very hard to make the steering feel natural. I don't care all that much.
2) I don't know how it computes the relationship between wattage (power output) and calorie consumption. It gives me somewhat lower calorie numbers compared to the other exercise bikes we have, which may or may not be due to shifting response (it's easy to not shift high enough on downhills). For a 30~40 minute ride, I've averaged 227~240 watts vs. 235~260 that I typically average on the
A lot of the problem is that people weren't told how it was sold -- like the fact that it's really permanently (er, at least 5 years) locked, not just for the life of the contract.
I've started creating 2 root partitions on my hard disks. That's not trivial on my laptop (10% of the disk), but it made life a lot easier when upgrading from OpenSUSE 10.3 32-bit to 11.0 64-bit. I dd'd one partition to the spare, fixed up partition names in the spare, and then did an upgrade. Yes, it is possible to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit with OpenSUSE, although it doesn't get all of the RPM architectures right, so I had some stuff to fix up afterwards.
So arguably I didn't need it, because I didn't need to back it out...but it did make for peace of mind, and it will in future upgrades.
If you're sold "unlimited" service, and you're told that the bandwidth is X and is available 24x7, it's a reasonable presumption that you can use that entire bandwidth continuously. If there's actually a cap on the total amount you're allowed to transfer, that should be clearly stated ahead of time, not buried somewhere and especially not "if you're in the top 1000 users" or some other nebulous (or at least impractical to determine) statement (or non-statement). That's what the problem is. It's like the schoolyard "cross your fingers behind your back".
People do indeed know what "unlimited" means. It *doesn't* mean "we tell you it's unlimited, but we really impose secret limits behind the scenes", as much as the marketers might like to pretend it does.
A lot of the performance problem is with the browser rendering the page, not the Javascript per se. I have one application that does filtering, sorting, column hiding, and such on tables, which may be quite large (thousands of rows, 20~30 columns). Benchmarking suggests that the JavaScript isn't the issue; it's the browser re-rendering the page.
I've done all kinds of tricks with the DOM, some of them browser-specific (some things work well on Gecko browsers but not at all on WebKit/KHTML; some things that work well on the latter perform very poorly on the former). But as best as I can tell, I'm simply close to the limits for what the browser can do with the data it's being asked to display.
Actually, they don't currently have to use the same bike (and certainly not the same parts) for the entire race. They can use special bikes for time trials that aren't allowed in mass start road races. There are other parts changes that can be done for particular conditions; on mountain stages they might use a rear gear cluster (and possibly chainrings) with lower gear ratios on the low end -- on flat stages they use narrower gear ranges to stay as close as possible to optimum RPM at all times.
The Point is to encourage progress in the arts and science, which copyrights can do. Copyright should give you the opportunity to reap a financial reward, they don't guaranty that reward though. It's one thing to spend 1000s of hours to write a computer game and having an exclusive right to sell that game to those willing to pay, but it's different to spend those hours programming so someone who did not have the expense of creating the game take it and sell copies of it them self.
Ah, now we get to the real meat of the matter! While I disagree that copyright really does encourage progress, you're at least bringing the discussion back to the right level -- how best to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. I happen to believe that granding exclusive rights to one person almost never encourages progress -- it encourages people to milk what they've already done -- this is something that people can reasonably disagree on. Where I take issue is with people saying "how DARE you interfere with my business model!" or "people should be able to do what they want with what they create".
The problem is that people have got it into their heads that the only valid business model is to sell items at retail to consumers at a fixed price. That model only works when it's cheaper to buy something than to produce it; it's tough to sell something to someone when they can create an incremental unit for less than the selling price. For most material items, it is indeed cheaper for people to buy (counting all costs) than build. Thus, we buy our car in preference to buying raw materials, forging parts, etc. We buy food rather than growing it in person. We see a doctor rather than educating ourselves in detail about how to check our health -- that's not entirely a criticism; doctors do go through extensive training.
This model breaks down when the incremental cost of production is less than the required selling price to make a profit. That's not the only time this model breaks down -- it also breaks down if there isn't enough demand for an item -- but this is a situation where it breaks down. By now, the intrinsic cost of duplicating (copying) a song is negligible; the cost of duplicating a movie is a little higher, but for most people it's less than $20 or so.
So what do we do about it? The classic free market response would be to shrug one's shoulders and allow the market to reallocate resources appropriately. Maybe this would mean that companies specializing in selling books and CD's would go out of business, but again, the classic free market response is that that's what happens, and those people should find something else to do. But the CxO's of large companies aren't really interested in free markets; they're capitalists, but not free marketeers. Rather than reorganizing their businesses, they want to rig the market to artificially make it more expensive to copy music (for example) -- a classic protectionist move. All of this is why I believe that "free market" does not equate with "capitalism". I generally favor a free market. I most certainly do not consider myself to favor capitalism.
Mind you, I'm not an absolute laissez faire Adam Smith true believer. Free markets on their own won't solve every problem. Free markets, for example, don't work when one side lacks information to make rational decisions. Someone who sells something claiming to be an effective medicine, who knows that that isn't true, is not contributing to a free market. In other cases, purely free market transactions may have effects on third parties (externalities). An airplane that falls out of the sky may kill people on the ground who aren't party to the transaction, for example. Antibiotics that select for resistant bacteria are another such example. Entrenched inequality is another issue -- people who have never had the opportunity to get educated sufficiently to make rational decisions are another example of a market failure. Children simply haven't had the oppo
I hear these claims a lot. They generally come from people who aren't the ones risking their livelihood on an unproven business model.
As he so often did, Robert Heinlein put it best (in "Lifeline"):
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
Nobody's saying that abandoning copyright would make you, or any other particular person, better off -- that isn't the point here. For that matter, if the market turns away from single player games altogether (maybe everyone plays multi-player games on their cellphones or something), you're screwed anyway. Would you have the law restrict multiplayer games to protect your niche?
Let's say that there was no copyright... then the reality of things is that publishers would have not have any incentive to publish the works of an unknown without an up-front payment (which means that only rich people could get published by the big publishers), because they would know that some other publisher could easily come in after the fact and copy the work at lower cost (because they wouldn't have to deal with royalties). Sure, one might argue that there never used to be copyright until only a few hundred years ago, and one might observe that artists seemed to get by before then, but let's remember that back then, copying something was very hard work... it had to be done by hand and was error prone and tedious enough that it was sufficient deterrent for somebody to try to produce accurate unauthorized copies of published works. Not that this stopped some unscrupulous people from trying, but inevitably, such efforts would fail simply due to the unreliability of the process and the person trying to publish unauthorized copies just could not compete. Today, copying can be done by anybody with no more effort than pushing a button.
So, publish it yourself, on your blog. Your first one you'll probably have to give away, but if it's good, you might be able to serialize your next novel, and only post the next installment when you've received enough money. This is called the "street performer protocol". And before anyone says that Stephen King tried it and failed, that isn't what he actually tried -- he said that he'd only post the next installment if some percentage of the downloads were paid for (as opposed to having received a fixed amount of payment). That's not at all the same thing; it's trying to cling to the possibility of "everyone must pay for access" as opposed to "as long as I get paid the amount I require, it doesn't matter who is paying for what".
At least from what I've read, most publishers don't treat anyone but their star authors very well in any case. Same for record labels. So the copyright laws are really helping the distributors, not the creators.
Slashdot Mirror
Performing and composing are different, but one's not "less" or "more" than the other.
Aside from the fact that a lot of forms of music are improvisational, which is a form of creating something new, performing itself requires skill and (in most cases) collaboration with others and is expressive, from the choice of music to the tempo, shaping of the phrases, and indeed individual notes.
Asimov, particularly the Foundation and early Robot series -- these are some of the most important works of early modern SF
Harry Turtledove -- the master of alternate history. His works are very readable and very thought-provoking and may help students learn more about OTL as well.
They appear to allow the manufacturer to rebut negative reviews after the fact, but there are plenty of negative (even highly negative) reviews there
and it has probably been 30 years since I've written in cursive. My penmanship was always atrocious, in either print or cursive. I have decent enough motor control, but not for handwriting.
We learned typing in 8th or 9th grade. That was my salvation. After that, I think I wrote a few long letters to my parents in college, but that was about it for actually hand writing anything.
Personally, I think this is a completely negligible loss.
When I last used it heavily, my recollection was that the STL wasn't nearly as "standard" as it is today -- and that's a big part of the language.
Not to mention all of the new frameworks/libraries (such as Qt) that weren't around then.
In the debate about concepts vs. specific languages, one thing is missing: the most important skills in the "real world" are communication skills. It hardly matters how good of a programmer you are; if you can't communicate, you're going nowhere. That means being able to speak clearly and coherently, write well, understand and respond to other people's communications, and so forth. You could be a god-like programmer, but if nobody can understand what you're doing, your code won't be of much use and you won't be asked to do anything of interest because nobody will know what you can do. One of the best CS classes I took at MIT, about 25 years ago, had no programming or even design component whatsoever. It was called Computer Systems Engineering, 6.033 if I recall correctly. The common joke about it was that it was a humanities class. That's because the work involved reading a substantial body of material each week (often some of the major foundation papers of the field) and writing critiques. There were in addition two term papers, which involved architecting a solution to a particular problem (no design work here -- just the architecture). My observation was that students either loved it or hated it. The ones who hated it were the ones who just wanted to get down and dirty with coding. The ones who liked it were the ones who had good communication skills who wanted to really understand the field.
As far as the language issue goes, are you looking for a trade school or a professional education? Languages will come and go. If you have a sound technical base, you can pick up the fundamentals of any new language quickly enough, and languages constantly evolve anyway (C++ today isn't what it was 10 years ago, and who knows what the language de l'heur will be in 2 years, anyway). I learned JavaScript a few years ago while hacking on an internal tool to generate bug reports (something I've used for years to assist me in managing projects) -- someone wanted a more interactive experience. I'm no JavaScript expert, but I picked up the basics quickly enough -- and more importantly, because of my basic background in interface design, algorithms and optimization, my reporting tool is very fast, and the JavaScript can be used by anyone else in the company who wants to do similar manipulations on HTML tables. Similarly, I learned Python about 6 months ago because a planning tool I wanted to use was written in Python, but I wanted to add some new features, speed it up, and fix some bugs. No classes, no books, just reading the code and doing some Google searches when I needed to learn more about wxPython. When I was an undergrad, the only programming classes offered by the CS department used Scheme and CLU -- two languages with no significant commercial value even then (at that time, the commercially interesting languages were Fortran, Cobol, and C). Why? Because those languages had features that were particularly good for teaching the desired concepts.
Also, learning programming isn't very expensive. As others have said, you can learn a lot on your own at the cost of the computer that you already have. Better yet, you can create or work on something useful in the FOSS world.
When I've interviewed candidates for engineering jobs (both as a manager and as an engineer), I've never been concerned with "what languages or libraries does this person know". Depending upon the seniority of the person, I'm looking for good reasoning capability, ability to execute, and ability to communicate. I hired a fantastic engineer out of school. What set her apart from everyone else was her ability to explain why she did something. She didn't merely recite her class projects, she explained why she made engineering choices that she did in a way that was more than enough to demonstrate her technical chops, and her explanations were clear, and she could answer questions in a way that showed real understanding. Since my group was distributed (most of the people were on the other side of the country), communication
I would absolutely not want a large (in angular dimension) display -- and a head-mounted display right in front of my eyes is almost certainly going to be very large in that regard -- at a low refresh rate. I suspect the combination of flicker and lack of motion as my head moves would make me violently ill.
People are used to the scene moving as their head moves and the vision system corrects for that. If I move my head from side to side, I don't have a sensation of my laptop screen moving -- the image does actually move on my vision receptor, but my brain corrects for it.
A head-mounted display, unless it were very clever and very high resolution, wouldn't do that. That means that whatever's being displayed would be perceived to be moving in sync with my head, which would probably be very confusing.
The combination of large angular dimension and low refresh rate would create flicker over much or all of my visual field. I suspect that that would make me quite ill. IMAX films at the Museum of Science in Boston are projected on a large dome that basically covers the entire visual field. They warn about nausea from the vividness of the experience, but I don't think that that alone is what triggers it -- I think it's the flicker from 24 Hz refresh rate (exacerbated by the blank intervals between frames). I have no proof, but the disorientation is worse when something on the screen (such as a spinning wheel on a car in a closeup) interacts with the refresh rate -- steady motion isn't as bad. There's some disorientation when the film is showing something from a high place (such as Everest), but it's not as bad as the motion-induced disorientation.
Agreed (granted, from 20 years out of date). For the record, I have a bachelor's but not a master's degree.
My most valuable experience in college -- and this was MIT -- was my undergraduate work experience (as a sysadmin and -- more importantly -- systems programmer at Project Athena). More than any of the classes I took. That's not to say that they weren't valuable -- algorithms helped me learn how to analyze different approaches (more so than just the specifics of different algorithms) -- but actually working as a systems programmer in a UNIX environment is what actually tied everything together.
When I hired people (I was a manager about 5 years ago), the least important thing on someone's resume was their academic background. I actually helped hire someone quite senior (but fairly young for the level we hired him for), and after the offer went out my manager and I realized he hadn't stated any academic qualifications at all on his resume or his application. We looked at each other and shrugged. Didn't make him any less able to do what we needed, and he worked out fine. We do have guidelines that a master's degree is worth ~2 years of job experience, but what happens in practice is that promotions are based on demonstrated ability to do the work at the next level, and after the first promotion the exact amount of work experience is meaningless.
My personal opinion -- and again, this is based on my experience 20 years ago -- is that a master's in computer science is all but worthless, with one exception. Even if you assume that the 2 years spent translates into 2 years of salary increases (and ignore the fact that right now salary increases are nonexistent), it isn't worth it -- you're giving up those 2 years of base pay and getting nothing more from it.
The only exception I can really see is a 5 year program with a structured internship, like the VI-A (6-A) program at MIT. But that's more for the internship (which is real work experience) than for the piece of paper, and it's only one year more rather than two. But if you already have a degree, getting a separate master's in computer science/engineering just isn't worth it. For academia you need that PhD anyway. I suppose it's possible that there are some organizations that specifically want the piece of paper, but that situation's likely to be so bureaucratic that I wouldn't want to be in it at all.
I plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet; it looks like power output is proportional to roughly D^2.5 (probably closer to 3 than to 2; I didn't do a best fit analysis). Cost is proportional to somewhere between D and D^1.5 (closer to D).
Note that the area is proportional to D^2, so bigger windmills actually extract more energy from the same amount of airflow.
Basically, the 1 meter windmill is a toy. It would be more practical to hook up a generator to a bike or rowing machine and use a battery or flywheel to store the energy -- that way you'd at least get some exercise out of it.
To me, "quirky" means someone who eats offbeat food for lunch, or works particularly strange hours, or wears ripped T-shirts and cutoffs in the dead of winter, or wears a suit and tie when not visiting a customer, or who consistently underestimates schedules by the same amount each time. These can either be ignored or worked around (the person who consistently underestimates his schedule by a factor of 3 is easy to plan around, just triple his time estimates and caution other people to do the same thing). That's harmless.
The prima donna is someone with mildly narcissistic tendencies whose ego needs some stroking, but who will get things done in a fashion that allows others to understand what's going on. I can handle that, up to a point. If when push really comes to shove the person works well with the team, OK, he or she is fundamentally a good person but has some insecurities. If the person insists on taking all the credit for a team effort, that's getting destructive.
A real narcissist is another matter altogether. Someone whose code is impenetrable, who refuses to document anything or tell anyone what they're doing, or who deliberately and maliciously offends people (wearing offensive T-shirts...I don't simply mean less than stellar personal hygiene) is another matter altogether. Doesn't matter how brilliant the person is, someone like this will destroy a team, and however clever their work, it's not going to be usable if anything changes.
If the salesperson makes it clear that s/he's simply going through the motions with the extended warranty because he's required to, but that he really understands that I know better, I will politely decline it. This actually happened at Tweeter a number of years ago when we bought a TV -- he even prefaced it by saying that he was required to ask us, even though he knew we knew it was a bad deal. If the person acts serious about it, I'll be rude -- cold, snarky, or just plain condescending depending upon my mood. My strategy is to make pushing this kind of warranty an unpleasant experience while rewarding sales people (at least emotionally) who treat me respectfully.
Someone at Radio Shaft sold my mother in law a "protection plan" on a $12 phone. I managed to convince her to go right back to the store and demand a refund on it, which she had no problem with.
It's very far west in its timezone already, and DST simply enhances that effect. It would be interesting to run the same experiment in, say, Massachusetts or Illinois (which are in the eastern part of their respective timezones) or New York (which is centrally located in its timezone).
There's nothing wrong with going at a steady pace, but at least what I've been led to believe is that if you want to improve your fitness you need to vary your workouts, do intervals (30-60 seconds all out, similar amount of time at a resting pace, or variations). The terrain variation lets you decide whether to gear down to spin at a steady pace or power over the top with a quick burst.
It was something like 1-2 tracks per level that are locked, out of a total of maybe 8 per level. That's no big deal.
We have one of these at work, and we're expecting another. It's a blast. And I'm not a gamer.
First, the downsides:
1) The shifter is not very well designed. It's a single lever mounted on the stem, which is an inconvenient spot. With 30 "gears" and very sharp changes of gradient, it's not uncommon to have to shift by 10 gears or more in a matter of seconds to avoid stalling out. The shifting doesn't seem all that responsive either, so there's a tendency to overshift, which usually leaves you moving too slowly. I'd rather have two shifters mounted on the bars, with the left shifter giving you 3-5 gears in one shot (i. e. something like front and rear derailleurs on a "real" bike). This is by far the weakest part of the setup. If they would fix that, it would be a much stronger product.
2) Every course I've tried has at least one very sharp downhill curve, which I find disorienting (maybe because I'm not a gamer). Shutting my eyes helps, but then I don't know what terrain is coming up, so I'm likely to be in the wrong gear in a hurry. One person at the gym tried it once and found that he just couldn't use it because of that.
3) The saddle simply isn't very good. It's adjustable in maybe 1/2" increments both vertically and front to back (which is OK for this purpose, but finer increments would be better). However, it's a wide, heavily cushioned saddle, which really isn't very comfortable for long rides. It would be nice if there were a couple of different saddles to pick from, and you could just plunk down the one you like at any given time. It's a much better saddle than the usual exercise bike saddle, but that's not saying much.
Good points:
1) There's just a lot more variety than any other exercise bike I've seen (not that I'm an expert). The changing terrain makes things interesting, much more so than any standard programs. That's a huge plus.
2) The pedals are "real", with toe clips on one side (yes, the old fashioned kind, but they work) and clip-in pedals on the other. I'm not sure which clip-in system; it's obviously one of the SPD variants, but I don't know which one. If your bike shoes have a different system, it's not likely to work. The system looks like it doesn't have any side to side or rotational play, which makes it hard for some folks (when I was riding, I absolutely needed that because of my overpronation and toe-out).
3) There's a good range of courses, everything from a 1 mile flat track course to a 20 miler that looks like a major mountain pass. They're divided into four groups (plus one more "ride over the monsters" type thing), for easy, moderate, hard, and extreme, and ranked from easy to harder within the groups. The pace rider rides slower on the easy ones and harder on the hard ones, and you can adjust the continuous output of the pace rider. There are a few courses that aren't available without a paid membership, but it's not worth $10 a month just to get those few courses.
4) The bike can be connected to the internet, with some additional features (I don't know what they all are; ours isn't connected yet).
Neutral points:
1) While your avatar responds to the steering, it doesn't really affect the riding in any way, except on the game course. It won't let you go off the course (if you try to steer off, or don't try to steer on, it just keeps you at the side of the course). You can also ride right through other riders, and they can ride through you if you're slower. It doesn't really feel natural, but without actual movement, it would be very hard to make the steering feel natural. I don't care all that much.
2) I don't know how it computes the relationship between wattage (power output) and calorie consumption. It gives me somewhat lower calorie numbers compared to the other exercise bikes we have, which may or may not be due to shifting response (it's easy to not shift high enough on downhills). For a 30~40 minute ride, I've averaged 227~240 watts vs. 235~260 that I typically average on the
If a competent private company can so easily compete with the city, why does it need to sue?
A lot of the problem is that people weren't told how it was sold -- like the fact that it's really permanently (er, at least 5 years) locked, not just for the life of the contract.
I've started creating 2 root partitions on my hard disks. That's not trivial on my laptop (10% of the disk), but it made life a lot easier when upgrading from OpenSUSE 10.3 32-bit to 11.0 64-bit. I dd'd one partition to the spare, fixed up partition names in the spare, and then did an upgrade. Yes, it is possible to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit with OpenSUSE, although it doesn't get all of the RPM architectures right, so I had some stuff to fix up afterwards.
So arguably I didn't need it, because I didn't need to back it out...but it did make for peace of mind, and it will in future upgrades.
If you're sold "unlimited" service, and you're told that the bandwidth is X and is available 24x7, it's a reasonable presumption that you can use that entire bandwidth continuously. If there's actually a cap on the total amount you're allowed to transfer, that should be clearly stated ahead of time, not buried somewhere and especially not "if you're in the top 1000 users" or some other nebulous (or at least impractical to determine) statement (or non-statement). That's what the problem is. It's like the schoolyard "cross your fingers behind your back".
People do indeed know what "unlimited" means. It *doesn't* mean "we tell you it's unlimited, but we really impose secret limits behind the scenes", as much as the marketers might like to pretend it does.
Crawford, Texas perhaps?
A lot of the performance problem is with the browser rendering the page, not the Javascript per se. I have one application that does filtering, sorting, column hiding, and such on tables, which may be quite large (thousands of rows, 20~30 columns). Benchmarking suggests that the JavaScript isn't the issue; it's the browser re-rendering the page.
I've done all kinds of tricks with the DOM, some of them browser-specific (some things work well on Gecko browsers but not at all on WebKit/KHTML; some things that work well on the latter perform very poorly on the former). But as best as I can tell, I'm simply close to the limits for what the browser can do with the data it's being asked to display.
Actually, they don't currently have to use the same bike (and certainly not the same parts) for the entire race. They can use special bikes for time trials that aren't allowed in mass start road races. There are other parts changes that can be done for particular conditions; on mountain stages they might use a rear gear cluster (and possibly chainrings) with lower gear ratios on the low end -- on flat stages they use narrower gear ranges to stay as close as possible to optimum RPM at all times.
Ah, now we get to the real meat of the matter! While I disagree that copyright really does encourage progress, you're at least bringing the discussion back to the right level -- how best to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. I happen to believe that granding exclusive rights to one person almost never encourages progress -- it encourages people to milk what they've already done -- this is something that people can reasonably disagree on. Where I take issue is with people saying "how DARE you interfere with my business model!" or "people should be able to do what they want with what they create".
The problem is that people have got it into their heads that the only valid business model is to sell items at retail to consumers at a fixed price. That model only works when it's cheaper to buy something than to produce it; it's tough to sell something to someone when they can create an incremental unit for less than the selling price. For most material items, it is indeed cheaper for people to buy (counting all costs) than build. Thus, we buy our car in preference to buying raw materials, forging parts, etc. We buy food rather than growing it in person. We see a doctor rather than educating ourselves in detail about how to check our health -- that's not entirely a criticism; doctors do go through extensive training.
This model breaks down when the incremental cost of production is less than the required selling price to make a profit. That's not the only time this model breaks down -- it also breaks down if there isn't enough demand for an item -- but this is a situation where it breaks down. By now, the intrinsic cost of duplicating (copying) a song is negligible; the cost of duplicating a movie is a little higher, but for most people it's less than $20 or so.
So what do we do about it? The classic free market response would be to shrug one's shoulders and allow the market to reallocate resources appropriately. Maybe this would mean that companies specializing in selling books and CD's would go out of business, but again, the classic free market response is that that's what happens, and those people should find something else to do. But the CxO's of large companies aren't really interested in free markets; they're capitalists, but not free marketeers. Rather than reorganizing their businesses, they want to rig the market to artificially make it more expensive to copy music (for example) -- a classic protectionist move. All of this is why I believe that "free market" does not equate with "capitalism". I generally favor a free market. I most certainly do not consider myself to favor capitalism.
Mind you, I'm not an absolute laissez faire Adam Smith true believer. Free markets on their own won't solve every problem. Free markets, for example, don't work when one side lacks information to make rational decisions. Someone who sells something claiming to be an effective medicine, who knows that that isn't true, is not contributing to a free market. In other cases, purely free market transactions may have effects on third parties (externalities). An airplane that falls out of the sky may kill people on the ground who aren't party to the transaction, for example. Antibiotics that select for resistant bacteria are another such example. Entrenched inequality is another issue -- people who have never had the opportunity to get educated sufficiently to make rational decisions are another example of a market failure. Children simply haven't had the oppo
As he so often did, Robert Heinlein put it best (in "Lifeline"):
Nobody's saying that abandoning copyright would make you, or any other particular person, better off -- that isn't the point here. For that matter, if the market turns away from single player games altogether (maybe everyone plays multi-player games on their cellphones or something), you're screwed anyway. Would you have the law restrict multiplayer games to protect your niche?
So, publish it yourself, on your blog. Your first one you'll probably have to give away, but if it's good, you might be able to serialize your next novel, and only post the next installment when you've received enough money. This is called the "street performer protocol". And before anyone says that Stephen King tried it and failed, that isn't what he actually tried -- he said that he'd only post the next installment if some percentage of the downloads were paid for (as opposed to having received a fixed amount of payment). That's not at all the same thing; it's trying to cling to the possibility of "everyone must pay for access" as opposed to "as long as I get paid the amount I require, it doesn't matter who is paying for what".
At least from what I've read, most publishers don't treat anyone but their star authors very well in any case. Same for record labels. So the copyright laws are really helping the distributors, not the creators.