Let me clarify on these writing requirement courses. They do not teach how to write in those courses -- each one has a different focus (ancient literature, etc). The ability to write is expected to be there before you start, and you are graded on your ability to interpret the book the same way as the professor. You may lose marks if you have poor writing skills, but good writing skills alone will not allow you to pass this course.
My problem with this is that it was a reactionary tactic, and one that is not really effective. The problem is that programmers are never taught how to document things and why they must, and taking an artistic writing course doesn't really change that. Part of the problem is that producing documentation should really be a course of it's own, and a required course at that.
Although, in the interest of disclosure, I should mention that the University I went to was ranked, year after year, as the worst university in Canada (out of 49 universities) in nearly every category. The few categories it didn't rate dead last in, it rated very near the bottom (usually second last). I obviously made a poor choice, and this has coloured my view of these things. However, my inability to succeed at that programme was all my own fault (far too many mistakes, such as poor scheduling, course selection and self discipline).
WSH isn't terribly suitable to scripting applications that do not provide a COM interface. All Microsoft products do seem to provide such an interface (and as long as it's not Outlook, you're even be permitted to use it), but not many third party apps do. If you have apps that don't have nice neat COM interfaces, alternative software like AutoIt or AutoHotkey might be more useful in scripting the user interface of the app you need to control.
Or perhaps more importantly, a new toy for a group of people with far too many toys already. Better yet, it's one that causes severe pain with no physical after effects. I can't imagine how they could possibly misuse it -- *cough*hazing*cough* *cough*Abu Ghraib*cough*.
Plants do emit CO2, especially when there's no sunlight or water available. Dead or dying plants also produce it while they rot. When both sun and water are available, they produce O2.
It seems small I know, but the cumulative effect could be staggering
The fact that "heat pockets" exist around cities and other major centres is well known. In fact, it's a major reasons why cities tend to create their own weather. See this article or this one for more details. They call it the "urban heat island". It causes storms when the conditions shouldn't be right for them, extends the growing season in both fall and spring, and produces winds. This phenomenon has been observed since the early 1800s, and it's only getting worse.
Instead of targeting A/C, the researchers have pointed to the more mundane things, like roads and parking lots (the dark colour of asphalt absorbs sunlight and turns it into heat) and dark roofs. Areas with sufficient tree coverage, on the other hand, were much cooler. The seemingly trivial change of having a light colour roof can substantially reduce air conditioning requirements (although it can also increase heating requirements).
Because a COM add-in to do the same thing is considerably more difficult. While writing simple scripts in/bin/sh is quite easy to do, even off-the-cuff, writing a COM add-in to work in Outlook is anything but.
For those of us that have never gone to a school in the UK, you might want to explain the acronym ICT. Also, the link to the University of Glasgow was particularly useless (a link to a study would've been more useful).
I'm a Canadian, and joke computer courses in school is nothing new to me. In high school, the computer class was basically a glorified typing class. Your grade was based on the number of words per minute you could type, and basic use of word processors (WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS). The distance learning "Computer Science" course wasn't much better, since it was just basic BASIC programming the first year, and the same except using Pascal the second year.
On the other hand, I dropped out of comp sci in university because the first year of studies required me to take just about everything BUT the subject I was most interested in (you're allowed to take a total of TWO comp sci classes in first year -- one each semester). Because the university received complaints about the quality (or lack thereof) of the writings of graduates of the comp sci program, all students are required to take two arts courses. One of the courses you take has to fulfil a writing requirement. This wouldn't be so bad if there was a technical writing or business communication course, but there isn't. Writing a book report, and writing a technical proposal might both involve english words connected by proper grammatical constructs, but the similarity doesn't extend much past that.
Suffering through two years of stuff I wasn't particulary interested that I have to pay for, just to get to the stuff I would find facinating, didn't work for me.
You think Wal-Mart is somehow less evil than Microsoft? Wow. Wal-Mart rates slightly lower on my list of companies I don't like than Microsoft does. Microsoft at least pays their workers fair wages. Too much of Wal-Mart's stuff comes from sweatshops in third world countries.
If you were a blogger, you probably would've said you invented a "meme", and would've somehow included the "blogosphere", too. There's plenty more verbal diarrhea involved in most blogs, but those are the only two that I can remember at the moment. Unfortunately, I found a link with plenty more.:-(
If he learned how to write coherently, it wouldn't hurt either. His sentences ramble on endlessly, while saying absolutely nothing. In short, it's 100% pure blogarrhea.
Yes, but only a tech would think that the re-install is trivial. Most end users can not do it themselves. It's one of the reasons the criticisms of the Linux installers are so amusing. Even experienced users bring their computers to more technically inclined people to reinstall their operating system.
Besides, you ARE backing up your data to some sort of removable storage, right? (ha)
A lot of vendors don't consider their hardware quite as important as their software differentiation. Witness the rise of the winmodem (you almost can't find a hardware modem these days). The hardware is stupid, and does just enough to get by, while all the real workings are in the driver. It's probably no coincidence that winmodem manufacturers are among the most secretive about their hardware. The only one I'd say is even close to being a good "citizen" is SmartLink which seems to have contributed an intel8x0 modem driver for Alsa, which can be connected to their proprietary user-space daemon for providing a modem service to the system (the alsa driver alone doesn't make the modem work as a modem).
This is hardly the only brain damaged proposals in that bill. Micheal Geist has been writing about various parts of it for some time now. There was one particularly interesting article printed in the Winnipeg Free Press on this. The bill has a large negative effect on educational use (and I mean SCHOOLS) of copyrighted materials, particularly those from the internet. By all reports, the bill is extremely unbalanced in favour of copyright holders.
I wonder when people starting mistaking greed for ambition in managers? They are related, but not the same. An ambition man knows what he wants, and works toward that goal. It's often a positive trait in a manager. A greedy man simply is always unhappy with his current position, and wants the next one higher. It's long term goals versus short term ones. Both faced with needing to reduce costs, the ambitious man will look for either under-performing employees, or for ways to increase productivity. The greedy man will lay off any that he deems are making too much money, and replace them with entry level positions instead.
I suppose that these days, greed is the new ambition, because "Greed is Good"(TM). *sigh*
Not ironic at all. Old HP Laserjet printers used Canon print engines. I have a Laserjet IIIp, which uses the Canon LX engine. Aside from a scanner assy defect, it's a good solid little printer, and one of the first that doesn't produce ozone during printing (It uses a transfer roller instead of a corona wire). Most of the four digit Laserjets seem to be purely HP designs, whereas the earlier single digit ones seem to be Canon engines.
If you want to know how HP really became [incorrectly] known as the origin for all laser printers, I'd suggest reading this page. It covers the Canon CX print engine, and the things HP did right that gave them the marketshare they now have. Notice that some of the things they did right are opposite from what they're doing now.
Punishments should be proportional to the amount of damage a crime caused. The Sasser creator should've been locked away for life. He caused billions of dollars in damages.
So, you're saying the idiot who goes out "mooning" people and causes an accident which results in a death should bear the penalty of a murder? Perhaps we should suggest elaborate Rube Goldberg like situations to equate them to murder. The point both you, and the author of the article are neglecting is that unlike murder, the damage caused by this worm was repairable. The $10 million he assigns as the value of a life does not replace the life that was terminated (no amount of money can). The crimes we typically use life imprisonment or the death penalty for are not. You can bring an infected computer system back to life, you can't bring a murdered person back to life (if they're not dead, it's not murder). If you take the cold economic cost rational, then you could argue that current/former U.S. Presidents ought to be subject to life imprisonment or the death penalty for the economic damage they did to your government. This is obviously absurd, but is the consequence of assuming that economics is the only valid rational for laws.
His virus corrupted systems that, under certain circumstances, could have caused the deaths of hundreds of people. It's border-line terrorism - and in my opinion crosses that border completely.
Uhg, the T-word. Did the sasser author intend for his creation to cause that much damage? Did he have any foresight at all of the damage that it could do? Intent is a very big part of the common law and civil law systems we use. You can't terrorise someone without intent to terrorise them. There are plenty of things that are against the law, regardless of intent, but intent often makes the penalties worse. Take murder, for instance. If you accidently cause someone's death, one set of rules apply. If you intentionally cause someone's death, but did it without planning, another set apply. And if you plan and execute on the plan to cause someone's death, yet other rules apply. In all three instances, someone died because of your actions, but there are varying degrees of punishment for them.
I seriously doubt there is any single network administrator that hasn't done this AT LEAST once. Usually with these thoughts immediately following pressing enter (or Ok, or save, or...): "I didn't do what I think I just did, did I?... shit, shit, shit."
Followed immediately with a sprint to whatever machine was just rendered inoperative by that mistake.
Perhaps, or perhaps he was just shutting down so he could talk to the owner. It's often considered polite to stop whatever you're working on to give someone your undivided attention while they're talking to you. The problem is, we have one side's account of the situation, and that's it. There is a bit of difference between quickly shutting down so someone doesn't see what you're doing, and quickly finishing what you're doing so you can give someone your attention.
The problem for Windows is the brain damaged file locking mechanism. Files that are opened can not be deleted by Windows. That means, any programs and services that are running while you try to install a patch will prevent those files from being overwritten. Updating a program in UNIX involves deleting the old version and installing the new executable (or patch, delete, rename) and restarting whichever programs were using that file. If Windows had the ability to delete these locked files, most IE updates would take effect with just a simple restarting of IE and the shell, and possibly anything else that is using the MSHTML engine. In other words, log out, and log back in. It would make Windows servers far less painful to patch.
How many significant figures are there in 100? 1, 2 or 3? How about 30,000? Your computer or calculator could guess, but it'd be wrong more than 11% of the time. The human computational power required to convert the arbitrary precision number the calculator gives you is far less than it takes for you to correct a calculator mistake (or perhaps even detect a calculator mistake). This would be particularily annoying when using conversion constants (for example, 1 kilometre is 1000 meters) that are not measurements, so they have unlimited precision, and therefore should not be considered.
The only safe way for the calculator to know how many significant figures it can safely deliver to you would be for you to enter them in with the numbers you're calculating, but by then, you've gained nothing. You might as well do it by hand.
It's called taking responsibility for the consequences of one's actions. Maybe you'd prefer people trying to get laws passed to change distasteful company behaviour? There are only two other ways to change a company's behaviour -- getting a big enough stake in the company to directly achieve the change, and withholding purchases from the company until their behaviour changes.
You may think this behaviour is in opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, but you have to understand that buying from companies that don't use sweatshop labour, for example, is just another form of differentiation, and value. Criticizing people for buying because of ideology is just as stupid as criticizing them for buying a more expensive item for quality, appearance or any other arbitrary reasons that you don't care about. This is the market system at work, even if you don't like the aspect it's targeting. Then again, you might feel somewhat differently if the company in question was poisoning the groundwater in your neighbourhood because of improper disposal of toxic byproducts, for example, even if they DID have cheaper prices than all their competitors. These "product not the producer" values tend to break down pretty quickly once someone is personally involved.
As did you. Things I had forgotten about, hadn't properly considered, or just didn't know about. And it gave me an excuse to properly read the RFCs for HTTP and FTP.
Thanks for a civil discussion, something rather rare here these days.
Any time. It's always nice to have a conversation that doesn't devolve down to, "You're wrong, you're stupid, and your mother dresses you funny, too".
I know. I was being a little nit-picky since you said that microwave cooking doesn't "break atomic bonds". There's always some luddites/technophobes out there that think every new technology is killing them. Unfortunately some of them are students of Science, and can wrap their paranoia in plausible language. It then gets repeated until these myths turn into well known "facts" in public opinion.
On the other hand, there is evidence that more mundane cooking methods are more dangerous. Barbecuing meats or any other organic matter can create benzopyrene which is a potent mutagen and carcinogen. Even burning toast (like in a toaster) has been found to produce the dangerous chemical. Now, none of the scientists involved in these studies are telling people to stop grilling food, and stop having burnt toast for breakfast. Of course, some groups have taken those results and used them to further their agendas. I've seen a repeated claim that a grilled steak contains as much benzopyrene as 300 cigarettes (which is supposed to make you believe that a grilled steak is as dangerous as 300 cigarettes, except the soundbite never mentions that cigarettes contain many other toxins and carcinogens). While it's strictly true, it's neither useful, or helpful.
Even vegetables that are cooked to higher than 120 degrees Celcius can form the carcinogen acrylamide. No one calls for us to renounce bread, nuts, french fries, and coffee. At least I didn't find any immediate results for that (I guess militant vegans [as opposed to the sane ones who can accept other people's food preferences] aren't eager to lose some of the few foods they are willing to eat).
Now, microwave cooking can not cause the first toxin to form (because it requires incomplete burning of fat and oils at 300 to 600 degrees C), and it's unlikely that it can cause the second to form either (deep frying and roasting tend to cause it). That must make microwaves safer than conventional cooking, right.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
My problem with this is that it was a reactionary tactic, and one that is not really effective. The problem is that programmers are never taught how to document things and why they must, and taking an artistic writing course doesn't really change that. Part of the problem is that producing documentation should really be a course of it's own, and a required course at that.
Although, in the interest of disclosure, I should mention that the University I went to was ranked, year after year, as the worst university in Canada (out of 49 universities) in nearly every category. The few categories it didn't rate dead last in, it rated very near the bottom (usually second last). I obviously made a poor choice, and this has coloured my view of these things. However, my inability to succeed at that programme was all my own fault (far too many mistakes, such as poor scheduling, course selection and self discipline).
WSH isn't terribly suitable to scripting applications that do not provide a COM interface. All Microsoft products do seem to provide such an interface (and as long as it's not Outlook, you're even be permitted to use it), but not many third party apps do. If you have apps that don't have nice neat COM interfaces, alternative software like AutoIt or AutoHotkey might be more useful in scripting the user interface of the app you need to control.
Or perhaps more importantly, a new toy for a group of people with far too many toys already. Better yet, it's one that causes severe pain with no physical after effects. I can't imagine how they could possibly misuse it -- *cough*hazing*cough* *cough*Abu Ghraib*cough*.
Instead of targeting A/C, the researchers have pointed to the more mundane things, like roads and parking lots (the dark colour of asphalt absorbs sunlight and turns it into heat) and dark roofs. Areas with sufficient tree coverage, on the other hand, were much cooler. The seemingly trivial change of having a light colour roof can substantially reduce air conditioning requirements (although it can also increase heating requirements).
Sure it does. The added wind cools you by evaporating sweat. The only time it doesn't work well is when the humidity levels are extremely high.
Because a COM add-in to do the same thing is considerably more difficult. While writing simple scripts in /bin/sh is quite easy to do, even off-the-cuff, writing a COM add-in to work in Outlook is anything but.
I'm a Canadian, and joke computer courses in school is nothing new to me. In high school, the computer class was basically a glorified typing class. Your grade was based on the number of words per minute you could type, and basic use of word processors (WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS). The distance learning "Computer Science" course wasn't much better, since it was just basic BASIC programming the first year, and the same except using Pascal the second year.
On the other hand, I dropped out of comp sci in university because the first year of studies required me to take just about everything BUT the subject I was most interested in (you're allowed to take a total of TWO comp sci classes in first year -- one each semester). Because the university received complaints about the quality (or lack thereof) of the writings of graduates of the comp sci program, all students are required to take two arts courses. One of the courses you take has to fulfil a writing requirement. This wouldn't be so bad if there was a technical writing or business communication course, but there isn't. Writing a book report, and writing a technical proposal might both involve english words connected by proper grammatical constructs, but the similarity doesn't extend much past that.
Suffering through two years of stuff I wasn't particulary interested that I have to pay for, just to get to the stuff I would find facinating, didn't work for me.
You think Wal-Mart is somehow less evil than Microsoft? Wow. Wal-Mart rates slightly lower on my list of companies I don't like than Microsoft does. Microsoft at least pays their workers fair wages. Too much of Wal-Mart's stuff comes from sweatshops in third world countries.
If you were a blogger, you probably would've said you invented a "meme", and would've somehow included the "blogosphere", too. There's plenty more verbal diarrhea involved in most blogs, but those are the only two that I can remember at the moment. Unfortunately, I found a link with plenty more. :-(
It's just a flesh wound!
If he learned how to write coherently, it wouldn't hurt either. His sentences ramble on endlessly, while saying absolutely nothing. In short, it's 100% pure blogarrhea.
Besides, you ARE backing up your data to some sort of removable storage, right? (ha)
A lot of vendors don't consider their hardware quite as important as their software differentiation. Witness the rise of the winmodem (you almost can't find a hardware modem these days). The hardware is stupid, and does just enough to get by, while all the real workings are in the driver. It's probably no coincidence that winmodem manufacturers are among the most secretive about their hardware. The only one I'd say is even close to being a good "citizen" is SmartLink which seems to have contributed an intel8x0 modem driver for Alsa, which can be connected to their proprietary user-space daemon for providing a modem service to the system (the alsa driver alone doesn't make the modem work as a modem).
This is hardly the only brain damaged proposals in that bill. Micheal Geist has been writing about various parts of it for some time now. There was one particularly interesting article printed in the Winnipeg Free Press on this. The bill has a large negative effect on educational use (and I mean SCHOOLS) of copyrighted materials, particularly those from the internet. By all reports, the bill is extremely unbalanced in favour of copyright holders.
I suppose that these days, greed is the new ambition, because "Greed is Good"(TM). *sigh*
If you want to know how HP really became [incorrectly] known as the origin for all laser printers, I'd suggest reading this page. It covers the Canon CX print engine, and the things HP did right that gave them the marketshare they now have. Notice that some of the things they did right are opposite from what they're doing now.
I seriously doubt there is any single network administrator that hasn't done this AT LEAST once. Usually with these thoughts immediately following pressing enter (or Ok, or save, or...): ... shit, shit, shit."
"I didn't do what I think I just did, did I?
Followed immediately with a sprint to whatever machine was just rendered inoperative by that mistake.
Perhaps, or perhaps he was just shutting down so he could talk to the owner. It's often considered polite to stop whatever you're working on to give someone your undivided attention while they're talking to you. The problem is, we have one side's account of the situation, and that's it. There is a bit of difference between quickly shutting down so someone doesn't see what you're doing, and quickly finishing what you're doing so you can give someone your attention.
The problem for Windows is the brain damaged file locking mechanism. Files that are opened can not be deleted by Windows. That means, any programs and services that are running while you try to install a patch will prevent those files from being overwritten. Updating a program in UNIX involves deleting the old version and installing the new executable (or patch, delete, rename) and restarting whichever programs were using that file. If Windows had the ability to delete these locked files, most IE updates would take effect with just a simple restarting of IE and the shell, and possibly anything else that is using the MSHTML engine. In other words, log out, and log back in. It would make Windows servers far less painful to patch.
The only safe way for the calculator to know how many significant figures it can safely deliver to you would be for you to enter them in with the numbers you're calculating, but by then, you've gained nothing. You might as well do it by hand.
You may think this behaviour is in opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, but you have to understand that buying from companies that don't use sweatshop labour, for example, is just another form of differentiation, and value. Criticizing people for buying because of ideology is just as stupid as criticizing them for buying a more expensive item for quality, appearance or any other arbitrary reasons that you don't care about. This is the market system at work, even if you don't like the aspect it's targeting. Then again, you might feel somewhat differently if the company in question was poisoning the groundwater in your neighbourhood because of improper disposal of toxic byproducts, for example, even if they DID have cheaper prices than all their competitors. These "product not the producer" values tend to break down pretty quickly once someone is personally involved.
Good thing neither the editors or news submitters can tell time properly! (23h 59m 59s = 11:59:59 PM, 0h 0m 0s = 12:00:00 AM)
On the other hand, there is evidence that more mundane cooking methods are more dangerous. Barbecuing meats or any other organic matter can create benzopyrene which is a potent mutagen and carcinogen. Even burning toast (like in a toaster) has been found to produce the dangerous chemical. Now, none of the scientists involved in these studies are telling people to stop grilling food, and stop having burnt toast for breakfast. Of course, some groups have taken those results and used them to further their agendas. I've seen a repeated claim that a grilled steak contains as much benzopyrene as 300 cigarettes (which is supposed to make you believe that a grilled steak is as dangerous as 300 cigarettes, except the soundbite never mentions that cigarettes contain many other toxins and carcinogens). While it's strictly true, it's neither useful, or helpful.
Even vegetables that are cooked to higher than 120 degrees Celcius can form the carcinogen acrylamide. No one calls for us to renounce bread, nuts, french fries, and coffee. At least I didn't find any immediate results for that (I guess militant vegans [as opposed to the sane ones who can accept other people's food preferences] aren't eager to lose some of the few foods they are willing to eat).
Now, microwave cooking can not cause the first toxin to form (because it requires incomplete burning of fat and oils at 300 to 600 degrees C), and it's unlikely that it can cause the second to form either (deep frying and roasting tend to cause it). That must make microwaves safer than conventional cooking, right. :-P