This may sound silly and is more a project than a talk, but perhaps you could make software development kind of fun. If it was a small class, you could split them up into a groups and give each group a bunch of lego with different colour blocks, wheel types, etc. Then, tell them they have to build a car of a certain size or something, but that there are some rules:
They are put into groups of 4.
Each group of 4 is split into 2 pairs of builders.
One pair is assigned the front half of the car, the other pair the back half.
They can only build as a pair, but not as a full group.
They can talk/collaborate/plan/design as a group, but not build as a group.
They can go back and forth between building as a pair and collaborating as a group as often as they want.
They can only bring their current iteration of their half of the car to the group meetings, but not other blocks.
It'd be interesting to see if they take an iterative or waterfall approach to building the car, and which method works out better for them, whether time wise or quality wise.
Hrmm.. I pay $10/m for my rdio.com subscription ($5/m for the service + $5/m for letting it play on my phone) for millions of songs. Or, I could give Apple/HTC/Microsoft/Samsung/Sony/Amazon/$ANY_OTHER_COMPANY $5 and get only 50. Nope, it sounds stupid no matter which company you use.
While Solr (& Lucene) are only a couple pieces of software, they also happen to be damn useful and widely deployed pieces of software. Pretty much every web site we make uses Solr to handle searching, so this problem is ours now too. Not that we'd put Java 7 in production on the first release anyways, but it certainly doesn't make me think highly of Oracle, since, as you noted, they didn't even bother to mention this bug in the release notes.
You raise an important point, which is that we are essentially learning how to win friends and influence people, not subconsciously as part of our character, but as a learned discipline.
It's not subconscious for the normal folks either. Social skills are just as learned as any other. As a "normal" person, social situations still require a lot of work for me. What is subconscious, is our ability to pick up cues that you'd probably miss. During a conversation, there is always a part of my brain that is concerned about what is going on in everyone else's head, that is fed, in part, by the social cues picked up as well as being able empathize with them (predict how they are feeling). That part of me is always there and always going, it is far from subconscious.
My local liberal MP candidate (Dan McTeague) was one of the most vocal supporters of harsher sentences for copyright infringement. And, yes, that is exactly why he lost my vote.
I mentioned this earlier, but when I was in elementary school some kid broke his arm falling off the playground, so they cut about 2 ft off it to make it shorter. Since you couldn't really climb or hang or anything on it anymore, a new pass-time was formed: climb on to the school's roof. Some kid fell off that. I bet they were pissed they couldn't shorten the roof of the school to a "safe" height.
Did her provincial healthcare cover any of her expenses? I've always assumed the OHIP would cover some (eg. equivalent cost in Canada) and travel insurance covers the rest.
In my last year of elementary school some kid fell of the school's playground and broke his arm. So, to prevent this from happening again, the solution was to literally pull the playground up, cut off a couple of feet and stick it back down. Kids stopped playing on it because it sucked. What's funny is that the worst accidents at our school were usually from kids just running around. I remember one kid taking a face plant at a full run into a bench and getting a huge chunk of wood in his cheek. Still has a huge scar to this day. Of course, it's not the playgrounds that hurt kids, its the kids themselves. Take away the playground, and they'll climb up onto the school roof and fall off (that happened too, after the playground was cut).
That said, I've been fairly pleased with some of the new playgrounds I've been seeing around my new area. They're tall, have lots of open areas, poles, ropes, slides, etc. There was another playground I found in Quebec City that had this giant rope geometric structure thing. Unfortunately for my embarrassed wife, I ended up playing on it for a while, before some kids showed up.
Regardless if it is security theatre, the fact remains that there are lots of great, free, functional captcha generators out there they could've used instead. The fact that they made their own shitty captcha, rather than just saving time and money and reusing an existing library says more about their security policy than the actual ineffectiveness of the captcha itself.
Honestly, I don't use an ad blocker as, mostly, ads don't bother me and I understand their need. However, I'd not feel so bad about installing an ad blocker that only blocks ad agencies known to not honour the do-not-track header.
Let's not forget that cell plans (at least in Canada) are still no match for landlines. The price of unlimited day-time minutes (VERY important if you work from home) is just way too high. I've also found when it comes to VOIP, of the three desirable features - cheap, reliable, and good quality - you only get to choose 2. Good quality, reliable VOIP (w/ SIP) costs as much as a regular land line.
As the retailer stated; it either works or it doesn't, there is no varying quality. I don't think they were saying ANY cable will do, but that there is no reason to buy an expensive cable over a cheaper cable, if they both "work." What's nice about a brick & mortar store like this is that the cheap cable they are selling you has probably been at least somewhat vetted by them and so you know it'll work, rather than buying the cheapest thing that comes up on ebay and being surprised when it doesn't work.
I'm the opposite. After trying my Kindle, I have a hard time going back to printed books. My 1.5h of commuting aside (Kindle wins here obviously), the Kindle is great for reading novels at home too. It is much lighter than most books, I can easily palm it in my hand, and I can flip the page single handed too. I can just drop it on a counter and read, without having to weigh down each side of the book to keep it open. I also keep the text in my Kindle slightly larger than I'd get in a novel. I don't have bad eyesight, I just find it much quicker to read. Obviously publishers have an incentive to keep the text as small as possible, while still being readable, so this makes sense.
I've actually noticed a huge amount of articles on Slashdot for bitcoin. However, not a single one of my nerd friends or I have ever discussed it nor read about it in any other news source. Either I've just completely missed a Big Thing, or/. is giving undue front-page time to bitcoin.
It is incredibly hard to give meaningful names to things. What would you have us do? "Oh, look, I've created 'PHP Web Framework #340203411: More jQuery'" That said, some of the names aren't terrible. That said, I think Varnish and Squid are both good names for what they are.
This argument was only valid before Java 6. Before Java 6, non-strictfp calculations were still treated as strict. In Java 6 and beyond, non-strictfp floating point calculations are no longer forced to be strict and Java's math benchmarks got significantly better.
I've seen a University network that required a program that ensures you have anti-virus, firewall, etc. programs installed just to access the network. The software was Windows only and it didn't last long (I'm guessing once the faculty started getting Macs, it became a much bigger problem).
To the submitter, I think your University is nuts. Mine had campus-wide wifi 8 years ago and never did it require anything more than to log-on w/ your web browser. I think it is terrible that you were mocked by University staff for suggesting they try to make their campus more accessible. Unfortunately, most universities have pretty strong staff unions and low turnover, so I would not count on any big changes in the ranks that would alleviate your woes.
Carmack demo'd a version of Rage running on an iPhone that was shooter on rails. I think he is somehow confusing a tech demo showing what the engine could do on a phone (which WAS impressive) with the game they are developing.
Same here. I stopped watching cable TV back when I was in University (couldn't afford it) and soon realized how much a trailer can ruin a movie. It was great going in to see a blockbuster and having 0 expectations about the movie. I still don't have cable, even though I'm no longer a broke student, and still avoid trailers like the plague. I also hate it when my friends hype up movies I haven't seen:\
Food, Inc is a fantastic movie that makes a lot of these points. The parallels between software patents and patents on seeds and the like are uncanny. The movie is not preachy at all, and definitely not anti-meat. I'd highly suggest Slashdotters watch it.
I'd recommend against it. I am trying to think of someone I know who currently has an HTC phone and has said they would buy one again... I can think of 6 people (myself included) I know who have vehemently said they would not get another. Both my wife's and my touch screens malfunctioned after about a year. Mine happened just in the warranty, my wife's happened just out (she now has a Samsung). My friend had to replace his battery after 13 months. Another just replaced his screen after a little over a year. My cousin's came DOA (bought it out-right from HTC) and instead of sending him a new one, they had him send his back and wait 8 weeks while they fixed his brand new, never used phone. My phone took 7 weeks and there is now a big splotch of dust under the screen that is very noticeable and obstructs the view when in natural light.
Slashdot Mirror
This may sound silly and is more a project than a talk, but perhaps you could make software development kind of fun. If it was a small class, you could split them up into a groups and give each group a bunch of lego with different colour blocks, wheel types, etc. Then, tell them they have to build a car of a certain size or something, but that there are some rules:
It'd be interesting to see if they take an iterative or waterfall approach to building the car, and which method works out better for them, whether time wise or quality wise.
Hrmm.. I pay $10/m for my rdio.com subscription ($5/m for the service + $5/m for letting it play on my phone) for millions of songs. Or, I could give Apple/HTC/Microsoft/Samsung/Sony/Amazon/$ANY_OTHER_COMPANY $5 and get only 50. Nope, it sounds stupid no matter which company you use.
Well, for instance, this comment is a valid HTML5 page.
While Solr (& Lucene) are only a couple pieces of software, they also happen to be damn useful and widely deployed pieces of software. Pretty much every web site we make uses Solr to handle searching, so this problem is ours now too. Not that we'd put Java 7 in production on the first release anyways, but it certainly doesn't make me think highly of Oracle, since, as you noted, they didn't even bother to mention this bug in the release notes.
You raise an important point, which is that we are essentially learning how to win friends and influence people, not subconsciously as part of our character, but as a learned discipline.
It's not subconscious for the normal folks either. Social skills are just as learned as any other. As a "normal" person, social situations still require a lot of work for me. What is subconscious, is our ability to pick up cues that you'd probably miss. During a conversation, there is always a part of my brain that is concerned about what is going on in everyone else's head, that is fed, in part, by the social cues picked up as well as being able empathize with them (predict how they are feeling). That part of me is always there and always going, it is far from subconscious.
My local liberal MP candidate (Dan McTeague) was one of the most vocal supporters of harsher sentences for copyright infringement. And, yes, that is exactly why he lost my vote.
You are exactly right. So, why would Harper not want to base his decisions on factual information... Hrmm...
I mentioned this earlier, but when I was in elementary school some kid broke his arm falling off the playground, so they cut about 2 ft off it to make it shorter. Since you couldn't really climb or hang or anything on it anymore, a new pass-time was formed: climb on to the school's roof. Some kid fell off that. I bet they were pissed they couldn't shorten the roof of the school to a "safe" height.
Did her provincial healthcare cover any of her expenses? I've always assumed the OHIP would cover some (eg. equivalent cost in Canada) and travel insurance covers the rest.
In my last year of elementary school some kid fell of the school's playground and broke his arm. So, to prevent this from happening again, the solution was to literally pull the playground up, cut off a couple of feet and stick it back down. Kids stopped playing on it because it sucked. What's funny is that the worst accidents at our school were usually from kids just running around. I remember one kid taking a face plant at a full run into a bench and getting a huge chunk of wood in his cheek. Still has a huge scar to this day. Of course, it's not the playgrounds that hurt kids, its the kids themselves. Take away the playground, and they'll climb up onto the school roof and fall off (that happened too, after the playground was cut).
That said, I've been fairly pleased with some of the new playgrounds I've been seeing around my new area. They're tall, have lots of open areas, poles, ropes, slides, etc. There was another playground I found in Quebec City that had this giant rope geometric structure thing. Unfortunately for my embarrassed wife, I ended up playing on it for a while, before some kids showed up.
Regardless if it is security theatre, the fact remains that there are lots of great, free, functional captcha generators out there they could've used instead. The fact that they made their own shitty captcha, rather than just saving time and money and reusing an existing library says more about their security policy than the actual ineffectiveness of the captcha itself.
Honestly, I don't use an ad blocker as, mostly, ads don't bother me and I understand their need. However, I'd not feel so bad about installing an ad blocker that only blocks ad agencies known to not honour the do-not-track header.
Let's not forget that cell plans (at least in Canada) are still no match for landlines. The price of unlimited day-time minutes (VERY important if you work from home) is just way too high. I've also found when it comes to VOIP, of the three desirable features - cheap, reliable, and good quality - you only get to choose 2. Good quality, reliable VOIP (w/ SIP) costs as much as a regular land line.
As the retailer stated; it either works or it doesn't, there is no varying quality. I don't think they were saying ANY cable will do, but that there is no reason to buy an expensive cable over a cheaper cable, if they both "work." What's nice about a brick & mortar store like this is that the cheap cable they are selling you has probably been at least somewhat vetted by them and so you know it'll work, rather than buying the cheapest thing that comes up on ebay and being surprised when it doesn't work.
A good example of a large company: IBM, with over 400k employees, uses Firefox.
I'm the opposite. After trying my Kindle, I have a hard time going back to printed books. My 1.5h of commuting aside (Kindle wins here obviously), the Kindle is great for reading novels at home too. It is much lighter than most books, I can easily palm it in my hand, and I can flip the page single handed too. I can just drop it on a counter and read, without having to weigh down each side of the book to keep it open. I also keep the text in my Kindle slightly larger than I'd get in a novel. I don't have bad eyesight, I just find it much quicker to read. Obviously publishers have an incentive to keep the text as small as possible, while still being readable, so this makes sense.
I've actually noticed a huge amount of articles on Slashdot for bitcoin. However, not a single one of my nerd friends or I have ever discussed it nor read about it in any other news source. Either I've just completely missed a Big Thing, or /. is giving undue front-page time to bitcoin.
It is incredibly hard to give meaningful names to things. What would you have us do? "Oh, look, I've created 'PHP Web Framework #340203411: More jQuery'" That said, some of the names aren't terrible. That said, I think Varnish and Squid are both good names for what they are.
This argument was only valid before Java 6. Before Java 6, non-strictfp calculations were still treated as strict. In Java 6 and beyond, non-strictfp floating point calculations are no longer forced to be strict and Java's math benchmarks got significantly better.
I've seen a University network that required a program that ensures you have anti-virus, firewall, etc. programs installed just to access the network. The software was Windows only and it didn't last long (I'm guessing once the faculty started getting Macs, it became a much bigger problem).
To the submitter, I think your University is nuts. Mine had campus-wide wifi 8 years ago and never did it require anything more than to log-on w/ your web browser. I think it is terrible that you were mocked by University staff for suggesting they try to make their campus more accessible. Unfortunately, most universities have pretty strong staff unions and low turnover, so I would not count on any big changes in the ranks that would alleviate your woes.
Carmack demo'd a version of Rage running on an iPhone that was shooter on rails. I think he is somehow confusing a tech demo showing what the engine could do on a phone (which WAS impressive) with the game they are developing.
Same here. I stopped watching cable TV back when I was in University (couldn't afford it) and soon realized how much a trailer can ruin a movie. It was great going in to see a blockbuster and having 0 expectations about the movie. I still don't have cable, even though I'm no longer a broke student, and still avoid trailers like the plague. I also hate it when my friends hype up movies I haven't seen :\
Food, Inc is a fantastic movie that makes a lot of these points. The parallels between software patents and patents on seeds and the like are uncanny. The movie is not preachy at all, and definitely not anti-meat. I'd highly suggest Slashdotters watch it.
I hope it keeps going! Mine failed 11 months in. My wife's worked fine until it failed 13 months in.
I'd recommend against it. I am trying to think of someone I know who currently has an HTC phone and has said they would buy one again... I can think of 6 people (myself included) I know who have vehemently said they would not get another. Both my wife's and my touch screens malfunctioned after about a year. Mine happened just in the warranty, my wife's happened just out (she now has a Samsung). My friend had to replace his battery after 13 months. Another just replaced his screen after a little over a year. My cousin's came DOA (bought it out-right from HTC) and instead of sending him a new one, they had him send his back and wait 8 weeks while they fixed his brand new, never used phone. My phone took 7 weeks and there is now a big splotch of dust under the screen that is very noticeable and obstructs the view when in natural light.