I had a win98 system running on one of my PCs, but the system itself was as old as win98, (ie: 8 years) and died last week of a CPU failure. (The motherboard's BIOS hardware monitor said the CPU was drawing about 10x the voltage it was supposed to - no wonder the thing wouldn't boot any OS at all...) I unplugged it and declared it dead. I'll salvage the hard drive and data when I get a system to replace it, probably the cheapest used system I can find, and yes, it will be Linux running on it, since everything that win98 was used for on that system now runs better through linux anyways. No matter what though, as I'm not buying the latest new $3000 system, it will definitely not even be able to run vista (or even XP most likely.)
The only problem I've ever had with OpenOffice (and the only reason I have to keep MS Office or Wordperfect around) is that the system for putting in address labels is so badly broken that it's useless. I have two files of about 250 addresses each, listed out as plain text, which I can load into MS Office or Wordperfect, set my paper type to labels, and *POOF*! Each address is on it's own label, no extra fighting needed. When I try to do that in OpenOffice, I either get the same (first) address on all of the labels, or I get only one label filled out (again the first one.)
If I want to actually get the separate addresses to show up on each individual label, I have to manually type the stupid things into a database first, and _THEN_ it will let me put them onto the labels. Major pain in then neck, and entirely not worth it, when it'll take less time to fire up my copy of wordperfect and just print the damn list. (The time required to manually enter 500+ addresses is _NOT_ worth it.)
And after I post it, I find that they moved the link... the Disabilities Act is actually at http://www.cou.on.ca/content/objects/DisabilitiesA ctGuidelines.pdf. They want the people to make their sites accessible, but the government sites about those requirements are full of out-dated, broken links. Figures.
In Ontario (Canada), it's legally required that web sites for government agencies, and government funded organizations follow the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines according to the Ontarians with Disibilities Act. If you're making a website for anyone in Ontario who gets funded in whole or in part by the government, and you don't follow those guidelines, you can face massive fines.
Definitely. Speaking as someone who has had to mark, debug, edit, and update other people's code a lot, I think that everyone who does any programming should always start out by learning Python. Not because it's a fully featured and powerful language, not because it's easy, interpreted versus compiled, or anything else like that. My reason for wanting people to start their programming with Python is pure self-interest.
Python is indentation-sensitive.
Python programmers write easy to read code.
That, when you are trying to figure out why the interest is being added to someone's account at the wrong day of the month, or why the pixels are being inverted in that sprite but not this one, or why in the world this bit of javascript is always crashing the browser when you move the mouse to the left (but not up/down, or to the right) is more important than anything else at all.
Coding everything by hand does not mean you understand the basics.
No, but being kept from seeing or knowing what's actually going in to your program because all you did was click on widgets and select choices from drop-downs does mean you aren't going to understand them.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that these people who are learning pseudo-programming via point-and-click are going to be going out into the world thinking they're every bit as good a programmer as the people who have learned actual programming skills, getting themselves jobs that require actual programming skill, and then they'll be in completely over their heads. The question here isn't about good first impressions, it's about false ones.
Why? What's the penalty for just doing the research? Is it that you can't ultimately profit from the result?
No, the penalty is being sued for lost royalties by the patent holders, because you used their property without their permission, and then having your research confiscated as it contains and is based on their property. So you're out all that money, <i>and</i> you no longer have access to your own work.
From the article: Astronomers want to determine the mass of Polaris accurately, because it is the nearest Cepheid variable star. Cepheids' brightness variations are used to measure...
Yup, definitely a good choice of comparissons.
not be true of like, scheme and Haskell, but it's definitely true of Java and C#
Scheme and Haskell aren't OOP languages, they're functional languages - knowing the OOP paradigm won't help you at all for them.
One thing I forgot to mention - ActiveX is still a very good tooklit for rapid development of stand-alone applications on MS Windows, it's fast, flexible and does a lot of the work for you, much like Java, but without the need for an interpreter (or any of that messy platform independance). That dosen't mean it's good for web pages though.
The biggest problem with ActiveX on web pages is not that it was "poorly designed for the web", it's that it was NOT DESIGNED FOR THE WEB at all - ActiveX was originally a programmer's toolkit library called OLE (Object Linked Environment) which pre-dates the web by several years, and allowed programmers to use any MS program or system call as part of their own program. Want to embed MS Excel in your tax application and feed info to it? Use OLE! Sadly, nobody liked it, and MS blamed the sucky, complex and scary sounding name, so they re-named it to ActiveX (which sold much better, because everyone knows "X"s are cool.)
When MS realized the web wasn't a fad that would go away, they needed to compete in it, and they needed something they owned to fight against this Java-thing (which they didn't own, and therefore didn't like), and they decided they already had something they could stick into any of their programs really quickly - ActiveX! - which lets you embed and access any other MS program, tool, or function, including things like the format command, the power on/off register in your hard drive, and other programs such as MS Wallet to transfer money from the user's bank account. Security didn't even start to happen until after they tried suing people who pointed out problems into oblivion (it didn't work).
Think about it, this person had already GOT TO UNIVERSITY!
From what I've seen, most new University students have just as big of a problem with literacy as the students who are just starting grade school. It's kind of sad, really, when you speak to someone, and they have a perfect command of the language, and then they write something down, and you find out that they can't string two words together coherently on paper.
I usually waste about a half hour of the web page development class I teach just trying to explain things like: "'UR' is not a word - it's the sound that cavemen make when they sit on something sharp." And yes, I take marks off of projects and tests that get handed in with l33t/IRC speak on them. I also warn the whole class about that right from the start, and refuse to answer any emails from students that are in l33t, except with a reminder that they shouldn't be doing that in any kind of official correspondence if they want anyone to take them seriously.
Did you expect the rest of the A-Team to appear in Rocky III? Did you expect the cast of Cheers to appear in Star Trek III? No.
Actually, every time Barklay showed up, I couldn't shake the image of him running around in the holodeck yelling "Neeeewww trashbag!" But then, I freely admit that I watched way too much of the A-Team as a child.
Maybe I missed something. I don't know how performing a pattern match on Term Papers in order to identify cheaters relates to the "community of trust"
Actually, it relates quite closely to it - by driving out the cheaters, the students, and future employers will know that they can trust the degrees and professed knowlege of the graduates in a field.
If an employer hires some Computer Science graduates from University X, and they all turn out to be incompetant cheaters, who plagerized their way through their degrees, then that employer will no longer trust Computer Science degrees from University X - they've seen that the degree in question is meaningless. Other students in the meantime, see cheaters getting good marks, and figure "Why should I bother working, that person cheated, and they got away with it." - Then the problem gets worse, because the students no longer trust the faculty to reward hard work and knowlege. If that pattern repeats, word spreads around, and eventually, no-one will hire people with Comp.Sci. degrees from University X, because the community no longer trusts them. Then, nobody will bother taking that degree, because you get nothing out of it anyways, so the department gets closed down. Thus, by not bothering to try and stop cheaters, the department becomes untrustworthy, and ceases to exist.
Asside from that, I do much the same thing myself, and got to fail one student, and have another thrown out of the University just this past semester. (I submitted the last of the paperwork for it an hour ago.) Strangely enough, those of my students who know that someone is being thrown out for cheating are quite happy about it - it makes them feel that their own hard work and studying was worth the effort they put into it.
Incidentally, the methods I used mostly involved copying sections of student's projects into the search box on Google, - I got perfect matches on both of the cheater's projects. The other part to catch cheaters was the fact that I had about 16 different tests scattered around the class during test time, with minor changes like different numbers, order of multiple choice questions & their answers, and different HTML code for the relevant section of the test. Since nobody had the same test as the people beside them, it was really easy to catch the guy who copied answers from the one beside him - his answers weren't related to his questions, but if he'd been doing test number 7 instead, he'd have had perfect... strange, eh? It makes for a bit more time marking, but in the end, it's worth it.
Ya know, you're right. Let's get rid of all of that nuclear powered stuff, expecially in space. After all, we don't want to spoil that wonderfull pure environment out there with filthy dirty icky radiation.
Of course, the first, and biggest source of nuclear radiation we'd have to get rid of would be the sun, and all of those other stars. Did you know that they pump out enough radiation to kill you if you go out there without shielding? We'd best hurry to get rid of them first, since they give off a whole heck of a lot more radiation, AND radioactive crud than any rocket we build could manage to do.
I mean, really. Suppose the punishment for stealing was being forced to return the stolen goods, end of story, no ostricizing, no apology.
Not quite. Since they'd be posting the source to the windows version of it, they've just become contributors to the project, and their work is included with it. It's more like someone stealing a car, fixing and/or replacing a few broken/non functional/missing parts, and THEN being forced to give it back, upgrades and all.
Personally, I'd rather see the added source material being made available than someone being punished for what may have been simple ignorance or incompetance.
Actually, it means "Vengefull Ghost Princess". "Sacred Cow" would be '(something or other) Ushi'
As far as the movie itself goes, I enjoyed it. One of the reasons you see a relative last of critical discernment in the anime-literati, is that most of the crap just dosen't get exported. Yes, Anime really does follow the 90% rule. Have you ever seen Tenshi Ni Naruman or Crayon Shin-chan? No? Be happy, they won't be getting released commercially in North America. Be very happy. (I'm still having traumatic flashbacks from seeing Tenshi Ni Naruman, and that was over 6 months ago. *shudder*)
If you look at their AUP, which is located here, you'll see that they explicitly forbid the storage of MP3 files on thier servers, regardless of who has the rights to it, regardless of wether they're legal MP3s or not, and regardless of wether you want to put them there or not. This is the relevant section from their policy page:
4.1.5. The storage and distribution of MP3 format files via the Company network is prohibited.
Frankly, since storing MP3s on the site was against their policy, he's lucky they didn't apply the $300 per instance of violation service charge that they promise right below that. While I'm not saying that storing MP3 files is bad, I am saying that when you place a file of any type on a server who has banned files of that type, you shouldn't be surprised when they remove them, and the AUP is all of the warning that needed to be given.
At this rate, the Canadian elections will be over, and we'll know who our new Prime Minister is before the Americans know who their new president is. And we haven't even started voting yet!
Get a normal torch and mount a LED and resistor in the old bulb's base... and good luck using up the batteries:)
Been there, done that, and it took a week. Some day I'll try it with actuall new batteries, instead of the year-old ones I used that time.
Slashdot Mirror
DMUANUY
Don't Make Up Acronyms - Nobody Understands You
I had a win98 system running on one of my PCs, but the system itself was as old as win98, (ie: 8 years) and died last week of a CPU failure. (The motherboard's BIOS hardware monitor said the CPU was drawing about 10x the voltage it was supposed to - no wonder the thing wouldn't boot any OS at all...) I unplugged it and declared it dead. I'll salvage the hard drive and data when I get a system to replace it, probably the cheapest used system I can find, and yes, it will be Linux running on it, since everything that win98 was used for on that system now runs better through linux anyways. No matter what though, as I'm not buying the latest new $3000 system, it will definitely not even be able to run vista (or even XP most likely.)
http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Along with awk, sed, vi/pico/nano, and occasionally perl for really complex alterations.
I tried that, the buttons don't work, and the up/down are reversed. (left and right work fine though)
She plays games on her Sega Master System every night, and doesn't want to get some expensive, confusing new thing with all those extra buttons.
By the way, does anyone know where I can find replacement controllers for a Sega Master System?
The only problem I've ever had with OpenOffice (and the only reason I have to keep MS Office or Wordperfect around) is that the system for putting in address labels is so badly broken that it's useless. I have two files of about 250 addresses each, listed out as plain text, which I can load into MS Office or Wordperfect, set my paper type to labels, and *POOF*! Each address is on it's own label, no extra fighting needed. When I try to do that in OpenOffice, I either get the same (first) address on all of the labels, or I get only one label filled out (again the first one.)
If I want to actually get the separate addresses to show up on each individual label, I have to manually type the stupid things into a database first, and _THEN_ it will let me put them onto the labels. Major pain in then neck, and entirely not worth it, when it'll take less time to fire up my copy of wordperfect and just print the damn list. (The time required to manually enter 500+ addresses is _NOT_ worth it.)
And after I post it, I find that they moved the link... the Disabilities Act is actually at http://www.cou.on.ca/content/objects/DisabilitiesA ctGuidelines.pdf. They want the people to make their sites accessible, but the government sites about those requirements are full of out-dated, broken links. Figures.
In Ontario (Canada), it's legally required that web sites for government agencies, and government funded organizations follow the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines according to the Ontarians with Disibilities Act. If you're making a website for anyone in Ontario who gets funded in whole or in part by the government, and you don't follow those guidelines, you can face massive fines.
Definitely. Speaking as someone who has had to mark, debug, edit, and update other people's code a lot, I think that everyone who does any programming should always start out by learning Python. Not because it's a fully featured and powerful language, not because it's easy, interpreted versus compiled, or anything else like that. My reason for wanting people to start their programming with Python is pure self-interest.
Python is indentation-sensitive.
Python programmers write easy to read code.
That, when you are trying to figure out why the interest is being added to someone's account at the wrong day of the month, or why the pixels are being inverted in that sprite but not this one, or why in the world this bit of javascript is always crashing the browser when you move the mouse to the left (but not up/down, or to the right) is more important than anything else at all.
Coding everything by hand does not mean you understand the basics.
No, but being kept from seeing or knowing what's actually going in to your program because all you did was click on widgets and select choices from drop-downs does mean you aren't going to understand them.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that these people who are learning pseudo-programming via point-and-click are going to be going out into the world thinking they're every bit as good a programmer as the people who have learned actual programming skills, getting themselves jobs that require actual programming skill, and then they'll be in completely over their heads. The question here isn't about good first impressions, it's about false ones.
Why? What's the penalty for just doing the research? Is it that you can't ultimately profit from the result?
No, the penalty is being sued for lost royalties by the patent holders, because you used their property without their permission, and then having your research confiscated as it contains and is based on their property. So you're out all that money, <i>and</i> you no longer have access to your own work.
From the article: ...
Astronomers want to determine the mass of Polaris accurately, because it is the nearest Cepheid variable star. Cepheids' brightness variations are used to measure
Yup, definitely a good choice of comparissons.
not be true of like, scheme and Haskell, but it's definitely true of Java and C#
Scheme and Haskell aren't OOP languages, they're functional languages - knowing the OOP paradigm won't help you at all for them.
But my mother and father already use Linux - mostly for the games though.
One thing I forgot to mention - ActiveX is still a very good tooklit for rapid development of stand-alone applications on MS Windows, it's fast, flexible and does a lot of the work for you, much like Java, but without the need for an interpreter (or any of that messy platform independance). That dosen't mean it's good for web pages though.
The biggest problem with ActiveX on web pages is not that it was "poorly designed for the web", it's that it was NOT DESIGNED FOR THE WEB at all - ActiveX was originally a programmer's toolkit library called OLE (Object Linked Environment) which pre-dates the web by several years, and allowed programmers to use any MS program or system call as part of their own program. Want to embed MS Excel in your tax application and feed info to it? Use OLE! Sadly, nobody liked it, and MS blamed the sucky, complex and scary sounding name, so they re-named it to ActiveX (which sold much better, because everyone knows "X"s are cool.)
When MS realized the web wasn't a fad that would go away, they needed to compete in it, and they needed something they owned to fight against this Java-thing (which they didn't own, and therefore didn't like), and they decided they already had something they could stick into any of their programs really quickly - ActiveX! - which lets you embed and access any other MS program, tool, or function, including things like the format command, the power on/off register in your hard drive, and other programs such as MS Wallet to transfer money from the user's bank account. Security didn't even start to happen until after they tried suing people who pointed out problems into oblivion (it didn't work).
Think about it, this person had already GOT TO UNIVERSITY!
From what I've seen, most new University students have just as big of a problem with literacy as the students who are just starting grade school. It's kind of sad, really, when you speak to someone, and they have a perfect command of the language, and then they write something down, and you find out that they can't string two words together coherently on paper.
I usually waste about a half hour of the web page development class I teach just trying to explain things like: "'UR' is not a word - it's the sound that cavemen make when they sit on something sharp." And yes, I take marks off of projects and tests that get handed in with l33t/IRC speak on them. I also warn the whole class about that right from the start, and refuse to answer any emails from students that are in l33t, except with a reminder that they shouldn't be doing that in any kind of official correspondence if they want anyone to take them seriously.
Did you expect the rest of the A-Team to appear in Rocky III? Did you expect the cast of Cheers to appear in Star Trek III? No.
Actually, every time Barklay showed up, I couldn't shake the image of him running around in the holodeck yelling "Neeeewww trashbag!" But then, I freely admit that I watched way too much of the A-Team as a child.
Maybe I missed something. I don't know how performing a pattern match on Term Papers in order to identify cheaters relates to the "community of trust"
Actually, it relates quite closely to it - by driving out the cheaters, the students, and future employers will know that they can trust the degrees and professed knowlege of the graduates in a field.
If an employer hires some Computer Science graduates from University X, and they all turn out to be incompetant cheaters, who plagerized their way through their degrees, then that employer will no longer trust Computer Science degrees from University X - they've seen that the degree in question is meaningless. Other students in the meantime, see cheaters getting good marks, and figure "Why should I bother working, that person cheated, and they got away with it." - Then the problem gets worse, because the students no longer trust the faculty to reward hard work and knowlege. If that pattern repeats, word spreads around, and eventually, no-one will hire people with Comp.Sci. degrees from University X, because the community no longer trusts them. Then, nobody will bother taking that degree, because you get nothing out of it anyways, so the department gets closed down. Thus, by not bothering to try and stop cheaters, the department becomes untrustworthy, and ceases to exist.
Asside from that, I do much the same thing myself, and got to fail one student, and have another thrown out of the University just this past semester. (I submitted the last of the paperwork for it an hour ago.) Strangely enough, those of my students who know that someone is being thrown out for cheating are quite happy about it - it makes them feel that their own hard work and studying was worth the effort they put into it.
Incidentally, the methods I used mostly involved copying sections of student's projects into the search box on Google, - I got perfect matches on both of the cheater's projects. The other part to catch cheaters was the fact that I had about 16 different tests scattered around the class during test time, with minor changes like different numbers, order of multiple choice questions & their answers, and different HTML code for the relevant section of the test. Since nobody had the same test as the people beside them, it was really easy to catch the guy who copied answers from the one beside him - his answers weren't related to his questions, but if he'd been doing test number 7 instead, he'd have had perfect... strange, eh? It makes for a bit more time marking, but in the end, it's worth it.
Ya know, you're right. Let's get rid of all of that nuclear powered stuff, expecially in space. After all, we don't want to spoil that wonderfull pure environment out there with filthy dirty icky radiation.
Of course, the first, and biggest source of nuclear radiation we'd have to get rid of would be the sun, and all of those other stars. Did you know that they pump out enough radiation to kill you if you go out there without shielding? We'd best hurry to get rid of them first, since they give off a whole heck of a lot more radiation, AND radioactive crud than any rocket we build could manage to do.
Not quite. Since they'd be posting the source to the windows version of it, they've just become contributors to the project, and their work is included with it. It's more like someone stealing a car, fixing and/or replacing a few broken/non functional/missing parts, and THEN being forced to give it back, upgrades and all.
Personally, I'd rather see the added source material being made available than someone being punished for what may have been simple ignorance or incompetance.
Actually, it means "Vengefull Ghost Princess". "Sacred Cow" would be '(something or other) Ushi'
As far as the movie itself goes, I enjoyed it. One of the reasons you see a relative last of critical discernment in the anime-literati, is that most of the crap just dosen't get exported. Yes, Anime really does follow the 90% rule. Have you ever seen Tenshi Ni Naruman or Crayon Shin-chan? No? Be happy, they won't be getting released commercially in North America. Be very happy. (I'm still having traumatic flashbacks from seeing Tenshi Ni Naruman, and that was over 6 months ago. *shudder*)
If you look at their AUP, which is located here, you'll see that they explicitly forbid the storage of MP3 files on thier servers, regardless of who has the rights to it, regardless of wether they're legal MP3s or not, and regardless of wether you want to put them there or not. This is the relevant section from their policy page:
4.1.5. The storage and distribution of MP3 format files via the Company network is prohibited.
Frankly, since storing MP3s on the site was against their policy, he's lucky they didn't apply the $300 per instance of violation service charge that they promise right below that. While I'm not saying that storing MP3 files is bad, I am saying that when you place a file of any type on a server who has banned files of that type, you shouldn't be surprised when they remove them, and the AUP is all of the warning that needed to be given.
At this rate, the Canadian elections will be over, and we'll know who our new Prime Minister is before the Americans know who their new president is. And we haven't even started voting yet!
Get a normal torch and mount a LED and resistor in the old bulb's base... and good luck using up the batteries :)
Been there, done that, and it took a week. Some day I'll try it with actuall new batteries, instead of the year-old ones I used that time.