Yep, Logo! I think that may have been one of my first computer experiences, in the 4th or 5th grade (around 1985?) Combine that with a little Carmen Sandiego in 5th and 6th grade (I was allowed to play it instead of going outside for recess, sometimes), and that's all the computer education I needed: computers were fun, and you could do a lot of stuff with them if you were willing to think a little.
I took that principle and ran with it. Got me through junior high journalism on the Mac, taught myself PageMaker in high school journalism to be one of the paper editors and the de-facto tech support guy.Picked physics in college, but ended up needing to do plenty of programming, or just playing with unix, the web, and other computery stuff. Never really looked back.
In PHP, my most dangerous error tends to be using = instead of == in IF statements. I suddenly make everything true all the time. It's perhaps comforting as a philosophy, but it's pretty bad for functionality.
The P4 appears to be included in every one of the performance benchmarks (or at least on the one performance page I bothered to check on). The headline here is badly skewed. It's a new chip comparison that includes benchmarks for a lot of older chips, including the P4. Not a "how far have we come" article remembering the bygone days of P4 yore. Bad/. headline.
Guess it's been a nice run, but since I turn 35 in less than two months, if that Douglas Adams quote has any accuracy all the fun is just about over. Technology, it's been nice knowing you, but my days as a network administrator are over. It's nothing but shaking canes and offmalawns from here on out.
See, this is a case where even brilliant scientists can perform bad science. Didn't it ever occur to Bohr that as a control he should play both sides of the test? Seems obvious enough to me.
That actually sounds like a pretty good business model for company. Might need a little more time for the ebook market to really take off, or it might take a lot of luck to get to the point where you could also be the printer and let Amazon do the distribution to cover both physical and electronic markets, but it might work. I've been a freelance copy editor, and all the work I did was long-distance. Not a challenge at all. It might be nice to be in the same room with an editor as they're trying to explain to you why the first three chapters have to go, and the last three chapters should come first, or whatever, but even that's probably doable long-distance.
One potential risk is you'd start out this way and find yourself gradually expanding to take on the same roles as a traditional publisher, either because your clients ask for it or because there's profit in it, until you're just like all the others. (Just ask my former boss, who bought the web half of a print/web design company, and now spends most of her time on print materials like annual reports, just like the company she split off from used to.)
As a teacher, may I say, I would have considered stapling your lips shut.
Your science teacher most likely knew you were right. But, if you are smart enough to figure it out, you were also smart enough to know the intent of the lesson.
And from the student's perspective I would say that if a teacher has to dream up something suitably confusing just to be able to say "gotcha!" then the teacher is wasting everyone's time. If you want to play "Simon Says" at a party to make people smile, that's one thing. If you want to write horrible, contradictory instructions and pretend it's teaching, that's just silly.
The only REAL answer to those instructions is to reply: these badly need editing. Scrap everything and just write "1. Do nothing."
Just to let you know, your second question is an OR question. "yes" or "no" wouldn't be an acceptable response to it, either way. Also, what does installing a linux distro have to do with being a quality programmer?
By the way, the programming I do doesn't need to compile at all, let alone take 5 minutes or more, but that's PHP for you. Which you probably don't consider "CS" quality, anyway. Still, I know I'm self-taught and thus probably below the "MBA" level, anyway.
In it, it says 12 relationships is what you need to find your best match. Given 4.6 * 12, I'll be 56 before I find the one...
What happens when you realize that your first relationship was your best match, and they've all been downhill from there? By that time it's generally far too late to go back.
We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.
No kidding. Just last weekend I was changing the lightbulb in a lamp. Took the bulb out, and noticed a bit of styrofoam or paper in socket. Thought to myself, "that shouldn't be there, it could be a fire hazard!" and stuck my finger in to fish it out. A sudden tingling/burning/biting sensation clued me in to the fact the lamp was still plugged in, and while I'd rotated the switch a couple of times in the process of realizing the bulb was out, I'd apparently left it in the ON position when I stopped.
So I took my finger out of there, inverted the lamp, and let the styrofoam fall out on its own. No real damage done in that instance, but for a sometimes intelligent person that was a brief moment of serious stupidity.
Also, without problems like daily eye strain and weekly headaches. Switching over to LCD screens has made for a huge quality of life improvement for me. (Not as much as dumping the computer and getting outside might, but... well, that ain't gonna happen.)
On the other hand, the word "backronym" is an example of the twenty-first century tendency to benniferize things. This word blending is also sometimes known as a brangelinaism.
I was getting halfway interested in the Kindle until the 1984 debacle.
You know, all signs point to that being a genuine mistake, but part of me can't help but think it was an intentional stunt. I mean really, 1984 is the classic tale of rewriting history, changing things behind the scenes, and insisting that's how it always been way. What better work to retroactively delete from Kindles?
If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them.
I'm more computer science than research science, but I've seen plenty of examples where throwing out data is the sensible thing to do. Computer analogy time:
Sometimes an application isn't working. So you set up experiments, adjusting settings, trying to find out what's wrong with the application. You get a good setting, for ten minutes, but then it goes bad. So you turn it back to the old setting that used to mostly work, but had one flaw. Now that flaw is gone, but you're getting a completely different error. The data itself is inconsistent and nonsensical. That's when you step back, reconsider what you think you know, and possibly throw out all the data as worthless.
Why? Well maybe the software isn't bad at all. It's actually a memory problem or a bad hard drive. Something else isn't the way you expected, so everything it seemed like you were learning was worthless.
Now if bad data leads you in the right direction, that's still valuable, even if you throw the data out in the process. Other times bad data eventually leads you to a human error (troubleshooting that network problem was unnecessary once you realize you didn't have the cable plugged in) and you've got to start over.
Moonlight 2.0, that's Novell's open source implementation of the Microsoft media framework in now available and with comes a new patent promise from Microsoft.
It reads like it's three sentences jammed together, it's missing a comma, and I assume "in" is supposed to be "is" and it's still an awkward sentence.
And if they ever learn to type, they'll be four times more productive than us
I question this math. Unless they can hit more than one key at a time with a tentacle, our ten fingers are going to go faster than their eight arms. A squid, now, that could at least keep up with us.
Maybe one day Microsoft will get rid of the Windows Registry. It's like putting port holes on the bottom of your boat. Sure, they let you see the fish, but sooner or later one is going to break and sink your ship.
Uh, how often do fish break through port holes on ships? I'd be willing to bet there isn't a single recorded instance of this happening. I see what you're trying to say, but the analogy makes for a very bad argument.
Unless people who do believe in it try to convince other people to believe in it, and use a scientific organization as evidence that it's real science. Over time more and more people pick up an irrational, illogical, and simply inaccurate understanding of the subject, leading to a general degredation in understanding of, appreciation for, and practice of actual science.
Indulging in superstition to the detriment of science couldn't possibly cause any harm, could it?
Not necessarily true. I know of several (admittedly smaller, niche) MMOs with different income models. One of my favorites, Kingdom of Loathing (well over a million accounts, so not that small) has an optional donation system with an item of the month. Yes, those items give you advantages at certain aspects of gameplay, but the admins also make sure all of those items can be traded for or purchased with in-game money. It is entirely possible to play the game indefinitely without forking over any actual cash.
Another is my own game, Twilight Heroes (http://www.twilightheroes.com). I keep the servers running based on donations and sales of items of the month, but a large portion of my players don't donate, and they can still get pretty close to the full experience.
I dunno. You have to program *something*. Given the choice between, say, programming a calculator and a calendar, or programming a game, I think the game is intrinsically more fun to think about.
I've had occasions where my work on my game translated in large part to a non-game concept (marketplace code for the game became the framework for a classroom reservation system at a university). The marketplace was more fun to code, but it still gave me a HUGE boost when I had the classroom reservation project given to me.
My web-based game (hobby that pays for the servers, isn't my full job) *IS* heavily Insert/Update/Select/Deletes. The job that puts money on the table only occasionally lets me do a little scripting.
I'm going to disagree here... I think the "faith" you attribute to science is pretty far removed from--or possibly not really related at all to--the faith of religion. I think a lot of people with good intentions try to draw comparisons, but they're mixing very different fuzzy definitions, and I think it's to the detriment of science, or at best confuses the scopes of the two.
Yes, with science there is a certain amount of established expectation based on observation. Do something, see what happens, expect it to behave the same way in an identical situation. If it doesn't behave the same way, figure out what's not identical about the situation. I don't think it's right to call this faith, or if you want to, it's important to suggest the only REAL faith is "expecting what you've already observed will continue to be true". There are still tests that can be tried and repeated, there are generally equations that can be applied to the results.
Religious faith, on the other hand, deals with having insight into the unknowable. As such there aren't any tests, any results, no expectation of repetition, no equations.
Religious faith may be rewarding for many people in many ways (hey, it seems pretty popular), but it doesn't pay to confuse it with the scientific process. Those two different uses of the word faith are so divergent, it's probably better just not to use them.
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I took that principle and ran with it. Got me through junior high journalism on the Mac, taught myself PageMaker in high school journalism to be one of the paper editors and the de-facto tech support guy.Picked physics in college, but ended up needing to do plenty of programming, or just playing with unix, the web, and other computery stuff. Never really looked back.
In PHP, my most dangerous error tends to be using = instead of == in IF statements. I suddenly make everything true all the time. It's perhaps comforting as a philosophy, but it's pretty bad for functionality.
The P4 appears to be included in every one of the performance benchmarks (or at least on the one performance page I bothered to check on). The headline here is badly skewed. It's a new chip comparison that includes benchmarks for a lot of older chips, including the P4. Not a "how far have we come" article remembering the bygone days of P4 yore. Bad /. headline.
Guess it's been a nice run, but since I turn 35 in less than two months, if that Douglas Adams quote has any accuracy all the fun is just about over. Technology, it's been nice knowing you, but my days as a network administrator are over. It's nothing but shaking canes and offmalawns from here on out.
See, this is a case where even brilliant scientists can perform bad science. Didn't it ever occur to Bohr that as a control he should play both sides of the test? Seems obvious enough to me.
Thank you! I loaded the comments for this article specifically hoping to find this joke.
One potential risk is you'd start out this way and find yourself gradually expanding to take on the same roles as a traditional publisher, either because your clients ask for it or because there's profit in it, until you're just like all the others. (Just ask my former boss, who bought the web half of a print/web design company, and now spends most of her time on print materials like annual reports, just like the company she split off from used to.)
As a teacher, may I say, I would have considered stapling your lips shut.
Your science teacher most likely knew you were right. But, if you are smart enough to figure it out, you were also smart enough to know the intent of the lesson.
And from the student's perspective I would say that if a teacher has to dream up something suitably confusing just to be able to say "gotcha!" then the teacher is wasting everyone's time. If you want to play "Simon Says" at a party to make people smile, that's one thing. If you want to write horrible, contradictory instructions and pretend it's teaching, that's just silly.
The only REAL answer to those instructions is to reply: these badly need editing. Scrap everything and just write "1. Do nothing."
By the way, the programming I do doesn't need to compile at all, let alone take 5 minutes or more, but that's PHP for you. Which you probably don't consider "CS" quality, anyway. Still, I know I'm self-taught and thus probably below the "MBA" level, anyway.
In it, it says 12 relationships is what you need to find your best match. Given 4.6 * 12, I'll be 56 before I find the one...
What happens when you realize that your first relationship was your best match, and they've all been downhill from there? By that time it's generally far too late to go back.
We're all just one failed experiment or innocent mistake away from being on the Darwin Awards list.
No kidding. Just last weekend I was changing the lightbulb in a lamp. Took the bulb out, and noticed a bit of styrofoam or paper in socket. Thought to myself, "that shouldn't be there, it could be a fire hazard!" and stuck my finger in to fish it out. A sudden tingling/burning/biting sensation clued me in to the fact the lamp was still plugged in, and while I'd rotated the switch a couple of times in the process of realizing the bulb was out, I'd apparently left it in the ON position when I stopped.
So I took my finger out of there, inverted the lamp, and let the styrofoam fall out on its own. No real damage done in that instance, but for a sometimes intelligent person that was a brief moment of serious stupidity.
Don't you also need to know the distance to the center of gravity of the moon to complete that equation?
Also, without problems like daily eye strain and weekly headaches. Switching over to LCD screens has made for a huge quality of life improvement for me. (Not as much as dumping the computer and getting outside might, but ... well, that ain't gonna happen.)
On the other hand, the word "backronym" is an example of the twenty-first century tendency to benniferize things. This word blending is also sometimes known as a brangelinaism.
I was getting halfway interested in the Kindle until the 1984 debacle.
You know, all signs point to that being a genuine mistake, but part of me can't help but think it was an intentional stunt. I mean really, 1984 is the classic tale of rewriting history, changing things behind the scenes, and insisting that's how it always been way. What better work to retroactively delete from Kindles?
If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them.
I'm more computer science than research science, but I've seen plenty of examples where throwing out data is the sensible thing to do. Computer analogy time:
Sometimes an application isn't working. So you set up experiments, adjusting settings, trying to find out what's wrong with the application. You get a good setting, for ten minutes, but then it goes bad. So you turn it back to the old setting that used to mostly work, but had one flaw. Now that flaw is gone, but you're getting a completely different error. The data itself is inconsistent and nonsensical. That's when you step back, reconsider what you think you know, and possibly throw out all the data as worthless.
Why? Well maybe the software isn't bad at all. It's actually a memory problem or a bad hard drive. Something else isn't the way you expected, so everything it seemed like you were learning was worthless.
Now if bad data leads you in the right direction, that's still valuable, even if you throw the data out in the process. Other times bad data eventually leads you to a human error (troubleshooting that network problem was unnecessary once you realize you didn't have the cable plugged in) and you've got to start over.
Seriously. Read before you post people!
Moonlight 2.0, that's Novell's open source implementation of the Microsoft media framework in now available and with comes a new patent promise from Microsoft.
It reads like it's three sentences jammed together, it's missing a comma, and I assume "in" is supposed to be "is" and it's still an awkward sentence.
And if they ever learn to type, they'll be four times more productive than us
I question this math. Unless they can hit more than one key at a time with a tentacle, our ten fingers are going to go faster than their eight arms. A squid, now, that could at least keep up with us.
Maybe one day Microsoft will get rid of the Windows Registry. It's like putting port holes on the bottom of your boat. Sure, they let you see the fish, but sooner or later one is going to break and sink your ship.
Uh, how often do fish break through port holes on ships? I'd be willing to bet there isn't a single recorded instance of this happening. I see what you're trying to say, but the analogy makes for a very bad argument.
Indulging in superstition to the detriment of science couldn't possibly cause any harm, could it?
Another is my own game, Twilight Heroes (http://www.twilightheroes.com). I keep the servers running based on donations and sales of items of the month, but a large portion of my players don't donate, and they can still get pretty close to the full experience.
I've had occasions where my work on my game translated in large part to a non-game concept (marketplace code for the game became the framework for a classroom reservation system at a university). The marketplace was more fun to code, but it still gave me a HUGE boost when I had the classroom reservation project given to me.
My web-based game (hobby that pays for the servers, isn't my full job) *IS* heavily Insert/Update/Select/Deletes. The job that puts money on the table only occasionally lets me do a little scripting.
Yes, with science there is a certain amount of established expectation based on observation. Do something, see what happens, expect it to behave the same way in an identical situation. If it doesn't behave the same way, figure out what's not identical about the situation. I don't think it's right to call this faith, or if you want to, it's important to suggest the only REAL faith is "expecting what you've already observed will continue to be true". There are still tests that can be tried and repeated, there are generally equations that can be applied to the results.
Religious faith, on the other hand, deals with having insight into the unknowable. As such there aren't any tests, any results, no expectation of repetition, no equations.
Religious faith may be rewarding for many people in many ways (hey, it seems pretty popular), but it doesn't pay to confuse it with the scientific process. Those two different uses of the word faith are so divergent, it's probably better just not to use them.