Heee, talk about nostalgia! My first boy scout campout (troop 103, circa summer of '90) involved us all going out to the local scout camp's rifle range over the weekend to attempt to qual for the riflery merit badge. My dad and I took along one of those very same Bucket o' Bullets.
Did they ban paintball too? Those'll do just as well at making a camera of less than optimal utility for would-be Peeping Governmental Toms, and you're not actually destroying property so if they did catch you the charges would probably be less.
.50's aren't just overkill, they're expensive ($1-2/shot). Sure we're a bunch of violent xenophobes here in Texas, but we're also a bunch of fiscally conservative violent xenophobes.;) If all you're aiming (heh) to do is fuck up a lense/camera, unless they're seriously armored a.22 will do the job (cheap gun, dirt cheap ammo).
(I meant "Some sects [of Islam], in a fashion similar to the Mormon sect of Christianity,...". I guess only getting five hours of sleep or less for several days doesn't do much for clarity.;))
And now the slashdot "oh, no, you can't POSSIBLY have anything to say more often than once every five minutes" filter is kicking in. BLEH.
I'm aware of that, I meant that as in stuff that's only fermented, not then further distilled (and in turn meant that to mean a certain strength, as there's a finite limit of course on what can be done before the ethanol kills off the yeast). My understanding of it is that alcohol, like other conciousness-altering substances, is frowned upon by the Qu'ran as altering the pathway to God. I would guess based on that that the stronger the alteration, the more the substance is frowned upon, and the less restrictive sects have a threshold that permits things of the typical strength of fermentation-only process beverages. Some sects, like the Mormons, apparently even frown on coffee and tea and such. The sufis are on the opposite extreme, seeing the altered states of conciousness as being religiously virtuous (based on my limited reading and exposure to their culture such as the glorification of wine in their poetry; again, hardly an expert on Islam), and the word "hashish" did originate in asia minor.;)
I'm hardly an expert on Islam, but iirc the different sects have differing levels of strictness with respect to alcohol (e.g. some forbid everything, others are ok with the fermented stuff like beer/wine). Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, not a Sharia state, so afaik there would be no a priori restriction on it from an official standpoint. Of course, (according to the cia world fact book, fwiw) the population is about 92% Sunni. I don't know what their cultural attitudes about it might be and what they might have voted for in the past.
That said there seem to be meaningful hits on a google search for "jordanian beer" so they appear to be making it, drinking it, and/or exporting it...
It's slower than dirt. Slow dirt.;) PHP5 is better about it than PHP4, but it's still slower than a native php-based templating engine. (And that assumes the best case of using as just a templater, throw misguided people pushing business logic willy-nilly into the xslt and not really grasping the fundamentally functional programming model it exposes and crappy debugging support and so on and it turns into a real god damned nightmare. [We use php5 and xml/xslt at work, work being a financial industry site that gets a great deal of traffic.])
And god bless the creatives / graphic-designers (because without them, our stuff would look like refried monkey butt), but trying to get them to understand bizarro-world logic puzzles that xslt can easily turn into is like trying to get a violinist to build a tank.;) That was the original plan at $ork, apparently, but trying to explain things like variables not varying or scoping rules to them went over real well. So now they pretty much just stick to the graphics and css, and we get to handle the xslt as well as the backend systems.
I'm sorry if this sounds too harsh, it's just my experience. Maybe in different places XSLT makes for happy times, but it's proven to be one of the biggest irritants about my current workplace, so my view of it has become rather dim.
There's huge, huge, huge differences between a nuclear power plant and a nuclear weapon. Nuke plants are not and will never be capable of the same level of destructiveness as a bomb. This is not to say that a meltdown doesn't release very crappy pollution, but it's not an explosive on the same level as a designed weapon.
(The specifics of why X != Y far overflows the capacity of the/. comment system. Suffice to say that even if the isotopic mix was right [it isn't, not by a loooooooooong shot], the configuration of a plant is all wrong in an area where tolerances are quite intolerant. [More info than you could ever want to know here.])
Probably the absolute worst that could be done with remote software would be a chernobyl-type event. And that assumes the target country's engineers blithly accept any plans given to them without taking a single look at fail-off safety measures (i.e. plant shuts down when critical failures occur rather than heating up further like the soviet design did). More likely you'd have either a minor three-mile-island type thing or a passive shutdown (no lights, but no harmful releases either).
Jesus [and at that price point, Mary and Joseph as well]! I spent about $30k on my college education (BSc chem from a department in the top 10 nationally).
So, what did you have to type into google maps to get directions to the Money Forest?;) Inquiring minds and all that...
Agreed. Probably 70% of my programming time is spent with languages that are succinct enough in form (and well-enough known to me that I don't have to consult any docs when writing them) that a plain, quick editor like vim is fine... It's the Java/XML and XSLT/omgwtflol projects on my plate that make me wish I had something that handled things like easy code completion, tag or syntax auto-complete/balance, intelligent folding, etc. I know that vim can do those things, but they're just irritating enough to set up that I haven't bothered to date. (vim's syntax highlighter for jsp is also real bad last I checked, fwiw.) So right now I'm in vim most of the time, occasionally dropping over to stuff like netbeans.
You seem to be confused, the last paragraph is about Textmate, not about ruby itself or the books about it. (It only came to mind because it seems everyone and their dog making ruby / RoR screencasts is using tm.)
(And yeah, the PDF approach by the pragmatic programmers is nice. That the pragmatic programmer guys are endorsing Ruby goes a long, long way with me. I probably wouldn't bother with yet another scripting language were it not for their endorsement.)
(Aside: You can get the pickaxe and awdw/ror books for a little under fifty on bookpool.com, fwiw. (I just ordered them yesterday.))
Yeah, it is kind of a bummer to need to shell out some cash up front for texts, but on the other hand: a) I remember when that was pretty much the case for Perl (Camel Book), and at least I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that investment. b) to most anyone in IT, $50 is not that much money c) assume the best case, where RoR really is good for you and your needs, what's the ROI of $50 worth of books vs. spending however much on another platform (esp. something proprietary)? Assume the worst case, and you hate Ruby and RoR. You're not out that much money in the large scheme of things.
The one thing I've found even mildly irritating about Ruby and RoR thus far is that everyone has been using Textmate in their screencasts, which is an editor that I've found... underwhelming at best. I've seen obvious gui glitches in the thing during my trial period (e.g. turn on the 80 column screen guide, then move the window size around; it leaves a trail of faulty redraw garbage on the screen), the author states he's moving onto the next development tree, and the current version is 39 euro with no mention of the possibility to freely upgrade to 2.0 whenever that comes out (if the upgrade would even fix the bugs!). Bah. vim kicks textmate's ass nine ways to sunday and is free (s/vim/xemacs/ if you happen to swing that way, I'm sure you'd get more mileage out of even that lispy armaggedon than you would out of textmate). This isn't a ruby problem at all, just guilt by association with a crapoid editor.;)
FWIW you can bless anything as an object. (Well, a reference to anything.) Scalar, hash, whatever. The key here is that it's optional rather than the default. (So, yes, perl isn't pure OO, but then again that's not really "broken" so much as "different design goal.";))
Well, to be fair SMU is a respectable institution academically, and 24k/yr is their normal tuition rate (give or take; I'm not a student there but my significant other is). I imagine these folks are getting a good education for their money.
(SMU has a bit of a reputation as being a warehouse for the rich-and-dumb set of Dallas/TX society, and there are a high number of Greek-letter wearing, BMW-or-spanking-new-Mustang driving, 19 year old idiots on campus, but there are a lot of very serious scholars as well.)
Of course, the idea of paying 24k/yr tuition is ridiculous to me, as I racked up almost two hundred hours of credit across two major disciplines and a minor (chemistry, cs, and business) over the course of about six years' worth of (non-contiguous) time at UT Austin (which provides at least a comparable level of education) for less than 30k, and thought the ~2k I was paying for six hour semesters at the end was ungodly expensive. But then again UTCS wouldn't be caught dead offering anything as applied-science as programming or game design.;)
Originally, all CS departments were an extension of the mathematics departments.
Whether a CS department originally descended from the maths or engineering sections of a school (and the corresponding implications that has for emphasis in curricula) depends on the school. For example, at the University of Texas - Austin, it is plainly descended from the mathematics department, and at the Dallas branch of UT (which historically had much closer ties to industry and thus a much strong applied focus than the more theoretical/pure-research focus of the Austin campus) they're descended from the engineering faculty, to the point that they offer a separate degree in Software Engineering at the undergraduate and graduate level, in addition to a normal CS program.
I don't say this to denigrate mathematics or the usefulness thereof, but to imply that engineering/applied approaches to the field are somehow lesser is kind of off base. Both approaches have merit and are required to do excellent work. For example, you can prove the formal validity of your software until the cows come home, but if your requirements gathering phase sucks your customers will hate you regardless.;) Which approach you favor depends more on temperment than any objective measure of utility.
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O
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Adobe Lightroom Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
photo.net perhaps? I don't know if they have a marketplace per se, but they probably have a sufficiently prosumer/photo-geek userbase to meet your search criteria and asking their forums might yield results.
Why would an American small-to-medium business want to deal with foreign customers? (A company large enough to not be a member of the SMB class wouldn't be posting here asking for ecomm advice.;))
1) Vastly greater incidence of fraud (see next point) 2) Vastly more complicated financial and legal proceedings 3) Vastly more complicated and expensive shipment processes for physical products 4) Vastly more expensive marketing costs 5) to all the above, add the "fun" of i18n/l10n and every grotesque language barrier complication possible
The only other country that is of much interest to the small business owners I know here in the US is Canada because the barrier to entry for that market is just low enough to make it practical. For the most of them, however, the marginal gains and marginal costs associated with trying to leave the American economic base are simply not practical. There's a lot of "headroom" to grow in our economy before it becomes a requirement to expand abroad to maintain growth.
As others above said, jumping to another school is probably a good move. Your faculty are going to be far too deep into CYA mode to pay attention to the needs of undergrads. That being said, since you're a) already in the South b) used to paying private-school rates c) going to a school with a good reputation and d) close-ish to Houston [subset of the first point], I'd seriously suggest taking a look at Rice. Rice has a very strong program in CS, and is a good school overall from what I've seen and heard. (I'm an alum from UT Austin, but I've known some very sharp people with Rice CS backgrounds.) Houston has a number of virtues for students as well, such as very inexpensive rents and a large job base for when you start looking for internships/first job/etc.
As with all advice on the internets, take with a grain of salt, etc. and good luck!
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
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Dungeons and Shadows
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· Score: 1
Amen. I *love* Shadowrun, but the exact phenomenon you describe pretty much restricted my playing of it to using a MUD (AwakenedWorlds, a pretty nice recreation of the milieu telnet://awakenedworlds.net:4000 iirc), and even that I haven't had time to log into for over a month due to a killer project at work.
Shit, cut a brother some slack, yo. I don't get paid until the 15th.:D
Last year I gave to the houston children's hospital here, and an equal $ donation to the general fund. (Gave to the first one too. Shooting for 3 for 3 this year.) A few weeks into the new year, I got a card , written out by one of the candy stripers (generally elderly volunteers that do various non-medical things to help out patients, for those not familiar). It showed a little girl, couldn't have been much more than about six or seven, with a bald head from chemo, surrounded by toys and wearing the biggest, 10000000 watt smile a little girl has ever smiled. I don't think I have any words, really, just a hope that I can bring more smiles like that into the world.
I've seen (Score: 5, Troll) several times. (How: post gets moderated once as "Troll", lowering the score and modifying the text segment, then several people say "Hey, that's not right!" and decide to use "Underrated", which raises the numeric score but leaves the text segment unaffected.)
Actually come to think of it, if I recall correctly, one of them was CmdrTaco's wife (... Kathleen?) responding to his will-you-marry-me post in the affirmative. The image of a troll wedding makes me laugh every time I think about it. I mean, obviously, under a bridge, but...
If you want a free IDE to go with those free compilers, you might enjoy SharpDevelop.
It's a pretty good (open source/free) IDE, at least from the limited playing around I've done with it (I'm more of a Java / lamp guy, but I try to at least check in on the MSFT world once a year or so).
Slashdot Mirror
Heee, talk about nostalgia! My first boy scout campout (troop 103, circa summer of '90) involved us all going out to the local scout camp's rifle range over the weekend to attempt to qual for the riflery merit badge. My dad and I took along one of those very same Bucket o' Bullets.
Did they ban paintball too? Those'll do just as well at making a camera of less than optimal utility for would-be Peeping Governmental Toms, and you're not actually destroying property so if they did catch you the charges would probably be less.
.50's aren't just overkill, they're expensive ($1-2/shot). Sure we're a bunch of violent xenophobes here in Texas, but we're also a bunch of fiscally conservative violent xenophobes. ;) If all you're aiming (heh) to do is fuck up a lense/camera, unless they're seriously armored a .22 will do the job (cheap gun, dirt cheap ammo).
(I meant "Some sects [of Islam], in a fashion similar to the Mormon sect of Christianity, ...". I guess only getting five hours of sleep or less for several days doesn't do much for clarity. ;))
And now the slashdot "oh, no, you can't POSSIBLY have anything to say more often than once every five minutes" filter is kicking in. BLEH.
I'm aware of that, I meant that as in stuff that's only fermented, not then further distilled (and in turn meant that to mean a certain strength, as there's a finite limit of course on what can be done before the ethanol kills off the yeast). My understanding of it is that alcohol, like other conciousness-altering substances, is frowned upon by the Qu'ran as altering the pathway to God. I would guess based on that that the stronger the alteration, the more the substance is frowned upon, and the less restrictive sects have a threshold that permits things of the typical strength of fermentation-only process beverages. Some sects, like the Mormons, apparently even frown on coffee and tea and such. The sufis are on the opposite extreme, seeing the altered states of conciousness as being religiously virtuous (based on my limited reading and exposure to their culture such as the glorification of wine in their poetry; again, hardly an expert on Islam), and the word "hashish" did originate in asia minor. ;)
I'm hardly an expert on Islam, but iirc the different sects have differing levels of strictness with respect to alcohol (e.g. some forbid everything, others are ok with the fermented stuff like beer/wine). Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, not a Sharia state, so afaik there would be no a priori restriction on it from an official standpoint. Of course, (according to the cia world fact book, fwiw) the population is about 92% Sunni. I don't know what their cultural attitudes about it might be and what they might have voted for in the past.
That said there seem to be meaningful hits on a google search for "jordanian beer" so they appear to be making it, drinking it, and/or exporting it...
(BJC = Baby Jesus Cries)
It's slower than dirt. Slow dirt. ;) PHP5 is better about it than PHP4, but it's still slower than a native php-based templating engine. (And that assumes the best case of using as just a templater, throw misguided people pushing business logic willy-nilly into the xslt and not really grasping the fundamentally functional programming model it exposes and crappy debugging support and so on and it turns into a real god damned nightmare. [We use php5 and xml/xslt at work, work being a financial industry site that gets a great deal of traffic.])
And god bless the creatives / graphic-designers (because without them, our stuff would look like refried monkey butt), but trying to get them to understand bizarro-world logic puzzles that xslt can easily turn into is like trying to get a violinist to build a tank. ;) That was the original plan at $ork, apparently, but trying to explain things like variables not varying or scoping rules to them went over real well. So now they pretty much just stick to the graphics and css, and we get to handle the xslt as well as the backend systems.
I'm sorry if this sounds too harsh, it's just my experience. Maybe in different places XSLT makes for happy times, but it's proven to be one of the biggest irritants about my current workplace, so my view of it has become rather dim.
There's huge, huge, huge differences between a nuclear power plant and a nuclear weapon. Nuke plants are not and will never be capable of the same level of destructiveness as a bomb. This is not to say that a meltdown doesn't release very crappy pollution, but it's not an explosive on the same level as a designed weapon.
(The specifics of why X != Y far overflows the capacity of the /. comment system. Suffice to say that even if the isotopic mix was right [it isn't, not by a loooooooooong shot], the configuration of a plant is all wrong in an area where tolerances are quite intolerant. [More info than you could ever want to know here.])
Probably the absolute worst that could be done with remote software would be a chernobyl-type event. And that assumes the target country's engineers blithly accept any plans given to them without taking a single look at fail-off safety measures (i.e. plant shuts down when critical failures occur rather than heating up further like the soviet design did). More likely you'd have either a minor three-mile-island type thing or a passive shutdown (no lights, but no harmful releases either).
Jesus [and at that price point, Mary and Joseph as well]! I spent about $30k on my college education (BSc chem from a department in the top 10 nationally).
So, what did you have to type into google maps to get directions to the Money Forest? ;) Inquiring minds and all that...
Agreed. Probably 70% of my programming time is spent with languages that are succinct enough in form (and well-enough known to me that I don't have to consult any docs when writing them) that a plain, quick editor like vim is fine... It's the Java/XML and XSLT/omgwtflol projects on my plate that make me wish I had something that handled things like easy code completion, tag or syntax auto-complete/balance, intelligent folding, etc. I know that vim can do those things, but they're just irritating enough to set up that I haven't bothered to date. (vim's syntax highlighter for jsp is also real bad last I checked, fwiw.) So right now I'm in vim most of the time, occasionally dropping over to stuff like netbeans.
You seem to be confused, the last paragraph is about Textmate, not about ruby itself or the books about it. (It only came to mind because it seems everyone and their dog making ruby / RoR screencasts is using tm.) (And yeah, the PDF approach by the pragmatic programmers is nice. That the pragmatic programmer guys are endorsing Ruby goes a long, long way with me. I probably wouldn't bother with yet another scripting language were it not for their endorsement.)
Yeah, because blogs are a perfect, intuitive source of product information and nothing ever said in a blog will later change. :)
(Aside: You can get the pickaxe and awdw/ror books for a little under fifty on bookpool.com, fwiw. (I just ordered them yesterday.))
Yeah, it is kind of a bummer to need to shell out some cash up front for texts, but on the other hand:
a) I remember when that was pretty much the case for Perl (Camel Book), and at least I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that investment.
b) to most anyone in IT, $50 is not that much money
c) assume the best case, where RoR really is good for you and your needs, what's the ROI of $50 worth of books vs. spending however much on another platform (esp. something proprietary)? Assume the worst case, and you hate Ruby and RoR. You're not out that much money in the large scheme of things.
The one thing I've found even mildly irritating about Ruby and RoR thus far is that everyone has been using Textmate in their screencasts, which is an editor that I've found ... underwhelming at best. I've seen obvious gui glitches in the thing during my trial period (e.g. turn on the 80 column screen guide, then move the window size around; it leaves a trail of faulty redraw garbage on the screen), the author states he's moving onto the next development tree, and the current version is 39 euro with no mention of the possibility to freely upgrade to 2.0 whenever that comes out (if the upgrade would even fix the bugs!). Bah. vim kicks textmate's ass nine ways to sunday and is free (s/vim/xemacs/ if you happen to swing that way, I'm sure you'd get more mileage out of even that lispy armaggedon than you would out of textmate). This isn't a ruby problem at all, just guilt by association with a crapoid editor. ;)
The new 1.0 of camino includes a multilingual build. (My testing of it has been limited to a little russian and german, so ymmv.)
FWIW you can bless anything as an object. (Well, a reference to anything.) Scalar, hash, whatever. The key here is that it's optional rather than the default. (So, yes, perl isn't pure OO, but then again that's not really "broken" so much as "different design goal." ;))
Well, to be fair SMU is a respectable institution academically, and 24k/yr is their normal tuition rate (give or take; I'm not a student there but my significant other is). I imagine these folks are getting a good education for their money.
(SMU has a bit of a reputation as being a warehouse for the rich-and-dumb set of Dallas/TX society, and there are a high number of Greek-letter wearing, BMW-or-spanking-new-Mustang driving, 19 year old idiots on campus, but there are a lot of very serious scholars as well.)
Of course, the idea of paying 24k/yr tuition is ridiculous to me, as I racked up almost two hundred hours of credit across two major disciplines and a minor (chemistry, cs, and business) over the course of about six years' worth of (non-contiguous) time at UT Austin (which provides at least a comparable level of education) for less than 30k, and thought the ~2k I was paying for six hour semesters at the end was ungodly expensive. But then again UTCS wouldn't be caught dead offering anything as applied-science as programming or game design. ;)
Whether a CS department originally descended from the maths or engineering sections of a school (and the corresponding implications that has for emphasis in curricula) depends on the school. For example, at the University of Texas - Austin, it is plainly descended from the mathematics department, and at the Dallas branch of UT (which historically had much closer ties to industry and thus a much strong applied focus than the more theoretical/pure-research focus of the Austin campus) they're descended from the engineering faculty, to the point that they offer a separate degree in Software Engineering at the undergraduate and graduate level, in addition to a normal CS program.
I don't say this to denigrate mathematics or the usefulness thereof, but to imply that engineering/applied approaches to the field are somehow lesser is kind of off base. Both approaches have merit and are required to do excellent work. For example, you can prove the formal validity of your software until the cows come home, but if your requirements gathering phase sucks your customers will hate you regardless. ;) Which approach you favor depends more on temperment than any objective measure of utility.
photo.net perhaps? I don't know if they have a marketplace per se, but they probably have a sufficiently prosumer/photo-geek userbase to meet your search criteria and asking their forums might yield results.
Why would an American small-to-medium business want to deal with foreign customers? (A company large enough to not be a member of the SMB class wouldn't be posting here asking for ecomm advice. ;))
1) Vastly greater incidence of fraud (see next point)
2) Vastly more complicated financial and legal proceedings
3) Vastly more complicated and expensive shipment processes for physical products
4) Vastly more expensive marketing costs
5) to all the above, add the "fun" of i18n/l10n and every grotesque language barrier complication possible
The only other country that is of much interest to the small business owners I know here in the US is Canada because the barrier to entry for that market is just low enough to make it practical. For the most of them, however, the marginal gains and marginal costs associated with trying to leave the American economic base are simply not practical. There's a lot of "headroom" to grow in our economy before it becomes a requirement to expand abroad to maintain growth.
As others above said, jumping to another school is probably a good move. Your faculty are going to be far too deep into CYA mode to pay attention to the needs of undergrads. That being said, since you're a) already in the South b) used to paying private-school rates c) going to a school with a good reputation and d) close-ish to Houston [subset of the first point], I'd seriously suggest taking a look at Rice. Rice has a very strong program in CS, and is a good school overall from what I've seen and heard. (I'm an alum from UT Austin, but I've known some very sharp people with Rice CS backgrounds.) Houston has a number of virtues for students as well, such as very inexpensive rents and a large job base for when you start looking for internships/first job/etc. As with all advice on the internets, take with a grain of salt, etc. and good luck!
(subject says it all ;))
Amen. I *love* Shadowrun, but the exact phenomenon you describe pretty much restricted my playing of it to using a MUD (AwakenedWorlds, a pretty nice recreation of the milieu telnet://awakenedworlds.net:4000 iirc), and even that I haven't had time to log into for over a month due to a killer project at work.
Shit, cut a brother some slack, yo. I don't get paid until the 15th. :D
Last year I gave to the houston children's hospital here, and an equal $ donation to the general fund. (Gave to the first one too. Shooting for 3 for 3 this year.) A few weeks into the new year, I got a card , written out by one of the candy stripers (generally elderly volunteers that do various non-medical things to help out patients, for those not familiar). It showed a little girl, couldn't have been much more than about six or seven, with a bald head from chemo, surrounded by toys and wearing the biggest, 10000000 watt smile a little girl has ever smiled. I don't think I have any words, really, just a hope that I can bring more smiles like that into the world.
I've seen (Score: 5, Troll) several times. (How: post gets moderated once as "Troll", lowering the score and modifying the text segment, then several people say "Hey, that's not right!" and decide to use "Underrated", which raises the numeric score but leaves the text segment unaffected.)
Actually come to think of it, if I recall correctly, one of them was CmdrTaco's wife (... Kathleen?) responding to his will-you-marry-me post in the affirmative. The image of a troll wedding makes me laugh every time I think about it. I mean, obviously, under a bridge, but...
If you want a free IDE to go with those free compilers, you might enjoy SharpDevelop. It's a pretty good (open source/free) IDE, at least from the limited playing around I've done with it (I'm more of a Java / lamp guy, but I try to at least check in on the MSFT world once a year or so).