(20 years ago or so, CS didn't exist in the first year, so you had to apply to do something else then change subjects. Now you can spend _part_ of your first year doing it.)
This general ed / "distribution" thing sounds ghastly. Being permitted to take courses outside your subject? Fine. Being forced to? Bleah.
There are various European countries where distribtion / gen ed doesn't exist, though of course I don't know how realistic an option that might be for the original poster.
I was _really_ disappointed by the Amber
Spyglass. I thought "Northern Lights"
was superb (with minor flaws that didn't
matter too much). "The Subtle Knife" was
good, but not as good, but book 3 really
really annoyed me. There are astonishing
changes in personality, throwaway one-liners
to completely change the meaning of previous
events ("oh, I was lying when I said X") and
so on.
If the 10^40 figure uses a definition of
"position" which includes the history
of the game, then ok. Otherwise, bear in
mind that just knowing which pieces are where
doesn't tell you enough.
You certainly need to know who has castled,
whether an en passant capture is possible,
the number of moves since the last capture
or pawn move, and indeed all previous board
positions so you could recognise repetition
of position if it happened.
I used to play Essex MUD, the first one,
between 2 and er... 5? 7? in the morning.
I never made it to Wizard, but quite a lot
of my friends did. Nouakchott was one of the
mausoleum answers when I played.
Sigh. firestone, broadsword, the swamp,
the coracle. The appallingly clever way
to get through the dwarf citadel by
blinding and unblinding yourself and
exploiting a bug in the "back" command.
Those were the days. I've never played any
of the later ones, for some reason.
One of my favourite weapons in the game
was the cricket bat in the attic.
I'm British, and lived in Italy from 89 to 95.
I've been there to visit occasionally since then.
I'd say Italian is a relatively easy language:
the spelling and pronunciation correspond
almost perfectly, which is somewhat unusual.
Wherever you go, you'd be better off being
able to communicate in the language before
you go there, but I know quite a few people
in multinationals who get transferred to
countries whose languages they don't speak.
Since I did Italian at uni in my spare time
I applied for an English language assistant
job at a university in Rome and moved there.
I did that for 2 years and then did other things.
Since I'd been a student immediately before
this, I didn't really appreciate how low
my salary was whilst I was in Italy. If you're
willing to lived in shared student flats
you can live quite cheaply. I lived in central
Rome and paid next to nothing.
I don't think I can imagine going back to
Italy to live there for a variety of reasons,
but I'm glad I did it. Being fluent in a second
language is very useful, and being there
is the best way to accomplish this. Admittedly,
I was able to cope ok on day 1, but after
I'd been there a year I was more or less
a fully functioning adult. I'll never be
mistaken for a native speaker, but I don't
mind that.
Judging by what my Italian contacts tell me,
salaries in Italy are much much lower than in
the UK. e.g. Italian friends who get jobs
in the UK seem not to believe the sums they
get offered here. I have no idea about
things like houses - I've never tried to buy
one anywhere. Certainly central Rome is not
somewhere you should dream of _buying_ one
unless you're astonishingly wealthy.
Most of the people I knew there were recent
graduates being paid very little (15 million
lire a year, 5 to 10 years ago) to do
language teaching jobs. My last job there
was as a proofreader for a publishing company.
I got twenty something million for a part-time
job.
When I was there, the bureaucracy was
almost as bad as Italians like to claim it
is. I think some of the worst excesses may
have calmed down, but I wonder. The bureacracy
is one of the reasons I wouldn't want to live
there again. e.g. the strange and bizarre
"one-off" taxes that get announced at
no notice, and then revoked and reimbursed
a few weeks later as they are declared
unconstitutional. Or sometimes not.
>if I am wrong (I am a Christian) and atheists
>are right then I'll end up worm food and my
>existence will be over, just like everyone else
As usual, the daft false dichotomy of Pascal's
wager.
Another possibility is that the universe
is run by some creature that wants you to
have (e.g.) danced around trees every Wednesday,
in which case both Christians and atheists
are in trouble.
It's not a choice between Christianity and
atheism, but between huge numbers of actual
or possible religions, atheism, just not
caring, etc.
Both Christians and tree-dancers might make
similar claims about eternal punishement etc.
Why should I believe one rather than the other?
Also, look up the word "palimpsest" in a dictionary. Erasing vellum/scrolls/whatever for re-use was quite common. Presumably they were expensive and buying new ones all the time wasn't an option.
My mother was an infant school headmistress, and said (i) she'd never had an application from a man wanting to be an infant school teacher and (ii) if she had, she'd have binned it.
Industry standard? Which industry? In some environments, postscript is standard.
You can't blindly send Word (or Postscript) documents to people without checking first. For all you know, they could be using VT100s and mainframes, or something.
A possible interpretation would be that the x-axis represents the sophistication of the programs you want to write, and the y-axis represenents how much you need to know about the language to do it.
In the case of Perl, you can write simple programs whilst knowing almost nothing about the language. With C++ perhaps you need to know a lot even to write trivial programs.
And how easy to use is a car? I've never learned to drive, and don't plan to, but it certainly seems to me that learning to drive well enough to be allowed on public roads is harder than learning to "use" a computer (whatever that means).
Popes are only (supposed to be) infallible when they _say_ they're being infallible. Not all the time. Do they say that they're about to be infallible, or that they just have been? The infallibility has to cover the declaration of infallibility itself as well, presumably.
This ought to be testable. Ask a Pope to factorize some huge integers, or something.
If it's illegal to link to places which contain the code, then don't do that. The code can be overseas. Links to the code are also overseas. People in the USA can just link to overseas pages which contain links to the code.
I haven't bought any "gifts" as such, but have bought stuff from www.bookshop.co.uk and www.linuxemporium.co.uk within the last week or so. All of it arrived by yesterday.
Many years ago, I believe the National Physical Laboratory in the UK used to sell Newtonmas cards (since Isaac Newton was born on the 25th of December in at least one of the calendar systems in use at the time).
I phoned them this year to see if I could get some and they said they don't do them, and don't remember doing them for at least 10 years. Ah well.
Slashdot Mirror
A specific example: Oxford
http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/computer_science/computer_science_.html
Cambridge is a less good example because in the first year they make you do other stuff:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/intro/
(20 years ago or so, CS didn't exist in the first year, so you had to apply to do something else then change subjects. Now you can spend _part_ of your first year
doing it.)
Imperial College, London:
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ugprospectus/facultiesanddepartments/computing/computingcourses
And how about Pisa:
http://www.di.unipi.it/
This general ed / "distribution" thing sounds ghastly. Being permitted to take courses outside your subject? Fine. Being forced to? Bleah.
There are various European countries where distribtion / gen ed doesn't exist,
though of course I don't know how realistic an option that might be for the original poster.
"trying to figure out how to type"? In emacs? There's nothing to figure out.
Learning how to use vi or emacs in the most basic way possible takes, oh,
seconds?
All you _need_ for vi is "i", "x", "dd", "wq", "a", and that's pretty much
all I've bothered to learn. emacs is even easier.
I was _really_ disappointed by the Amber
Spyglass. I thought "Northern Lights"
was superb (with minor flaws that didn't
matter too much). "The Subtle Knife" was
good, but not as good, but book 3 really
really annoyed me. There are astonishing
changes in personality, throwaway one-liners
to completely change the meaning of previous
events ("oh, I was lying when I said X") and
so on.
My main computer runs AmigaOS 3.9.
My second machine has Linux and FreeBSD
at the moment, and will probably gain
BeOS, OpenBSD, Solaris and Plan9 sooner
or later.
If the 10^40 figure uses a definition of
"position" which includes the history
of the game, then ok. Otherwise, bear in
mind that just knowing which pieces are where
doesn't tell you enough.
You certainly need to know who has castled,
whether an en passant capture is possible,
the number of moves since the last capture
or pawn move, and indeed all previous board
positions so you could recognise repetition
of position if it happened.
The number of possible positions isn't the
biggest problem, as far as I can tell. After
all, the number of positions in Chess is already
way too big.
The lack of an obvious evaluation function
(e.g. material in Chess) makes life hard.
The length of the game doesn't help.
The existence of the ko rule doesn't help either.
See the complete and utter Go links
page at http://nngs.cosmic.org/hmkw/golinks.html
I used to play Essex MUD, the first one,
between 2 and er... 5? 7? in the morning.
I never made it to Wizard, but quite a lot
of my friends did. Nouakchott was one of the
mausoleum answers when I played.
Sigh. firestone, broadsword, the swamp,
the coracle. The appallingly clever way
to get through the dwarf citadel by
blinding and unblinding yourself and
exploiting a bug in the "back" command.
Those were the days. I've never played any
of the later ones, for some reason.
One of my favourite weapons in the game
was the cricket bat in the attic.
I'm British, and lived in Italy from 89 to 95.
I've been there to visit occasionally since then.
I'd say Italian is a relatively easy language:
the spelling and pronunciation correspond
almost perfectly, which is somewhat unusual.
Wherever you go, you'd be better off being
able to communicate in the language before
you go there, but I know quite a few people
in multinationals who get transferred to
countries whose languages they don't speak.
Since I did Italian at uni in my spare time
I applied for an English language assistant
job at a university in Rome and moved there.
I did that for 2 years and then did other things.
Since I'd been a student immediately before
this, I didn't really appreciate how low
my salary was whilst I was in Italy. If you're
willing to lived in shared student flats
you can live quite cheaply. I lived in central
Rome and paid next to nothing.
I don't think I can imagine going back to
Italy to live there for a variety of reasons,
but I'm glad I did it. Being fluent in a second
language is very useful, and being there
is the best way to accomplish this. Admittedly,
I was able to cope ok on day 1, but after
I'd been there a year I was more or less
a fully functioning adult. I'll never be
mistaken for a native speaker, but I don't
mind that.
Judging by what my Italian contacts tell me,
salaries in Italy are much much lower than in
the UK. e.g. Italian friends who get jobs
in the UK seem not to believe the sums they
get offered here. I have no idea about
things like houses - I've never tried to buy
one anywhere. Certainly central Rome is not
somewhere you should dream of _buying_ one
unless you're astonishingly wealthy.
Most of the people I knew there were recent
graduates being paid very little (15 million
lire a year, 5 to 10 years ago) to do
language teaching jobs. My last job there
was as a proofreader for a publishing company.
I got twenty something million for a part-time
job.
When I was there, the bureaucracy was
almost as bad as Italians like to claim it
is. I think some of the worst excesses may
have calmed down, but I wonder. The bureacracy
is one of the reasons I wouldn't want to live
there again. e.g. the strange and bizarre
"one-off" taxes that get announced at
no notice, and then revoked and reimbursed
a few weeks later as they are declared
unconstitutional. Or sometimes not.
>if I am wrong (I am a Christian) and atheists
>are right then I'll end up worm food and my
>existence will be over, just like everyone else
As usual, the daft false dichotomy of Pascal's
wager.
Another possibility is that the universe
is run by some creature that wants you to
have (e.g.) danced around trees every Wednesday,
in which case both Christians and atheists
are in trouble.
It's not a choice between Christianity and
atheism, but between huge numbers of actual
or possible religions, atheism, just not
caring, etc.
Both Christians and tree-dancers might make
similar claims about eternal punishement etc.
Why should I believe one rather than the other?
FTL's "Dungeon Master", on the Atari ST
originally but later available for the Amiga
and PC, was the best game of this type
I've ever seen.
What about PCs running in 16-colour mode? I've
seen web browsers running on those, though
not recently.
Also, look up the word "palimpsest" in
a dictionary. Erasing vellum/scrolls/whatever
for re-use was quite common. Presumably
they were expensive and buying new ones
all the time wasn't an option.
Well, the Colosseum in Rome, along with many
other buildings, had its marble stripped for
recycling into churches etc.
My mother was an infant school headmistress,
and said (i) she'd never had an application
from a man wanting to be an infant school
teacher and (ii) if she had, she'd have binned
it.
Industry standard? Which industry? In some
environments, postscript is standard.
You can't blindly send Word (or Postscript)
documents to people without checking first.
For all you know, they could be using
VT100s and mainframes, or something.
A possible interpretation would be that
the x-axis represents the sophistication
of the programs you want to write, and the
y-axis represenents how much you need to
know about the language to do it.
In the case of Perl, you can write simple
programs whilst knowing almost nothing
about the language. With C++ perhaps you need
to know a lot even to write trivial programs.
And how easy to use is a car? I've never
learned to drive, and don't plan to, but
it certainly seems to me that learning
to drive well enough to be allowed on public
roads is harder than learning to "use"
a computer (whatever that means).
Your question doesn't seem to make sense.
Why should the rest of the year be repeats?
You could perfectly easily use the same slot
for other shows with 6-episode seasons.
I use http://www.bookshop.co.uk/ for most
of my purchases. Mostly out of habit, I have
to admit.
I should check Heffers again at some stage...
I remember they had a "there'll be a page
here one day" site a few years back.
How come Amazon got to be so famous when
books.com had been around (via telnet) for
ages earlier?
Popes are only (supposed to be) infallible
when they _say_ they're being infallible. Not
all the time. Do they say that they're
about to be infallible, or that they just
have been? The infallibility has to cover
the declaration of infallibility itself as well,
presumably.
This ought to be testable. Ask a Pope to
factorize some huge integers, or something.
Amiga/68k
Amiga/PPC
If it's illegal to link to places which contain
the code, then don't do that. The code
can be overseas. Links to the code are also
overseas. People in the USA can just link
to overseas pages which contain links to the code.
I haven't bought any "gifts" as such, but
have bought stuff from www.bookshop.co.uk
and www.linuxemporium.co.uk within the last
week or so. All of it arrived by yesterday.
Many years ago, I believe the National
Physical Laboratory in the UK used to
sell Newtonmas cards (since Isaac Newton was
born on the 25th of December in at least
one of the calendar systems in use at the time).
I phoned them this year to see if I could
get some and they said they don't do them,
and don't remember doing them for at least 10
years. Ah well.