> Listen, man, I'm glad this worked for you. But it's a one way communication channel.
So are most lectures. OK, there's a bit of interaction (most with the students who you are "illegally" collaborating with on take-home assessment), and the lecturer might explain stuff in office hours, but universities rely on most of their students not wasting too much lecturer time. Just look at student-teacher ratios.
FTA (yeah, I scanned it) ost of the issues seem to be "Thrun is a shitty stats teacher". It's like all the teachers who say "Khan can't teach math, he's a bad math teacher". I'm sure they have issues - no teacher is perfect. And I'm sure a good stats lecturer / math teacher can do a slightly better job. But both Thrun and Khan are generally bright people who know their subject, and good speakers, so they are pretty good teachers.
I don't think that offline courses (the way they are run these days - badly) have much of an advantage over online ones. And I don't think the current teachers doing well-known online courses are below average (though there's probably quite a few teachers who could do better).
Yes, it's very context dependent. Too much architecture, and you "lasagna code" - so many layers it's impossible to understand. Not enough architecture, and you get "spagetti code". If you care too much about nice code, you get Haskell - beautiful by ultimately pretty useless. If you don't care about good code, you get Fortran - extremely useful, but so ugly no-one wants to modify it. (Yes, it's possible to write practical stuff in Haskell, and nice code in Fortran... but it's rarely seen in the wild).
Also, Neil Gaiman claims he made up a "fact" in American Gods, which Wikipedia put in unreferenced. Another website used Wikipedia as a source for this fact. Wikipedia then referenced the other website. Neil Gaiman thinks it's too funny to spoil, by actually telling anyone what the "fact" was.
The problem with standardized tests is when they start being the tail that wags the dog. The same is true for any assessment. They are a good way to test education systems, provided the system does not focus on standardized tests. "Teaching the test" is a real danger. Teachers shouldn't care how their students perform on standardized tests, nor should students. It's bad science to care how your results turn out.
A second-order criticism is that they tend to encourage a narrow focus. It's "unfair" to test a wide curricula, because it's unfair to ask offbeat questions which some students will ace simply because they happened to study an offbeat thing. But it shouldn't matter if standardized tests are "unfair" to individual students, as they are only good for testing the system.
> Here in China you can lead what is basically an upper class lifestyle on less than $10k USD a year because the cost of living in much of China is that low. I don't get paid in USD and I don't buy things in USD so using that as some sort of measuring stick makes no sense.
No, you can't. You can eat upper-class food, and have lots of cheap beer and cigarettes. If you want a decent car, you'll need *more* than in the US. If you need to buy a computer, it's 1 month's salary, not 1 week's. If you want imported food, it's more expensive.
You can live an upper class life in the US on $10k, as long as you are willing to make a few sacrifices. It's all about your point of view.
And the middle-class Chinese are on ~$3500 a year, which is tough no matter where you live.
Having a small DoF (lots of blur for out-of-plane stuff) relies on real lens length (a 150mm full frame equivalent P&S might be more like a 25mm DSLR), and a wide apature.
Image quality is... complicated. If you want to take pictures fast (to minimize motion blur) you need good usable ISO, and a good apature number. Usable ISO will very roughly scale with crop factor, because big sensors tend to be better, but it also depends on other factors.
So all the people winging about the Canon G1 X having a worse apature than the Canon S95 or S100 are basically blow-hards who like quoting numbers without understanding what they mean.
It just doesn't look as fun as the 2D original. Sure, the graphics are 3D (and can take advantage of a 3D card) but aren't pixel perfect like the 2D original. You can't pack as much information into the screen, as the 3D models are just not optimal.
3D RPGs and RTS games just seem fiddly to me. It's a gratuitous exercise in realism which doesn't add anything to the gameplay.
Look at the really successful RPG and RTS games - War/Starcraft, Diablo, Dark Reign (the original)... very little gratuitous 3D design.
Then there's platform and adventure games... they basically died once they started going 3D. Maybe multiplayer games (FPS / racing) had something to do with that (as they benefited from both faster internet connections, and better 3D graphics).
Exactly. You'd expect human teeth to be "tough" (durable). We only have one adult set.
You'd expect shark teeth to be maintain a sharp edge, but they don't mind if a few break.
I'll use an example for slashdot's Nipponophiles - it's like a katana. Human teeth should be like the tough low-carbon hocho-tetsu, which is used in the core of the blade. Shark teeth should be like the higher carbon nabe-gane, which is used to form the sharp outer shell.
Yes, but for the first 35 years of computer games, more detail was better. It was a challenge on some platforms to draw more than one bad guy. It's in the DNA of game people to try to push for better graphics, even if it's actually deleterious.
Now you know why China and India have lots of blackouts - peaking load or load following plants are more expensive than just switching off all the residential power.
IIRC, math knowledge is one of the most important factors in whether people repay loans. People who can't count (or can't divide by 12, or figure out what interest is, etc) can't manage their personal finance. It's sometimes maddening to hear their explanations. Even if you are good at math, it can be hard to figure out a lot contracts (which are designed to mess with your head), people without math skills who sign contracts are like people who represent themselves in court.
If children are involved, you can stream as low as 300 kbit/s (like I do) and they won't care. That's about equal to VHS or youtube-360p in quality.
I watch about 2 hours a day... 8 on weekends. So that's 16+2*5 == 26 per week or 111 for the month. 250GB/111 hours == 5 Mbit/s. Most streams don't come anywhere near that amount so I'd not worry about going over the limit. And just to be sure I'd watch everything in SD (which is what comcast cable serves anyway).
All you'd do with your internet connection is watch TV?
In terms of bandwidth... yes.
You can download a new Ubuntu distro ever day, if you are willing to watch 4Mbit/s TV. But not many people do that.
So, do you think that China should have the same per-capita emissions as the US? We'd all be dead.
Or maybe you think that each country should emit the same (since it's China's fault for being too large), and the US should have the same *total* emissions as Canada.
Look, if they had a good shot, they should have taken it. But most of the 300 people wouldn't have been in a position to do anything other than make themselves a small target.
If you look at The Communist Manifesto, it's a pretty good idea. But in reality, it doesn't work (due to factors which Marx didn't realise were important). So let's forget about rhetoric, and just look at the facts.
There's bugger all conclusive evidence either way. The Swiss have lots of guns, and similar crime rates to their neighbors. The US and Canada both have a lot of guns, and crime is mostly driven by socioeconomic factors.
There's some evidence that if you have legal guns, a few more women get raped, and a few less get murdered. Homicide against males remains pretty constant.
There's basically not factual reason for favoring either side - it's all just political bullshit.
Personally, I favor banning the kind of weapons which can be used for these kind of attacks - semi autos. Mass murders aren't just bad because of the number of deaths, but because they are a massive distraction for the police. Security measures against this kind of attacks are insanely expensive and ineffective. Counter-terrorism is probably the only thing more futile than trying to stop mass murders through anything other than gun control.
I'm only familia with the Cantana by Orff (written in.... modernish Germany) but it's based on 11th or 12th century poetry.
The first bit is about the wheel of fate, then spring, then drinking, then courtship, then there's the song when the soprano fakes an orgasm onstage, then we go back to the wheel of fate.
Slashdot Mirror
> Listen, man, I'm glad this worked for you. But it's a one way communication channel.
So are most lectures. OK, there's a bit of interaction (most with the students who you are "illegally" collaborating with on take-home assessment), and the lecturer might explain stuff in office hours, but universities rely on most of their students not wasting too much lecturer time. Just look at student-teacher ratios.
FTA (yeah, I scanned it) ost of the issues seem to be "Thrun is a shitty stats teacher". It's like all the teachers who say "Khan can't teach math, he's a bad math teacher". I'm sure they have issues - no teacher is perfect. And I'm sure a good stats lecturer / math teacher can do a slightly better job. But both Thrun and Khan are generally bright people who know their subject, and good speakers, so they are pretty good teachers.
I don't think that offline courses (the way they are run these days - badly) have much of an advantage over online ones. And I don't think the current teachers doing well-known online courses are below average (though there's probably quite a few teachers who could do better).
Yes, it's very context dependent. Too much architecture, and you "lasagna code" - so many layers it's impossible to understand. Not enough architecture, and you get "spagetti code". If you care too much about nice code, you get Haskell - beautiful by ultimately pretty useless. If you don't care about good code, you get Fortran - extremely useful, but so ugly no-one wants to modify it. (Yes, it's possible to write practical stuff in Haskell, and nice code in Fortran ... but it's rarely seen in the wild).
Also, Neil Gaiman claims he made up a "fact" in American Gods, which Wikipedia put in unreferenced. Another website used Wikipedia as a source for this fact. Wikipedia then referenced the other website. Neil Gaiman thinks it's too funny to spoil, by actually telling anyone what the "fact" was.
Citogenesis in action.
The problem with standardized tests is when they start being the tail that wags the dog. The same is true for any assessment. They are a good way to test education systems, provided the system does not focus on standardized tests. "Teaching the test" is a real danger. Teachers shouldn't care how their students perform on standardized tests, nor should students. It's bad science to care how your results turn out.
A second-order criticism is that they tend to encourage a narrow focus. It's "unfair" to test a wide curricula, because it's unfair to ask offbeat questions which some students will ace simply because they happened to study an offbeat thing. But it shouldn't matter if standardized tests are "unfair" to individual students, as they are only good for testing the system.
This is similar to what git and ZFS do (but with a better hash, some kind of sha I think).
I've always found getting the right version of gcc to be a little ... difficult.
> Here in China you can lead what is basically an upper class lifestyle on less than $10k USD a year because the cost of living in much of China is that low. I don't get paid in USD and I don't buy things in USD so using that as some sort of measuring stick makes no sense.
No, you can't. You can eat upper-class food, and have lots of cheap beer and cigarettes. If you want a decent car, you'll need *more* than in the US. If you need to buy a computer, it's 1 month's salary, not 1 week's. If you want imported food, it's more expensive.
You can live an upper class life in the US on $10k, as long as you are willing to make a few sacrifices. It's all about your point of view.
And the middle-class Chinese are on ~$3500 a year, which is tough no matter where you live.
Also, small DoF comes from a close subject. That's why all the iPhone bokeh shots are of small subjects (flowers, sushi, other iPhones).
Yeah, there's a few factors:
Having a small DoF (lots of blur for out-of-plane stuff) relies on real lens length (a 150mm full frame equivalent P&S might be more like a 25mm DSLR), and a wide apature.
Image quality is ... complicated. If you want to take pictures fast (to minimize motion blur) you need good usable ISO, and a good apature number. Usable ISO will very roughly scale with crop factor, because big sensors tend to be better, but it also depends on other factors.
So all the people winging about the Canon G1 X having a worse apature than the Canon S95 or S100 are basically blow-hards who like quoting numbers without understanding what they mean.
Maybe with this technology we will finally find out who is Cartman's mom or dad (or both).
No, because the network is almost trivial, due to the large number of connections.
That looks ... pretty awesome actually.
It just doesn't look as fun as the 2D original. Sure, the graphics are 3D (and can take advantage of a 3D card) but aren't pixel perfect like the 2D original. You can't pack as much information into the screen, as the 3D models are just not optimal.
3D RPGs and RTS games just seem fiddly to me. It's a gratuitous exercise in realism which doesn't add anything to the gameplay.
Look at the really successful RPG and RTS games - War/Starcraft, Diablo, Dark Reign (the original) ... very little gratuitous 3D design.
Then there's platform and adventure games ... they basically died once they started going 3D. Maybe multiplayer games (FPS / racing) had something to do with that (as they benefited from both faster internet connections, and better 3D graphics).
> a good number of the more recent additions mostly just droll on the keyboard
How very drool!
Exactly. You'd expect human teeth to be "tough" (durable). We only have one adult set.
You'd expect shark teeth to be maintain a sharp edge, but they don't mind if a few break.
I'll use an example for slashdot's Nipponophiles - it's like a katana. Human teeth should be like the tough low-carbon hocho-tetsu, which is used in the core of the blade. Shark teeth should be like the higher carbon nabe-gane, which is used to form the sharp outer shell.
So, we should just bite its fin?
Yes, but for the first 35 years of computer games, more detail was better. It was a challenge on some platforms to draw more than one bad guy. It's in the DNA of game people to try to push for better graphics, even if it's actually deleterious.
Now you know why China and India have lots of blackouts - peaking load or load following plants are more expensive than just switching off all the residential power.
IIRC, math knowledge is one of the most important factors in whether people repay loans. People who can't count (or can't divide by 12, or figure out what interest is, etc) can't manage their personal finance. It's sometimes maddening to hear their explanations. Even if you are good at math, it can be hard to figure out a lot contracts (which are designed to mess with your head), people without math skills who sign contracts are like people who represent themselves in court.
If children are involved, you can stream as low as 300 kbit/s (like I do) and they won't care. That's about equal to VHS or youtube-360p in quality.
I watch about 2 hours a day... 8 on weekends. So that's 16+2*5 == 26 per week or 111 for the month. 250GB/111 hours == 5 Mbit/s. Most streams don't come anywhere near that amount so I'd not worry about going over the limit. And just to be sure I'd watch everything in SD (which is what comcast cable serves anyway).
All you'd do with your internet connection is watch TV?
In terms of bandwidth ... yes.
You can download a new Ubuntu distro ever day, if you are willing to watch 4Mbit/s TV. But not many people do that.
So, do you think that China should have the same per-capita emissions as the US? We'd all be dead.
Or maybe you think that each country should emit the same (since it's China's fault for being too large), and the US should have the same *total* emissions as Canada.
I think soldiers won't say "shoot his gun" because a pistol or rifle is not a gun.
Look, if they had a good shot, they should have taken it. But most of the 300 people wouldn't have been in a position to do anything other than make themselves a small target.
If you look at The Communist Manifesto, it's a pretty good idea. But in reality, it doesn't work (due to factors which Marx didn't realise were important). So let's forget about rhetoric, and just look at the facts.
There's bugger all conclusive evidence either way. The Swiss have lots of guns, and similar crime rates to their neighbors. The US and Canada both have a lot of guns, and crime is mostly driven by socioeconomic factors.
There's some evidence that if you have legal guns, a few more women get raped, and a few less get murdered. Homicide against males remains pretty constant.
There's basically not factual reason for favoring either side - it's all just political bullshit.
Personally, I favor banning the kind of weapons which can be used for these kind of attacks - semi autos. Mass murders aren't just bad because of the number of deaths, but because they are a massive distraction for the police. Security measures against this kind of attacks are insanely expensive and ineffective. Counter-terrorism is probably the only thing more futile than trying to stop mass murders through anything other than gun control.
Or, they thought that shooting into a dark crowded theatre filled with smoke was far more stupid than just hiding under their seat.
Or Carmina Burana.
I'm only familia with the Cantana by Orff (written in .... modernish Germany) but it's based on 11th or 12th century poetry.
The first bit is about the wheel of fate, then spring, then drinking, then courtship, then there's the song when the soprano fakes an orgasm onstage, then we go back to the wheel of fate.
The words are written by monks, I think.