The problem is that you don't learn anything, and you don't get any practice reinforcing what you've learned by doing the projects. That's your own loss, not anyone else's.
No. It's everybody's loss. These losers devalue the degree of Computer Science. Employers are starting to realize that a lot of these dolts don't really have any clue at all, and this alters their perceptions of CS graduates in general. I put in the long hours and hard work to really earn my degree, but many do not. Employers are not blind -- they realize that a lot of CS "grads" are total nitwits. This might lead them to believe that I am as well.
"You're only cheating yourself" might be true in high school but certainly not at the collegiate level. These sorts of people piss me off.
Discovery Channel has long since spun into multiple channels -- Discovery, The Learning Channel, Science, Animal Planet... I had always assumed that the interesting shows just got moved over to the Science channel. Unfortunately, I only pay enough for cable internet access and thus I only receive a few basic cable channels (which include Discovery but none of the other) so I have no idea if that is actually true or not.
The rise of "Reality" style Discovery shows could have been predicted by anybody. I just hope it hasn't spread to the Science Channel. Can somebody fill me in?
Why not just do away with the penny in american currency? It is one of the most useless peices of coinage in the world. Melting the current supply of pennies would give us how many million pounds of copper.
Not much. Considering that pennies are not made of copper, only coated in it.
A man was recently acquitted of murdering his father because he was sleepwalking when it occurred. Other people have similarly been acquitted because they believed that they were dreaming when they committed certain crimes. Explain how that fits into your logic.
It's about a billion times hotter than the ambient temperature of the Library of Congress.
Somehow this got an "Insightful" rating. I think you were going for "Funny." It's only about 6000 times hotter, and you DID carry out the calculation using KELVINS, right? Ratios of temperature are meaningless unless you're using Kelvins.
I can't tell you how many times I've been in the bathroom here at work when some other guy comes out of the shitter or steps away from the urinal and just walks out without washing his hands.
Unless he pissed on his hands, what's the problem? Does the human penis magically grow bacteria on it? I think this is more a symptom of homophobia than anything else. As if a quick wash could somehow remove the "penis essence" from his hands... Sheesh.
When I urinate, if I do spill anything anywhere, which is EXCEEDINGLY rare (you know the times when for some reason it shoots out sideways?), I clean up well, and I wash my hands. Also, if I was performing "number 2," I wash my hands. If not, I don't, and fuck you for implying that my penis is some sort of filthy bacterial breeding ground. I shower every morning and pay particular attention to that particular facet of my anatomy, thank you very much.
Scrubbing is for chumps. Throw the keyboard (sans circuitly obviously) into a strong, hot solution of Oxiclean for 12 hours. You've never seen something so clean. In fact, it might even take the printed letters off the keyboard, but who needs those?
Use two cups of plain water with a cap of bleach in it to clean your keyboard. No known bug can survive bleach, even at that low level. Ice cream shops generally do this for the water they use for their scoops.
I very much doubt that they are using bleach. Most states mandate a licensed sanitizing agent for food uses. Bleach does not fall in that category, although it is a useful sanitizer, because it is slow-acting -- it can take up to 20 minutes to have a full sanitizing effect. A quick dip in bleach is not going to kill everything. More than likely, the ice cream shop is using iodophor.
Other sanitizers like iodophor or dodecylbenzenesulfonic acid (sold as Star San) or even phosphoric acid work much more rapidly -- iodophor in 2 minutes or less, Star San even quicker.
Also, do not confuse "sanitation" with "sterilization." Only extreme heat can truly sterilize. There will always be a few bugs here and there that escaped the treatment.
Why would a toilet seat have enormous germ colonies anyway? Do you spread shit on the seat while you take a dump? I know I don't. Does it transfer from your shit-covered ass? Come on.
Does it come from urine? Urine is sterile. I've seen videos of surgeries where the ureter between the kidneys and the bladder was severed, and the surgeons allowed the urine to flow directly into the body cavity. Old urine will harbor germs, true. This is why we flush toilets and wipe the seat if we get a little bit on it.
Germs grow in certain locations because those locations are not cleaned. Toilets are cleaned often. Keyboards are rarely cleaned. Why are these results a surprise?
The English language has both a "to" and a "too" because they have completely different meanings. It causes a hiccup in understanding (regardless of intelligence, and your subtle innuendo that someone would have to be dumb to be caught up by that is inane), distracting from the fluidity of comprehension, when someone needlessly transposes them.
In spoken language you don't get to see the letters. Yet you somehow easily distinguish "to," too," and "two." When it's written, suddenly it's impossible? Yes, I think that if it hangs you up, this indicates a lack of noise-filtering ability.
How is it that we sit here on Slashdot wishing for a computer language that could just "figure out what I really mean," but when it comes to real humans there is zero tolerance?
In any case, the defeatist "don't complain!" mantra bleating from the Slashdot is pretty tiring. "Suck it up and like it, or go elsewhere!" Are you people from Soviet Russia or something?
The point I was trying to make is that complaints get you nowhere around here. What is it they say about a person who does the same thing over and over and expects different results?
Increasing the money supply in game will drive down the Ebay price of gold pieces, but will cause in game inflation. Stuff will cost more gold pieces to buy in game.
Hmm, I wonder how we could inject more gold into the game in such a way that the players don't get screwed by inflation... I've got it... It's.. It's... BANK INTEREST! You increase the supply of gold by giving it to the players.
Taken to an extreme, even if the game designers injected so much in game money into the economy that gold pieces became worthless, the gold farmers would start to sell hard to acquire items (uber loot) on Ebay, instead of gold. And, the in game economy would be reduced to a barter economy.
A barter economy is FAR more interesting than a currency based economy, IMHO. You actually have to think instead of forking over the coin. I think you've hit upon one possible solution right there.
The point is that your audience is filled with people who are generally regarded as "above-average" in terms of intelligence.
You're above average in intelligence, yet a simple confusion between "to" and "too" stymies you to the point of not understanding what is being communicated? What the hell are you, a human, or a compiler?
We went to spelling bees as kids, we got beat up for knowing big words in high school.
I was praised universally by all who knew me in high school. Even when I used the big words. I'm not going to spell it out for you (you're "above average in intelligence," right?) but suffice it to say I was treated well because of my attitude toward the less intellectually inclined. Refraining from berating somebody for a simple and ultimately unimportant grammatical mistake goes a long way toward alleviating the beatings.
If you don't like the articles, don't read them. Admit it -- you're addicted to Slashdot like crack. You can't help yourself. You purposefully torture your poor little brain with these horrific typos because you JUST... CAN'T... QUIT.
Did the higher ups threaten to take a waffle iron to your ass? Receiving monumental negative input from users? What is it? It's not like you to actually communicate or listen to anybody.
It seems the problem stems from a seemingly infinite supply of gold in the games. We all know what happens when governments start printing currency like mad. It leads to insane, spiralling inflation and eventual economic breakdown. Can you say, "Chile?"
What these games need is a "Fed," an entity which controls and regulates the dispensation of large sums of gold. It doesn't need to be implemented in an even remotely similar way to in the real world, but some kind of control has to exist.
When the real world price of Game Gold starts going up, the "Fed" should pump more gold into the game, somehow, in order to deflate its value relative to the dollar. I have no idea how to implement this in a way that's true to the character of the game -- somebody who actually plays these games a lot might get some creative ideas about it.
It seems like you should also be able to "sell short" the game gold, and increase your game wealth, since the value of the gold is decreasing relative to some other currency. Converting between game gold and real dollars give you all sorts of opportunities.
If I was a player in one of these games, and rumors got started that the game economy was about to be regulated, I would be overjoyed. I would purchase, with real dollars, huge quantities of gold, and wait until regulation caused the value of gold to rise. Then I'd auction it back off and walk away with real cash.
I suggest you learn how power supplies work. At their most basic level, they consist of a diode and a capacitor.
And an inductor and a switching transistor. I'm not ignorant.. Even built one, once. I was guessing that this particular supply might have some extra circuitry between the wall and the rectifier, possibly for cleaning up the AC waveform. Again, it's a wild-assed guess. Other people have put forth more likely scenarios, involving faulty grounds.
Keyboards, mice and monitors have nothing to do with the computer.
I have a computer sitting inside my closet which IS the keyboard. It's a Commodore 64.
To say that KVM has nothing to do with the computer is insane. They ARE NOT the computer but they are clearly plugged into it. Saying something as crazy as "The keyboard has NOTHING to do with the computer" is exactly the sort of thing that has these people so discombobulated in the first place. They're trying to get practical information and you're waxing semantic.
By all means, explain what a peripheral is. Perhaps mention that inside many peripherals is a little tiny computer! Imagine that, computers plugging into computers. Soon they'll understand the freaking Internet.
I can't tell you how many people say they're "afraid" of computers. They don't want to try too many things since they're afraid of breaking something. There is the possibility they might delete system files, but that's become increasingly rare. I'd tell people not to be intimated by what they don't understand on their own computers, then show them how to find answers on their own.
The following is funny, but totally serious.
Here's what you do. It's like a little LAN party, but it's called a "Computer Destruction Party." Set up about 10 computers on a few desks. Each has a fresh install of XP, updated to all the latest. Invite ten of your parents, parents' friends, etc. People who feel insecure with computers. Tell them that the goal here, is to be the first person to render a computer totally unusable and unbootable. The winner receives some humorous item. The only rule is, you cannot physically smash or fry the computer with electricity.
To be even cuter, sign a little waver with each guest that nobody will be held at fault for any damage to the computers.
When you turn "Computer Destruction" into the GOAL, instead of something to be avoided, people become interested and their innate tendencies to destruction are activated. At this point, they will discover just how difficult it really is to seriously fuck up a system irretrievably.
For the final stroke, flash the machines (using Ghost or some equivalent) back to their initial states as the party is winding down. This'll demonstrate that try though they might, the users simply CAN'T do irreversible damage to their system.
You assume and treat them like arrogant, yet ignorant, people who can't communicate, yet you insist on asking them questions about things you admittedly don't understand but take for granted that they do--and scoff at anything short of exhaustive, encyclopedic knowledge as evidence of incompetence, no matter how trivial your query--well, suffice it to say, you get what you give, sweetheart.
I have no idea if you're trying to respond to me or not (it looks like it, but you're at the wrong thread level). I'm assuming you are.
First, I was using a literary "you" here. If we break people down into the savvy vs. non-savvy classes, I fall in the first group. I write from the second group because I have a certain level of empathy.
You seem upset at my implication that most geeks are not good communicators. Wake up. Most PEOPLE are not good communicators. Most problems between people are due to communication failure. This does not imply that either party necessarily lacks intelligence (they do lack a certain TYPE of intelligence...)
There are probably a million developers just on the North American continent. A large number of these are highly skilled, indeed. Very few are competent to write a book, or even explain simple programming concepts.
It takes a special sort of person to be able to explain a concept in different ways to different people -- or in the context of a book, to take a sufficient number of angles on it that the majority of the readership will understand. Such a person is usually called a "teacher." Most of us aren't like this, a few of us are. There's nothing wrong with not having that particular talent, what IS wrong is treating everybody else like it's THEIR problem when in fact it is yours.
Frustrated and pissy because your users are assholes? Maybe they're assholes because you always act frustrated and pissed. Maybe it's a vicious circle and BOTH of you are at fault.
I think both binary and Morse would be too hard to learn. I'd compromise with a system somewhat like Roman numerals (but without their silly prefix-postfix rules):
High pitched DING = one floor
Medium pitched DANG = five floors
Low pitched DONG = ten floors
So the 33rd floor is DONG DONG DONG DING DING DING, the 38th floor is DONG DONG DONG DANG DING DING DING, etc...
No... A Mac is a "personal computer." The fact that PC stands for the same words does not make the two terms equivalent.
My wife owns an iPod. It has processor, a memory, and methods for input and output. It is therefore a computer, and it's obviously "personal." So, it's a "personal computer." Does that make it a PC?
PC refers, specifically, to the lineage of systems descended from the IBM desktop systems of the 1980's and their clones.
Maybe most people are capable of understanding computers but most geeks are such shitty communicators they just cant explain things clearly enough, often because they just dont understand the subject well enough themselves half the time.
A lot of it has to do with the patronizing or downright condescending attitude that many geeks assume while trying to explain things. Believe me -- knowing this shit (or thinking you know it) does not make you Master Of The Universe, nor does it even imply that you are particularly intelligent. When you're having trouble communicating concepts to a non-savvy person, this usually indicates that You Fail It, not that they do.
Also not to mention the matter of language. 33 isn't "Thirty-Three" in every language. But 33 dings is 33 in any language.
So, for the first floor we hear 1 ding. Second floor, 2 dings. 33rd floor, 33 dings. By the time you get to the 40th floor you've heard 820 dings.
If that's not enough to induce elevator carnage, I don't know what is. Me: "I just want to get to work!" Elevator: "DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING!!!!!!"
Well, once the plug was unplugged from its socket, how does the capacitor remember what phase it was plugged in? It's just sitting there holding a DC charge, which of course has no phase to rememeber.
Not if there are two capacitors, one on each phase. One might be in a charged state while the other is discharged, that would allow the two states to be distinguishable. It would also depend on the exact moment that the power got dropped. A diode would probably have to be involved somehow. But this is just a wild-ass guess.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's everybody's loss. These losers devalue the degree of Computer Science. Employers are starting to realize that a lot of these dolts don't really have any clue at all, and this alters their perceptions of CS graduates in general. I put in the long hours and hard work to really earn my degree, but many do not. Employers are not blind -- they realize that a lot of CS "grads" are total nitwits. This might lead them to believe that I am as well.
"You're only cheating yourself" might be true in high school but certainly not at the collegiate level. These sorts of people piss me off.
The rise of "Reality" style Discovery shows could have been predicted by anybody. I just hope it hasn't spread to the Science Channel. Can somebody fill me in?
I was starting to get excited there.
Not much. Considering that pennies are not made of copper, only coated in it.
A man was recently acquitted of murdering his father because he was sleepwalking when it occurred. Other people have similarly been acquitted because they believed that they were dreaming when they committed certain crimes. Explain how that fits into your logic.
Somehow this got an "Insightful" rating. I think you were going for "Funny." It's only about 6000 times hotter, and you DID carry out the calculation using KELVINS, right? Ratios of temperature are meaningless unless you're using Kelvins.
Unless he pissed on his hands, what's the problem? Does the human penis magically grow bacteria on it? I think this is more a symptom of homophobia than anything else. As if a quick wash could somehow remove the "penis essence" from his hands... Sheesh.
When I urinate, if I do spill anything anywhere, which is EXCEEDINGLY rare (you know the times when for some reason it shoots out sideways?), I clean up well, and I wash my hands. Also, if I was performing "number 2," I wash my hands. If not, I don't, and fuck you for implying that my penis is some sort of filthy bacterial breeding ground. I shower every morning and pay particular attention to that particular facet of my anatomy, thank you very much.
Scrubbing is for chumps. Throw the keyboard (sans circuitly obviously) into a strong, hot solution of Oxiclean for 12 hours. You've never seen something so clean. In fact, it might even take the printed letters off the keyboard, but who needs those?
I very much doubt that they are using bleach. Most states mandate a licensed sanitizing agent for food uses. Bleach does not fall in that category, although it is a useful sanitizer, because it is slow-acting -- it can take up to 20 minutes to have a full sanitizing effect. A quick dip in bleach is not going to kill everything. More than likely, the ice cream shop is using iodophor.
Other sanitizers like iodophor or dodecylbenzenesulfonic acid (sold as Star San) or even phosphoric acid work much more rapidly -- iodophor in 2 minutes or less, Star San even quicker.
Also, do not confuse "sanitation" with "sterilization." Only extreme heat can truly sterilize. There will always be a few bugs here and there that escaped the treatment.
Does it come from urine? Urine is sterile. I've seen videos of surgeries where the ureter between the kidneys and the bladder was severed, and the surgeons allowed the urine to flow directly into the body cavity. Old urine will harbor germs, true. This is why we flush toilets and wipe the seat if we get a little bit on it.
Germs grow in certain locations because those locations are not cleaned. Toilets are cleaned often. Keyboards are rarely cleaned. Why are these results a surprise?
In spoken language you don't get to see the letters. Yet you somehow easily distinguish "to," too," and "two." When it's written, suddenly it's impossible? Yes, I think that if it hangs you up, this indicates a lack of noise-filtering ability.
How is it that we sit here on Slashdot wishing for a computer language that could just "figure out what I really mean," but when it comes to real humans there is zero tolerance?
In any case, the defeatist "don't complain!" mantra bleating from the Slashdot is pretty tiring. "Suck it up and like it, or go elsewhere!" Are you people from Soviet Russia or something?
The point I was trying to make is that complaints get you nowhere around here. What is it they say about a person who does the same thing over and over and expects different results?
Hmm, I wonder how we could inject more gold into the game in such a way that the players don't get screwed by inflation... I've got it... It's.. It's... BANK INTEREST! You increase the supply of gold by giving it to the players.
Taken to an extreme, even if the game designers injected so much in game money into the economy that gold pieces became worthless, the gold farmers would start to sell hard to acquire items (uber loot) on Ebay, instead of gold. And, the in game economy would be reduced to a barter economy.
A barter economy is FAR more interesting than a currency based economy, IMHO. You actually have to think instead of forking over the coin. I think you've hit upon one possible solution right there.
You're above average in intelligence, yet a simple confusion between "to" and "too" stymies you to the point of not understanding what is being communicated? What the hell are you, a human, or a compiler?
We went to spelling bees as kids, we got beat up for knowing big words in high school.
I was praised universally by all who knew me in high school. Even when I used the big words. I'm not going to spell it out for you (you're "above average in intelligence," right?) but suffice it to say I was treated well because of my attitude toward the less intellectually inclined. Refraining from berating somebody for a simple and ultimately unimportant grammatical mistake goes a long way toward alleviating the beatings.
If you don't like the articles, don't read them. Admit it -- you're addicted to Slashdot like crack. You can't help yourself. You purposefully torture your poor little brain with these horrific typos because you JUST... CAN'T... QUIT.
Did the higher ups threaten to take a waffle iron to your ass? Receiving monumental negative input from users? What is it? It's not like you to actually communicate or listen to anybody.
What these games need is a "Fed," an entity which controls and regulates the dispensation of large sums of gold. It doesn't need to be implemented in an even remotely similar way to in the real world, but some kind of control has to exist.
When the real world price of Game Gold starts going up, the "Fed" should pump more gold into the game, somehow, in order to deflate its value relative to the dollar. I have no idea how to implement this in a way that's true to the character of the game -- somebody who actually plays these games a lot might get some creative ideas about it. It seems like you should also be able to "sell short" the game gold, and increase your game wealth, since the value of the gold is decreasing relative to some other currency. Converting between game gold and real dollars give you all sorts of opportunities.
If I was a player in one of these games, and rumors got started that the game economy was about to be regulated, I would be overjoyed. I would purchase, with real dollars, huge quantities of gold, and wait until regulation caused the value of gold to rise. Then I'd auction it back off and walk away with real cash.
And an inductor and a switching transistor. I'm not ignorant.. Even built one, once. I was guessing that this particular supply might have some extra circuitry between the wall and the rectifier, possibly for cleaning up the AC waveform. Again, it's a wild-assed guess. Other people have put forth more likely scenarios, involving faulty grounds.
I have a computer sitting inside my closet which IS the keyboard. It's a Commodore 64.
To say that KVM has nothing to do with the computer is insane. They ARE NOT the computer but they are clearly plugged into it. Saying something as crazy as "The keyboard has NOTHING to do with the computer" is exactly the sort of thing that has these people so discombobulated in the first place. They're trying to get practical information and you're waxing semantic.
By all means, explain what a peripheral is. Perhaps mention that inside many peripherals is a little tiny computer! Imagine that, computers plugging into computers. Soon they'll understand the freaking Internet.
The following is funny, but totally serious.
Here's what you do. It's like a little LAN party, but it's called a "Computer Destruction Party." Set up about 10 computers on a few desks. Each has a fresh install of XP, updated to all the latest. Invite ten of your parents, parents' friends, etc. People who feel insecure with computers. Tell them that the goal here, is to be the first person to render a computer totally unusable and unbootable. The winner receives some humorous item. The only rule is, you cannot physically smash or fry the computer with electricity.
To be even cuter, sign a little waver with each guest that nobody will be held at fault for any damage to the computers.
When you turn "Computer Destruction" into the GOAL, instead of something to be avoided, people become interested and their innate tendencies to destruction are activated. At this point, they will discover just how difficult it really is to seriously fuck up a system irretrievably.
For the final stroke, flash the machines (using Ghost or some equivalent) back to their initial states as the party is winding down. This'll demonstrate that try though they might, the users simply CAN'T do irreversible damage to their system.
I have no idea if you're trying to respond to me or not (it looks like it, but you're at the wrong thread level). I'm assuming you are.
First, I was using a literary "you" here. If we break people down into the savvy vs. non-savvy classes, I fall in the first group. I write from the second group because I have a certain level of empathy.
You seem upset at my implication that most geeks are not good communicators. Wake up. Most PEOPLE are not good communicators. Most problems between people are due to communication failure. This does not imply that either party necessarily lacks intelligence (they do lack a certain TYPE of intelligence...)
There are probably a million developers just on the North American continent. A large number of these are highly skilled, indeed. Very few are competent to write a book, or even explain simple programming concepts.
It takes a special sort of person to be able to explain a concept in different ways to different people -- or in the context of a book, to take a sufficient number of angles on it that the majority of the readership will understand. Such a person is usually called a "teacher." Most of us aren't like this, a few of us are. There's nothing wrong with not having that particular talent, what IS wrong is treating everybody else like it's THEIR problem when in fact it is yours.
Frustrated and pissy because your users are assholes? Maybe they're assholes because you always act frustrated and pissed. Maybe it's a vicious circle and BOTH of you are at fault.
High pitched DING = one floor
Medium pitched DANG = five floors
Low pitched DONG = ten floors
So the 33rd floor is DONG DONG DONG DING DING DING, the 38th floor is DONG DONG DONG DANG DING DING DING, etc...
Okay, maybe that method sucks too.
No... A Mac is a "personal computer." The fact that PC stands for the same words does not make the two terms equivalent.
My wife owns an iPod. It has processor, a memory, and methods for input and output. It is therefore a computer, and it's obviously "personal." So, it's a "personal computer." Does that make it a PC?
PC refers, specifically, to the lineage of systems descended from the IBM desktop systems of the 1980's and their clones.
A lot of it has to do with the patronizing or downright condescending attitude that many geeks assume while trying to explain things. Believe me -- knowing this shit (or thinking you know it) does not make you Master Of The Universe, nor does it even imply that you are particularly intelligent. When you're having trouble communicating concepts to a non-savvy person, this usually indicates that You Fail It, not that they do.
Of course not. According to one of my ex-GF's, that box is properly referred to as the "modem."
So, for the first floor we hear 1 ding. Second floor, 2 dings. 33rd floor, 33 dings. By the time you get to the 40th floor you've heard 820 dings.
If that's not enough to induce elevator carnage, I don't know what is. Me: "I just want to get to work!" Elevator: "DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING!!!!!!"
Not if there are two capacitors, one on each phase. One might be in a charged state while the other is discharged, that would allow the two states to be distinguishable. It would also depend on the exact moment that the power got dropped. A diode would probably have to be involved somehow. But this is just a wild-ass guess.