Lecturer: "Today we taak abou daita modw and tupw cacuwus"
(followed by long string of chinese to the front row of foreign students) Students, row 1: lots of head nodding Students, rows 2.. n: WTF!!?
80% of us failed that subject - which was really just basic SQL and database normalisation design etc. I scraped through but just barely - while getting distinctions and HD's in other subjects. Went well in the assignments, but you didn't pass the exam it was instant fail, regardless of your assignmnent marks. - and it didn't help that a good chunk of the exam was on stuff only in the lectures, not in the book.
Enough people failed that they went to the dean and tried to get the guy thrown out of teaching the course. Unfortunately there was no other chump willing to work for lecturers salary when those same skills were so much better paid out in industry, so they got the same guy the next year.
Fact is, having foreign lecturers is nothing new, and I went on to successfully catch up on the stuff I should have learnt in those lectures - so it didn't hurt in the long run, infact, when working in industry overseas later, it was a lot easier to work with and understand other nationalities better, having already had a fair bit of exposure to heavy accents. God knows my foreign language skills aren't exactly awesome, so you got to cut the lecturer some slack.
Main thing, is if you have a lecturer you really can't understand properly, *insist* on getting access to decent written lecture notes from him, or recordings that you can go through again later. One thing that lecturer was right about though - having good knowledge of SQL and database design really pays off.in industry.
I am pretty sure the memory effect has long been debunked - it was a phenomenon that affected NiCads on satellites, where the charge and discharge cycle was very periodic and the discharge amount each time was almost exactly the same, as the craft orbited the earth. If there is much variation in the charge/discharge cycle, the memory effect does not occur. From that fount of eternal wisdom and knowledge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect: The memory effect can not occur if: * Batteries achieve full overcharge. * Discharge is not exactly the same each cycle, within plus or minus 3% * Discharge is to less than 1.0 volt per cell.[2]
Overcharging is going to be a much bigger cause of the batteries becoming cactus, because of formation of crystals. There's more info in the wilipedia article about that too - but in summary, don't leave your NiCad devices charging all day and night, if you want them to keep good battery life.
Unity does suck though - there's no denying that. If rolling releases mean that I can keep upgrading the installed packages (including KDE but NOT including Unity) with the new better shinier versions of the software without ever having to do another major upgrade, reconfigure for the window manager I want and ditch Unity yet again, I am all for it.
However if rolling upgrades means that you might suddenly have Unity (or something similarly horrible) forced on you with a regular upgrade, then I am dead against it.
Before Unity, my pet peeve with Ubuntu was the forcing of Pulseaudio onto the system, before it was anything like stable enough to work properly. Unity isn't the only thing that Ubuntu has dunped on users before it was really ready. If rolling releases do more of that kind of thing, it will be a disaster for Ubuntu.
Actually the most efficient way to heat somewhere, is to move heat fro where it is not needed (like outside) to where it is needed (ie. inside) instead of creating it from scratch. Heat pumps, such as reverse cycle air conditioners do this, and it turns out that actually it uses much less energy to do so. Heat pumps have a Coefficient of Performance (COP), which relates their performance compared to resistive heating, for a given change in temperature.
it's not going to work for you if you experience -40 degree temperatures (damned cold in both C and F) but for more moderate temperature reigimes, such as around 0 degrees C in the UK, they can happily provide a temperature lift about 3 to 4 times more efficiently compared to resistive heating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Reversible_heat_pumps
WoW is like nuclear war - the only way to win is to not play.
I have been really enjoying a real world social life now, plus found time to pick up a few real world skills like playing a few tunes on the piano. I rid myself of the compulsion to keep trying to maintain 3 level 85 toons and grinding for gear, some time around the first Darkmoon fair for the cataclysm expansion. It was grinding for all the damned herbs for darkmoon cards that finally broke the WoW experience for me. Wish I'd quit way earlier - haven't missed it at all.
I disagree - if more corporations were playing the game honestly, and actually shouldering their share of the tax burden, the overall tax rates could be lower, and regular citizens who can't escape tax as easily, could pay less. Therefore, with lower tax rates, there would be a lower marginal reward per tax payer for dodging the system.
The problem is, right now, the biggest and richest corporations and individuals can escape a large chunk of the tax that they are supposed to be paying, so more has to be paid by middle and lower level tax payers to make up the shortfall.
After having experienced my chef girlfriend's cooking in a somewhat under - equipped kitchen while living on a tropical island, I can assure you that all the gadgets in the world have nothing to do with the quality of the fare that comes from the kitchen - it's all down to timing, heat, and good ingredients - and having a clue on how best to combine these elements - usually with a lot of multitasking. The rest can be improvised. Eg. Impossible to bu castor sugar on the island? no worries - blend regular sugar till it's the consistency you want. Lacking a toaster? a grill will do just fine - only you better be able to track several things at once, or you end up with carbon. She manages it with ease. I struggle to make bacon & eggs without stuffing something. for a couple with no kids, by the time you have rinsed the dishes, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, you might as well have just washed them by hand anyway - can preparation implements and stuff as you are cooking and finish with things, leaving hardly anything left to wash anyway by the time you eat. Keep it simple!
For a robot call to be effictive, it must be trying to promote something (say, some kind of interest group) or or sell some product or service on behalf of some company or person - Just fine the hell out of the entity that is being promoted.
Hydrocarbons are a crap way to store energy if using that energy means burning it in a heat engine with typical efficiencies of 25 to 30% If they were synthesising alcohol out of pure air, at least then a) you could drink it b) you could use it in a fuel cell at higher efficiencies to recover the energy, prefferably not after having done too much of a). This would at best be a Rube Goldberg like effort at storing and using energy.
I started with programmg in Applesoft Basic on an Apple ][, and mostly doing stuff like drawing lines and figuring out how to make it draw a circle. (trigonometry was a lot more interesting when I found how you needed to know about sine and/or cos to do that) . If it had existed at the time, I wish I had started programming in c++ instead of having to struggle with those concepts later. Set up a basic graphic framework, give him the tools to draw dots, lines and circles and get him started in writing programs to draw stuff. Just because you are using a C++ compiler doesn't mean you have to know how to write object oriented programs to start with - he could start off with writing pure functional programs, but it will be a lot better to start with a full fledged programming language that will be capable of anything he cares to write, and will be a solid choice for any project. The synax is easy - the biggest difficulty will be in learning what the various errors mean, but he'll get the hang of that pretty fast. I'd suggest mabey QT if you want to do windows & widgets stuff.
Don't waste time mucking around with a toy language.
See how Prohibition worked out for a good reason why trying to protext people from themselves by banning addictive products is a stupid idea. All that would happen is it would become yet another drug that is peddled by your local corner guy - at great profit to them and great cost to the community in trying to enforce the laws and lock up nicotine drug users.
It's bad enough when the waste pump on a boat toilet needs fixing - at least that thing's mostly a small sealed unit with just a couple of hoses clamped on. That's one conveyor belt that you'd want to make sure was damned reliable and never ever needed repairs rr maintenance on - it's going to be one hell of a nasty job if it gets so crusted up it can't move or the bearings go or something like that.
Road wear goes up to the 4th power of axle load, ie. (Wx / Wref) ^ 4. Anempty semi trailer weighs around 20000 kg spread over 5 axles, ie. 4000 kg per axle. compared to a small car which weighs say, 2000 kg. on 2 axles - 1000 kg/axle. The truck is causing 4^4 times the road wear per axle. A creally really fat cyclist on a heavy mountain bike might weigh in at 200 kg on 2 axles, weighing 1/10 of a car, and causing about as much wear as a butterfly landing on a rock by comparison. If you really want to go after free-loading road users, go after the trucking industry, which causes disproportionate weight on roads compared to the registration efes they pay, effectively with roads being subsidised by regular car drivers to pay for wear and tear caused by big trucks.
If only cycle ways were needed, the'd be built at a fraction of the cost of what it costs to build roads.
I don't get what the big deal is with having to wear a bike helmet. I hear others cite about having to carry their helmet everywhere too - I just leave mine on my bike, with the bike lock going though the straps. Sure, someone might cut the straps or something if they were really nasty, but so far I have never had a problem - and a helmet's worth what, about $40 for a half decent one, and $15 for a kmart one.
I think the real problem is for some reason people have got it into their heads that helmets might get the fashion police onto them or something - that it's not as cool looking or something than not wearing one. Certainly having to "carry a helmet around" is the lamest excuse for not riding a bike.
I haven't had a static address ever in my life - yet never have problems connecting from wherever I am to my home machines, thanks to DynDns. I don't fully get what the big deal is about having a static address.
I have 12G of ram too - the thing is, I bought that 12G so I could run a few VM's for testing app installs and do other useful stuff - not to feed a ravenously hungry bloated piece of crappy eye candy. I hate the attitude that "oh users have heaps of memory now, so it doesn't matter if we write really ludicrously inefficient code and bloaty software".
I'm not saying you should have to hand optimize everything in assembler, but there definitely should be more attention paid to keeping on top of bloat - or we will never reap the benefits of faster and more power efficient CPU's - we will just be using a lot more machine cycles and ram do do stuff in the same time and using the same amount of power.
Call me a cynic, but I think everyone wised up to the fact that they weren't really buying solid gold toilet seats, so they had to find something else in the budget to fund all that black ops stuff...
One of the most memorable games from my youth was an RPG called Ultima IV. In the previous games in the series, you just stole all the gold and levelled entire friendly towns for profit, once you got strong enough - no consequences.
In Ultima IV however all of a sudden there were consequences for mis-deeds. you could still lie, cheat, steal, and lay waste to the friendly citizens, but there were in-game consequences that cost you. Of course a central theme to the game was to become virtuous, but I think more games could do with some of these mechanisms - allow free action still, but make it have consequences.
Actually I think if they just got laid once in a while it'd reduce their effectiveness. Unfortunately for them their belief system makes them think the only way it's going to happen is to get married or get martyred. Given their apparently poor respect of women, the former isn't likely without some kind of arranged marriage.
Who exactly should get a head start, and a head start on whom? The journal publishers? Researchers sometimes even have to pay a fee to submit papers for publication in the first place. The peer reviewers? they aren't paid by the journals or by the researchers. The researchers? they have already processed the information, which is why they are submitting for publication.
Leaving a 6 month clause just begs to have endless lobbying to get it extended to 12 months, then 2 years, etc. If you are actively researching in a field, you will still be forced to get the expensive peer reviewed journals, usually bundled with a bunch of other journals you don't want at all, but are more or less forced to buy because of the prohibitive cost of buying articles one at a time.
Journal Publishers basically get all the content written and submitted by scientists for free, selected by peer reviewed by another bunch of scientists for free, then slap a cover on a bunch of them and sell them at obscene prices. The price increases have way outstripped the CPI since the mid 80's and it's way past time the greedy bastards got a shake up.
At any rate, it's about equivalent to half a kilo of TNT, which contains about 4.184MJ of energy. Got a long way to go before it's going to be useful for blowing up even small asteroids, let alone planets.
Roads, like all networks are a natural monopoly, and thus should be run by the state. Unless you want to allow for competition that is by having a second road network constructed and maintained alongside the first. Then you could have a dupoly. Services on networks should be privatized (bus services, mail services, electricity generation, internet service provision, telephone, etc) but the physical network structure itself should be in the hands of the public, via that trustworthy custodian, the government. If you don't like how they run things, vote in a new bunch.
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Scene: Data Models 101... 22 year ago.
Lecturer: "Today we taak abou daita modw and tupw cacuwus" .. n: WTF!!?
(followed by long string of chinese to the front row of foreign students)
Students, row 1: lots of head nodding
Students, rows 2
80% of us failed that subject - which was really just basic SQL and database normalisation design etc. I scraped through but just barely - while getting distinctions and HD's in other subjects. Went well in the assignments, but you didn't pass the exam it was instant fail, regardless of your assignmnent marks. - and it didn't help that a good chunk of the exam was on stuff only in the lectures, not in the book.
Enough people failed that they went to the dean and tried to get the guy thrown out of teaching the course. Unfortunately there was no other chump willing to work for lecturers salary when those same skills were so much better paid out in industry, so they got the same guy the next year.
Fact is, having foreign lecturers is nothing new, and I went on to successfully catch up on the stuff I should have learnt in those lectures - so it didn't hurt in the long run, infact, when working in industry overseas later, it was a lot easier to work with and understand other nationalities better, having already had a fair bit of exposure to heavy accents. God knows my foreign language skills aren't exactly awesome, so you got to cut the lecturer some slack.
Main thing, is if you have a lecturer you really can't understand properly, *insist* on getting access to decent written lecture notes from him, or recordings that you can go through again later. One thing that lecturer was right about though - having good knowledge of SQL and database design really pays off.in industry.
I am pretty sure the memory effect has long been debunked - it was a phenomenon that affected NiCads on satellites, where the charge and discharge cycle was very periodic and the discharge amount each time was almost exactly the same, as the craft orbited the earth. If there is much variation in the charge/discharge cycle, the memory effect does not occur.
From that fount of eternal wisdom and knowledge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect: The memory effect can not occur if:
* Batteries achieve full overcharge.
* Discharge is not exactly the same each cycle, within plus or minus 3%
* Discharge is to less than 1.0 volt per cell.[2]
Overcharging is going to be a much bigger cause of the batteries becoming cactus, because of formation of crystals.
There's more info in the wilipedia article about that too - but in summary, don't leave your NiCad devices charging all day and night, if you want them to keep good battery life.
Seriously, whats wrong with you people? What kind of twisted mind comes up with this stuff in the first place?
Unity does suck though - there's no denying that.
If rolling releases mean that I can keep upgrading the installed packages (including KDE but NOT including Unity) with the new better shinier versions of the software without ever having to do another major upgrade, reconfigure for the window manager I want and ditch Unity yet again, I am all for it.
However if rolling upgrades means that you might suddenly have Unity (or something similarly horrible) forced on you with a regular upgrade, then I am dead against it.
Before Unity, my pet peeve with Ubuntu was the forcing of Pulseaudio onto the system, before it was anything like stable enough to work properly. Unity isn't the only thing that Ubuntu has dunped on users before it was really ready.
If rolling releases do more of that kind of thing, it will be a disaster for Ubuntu.
Actually the most efficient way to heat somewhere, is to move heat fro where it is not needed (like outside) to where it is needed (ie. inside) instead of creating it from scratch.
Heat pumps, such as reverse cycle air conditioners do this, and it turns out that actually it uses much less energy to do so. Heat pumps have a Coefficient of Performance (COP), which relates their performance compared to resistive heating, for a given change in temperature.
it's not going to work for you if you experience -40 degree temperatures (damned cold in both C and F) but for more moderate temperature reigimes, such as around 0 degrees C in the UK, they can happily provide a temperature lift about 3 to 4 times more efficiently compared to resistive heating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Reversible_heat_pumps
Soviet Russia.does not have a monopoly on that.
WoW is like nuclear war - the only way to win is to not play.
I have been really enjoying a real world social life now, plus found time to pick up a few real world skills like playing a few tunes on the piano. I rid myself of the compulsion to keep trying to maintain 3 level 85 toons and grinding for gear, some time around the first Darkmoon fair for the cataclysm expansion. It was grinding for all the damned herbs for darkmoon cards that finally broke the WoW experience for me. Wish I'd quit way earlier - haven't missed it at all.
I disagree - if more corporations were playing the game honestly, and actually shouldering their share of the tax burden, the overall tax rates could be lower, and regular citizens who can't escape tax as easily, could pay less. Therefore, with lower tax rates, there would be a lower marginal reward per tax payer for dodging the system.
The problem is, right now, the biggest and richest corporations and individuals can escape a large chunk of the tax that they are supposed to be paying, so more has to be paid by middle and lower level tax payers to make up the shortfall.
After having experienced my chef girlfriend's cooking in a somewhat under - equipped kitchen while living on a tropical island, I can assure you that all the gadgets in the world have nothing to do with the quality of the fare that comes from the kitchen - it's all down to timing, heat, and good ingredients - and having a clue on how best to combine these elements - usually with a lot of multitasking. The rest can be improvised.
Eg. Impossible to bu castor sugar on the island? no worries - blend regular sugar till it's the consistency you want. Lacking a toaster? a grill will do just fine - only you better be able to track several things at once, or you end up with carbon. She manages it with ease. I struggle to make bacon & eggs without stuffing something. for a couple with no kids, by the time you have rinsed the dishes, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, you might as well have just washed them by hand anyway - can preparation implements and stuff as you are cooking and finish with things, leaving hardly anything left to wash anyway by the time you eat.
Keep it simple!
For a robot call to be effictive, it must be trying to promote something (say, some kind of interest group) or or sell some product or service on behalf of some company or person - Just fine the hell out of the entity that is being promoted.
Problem solved.
Where's my 50k please?
Hydrocarbons are a crap way to store energy if using that energy means burning it in a heat engine with typical efficiencies of 25 to 30%
If they were synthesising alcohol out of pure air, at least then
a) you could drink it
b) you could use it in a fuel cell at higher efficiencies to recover the energy, prefferably not after having done too much of a).
This would at best be a Rube Goldberg like effort at storing and using energy.
I started with programmg in Applesoft Basic on an Apple ][, and mostly doing stuff like drawing lines and figuring out how to make it draw a circle. (trigonometry was a lot more interesting when I found how you needed to know about sine and/or cos to do that) . If it had existed at the time, I wish I had started programming in c++ instead of having to struggle with those concepts later. Set up a basic graphic framework, give him the tools to draw dots, lines and circles and get him started in writing programs to draw stuff. Just because you are using a C++ compiler doesn't mean you have to know how to write object oriented programs to start with - he could start off with writing pure functional programs, but it will be a lot better to start with a full fledged programming language that will be capable of anything he cares to write, and will be a solid choice for any project.
The synax is easy - the biggest difficulty will be in learning what the various errors mean, but he'll get the hang of that pretty fast.
I'd suggest mabey QT if you want to do windows & widgets stuff.
Don't waste time mucking around with a toy language.
See how Prohibition worked out for a good reason why trying to protext people from themselves by banning addictive products is a stupid idea.
All that would happen is it would become yet another drug that is peddled by your local corner guy - at great profit to them and great cost to the community in trying to enforce the laws and lock up nicotine drug users.
It's bad enough when the waste pump on a boat toilet needs fixing - at least that thing's mostly a small sealed unit with just a couple of hoses clamped on. That's one conveyor belt that you'd want to make sure was damned reliable and never ever needed repairs rr maintenance on - it's going to be one hell of a nasty job if it gets so crusted up it can't move or the bearings go or something like that.
Road wear goes up to the 4th power of axle load, ie. (Wx / Wref) ^ 4.
Anempty semi trailer weighs around 20000 kg spread over 5 axles, ie. 4000 kg per axle. compared to a small car which weighs say, 2000 kg. on 2 axles - 1000 kg/axle. The truck is causing 4^4 times the road wear per axle.
A creally really fat cyclist on a heavy mountain bike might weigh in at 200 kg on 2 axles, weighing 1/10 of a car, and causing about as much wear as a butterfly landing on a rock by comparison.
If you really want to go after free-loading road users, go after the trucking industry, which causes disproportionate weight on roads compared to the registration efes they pay, effectively with roads being subsidised by regular car drivers to pay for wear and tear caused by big trucks.
If only cycle ways were needed, the'd be built at a fraction of the cost of what it costs to build roads.
I don't get what the big deal is with having to wear a bike helmet.
I hear others cite about having to carry their helmet everywhere too - I just leave mine on my bike, with the bike lock going though the straps. Sure, someone might cut the straps or something if they were really nasty, but so far I have never had a problem - and a helmet's worth what, about $40 for a half decent one, and $15 for a kmart one.
I think the real problem is for some reason people have got it into their heads that helmets might get the fashion police onto them or something - that it's not as cool looking or something than not wearing one.
Certainly having to "carry a helmet around" is the lamest excuse for not riding a bike.
I haven't had a static address ever in my life - yet never have problems connecting from wherever I am to my home machines, thanks to DynDns.
I don't fully get what the big deal is about having a static address.
I have 12G of ram too - the thing is, I bought that 12G so I could run a few VM's for testing app installs and do other useful stuff - not to feed a ravenously hungry bloated piece of crappy eye candy. I hate the attitude that "oh users have heaps of memory now, so it doesn't matter if we write really ludicrously inefficient code and bloaty software".
I'm not saying you should have to hand optimize everything in assembler, but there definitely should be more attention paid to keeping on top of bloat - or we will never reap the benefits of faster and more power efficient CPU's - we will just be using a lot more machine cycles and ram do do stuff in the same time and using the same amount of power.
Call me a cynic, but I think everyone wised up to the fact that they weren't really buying solid gold toilet seats, so they had to find something else in the budget to fund all that black ops stuff...
One of the most memorable games from my youth was an RPG called Ultima IV. In the previous games in the series, you just stole all the gold and levelled entire friendly towns for profit, once you got strong enough - no consequences.
In Ultima IV however all of a sudden there were consequences for mis-deeds. you could still lie, cheat, steal, and lay waste to the friendly citizens, but there were in-game consequences that cost you. Of course a central theme to the game was to become virtuous, but I think more games could do with some of these mechanisms - allow free action still, but make it have consequences.
Actually I think if they just got laid once in a while it'd reduce their effectiveness. Unfortunately for them their belief system makes them think the only way it's going to happen is to get married or get martyred.
Given their apparently poor respect of women, the former isn't likely without some kind of arranged marriage.
While you are at it, test for basic empathy and compassion too.
Who exactly should get a head start, and a head start on whom?
The journal publishers? Researchers sometimes even have to pay a fee to submit papers for publication in the first place.
The peer reviewers? they aren't paid by the journals or by the researchers.
The researchers? they have already processed the information, which is why they are submitting for publication.
Leaving a 6 month clause just begs to have endless lobbying to get it extended to 12 months, then 2 years, etc.
If you are actively researching in a field, you will still be forced to get the expensive peer reviewed journals, usually bundled with a bunch of other journals you don't want at all, but are more or less forced to buy because of the prohibitive cost of buying articles one at a time.
Journal Publishers basically get all the content written and submitted by scientists for free, selected by peer reviewed by another bunch of scientists for free, then slap a cover on a bunch of them and sell them at obscene prices. The price increases have way outstripped the CPI since the mid 80's and it's way past time the greedy bastards got a shake up.
Not nearly enough.
At any rate, it's about equivalent to half a kilo of TNT, which contains about 4.184MJ of energy. Got a long way to go before it's going to be useful for blowing up even small asteroids, let alone planets.
Roads, like all networks are a natural monopoly, and thus should be run by the state.
Unless you want to allow for competition that is by having a second road network constructed and maintained alongside the first. Then you could have a dupoly.
Services on networks should be privatized (bus services, mail services, electricity generation, internet service provision, telephone, etc) but the physical network structure itself should be in the hands of the public, via that trustworthy custodian, the government. If you don't like how they run things, vote in a new bunch.