A bigger issue than keystrokes changing (and have they, really?) is the move away from keyboard accelerators toward mouse UIs and (ugh) gesture-based interfaces. I don't want Windows to suddenly minimize all my other windows when it thinks I'm shaking my title bar - I have hotkeys for that sort of stuff already. But they've moved to eliminate very useful hotkeys like alt-space and worse, have moved to non-deterministic interfaces like the travesty that is the Windows Search function on the Vista/7 start menus.
Here's a fun test: on a Vista/7 machine, close your eyes and tap the Windows key, and then type "iTunes". Hit return. See what actually launches. On the last three computers I tested this on, it didn't actually launch iTunes. Neat, isn't it? And you might have been used to typing iTunes to launch it, but Windows suddenly gave a document first priority in launching.
>>Consciousness is weird. Quantum theory is weird. Therefore quantum theory must explain consciousness.
Quantum Theory is the new "magic" for all sorts of New Age thinkers.
Penrose at least proposes a mechanism of action (quantum tube thingies), which has the benefit of at least giving his theory something more than hand-waving to base his theory on, but has the downside of having absolutely no evidence to support it from studies of the structure of the brain.
Penrose is a smart guy (black holes and tiling and all that) but he does like to propose some rather outlandish things in his free time. Might be a correlation between the two, who knows.
>>I myself like widescreen, after all our EYES are oriented on a "wide" manner. I could understand if you were some type of fish with vertical oriented eyes, but humans can see to the side better than up and down.
Que? Our area of focus is circular, which matches a 4:3 monitor better than a widescreen.
The death of 4:3 is one of my least favorite trends in technology. The only benefit from widescreen is that you can put two documents side by side on the same monitor.
All my professors (except one) in the CS department wrote their own code, and were, generally speaking, elite hacker ninjas. People like Bennet Yee (bsy) and Stephen Savage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Savage) were younger, brilliant professors when I was there, but even the older chaps kept their hand in the game. The only one I knew that hadn't written code in a decade went on to become a high level administrator.
The professors (and the TAs) rigorously enforced good coding practices throughout the undergraduate curriculum, so you did learn about "writing good code" in the program. Very much so - when I became a TA myself, I'd slap down people for writing sloppy code. We'd do code audits with the undergraduates as part of the grading process, and I'd skim their code and be able to tell them three different ways their code would break before I even compiled it. (Good experience for me, too, come to think of it.) It's a shame you didn't get this experience as part of your college career - it was amazingly useful for me.
I agree somewhat with your sympathy that colleges should spend a bit more time on practical stuff (cough, databases) which you can teach general/theoretical concepts about (3rd normal form, etc.) which will increase your usefulness in the real world. At UCSD, it was an elective, whereas compilers was a mandatory class. While learning how to write a compiler (and all the related concepts) was in retrospect much more useful than I thought it'd be at the time, it still wasn't as applicable as databases.
To be fair, the people in Ohio are suspected first, and THEN their electricity records are being pulled to confirm suspicions. Whereas in Canada, it looks like any random citizen's electricity usage can be monitored by the government.
In America, they ruled the DEA scanning for heat signatures from random houses violated the 4th Amendment.
In Canada, I'm surprised they care at all, given that when I was in Vancouver last week, I saw no less than three people smoking pot openly on the streets. One of them was while I was trying to eat sushi outdoors, which was rather annoying. Pot may decrease violence in its users... but there might be a Conservation of Rage principle at work.
>>But then they teach all math and theory while expecting you to pick up the actual languages on your own
"All" math and theory? I doubt it, unless your CS program was radically different from mine (at UC San Diego), which offers intro classes and labs on actual programming. All theory isn't much use if you can't code your theory into an executable. Generally speaking, while most intro classes aren't marketed as "programming" classes, but rather "intro to data structures" or something like that, in practice they're going to be teaching their students the language of choice, and proper coding techniques.
My roommate absolutely could not get it (programming, that is). I was an undergraduate TA for an intro computer science class (CSE12 - second quarter CS) for a couple quarters at UC San Diego. Despite his attendance in class, and extensive sit-down time with him helping every step along the way, he failed the course two quarters in a row. It was like a mental block was preventing him from understanding programming. (Despite me failing him, we're still friends.)
Fast forward a few years, he retakes it and suddenly everything makes sense to him and he did swimmingly well. He went on to become an AP Computer Science instructor at a high school. I'm not sure what changed in the interim, but it does mean there is hope.
That said, from a CS department point of view, I could generally tell who'd be successful in the program just by asking the incoming freshman who had tried programming or modding in their free time before. Not because of the experience, but because of the mindset.
>>As for dissent being allowed, if what you ask still assumes the inherent superiority of the religious (ie, guess and hope) methodology it implicitly supports all their assumptions and feelings.
It's hard being a member of The Bears Fan Club if you don't like Da Bears, I guess. And they'd less tolerate questioning Mike Ditka's wisdom than the questions you'd hear thrown at my pastor.
>>The mainstream religions have caused more death and suffering in the last century alone than all
Wow. No. Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid, man.
Communism and socialism killed, what? 150 million people? Are you honestly going to say that "mainstream religions" caused more death and suffering than 150 million deaths?
>>Is that the same 'reality' your god/whatever exists in?
What reality are you living in, in which mainstream religions caused more than 150 million deaths?
But they're subsidized as much by the big airlines as by the federal government. While you have paid federal employees at the gates, remember, you get to pay $20 or so on every ticket you purchase for the right to get Groped At The Gate (sm TSA).
>>Whether they would be more than a travel niche without taxpayer support is not a simple question to answer.
It's actually not a hard question. Subsidies mainly keep the smaller airports open - if all federal subsidies ended, you'd lose air service in Evansville, not Los Angeles.
There's the rub in the logic. Mass transit can't pay for itself without relying on government money, aka taxes. Therefore we should continue to use roads/bridges/highways that are paid for out of taxes. Of course most of those taxes were paid half a decade ago or more and we're merely maintaining the public infrastructure on a shoestring budget.
Apparently I didn't make the difference clear enough - roads are paid for almost entirely by the users of the roads. Rails are paid for by all taxpayers, including those that do not use the rails.
If you don't drive here in California, you don't pay for the roads. This is fair. If you don't take the BART, but live in the SF Bay Area, you get to pay for BART anyway. This is unfair.
The fact that taxes are involved in both cases just is an attempt to obfuscate the matter.
>>...which is what he's saying. Unless tolls fund the majority of roads (I'm ignoring state vs. city roads here), then it's just like rail. The government funds the infrastructure to keep things moving.
No.
Gasoline taxes and registration fees ARE usage taxes. In other words, the people using the roads pay for them. If you don't drive a car in California, you by and large don't pay for the roads. (With some small exceptions, like putting roads into suburbs.)
Rail and light rail systems, by contrast, are not paid for by usage fees (i.e. ticket sales, mostly), but are subsidized by the general taxpayer base, including people that don't ride them.
There's a fundamental difference there you're missing. The first case is fair, the second unfair.
Everyone has priorities for their free time. If you don't want to spend your free time writing code, that's perfectly acceptable. Sports, ACM, etc., are all great things to do, and I, in fact, did them on top of writing code for fun.
Just don't pretend that people have no free time. That's a convenient lie that everyone always tells in our society, but it really just means they don't want to do whatever it is they're talking about.
Even if you think it's just 30 hours free a week, 30 hours x 50 weeks = 1500 hours of free time a year.
Writing the first version of CustomTF took me two pretty intensive days over a weekend. Maybe 20 hours to get the basic structure in place, and maybe a couple hundred hours after that fleshing it out.
You're telling me that a person can't find a hundred hours in a year with 1500 hours of free time? That's just bullshit. What you actually mean is that he wants to do other things with his free time and not work on a project. Which is fine. But don't pretend that he couldn't find the time if he wanted.
>>>>(It's not work, in any event, it's play.) >>Oh bullshit.
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A bigger issue than keystrokes changing (and have they, really?) is the move away from keyboard accelerators toward mouse UIs and (ugh) gesture-based interfaces. I don't want Windows to suddenly minimize all my other windows when it thinks I'm shaking my title bar - I have hotkeys for that sort of stuff already. But they've moved to eliminate very useful hotkeys like alt-space and worse, have moved to non-deterministic interfaces like the travesty that is the Windows Search function on the Vista/7 start menus.
Here's a fun test: on a Vista/7 machine, close your eyes and tap the Windows key, and then type "iTunes". Hit return. See what actually launches. On the last three computers I tested this on, it didn't actually launch iTunes. Neat, isn't it? And you might have been used to typing iTunes to launch it, but Windows suddenly gave a document first priority in launching.
Non-determinism is the bane of UIs.
>>Consciousness is weird. Quantum theory is weird. Therefore quantum theory must explain consciousness.
Quantum Theory is the new "magic" for all sorts of New Age thinkers.
Penrose at least proposes a mechanism of action (quantum tube thingies), which has the benefit of at least giving his theory something more than hand-waving to base his theory on, but has the downside of having absolutely no evidence to support it from studies of the structure of the brain.
Penrose is a smart guy (black holes and tiling and all that) but he does like to propose some rather outlandish things in his free time. Might be a correlation between the two, who knows.
>>I myself like widescreen, after all our EYES are oriented on a "wide" manner. I could understand if you were some type of fish with vertical oriented eyes, but humans can see to the side better than up and down.
Que? Our area of focus is circular, which matches a 4:3 monitor better than a widescreen.
The death of 4:3 is one of my least favorite trends in technology. The only benefit from widescreen is that you can put two documents side by side on the same monitor.
Thank you for your reply, sir.
You can leave your nerd card by the front desk.
What college did you go to, out of curiosity?
All my professors (except one) in the CS department wrote their own code, and were, generally speaking, elite hacker ninjas. People like Bennet Yee (bsy) and Stephen Savage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Savage) were younger, brilliant professors when I was there, but even the older chaps kept their hand in the game. The only one I knew that hadn't written code in a decade went on to become a high level administrator.
The professors (and the TAs) rigorously enforced good coding practices throughout the undergraduate curriculum, so you did learn about "writing good code" in the program. Very much so - when I became a TA myself, I'd slap down people for writing sloppy code. We'd do code audits with the undergraduates as part of the grading process, and I'd skim their code and be able to tell them three different ways their code would break before I even compiled it. (Good experience for me, too, come to think of it.) It's a shame you didn't get this experience as part of your college career - it was amazingly useful for me.
I agree somewhat with your sympathy that colleges should spend a bit more time on practical stuff (cough, databases) which you can teach general/theoretical concepts about (3rd normal form, etc.) which will increase your usefulness in the real world. At UCSD, it was an elective, whereas compilers was a mandatory class. While learning how to write a compiler (and all the related concepts) was in retrospect much more useful than I thought it'd be at the time, it still wasn't as applicable as databases.
In America, they ruled the DEA scanning for heat signatures from random houses violated the 4th Amendment.
In Canada, I'm surprised they care at all, given that when I was in Vancouver last week, I saw no less than three people smoking pot openly on the streets. One of them was while I was trying to eat sushi outdoors, which was rather annoying. Pot may decrease violence in its users... but there might be a Conservation of Rage principle at work.
Don't forget that GRRM finally finished Dance of Dragons, which will be out July 2.
It truly must be the end days.
>>But then they teach all math and theory while expecting you to pick up the actual languages on your own
"All" math and theory? I doubt it, unless your CS program was radically different from mine (at UC San Diego), which offers intro classes and labs on actual programming. All theory isn't much use if you can't code your theory into an executable. Generally speaking, while most intro classes aren't marketed as "programming" classes, but rather "intro to data structures" or something like that, in practice they're going to be teaching their students the language of choice, and proper coding techniques.
>>Some folks are just not capable of CS.
My roommate absolutely could not get it (programming, that is). I was an undergraduate TA for an intro computer science class (CSE12 - second quarter CS) for a couple quarters at UC San Diego. Despite his attendance in class, and extensive sit-down time with him helping every step along the way, he failed the course two quarters in a row. It was like a mental block was preventing him from understanding programming. (Despite me failing him, we're still friends.)
Fast forward a few years, he retakes it and suddenly everything makes sense to him and he did swimmingly well. He went on to become an AP Computer Science instructor at a high school. I'm not sure what changed in the interim, but it does mean there is hope.
That said, from a CS department point of view, I could generally tell who'd be successful in the program just by asking the incoming freshman who had tried programming or modding in their free time before. Not because of the experience, but because of the mindset.
>>I think it's highly unlikely that road taxes of various kinds ever generate enough cash to actually maintain and build said roads.
Instead of guessing, why don't you look at the budget of your state?
I'm mostly familiar with my own state (California). Your mileage may vary.
Maintenance is only 33% of our budget, with 47% going toward "Rehab, Construction, and Lighting".
You can read more here: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tpp/offices/osp/ctp2025_files/ctp07.pdf
>>As for dissent being allowed, if what you ask still assumes the inherent superiority of the religious (ie, guess and hope) methodology it implicitly supports all their assumptions and feelings.
It's hard being a member of The Bears Fan Club if you don't like Da Bears, I guess. And they'd less tolerate questioning Mike Ditka's wisdom than the questions you'd hear thrown at my pastor.
>>The mainstream religions have caused more death and suffering in the last century alone than all
Wow. No. Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid, man.
Communism and socialism killed, what? 150 million people? Are you honestly going to say that "mainstream religions" caused more death and suffering than 150 million deaths?
>>Is that the same 'reality' your god/whatever exists in?
What reality are you living in, in which mainstream religions caused more than 150 million deaths?
Check your brain, brother.
For small plane aviation, sure.
But they're subsidized as much by the big airlines as by the federal government. While you have paid federal employees at the gates, remember, you get to pay $20 or so on every ticket you purchase for the right to get Groped At The Gate (sm TSA).
>>Whether they would be more than a travel niche without taxpayer support is not a simple question to answer.
It's actually not a hard question. Subsidies mainly keep the smaller airports open - if all federal subsidies ended, you'd lose air service in Evansville, not Los Angeles.
Apparently I didn't make the difference clear enough - roads are paid for almost entirely by the users of the roads. Rails are paid for by all taxpayers, including those that do not use the rails.
If you don't drive here in California, you don't pay for the roads. This is fair.
If you don't take the BART, but live in the SF Bay Area, you get to pay for BART anyway. This is unfair.
The fact that taxes are involved in both cases just is an attempt to obfuscate the matter.
>>...which is what he's saying. Unless tolls fund the majority of roads (I'm ignoring state vs. city roads here), then it's just like rail. The government funds the infrastructure to keep things moving.
No.
Gasoline taxes and registration fees ARE usage taxes. In other words, the people using the roads pay for them. If you don't drive a car in California, you by and large don't pay for the roads. (With some small exceptions, like putting roads into suburbs.)
Rail and light rail systems, by contrast, are not paid for by usage fees (i.e. ticket sales, mostly), but are subsidized by the general taxpayer base, including people that don't ride them.
There's a fundamental difference there you're missing. The first case is fair, the second unfair.
You'd be incorrect. Road systems are more than paid for by their various taxes and fees (gas and registration, mainly).
I don't think anyone rational would say all possibilities have equal probability. That's total nonsense.
That said, don't be an ignoramus about the problem of induction.
FFXIV was horrendous
FFXIII was horrible
Front Mission Evolved wanted to make me kill people in real life
You know your company is in trouble when people start running out of bad adjectives to describe your games.
Thanks for repeating what I said elsewhere here?
>>Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.
Indeed. That's why we need to bring back the USSR so they can run all our nuke plants.
The lack of a profit motive made all their plants super-safe.
Doesn' tolerate dissent? Perhaps some churches are like that. Mine encourages questioning.
Cults are not the same as mainstream religions. In the real world (i.e. outside the fevered imaginations of atheists), the difference is very clear.
I'm sorry if that disappoints you, but reality doesn't conform to your prejudices.
IIRC, there was a movement to get it named the hella-byte. (Or hecka-byte, maybe.)
Everyone has priorities for their free time. If you don't want to spend your free time writing code, that's perfectly acceptable. Sports, ACM, etc., are all great things to do, and I, in fact, did them on top of writing code for fun.
Just don't pretend that people have no free time. That's a convenient lie that everyone always tells in our society, but it really just means they don't want to do whatever it is they're talking about.
Even if you think it's just 30 hours free a week, 30 hours x 50 weeks = 1500 hours of free time a year.
Writing the first version of CustomTF took me two pretty intensive days over a weekend. Maybe 20 hours to get the basic structure in place, and maybe a couple hundred hours after that fleshing it out.
You're telling me that a person can't find a hundred hours in a year with 1500 hours of free time? That's just bullshit. What you actually mean is that he wants to do other things with his free time and not work on a project. Which is fine. But don't pretend that he couldn't find the time if he wanted.
>>>>(It's not work, in any event, it's play.)
>>Oh bullshit.
Precisely my point.
Actually, come to think of it, I don't know for sure.
But her attitudes about a lot of things seems akin to the statements on here.