Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there. Which is why the web itself horrifies many teachers. They've been complaining about all the amateur "scholars" and pseudo-objective material on the web for years. All Wikipedia has done is caused a lot of individual informational web sites to be coalesced into one.
Hell, blocking it risks creating an atmosphere where students become complacent and trust every source they come across "Created"? As long as I can remember, students have assumed that certain sources — dictionaries, almanacs, encylopedias — are infallible. And of course they're anything but.
No, we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources, how to research, and what citation means. Failure to do so will just create yet another generation of research-i-tards that can't find information to save their life. Right you are, and ironically enough Wikipedia is the perfect tool for that purpose. It's very flaws make it an excellent place to teach students why some information is good and some is not so good.
Unfortunately, schools are not set up to teach this kind of critical thinking. Schools are judged by the number of "facts" they pound into a student's head, not the intellectual skills they really need.
Of course it's designed to "ridicule the discussion". What's being ridiculed is the idea that previous associations permanently determines who you are. It's stupid to call the Pope a Nazi just because he wore a swastika for a few weeks for exactly the same reason it's stupid to assume that anybody who ever worked for a given industry is a shill for that industry.
The irony here is that you love to whine about imaginary "double standards" applied by people you disagree with, but you yourself see no reason to apply standards consistently.
Typical right-wing regurgispeak. Don't respond to the issues at hand. Just accuse the other side of having a double standard.
You're right about one thing: it's not fair to assume that Dick Cheney is a shill for Haliburton just because he used to work there. Except that none of the criticism of Mr. Undisclosed Location is based on that assumption. It's based on his shill-like behavior since he became VP. And not just with respect to Haliburton, but with respect to the entire oil-and-gas industry. The whole Bush administration has that problem, not just Dick.
What's particularly obnoxious is that you ignore a relevant comparison with a character who is very conservative indeed: the Pope. Or are you arguing, "Once a Nazi, always a Nazi"? For my part, I haven't seen His Holiness beat up any Jews lately, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
You remind me of the guy who tried to convince me that anybody who could drive could learn to fly. Hello! Three dimensions versus two! Absence of road signs! And where are the little dotted lines?
There's more here than "practice". I taught myself to program in language like Fortran and BASIC pretty much by reading the language manuals. In that realm, coding was just a matter of thinking of data as bits and figuring out the right way to use code to tweak the bits. Not that different from doing it yourself with a pencil and paper, just a lot faster.
OOP was a little harder, because it required more abstract thinking. I didn't really get it until I studied C++, because that language allowed me to think of an object as a kind of data structure. Which is precisely why most OOP programming is done in "mixed" languages like C++, Java, and C#, not "pure" OOP languages like Smalltalk.
With functional programming there's yet another level of abstraction, and I've studied it off and on for years. I've never achieved, never even begun to achieve, the skill level I have with procedural and OOP languages. My skill level in languages like Java and Visual Basic is not high (that's why I'm a technical writer instead of a programmer) but at least I can hack out simple utilities and examples. In functional languages, I can't even make change
Every applied science has its scientists (who dream up the basic science), engineers (who turn the abstract science into concrete technology) and mechanics (who tinker with the technology, fix stuff that's not quite working right, and deal with all the low level shit that scientists and engineers are bored by). That's kind of a simplification, especially in computer science, where most people fall into more than one category, and often all three. But in my case, I'm a mechanic, pure and simple. It's taken me a long time to learn my limitations, so don't pretend you understand them better than I do!
Dude, you think C and Fortran are the main alternatives to functional languages? You're about 20 years out of date! Nowadays, the Big Thing is OOP languages. Everybody programs in C++, Java, or C# these days.
You do have a point. I wrote the Concurrency chapter in The Java Tutorial (yeah, yeah, it wasn't my idea to assign a bunch of tech writers to write what's essentially a CS textbook), struggled for 15 pages just to discuss the basics of the topic, and ran out of time to cover more than half of what I should have. Most of what I wrote was about keeping your threads consistent, statewise. All of which is irrelevant to functional programming, because functional programs don't have state! If Java were a functional language, the whole chapter would have been a paragraph. A short one.
But getting programmers to give up stateful programming is not gonna happen. Because most programmers are just not Mr. Spock enough to create whole programs that all logic and no variables. Yes, I know, functional languages have variables too. But those variables are just fancy semantic shortcuts for the lambda of whatever. To most programmers, a "variable" isn't a symbol, it's a place where you store information. Doing without all the cubbyholes of information that are used in procedural programming is just too difficult for most of us.
(Somebody's going to reply, "It's not that hard! You just..." Dude, you have the Abstract Math gene. Most of us don't. Go away.)
Also, buffer overflows and double frees are a symptom of languages where the application programmer is responsible for managing their own memory. That's the case in C++ (and yes, C and Fortran) but not in more recent languages.
Is there some reason these haxxors couldn't have had as much fun with Access Linux? Which is what the original PalmOS has been evolving into.
The news here is not that Palm is going to Linux. The news is that they're developing their own, rather than using Access's. In effect, they're recreating the OS department that they spun off as just a few years ago. It's amusing how many corporate machinations end up with "Oops! Never mind!"
Oh, please. It's not as if Nintendo is have trouble manufacturing boxes. They've simply got more demand than they can be expected to supply. Those games have plenty of players; they just don't have as many as they would if the Nintendo could magically create new factories out of thin air.
The Wii was a big gamble for Nintendo. The fact that it paid off off better than they anticipated is nothing but good news for them.
Maybe fun really is more important than pretty? I think you're missing the point. Both platforms are designed for "fun". They just differ on how you go about providing it. Sony just assumed that more fun meant better graphics, just as it always has. Nintendo decided that they'd already gone far enough in that direction, and decided to get clever with the interaction side of things.
Also, remember that the Wii's target audience isn't exactly the same as the PS3's. The Wii was designed to attract people who have no interest in traditional twitch-factor video games. (At which it seems to have exceeded even its designers' best hopes!) Even if the Wii had not been invented, those extra PS3s would probably still be gathering dust.
It will also take an attitude adjustment by teachers and administrators. Too many of them are obsessed with being in control. That's not something you're going to change through litigation.
That story is far from the strangest Shockley story I've heard. Did you know that when he was small child, he got a splinter in his foot, extracted it, measured, labeled it, and filed it away? It turned up in his effects when he died, along with a lot of other stuff any sane person would have thrown away.
One biographer quoted a Shockley acquaintance (no friends, alas) as saying he had "Negative Charisma." Interesting interview here:
Shockley may have a place in history (both good and bad), but not everything he touched does. This isn't the place where he said, "Eureka! A vacuum tube without a vacuum!" It's just a place where he briefly ran an unsuccessful business. TFA's claim that this is "the birthplace of Silicon Valley" is just a cheap attempt to catch eyeballs.
While the full cause of the problem is not yet known, failure to account for the asymmetric loads in the engineering design of the magnet appears to be a likely cause. The test configuration corresponds to conditions that occur during a magnet quench, when a superconducting magnet suddenly "goes normal," releasing large amounts of energy. They may also occur during magnet cooldown and during certain other conditions such as refrigerator failure. I consider myself reasonably technical, but I find this "information" pretty fucking opaque. Did somebody forget to plug in the refrigerator? You can hardly blame the "popular press" for failing to penetrate this kind of clunkspeak.
I have no respect for people that don't try to understand the sensitivity of avionics and then reject every technical argument as "political cover-up". People like conspiracy theories. They're more emotionally satisfying than banal technical explanations. Take a popular urban legend, find somebody who believes it, and try to pick hobs in it. You'll get nowhere.
My favorite example is the one about the bodies of all the dead construction workers buried in Hoover Dam, supposedly to conceal the high rate of accidental deaths on that project. Construction engineers have no patience with that one -- the builders went to a lot of trouble to control the consistency of the concrete. But that little fact does nothing to deter people who like the story -- which seems to he most people.
And China, while a Kyoto signatory, definitely doesn't really believe in it. Last year they installed more coal fired power plant capacity than England's total plant. Here's a more graphic way to put it: China opens a new coal-fired power plant every three days.
If it were simple economics, it would have happened 10 years ago. There was (and is) a lot of resistance to admitting that Windows is an OS you have to support. This is true both inside and outside Sun. It's particularly true on Slashdot!
Also, building systems based on commodity chip is not the same thing as being an "Intel box shifter". (Or in this case, an AMD box shifter.) There's a lot more to designing a high-end server than picking the CPU!
If you have the right hardware, you don't need to be on-site. Serious servers come with something called lights out management. This utilizes a self-contained ROM-based system that's always running, even when the main system is shut down (or displaying a BSOD). As long as the system is getting power and there's an Ethernet cable connected to its management port, a remote user can do anything that an onsite user can do, provided it doesn't require opening the cover of the system. You can even re-install the operating system, used remote ISO and floppy images.
I'm the documentation lead for a server with a LOM that's very fancy indeed. There's a graphic terminal service that supports things like interacting with the BIOS, or logging into the server's GUI. There's a LOM command line you can access using a serial connection or over SSH. The LOM also supports IPMI, which is kind of a basic necessity when you have a lot of servers, even if they're all down the hall.
This server is certified for Windows 2003 (and I understand a lot of our customers buy it for that fell purpose), so it would be ideal for Microsoft's container. However, we have a our own competing container product.
And yes, the company I work for is Sun, and yes, we're selling Windows-based systems now. Shocking, isn't it?
Nobody tries to be an asshole. Except on MTV, of course.
"Sidetone" isn't a "more proper term". It's just a more technical way of describing an effect that is perfectly well described by "feedback". (At least if your audience doesn't consist of electrical engineers.) Hence my rude description of you. People who insist on using technical terms just because they're "more proper" are irritating and clueless.
And before you dismiss me as an illiterate technerd, you should know that I make my living explaining obscure complicated shit — excuse me, I mean "writing technical documentation". That means I use words like "sidetone" a lot. But I never use a technical word when an ordinary word does the job. The purpose of my documentation is to help people figure stuff out, not to show off how many obscure words I know. And I probably know more of them than you do.
Now, if you had told me that "sidetone" is the technical term for the feedback that a phone handset provides, I would have said, "Hey, that's interesting, thanks for educating me." But when you say, "Hey, you yahoo, it's not feedback, it's sidetone," you're not instructing me, you're being an asshole. Which is the exact opposite of mentoring.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, schools are not set up to teach this kind of critical thinking. Schools are judged by the number of "facts" they pound into a student's head, not the intellectual skills they really need.
And my whole point is that the "disparity" is in your imagination.
Of course it's designed to "ridicule the discussion". What's being ridiculed is the idea that previous associations permanently determines who you are. It's stupid to call the Pope a Nazi just because he wore a swastika for a few weeks for exactly the same reason it's stupid to assume that anybody who ever worked for a given industry is a shill for that industry.
The irony here is that you love to whine about imaginary "double standards" applied by people you disagree with, but you yourself see no reason to apply standards consistently.
Typical right-wing regurgispeak. Don't respond to the issues at hand. Just accuse the other side of having a double standard.
You're right about one thing: it's not fair to assume that Dick Cheney is a shill for Haliburton just because he used to work there. Except that none of the criticism of Mr. Undisclosed Location is based on that assumption. It's based on his shill-like behavior since he became VP. And not just with respect to Haliburton, but with respect to the entire oil-and-gas industry. The whole Bush administration has that problem, not just Dick.
What's particularly obnoxious is that you ignore a relevant comparison with a character who is very conservative indeed: the Pope. Or are you arguing, "Once a Nazi, always a Nazi"? For my part, I haven't seen His Holiness beat up any Jews lately, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
You remind me of the guy who tried to convince me that anybody who could drive could learn to fly. Hello! Three dimensions versus two! Absence of road signs! And where are the little dotted lines?
There's more here than "practice". I taught myself to program in language like Fortran and BASIC pretty much by reading the language manuals. In that realm, coding was just a matter of thinking of data as bits and figuring out the right way to use code to tweak the bits. Not that different from doing it yourself with a pencil and paper, just a lot faster.
OOP was a little harder, because it required more abstract thinking. I didn't really get it until I studied C++, because that language allowed me to think of an object as a kind of data structure. Which is precisely why most OOP programming is done in "mixed" languages like C++, Java, and C#, not "pure" OOP languages like Smalltalk.
With functional programming there's yet another level of abstraction, and I've studied it off and on for years. I've never achieved, never even begun to achieve, the skill level I have with procedural and OOP languages. My skill level in languages like Java and Visual Basic is not high (that's why I'm a technical writer instead of a programmer) but at least I can hack out simple utilities and examples. In functional languages, I can't even make change
Every applied science has its scientists (who dream up the basic science), engineers (who turn the abstract science into concrete technology) and mechanics (who tinker with the technology, fix stuff that's not quite working right, and deal with all the low level shit that scientists and engineers are bored by). That's kind of a simplification, especially in computer science, where most people fall into more than one category, and often all three. But in my case, I'm a mechanic, pure and simple. It's taken me a long time to learn my limitations, so don't pretend you understand them better than I do!
Let's get this straight: I don't have the dude gene, I have the cliche gene. Like everyone else at slashdot!
Dude, you think C and Fortran are the main alternatives to functional languages? You're about 20 years out of date! Nowadays, the Big Thing is OOP languages. Everybody programs in C++, Java, or C# these days.
You do have a point. I wrote the Concurrency chapter in The Java Tutorial (yeah, yeah, it wasn't my idea to assign a bunch of tech writers to write what's essentially a CS textbook), struggled for 15 pages just to discuss the basics of the topic, and ran out of time to cover more than half of what I should have. Most of what I wrote was about keeping your threads consistent, statewise. All of which is irrelevant to functional programming, because functional programs don't have state! If Java were a functional language, the whole chapter would have been a paragraph. A short one.
But getting programmers to give up stateful programming is not gonna happen. Because most programmers are just not Mr. Spock enough to create whole programs that all logic and no variables. Yes, I know, functional languages have variables too. But those variables are just fancy semantic shortcuts for the lambda of whatever. To most programmers, a "variable" isn't a symbol, it's a place where you store information. Doing without all the cubbyholes of information that are used in procedural programming is just too difficult for most of us.
(Somebody's going to reply, "It's not that hard! You just..." Dude, you have the Abstract Math gene. Most of us don't. Go away.)
Also, buffer overflows and double frees are a symptom of languages where the application programmer is responsible for managing their own memory. That's the case in C++ (and yes, C and Fortran) but not in more recent languages.
He is the third person! (Cue zither music.)
Is there some reason these haxxors couldn't have had as much fun with Access Linux? Which is what the original PalmOS has been evolving into.
The news here is not that Palm is going to Linux. The news is that they're developing their own, rather than using Access's. In effect, they're recreating the OS department that they spun off as just a few years ago. It's amusing how many corporate machinations end up with "Oops! Never mind!"
Oh, please. It's not as if Nintendo is have trouble manufacturing boxes. They've simply got more demand than they can be expected to supply. Those games have plenty of players; they just don't have as many as they would if the Nintendo could magically create new factories out of thin air.
The Wii was a big gamble for Nintendo. The fact that it paid off off better than they anticipated is nothing but good news for them.
Also, remember that the Wii's target audience isn't exactly the same as the PS3's. The Wii was designed to attract people who have no interest in traditional twitch-factor video games. (At which it seems to have exceeded even its designers' best hopes!) Even if the Wii had not been invented, those extra PS3s would probably still be gathering dust.
It will also take an attitude adjustment by teachers and administrators. Too many of them are obsessed with being in control. That's not something you're going to change through litigation.
That story is far from the strangest Shockley story I've heard. Did you know that when he was small child, he got a splinter in his foot, extracted it, measured, labeled it, and filed it away? It turned up in his effects when he died, along with a lot of other stuff any sane person would have thrown away.
0 06/1678241.htm
One biographer quoted a Shockley acquaintance (no friends, alas) as saying he had "Negative Charisma." Interesting interview here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/inconversation/stories/2
Shockley may have a place in history (both good and bad), but not everything he touched does. This isn't the place where he said, "Eureka! A vacuum tube without a vacuum!" It's just a place where he briefly ran an unsuccessful business. TFA's claim that this is "the birthplace of Silicon Valley" is just a cheap attempt to catch eyeballs.
In other words, Apple TV plays low definition in low definition. Will someone explain to me why this is newsworthy?
My favorite example is the one about the bodies of all the dead construction workers buried in Hoover Dam, supposedly to conceal the high rate of accidental deaths on that project. Construction engineers have no patience with that one -- the builders went to a lot of trouble to control the consistency of the concrete. But that little fact does nothing to deter people who like the story -- which seems to he most people.
Right on! People who believe in Global Warming are all morons! That relieves us of all responsibility for trying to understand their silly theories!
Now excuse me, I have to go shop for a bigger SUV!
If it were simple economics, it would have happened 10 years ago. There was (and is) a lot of resistance to admitting that Windows is an OS you have to support. This is true both inside and outside Sun. It's particularly true on Slashdot!
Also, building systems based on commodity chip is not the same thing as being an "Intel box shifter". (Or in this case, an AMD box shifter.) There's a lot more to designing a high-end server than picking the CPU!
If you have the right hardware, you don't need to be on-site. Serious servers come with something called lights out management. This utilizes a self-contained ROM-based system that's always running, even when the main system is shut down (or displaying a BSOD). As long as the system is getting power and there's an Ethernet cable connected to its management port, a remote user can do anything that an onsite user can do, provided it doesn't require opening the cover of the system. You can even re-install the operating system, used remote ISO and floppy images.
I'm the documentation lead for a server with a LOM that's very fancy indeed. There's a graphic terminal service that supports things like interacting with the BIOS, or logging into the server's GUI. There's a LOM command line you can access using a serial connection or over SSH. The LOM also supports IPMI, which is kind of a basic necessity when you have a lot of servers, even if they're all down the hall.
This server is certified for Windows 2003 (and I understand a lot of our customers buy it for that fell purpose), so it would be ideal for Microsoft's container. However, we have a our own competing container product.
And yes, the company I work for is Sun, and yes, we're selling Windows-based systems now. Shocking, isn't it?
Oh, go look it up for yourself. And don't forget that dictionary while you're at it.
Hey, I was just trying to mentor you.
Nobody tries to be an asshole. Except on MTV, of course.
"Sidetone" isn't a "more proper term". It's just a more technical way of describing an effect that is perfectly well described by "feedback". (At least if your audience doesn't consist of electrical engineers.) Hence my rude description of you. People who insist on using technical terms just because they're "more proper" are irritating and clueless.
And before you dismiss me as an illiterate technerd, you should know that I make my living explaining obscure complicated shit — excuse me, I mean "writing technical documentation". That means I use words like "sidetone" a lot. But I never use a technical word when an ordinary word does the job. The purpose of my documentation is to help people figure stuff out, not to show off how many obscure words I know. And I probably know more of them than you do.
Now, if you had told me that "sidetone" is the technical term for the feedback that a phone handset provides, I would have said, "Hey, that's interesting, thanks for educating me." But when you say, "Hey, you yahoo, it's not feedback, it's sidetone," you're not instructing me, you're being an asshole. Which is the exact opposite of mentoring.