I had some fantastic college professors - music, costume and apparel history, classical greek and roman literature. The one subject where I never ONCE had a professor from whom I learned a single thing was CS.
I took a horrible intro class where the prof was the golf coach, and half the classes were cancelled because they had practice or a match (he also couldn't come up with a definition for what a "constant" is, as compared to a variable).
Next two were lecture classes given by someone who would give us a skeleton program and have us fill the rest of it in... not a problem once you found the multiple (and not intentional) mistakes in EVERY code example he gave us.
Next two classes were taught by a prof who decided that he wouldn't actually go over what we'd need to know for tests and homework... we'd take tests, and there would be all kinds of things that no one had ever seen before. We figured out that the only way he'd tell us what would be on those tests was if we spent another 3-4 hours in his office every week, on top of class time and any independent study.
Last class was a networks class where we didn't cover a single relevant topic. We talked a lot about the ARPAnet. Forget current networks.
It wasn't that I wasn't interested by the subject matter, because I certainly was (the day I figured out recursion despite the ramblings of my professor was a very proud day), but it became very difficult to enjoy the subject when the classes were so very painful. I guess I'm another example of how useless college CS courses are - if you want to learn it, learn by doing.
When I was in high school we had these weekly English writing labs. However, every so often we would graduate from that hell into the amusing world of the "Computer Writing Lab". The class would trudge down to the lab, with its 30 or so horribly outdated machines that possessed just enough oomph to run a word processing program... of course, this was where the fun began. As our teacher would take half an hour to figure out how to either turn on the computer or insert a disk, the students would all conspire to find ways to crash the things. And then we would raise our hands with a desperate "it won't work," and watch our tech challenged teacher try to fix it. (It was high school, we needed such distractions)
Nice to see that some real live computer teachers in high schools don't come close to knowing what they're doing either.:)
As someone who WAS raised on MTV and other such abominations, I'd also like to say that I didn't think 2001 was a particularly slow-moving film. I had seen it at least 20 times without reading the book (I enjoyed it even though I only partially understood it), and I have seen it a number of times after reading the book.
The science fiction genre does not have to mean action / adventure. Not every scifi movie has to have a big laser fight or chase scene, and 2001 certainly didn't need anything like that to be a great film.
The college I went to recently banned napster, citing network lag, etc, as the cause.
Of course, they also just upgraded the entire network last summer ('99), and I believe they banned it very early in this school year without even seeing if napster usage would in fact noticeably lag the network. Curious.
I would have loved to see their network stats during those couple of days... seriously wondering if they're just using "oh, the network can't handle it" as an excuse because administration is afraid they'll get sued someday.
my personal wish list for netscape is simply that i don't want the browser (and the email client on occasion) to crash EVERY time i use it. that wouldn't even be so bad, but then the "Feedback Agent" pops up, and while it looks helpful, i personally can never ever get it to actually send my little "here's what i was doing when your product crashed (again)" report.
there are tons of distributed projects like this out there. whether or not they're more "useful" is anybody's guess.
Entropia looks interesting, but i'm not a member and don't know any of the specific projects off hand. There's also distributed.net, which does code cracking. again, not sure it's more useful...
do a search on most search engines for distributed projects, there's a whole list.
i'm not all that up on my tech stuff/ licensing/etc., so thanks for clearing that up... makes WAY more sense than what i thought.
sometimes, i'm just not all that bright. it's a gift.
From The Radio Shack website:
"Simply use:CueCat to swipe a product code in advertising or catalogs, and:CueCat will link you instantly to a relevant Web page data at RadioShack.com."
Ok, this is admittedly kinda cool. However, a problem will possibly arise if any other companies want to implement a similar interactive catalog.
Scenario:
Radio Shack patents:CueCat. Other catalog companies start using similar technology. Radio Shack sues. Say hello to legal brouhaha!
I wonder if they're planning to let other businesses get in on this in the long run.
On one hand, there is the "tv show to movie" curse of doom.
On the other hand, The Simpsons already gets away with tons upon tons of jabs at Fox, Disney (how they weren't sued for the Itchy and Scratchy Land episode, I'll never know). Imagine what they could do without having to get by network censors. And especially if they could retrieve some of the early writers... there's definitely potential here.
I've got one of those too. It's made me a lot lazier...:)
The really nice thing about this thing is that all of the keys are customizable - if I don't want the "email" key to open my email program, I can fix it so that it opens something else. It doesn't look like that's the case with the AOL version. It will be interesting to see how much, if any, freedom will be given to users who have this thing as far as letting them customize - right now it looks limited (to put it mildly)
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I had some fantastic college professors - music, costume and apparel history, classical greek and roman literature. The one subject where I never ONCE had a professor from whom I learned a single thing was CS.
I took a horrible intro class where the prof was the golf coach, and half the classes were cancelled because they had practice or a match (he also couldn't come up with a definition for what a "constant" is, as compared to a variable).
Next two were lecture classes given by someone who would give us a skeleton program and have us fill the rest of it in... not a problem once you found the multiple (and not intentional) mistakes in EVERY code example he gave us.
Next two classes were taught by a prof who decided that he wouldn't actually go over what we'd need to know for tests and homework... we'd take tests, and there would be all kinds of things that no one had ever seen before. We figured out that the only way he'd tell us what would be on those tests was if we spent another 3-4 hours in his office every week, on top of class time and any independent study.
Last class was a networks class where we didn't cover a single relevant topic. We talked a lot about the ARPAnet. Forget current networks.
It wasn't that I wasn't interested by the subject matter, because I certainly was (the day I figured out recursion despite the ramblings of my professor was a very proud day), but it became very difficult to enjoy the subject when the classes were so very painful. I guess I'm another example of how useless college CS courses are - if you want to learn it, learn by doing.
When I was in high school we had these weekly English writing labs. However, every so often we would graduate from that hell into the amusing world of the "Computer Writing Lab". The class would trudge down to the lab, with its 30 or so horribly outdated machines that possessed just enough oomph to run a word processing program... of course, this was where the fun began. As our teacher would take half an hour to figure out how to either turn on the computer or insert a disk, the students would all conspire to find ways to crash the things. And then we would raise our hands with a desperate "it won't work," and watch our tech challenged teacher try to fix it. (It was high school, we needed such distractions)
:)
Nice to see that some real live computer teachers in high schools don't come close to knowing what they're doing either.
As someone who WAS raised on MTV and other such abominations, I'd also like to say that I didn't think 2001 was a particularly slow-moving film. I had seen it at least 20 times without reading the book (I enjoyed it even though I only partially understood it), and I have seen it a number of times after reading the book.
The science fiction genre does not have to mean action / adventure. Not every scifi movie has to have a big laser fight or chase scene, and 2001 certainly didn't need anything like that to be a great film.
The college I went to recently banned napster, citing network lag, etc, as the cause.
Of course, they also just upgraded the entire network last summer ('99), and I believe they banned it very early in this school year without even seeing if napster usage would in fact noticeably lag the network. Curious.
I would have loved to see their network stats during those couple of days... seriously wondering if they're just using "oh, the network can't handle it" as an excuse because administration is afraid they'll get sued someday.
gotta love higher ed. sometimes...
my personal wish list for netscape is simply that i don't want the browser (and the email client on occasion) to crash EVERY time i use it. that wouldn't even be so bad, but then the "Feedback Agent" pops up, and while it looks helpful, i personally can never ever get it to actually send my little "here's what i was doing when your product crashed (again)" report.
Entropia looks interesting, but i'm not a member and don't know any of the specific projects off hand. There's also distributed.net, which does code cracking. again, not sure it's more useful...
do a search on most search engines for distributed projects, there's a whole list.
i'm not all that up on my tech stuff/ licensing/etc., so thanks for clearing that up... makes WAY more sense than what i thought. sometimes, i'm just not all that bright. it's a gift.
From The Radio Shack website: "Simply use :CueCat to swipe a product code in advertising or catalogs, and :CueCat will link you instantly to a relevant Web page data at RadioShack.com."
Ok, this is admittedly kinda cool. However, a problem will possibly arise if any other companies want to implement a similar interactive catalog.
Scenario:
Radio Shack patents :CueCat. Other catalog companies start using similar technology. Radio Shack sues. Say hello to legal brouhaha!
I wonder if they're planning to let other businesses get in on this in the long run.
On one hand, there is the "tv show to movie" curse of doom.
On the other hand, The Simpsons already gets away with tons upon tons of jabs at Fox, Disney (how they weren't sued for the Itchy and Scratchy Land episode, I'll never know). Imagine what they could do without having to get by network censors. And especially if they could retrieve some of the early writers... there's definitely potential here.
I've got one of those too. It's made me a lot lazier... :)
The really nice thing about this thing is that all of the keys are customizable - if I don't want the "email" key to open my email program, I can fix it so that it opens something else. It doesn't look like that's the case with the AOL version. It will be interesting to see how much, if any, freedom will be given to users who have this thing as far as letting them customize - right now it looks limited (to put it mildly)