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User: KalvinB

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  1. Meanwhile.... on Romney Taps Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan As Running Mate · · Score: 1

    Ryan's budgets and other plans consistently pass the house and are blocked from even getting a vote in the Senate by Reid.

    This choice gives all Americans a chance to do what Reid doesn't want to allow: vote for Ryan's plans for America.

    If 2010 is any indication, Romney just won the election with this pick.

  2. Opportunities on Ask Slashdot: How Many of You Actually Use Math? · · Score: 2

    The more you know the more opportunities you will have and the more earning potential you will have. I've used college level math in programming projects before. I have a friend who's a PhD making buckets of money doing very high level math. So if you want to make buckets of money doing high level math related programming, you will need to learn high level math. If you're comfortable making decent money limited to projects going no higher than high school math, then that's all you need.

    So Trig is like 3 houses in Monopoly. You've made a huge leap in earning potential but you're not at the top yet.

  3. Print them on Wozniak Predicts Horrible Problems With the Cloud · · Score: 0

    You can sync your hotmail account with Outlook. For really important emails, I print to PDF and store with Subversion. I use my GMail account through Outlook as well. It's much easier to work with.

  4. Complexity on Ask Slashdot: Are The Days of Homebrew Gaming Over? · · Score: 0

    Older consoles were not particularly complex and used moderately common parts so you could hack them and make your own games since things were generally well documented.

    These days consoles are generally far more powerful than your average PC with custom hardware (so you're not emulating it) and good luck making games without manuals, etc to tell you where to even begin coding. Without an emulator you can't code and test on your PC. Every change has to go through the process of loading it onto the actual console.

    In addition, with certified channels, you don't need to go through the hassle. If you want to make games, anyone can for iOS and Android and if you have talent you can get picked up by a developer with the proper tools to work on consoles. XBox is pretty much a standard PC so you can use DirectX and if it runs on your computer there's a very good chance it will run on the XBox. MS released XNA to make XBox development accessible to people.

    So again, the whole "homebrew" thing is either supported or not. If it's not supported by the console maker, it's just not worth the hassle. If you really want to get into the game programming business it doesn't matter what platform you work with. Most people now just use the PC, Android or iOS since that captures the bulk of the market and proves you value to any development company.

    Homebrew hasn't gone away. The historical "hacking" aspect of that term has just been rendered mostly moot.

  5. Khan Needs Guidence on Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've used Khan Academy in the classroom a few times for Algebra 1 when doing my student teaching. While the video was playing my mentor says to me "it's so boring" and I said "I know, but they're addicted to TV so they're watching it." For one lesson I came up with what I thought was a great way to teach multiplying polynomials and I said to myself, if Khan doesn't teach it this was, I'm not showing the video. Turns out, he had the same idea so I showed the video. The students got it. But not without me running through a few examples and reiterating the prior knowledge that makes it "nothing new" to them. The video is nice way to introduce the material the first time, but it needs to be repeated by the teacher to make sure everyone in the class gets it.

    At one point the video says "I'm going to use magenta because it shows up well." The students in the room were about to yell out "NO STOP IT!" because magenta does not show up when using a video projector in a classroom. Khan also makes jokes to which I pointed out "as a teacher I'm responding to you and making adjustments in response to your feedback, Khan is talking to himself and has no idea what's going on."

    I now do tutoring and for my student I have him using Khan Academy. I can see what the site can't. For example, the student is decent at math but his handwriting sucks which is normal. Khan Academy can't see that. I can, so now I have the student work problems using 1/2" grid paper with one number per box. His handwriting is improving and silly mistakes are going down dramatically.

    At best, Khan is a supplement to the classroom. It's not a replacement. My goal as a tutor is to get students to understand how to use it to improve their remedial math skills so I can focus on teaching them the new things. When school gets back in session I'll be tutoring a lot more students and working with them using Khan Academy to guide the material as well as working with their current material assigned by their teachers when available.

    When I start teaching full time, most likely next fall, I'll be pushing Khan Academy but will not use it in the classroom. It's great for remedial work. It's not for classrooms. And it's certainly no substitute for a teacher.

  6. Facebook hasn't screwed up...yet on Why You Shouldn't Write Off Google+ Just Yet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What killed MySpace was allowing the level of customization to a profile page such that the result was GeoCities. I stopped going to MySpace because I valued my eyesight.

    Until Facebook makes me not want to look the main page or other people's profiles, it's not going anywhere.

    Features aren't going to win people to Google+ because Facebook has a perfectly solid team of developers that will happily spend their days copying the things that make the user experience better.

  7. Sloppy Work on Microsoft Taking Heat For Five-Figure Xbox 360 'Patch Fee' · · Score: 1, Troll

    MS charges a huge fee for two reasons: they have to do work to issue your patch and they don't want sloppy unfinished products. Back in the days of cartridges patches weren't even an option.

  8. The cause of conflicts on Google Launches International Campaign For Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage · · Score: 1

    Making other people do what you want to do
    Preventing other people from doing what they want to do
    Sending other people the bill for your life choices

    Nobody would have a legitimate concern about gay marriage if the gay community and its supporters would stop trying to force their morality on other people.

    The Obama administration blew it for gay marriage with his contraceptives mandate. It is abundantly clear from places that have already permitted gay marriage that those who oppose it themselves (even if they don't give a shit what you do), are going to be forced to materially support or even participate. A photographer from Arkansas was successfully sued because she didn't want to offer her services at a gay wedding. That's the kind of stupid that keeps gay marriage illegal.

    If a business wants to turn you down for what you think are stupid reasons, who cares? That's a business opportunity for someone else.

    We have fights in this country because it's no longer good enough to have the freedom to do what you want to do, you want to oppress others so they have to do what you want to do.

  9. Lousy Developers on The PHP Singularity · · Score: 2

    If PHP were as awful as the author claims, "Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP" would not be possible.

    Coders without the most basic grasp of object oriented designed, initial variable initialization, white-space use, code flow, etc are the problem. Languages that try to force coders to not be retarded are not the answer. It's very easy to spot coders you should never hire if they use a language that lets them reveal their ignorance and lack of organization skills.

    It's far easier to modernize code while maintaining the same core language than it is to completely start from scratch with a new language.

    While PHP's OO functionality is pretty lousy up until 5.3 when it finally got late static binding, it is perfectly sufficient and no excuse for crappy spaghetti code.

  10. Industry needs to pay for it on ADA May Force Netflix To Provide Closed Captioning On Content · · Score: 1

    Why should Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, etc, pay the same costs over and over to do this? Likely all those companies will team up to get it done one way or another and ultimately the cost will go to the consumers. It's likely the more niche movies and shows that will suffer from this since they have a smaller audience and may not have the budget to justify CC. The studios don't care because they're already CCing the blockbusters and if that's all Netflix can provide then that works out better for them.

    However, this sort of thing really does benefit everyone. There are a lot of reasons that even people with good hearing benefit from closed captions. TV speakers might suck, actors might have thick accents or mumble, maybe you need to keep the volume down so other people can sleep.

    It's also not terribly expensive. A quick search on Google shows it's around $35 a minute which works out to about $3000 for a 90 minute film. And there are plenty of companies that do it for varying costs to well under $10 a minute. So really, this is a non-issue. If your movie didn't make enough to be able to afford even basic closed captioning it probably isn't streaming anywhere.

  11. Stop It on Ask Slashdot: Best Choice of Linux Laptops For Elementary School? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You know what would educate kids better than some flavor of laptop?

    Teachers.

  12. Small Claims on A 'Small Claims Court' For the Internet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I sued an ex-client in small claims. One of the defendants had a lawyer for a dad who tried to be as much of a weasel as possible. They moved it to civil court threatening to sue me for 10's of thousands. I handled my own side of it and still won without stepping foot in court. Cost maybe $80 all together for filing fees and postage and got every penny I was owed.

    The agreement on who owes who what should be settled before work begins. You're then just going to court to enforce a contract when one side doesn't deliver. For small amounts you're on your own. You'd spend more on lawyers than you're owed and if the client has a lawyer, you just have to deal with it.

    If you're lucky, they come to their senses and you can avoid the courtroom. What would really be helpful is simple legal advice. Even arbitration is a little late to the game. You need to know whether you even have a case, what documents you need to win your case, etc, what arguments you need to make, etc.

    Showing up to arbitration unprepared is no better than showing up to court unprepared.

    The simple solution is to just never leave large sums of money on the table and work with people you trust. I don't like racking up large invoices simply because I'd rather have cash in hand. I can't pay bills with invoices.

  13. Same here on Ask Slashdot: What To Do With a Math Degree? · · Score: 1

    I have a BA in Math and am 2 credits away from an MA in Secondary Education. I've been a web developer for about 10 years now. A math degree is pretty much universally applicable to any profession. Just doing student teaching I found a school district I'll never set for in or have my daughter set foot in. I've had jobs not work out. I live in AZ and currently work for a company in CT and have a handful of other clients. My boss in CT recently mentioned that he may be able to get some work in Data Analysis since I have a math background. There's tons of opportunity out there if you know math. And apparently he's billing his clients at over $200 an hour to do analysis. So it's lucrative as well if you can find work. I'm not sure what entry level pay would be.

    It doesn't matter what career you are in, you're going to find places that you just don't fit. You can't change a company. You can't change a district. And you're probably not going to change yourself, so try a different company or district.

    One bad experience doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't teach. Take what you learned from that experience and move forward. I switched to a different district for the second half of my student teaching and things worked out very well. I had a student transfer from the first district with a failing grade, she was only at my new school for a couple weeks and got about a 75% on a test she expected to fail. It just re-enforces the idea that the first district can pound sand. I'm very good at what I do and if I end up at a district that won't let me do my job I'll happily work somewhere else.

  14. Re:Until you can prove them wrong on In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins · · Score: 1

    Genesis also says everything was created from nothing. Even the order of creation in Genesis matches evolution's version of events. The only thing Science hasn't proven about Genesis is that God did it and that he went back to dirt to create man, he didn't grab a couple apes.

  15. I can't use a pen and paper on Overheated Voting Machine Cast Its Own Votes · · Score: 1

    You insensitive clod!

  16. Subversion and Redundancy on Ask Slashdot: Best Option For Printing Digital Photos? · · Score: 1

    I have digital pictures going back about 10 years now. 10's of thousands of them. And video. I don't delete pictures, I copy them to my computer, check them into Subversion and then edit if needed and commit again so the completely unaltered file is available. My subversion repositories are all backed up on a regular basis to an external drive. All the directories are year / year-month and occasionally toss in the day and a descriptive line if it's a special event.

    Terabyte drives are moderately priced. Setting up Apache with Subversion isn't too terribly difficult. And any desktop PC will work as a server. With broadband you get a public IP so you can check in photos / video from anywhere you happen to be. All you need is one good flash card for the camera and then download and commit when you need space or don't want to risk the flash drive crapping out.

    Keeping photos available is more about having a good system to organize them than the file format or current storage options. File formats aren't going away. If you really are worried though, just save them as BMPs. Uncompressed, straightforward file format that requires pretty much no effort to write a reader for.

  17. Put your expected graduation date on Universities Hold Transcripts Hostage Over Loans · · Score: 1

    Ultimately your resume shows your competence. I got a few salaried positions over the years just putting the date I was going to graduate on my resume (clearly marked as "expected graduation date"). I got my first salary position in my field about 2 years before I graduated. You don't necessarily need the degree. As long as you can show that you're actually knowledgeable and capable and that finishing the degree will not interfere with your work schedule. Obviously, if the issue is paying a debt then you don't have to go to classes so it won't interfere. You might end up with a slightly lower starting salary but that will go up quickly then.

    I've been working for a company now for over a year and my boss just recently found out I had a degree in math. At a certain point, they just don't even look at it. It only came up because he was talking about another possible area I could do work within the company. They look at your listed accomplishments and see if you're competent enough to do the initial job they want you to do.

  18. Re:Perfectly fine on Not Just Apple, How Microsoft Sidestepped Billions In State Taxes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm going into teaching. I just finished student teaching, I'll have my certificate for Secondary Ed within a month or two. The *minimum* salary I will be paid is clearly posted and easy to find. There's really no excuse to complain about your pay when going in you know what you're getting into. Schools are free to pay teachers whatever they want above the minimum and many do. Teachers are paid middle class income. If you don't want to earn middle class income, then find a different profession.

    And yes, teachers actually have to like their job because if the teacher isn't enthusiastic about what they are teaching, the students aren't going to be enthusiastic about what they're learning. I've been living on 30K for the last few years with a nice house, a decent car, etc. The minimum teacher's salary with my credentials is actually a raise so no, I'm not complaining.

    Teaching is not a revenue generating profession. CEOs can quantify their value in real dollars and that's how they get paid. On top of not generating revenue, teachers are barely being ranked on results. By what objective metric can we say that a particular teacher deserves X amount of dollars? Currently we just lump all teachers together and refuse to acknowledge teachers as individuals. Any attack on a particular crappy teacher is turned into an attack on all teachers.

    So until that changes, teachers will be paid a decent middle class income. And no, they have no room to complain about it unless they want to change the collective mindset into an individual mindset.

  19. Re:Can You SHow Me on Hobbit Film Underwhelms At 48 Frames Per Second · · Score: 1

    Go into any Big Box store and watch the high end TVs vs the lower end TVs playing the same film.

    The first time I saw 48fps+ playing on a TV I thought it was behind the scenes stuff for the movie instead of the actual movie.

  20. Textbooks should be reference texts on University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks · · Score: 1

    That's exactly what a textbook should be. Now, we have about 1/2 a page of actual useful information per 10-20 pages of chapter. A student can actually carry around a reference text. Textbooks today are mostly just question books with no teaching value. I can use Infinite Math to generate questions. What students need is a book that actually helps explain things.

    Instead, because the textbooks are useless, they have to rely solely on notes.

  21. Attitude on Technology Makes It Harder To Save Money · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Really what has to happen is that people have to decide they aren't going to sign contracts for luxuries. My income has fluctuated so wildly over the last several years that I absolutely will not sign a contract for a luxury. Sure I can afford a $70 a month phone now, but what about 1 year from now? So I go with cheaper, non-contractual alternatives. I pay $37 a month for Virgin Mobile but I can drop it any time and go with a cheaper alternative (TracFone) or nothing at all. For awhile I dropped Netflix, stopped watering my backyard, stuck with TracFone, etc to minimize my monthly expenses.

    Contracts lock you into a particular life style that you may not continue to be able to afford. You need to be able to cancel services as quickly as you can lose a job.

    People can have nice things even without being rich, but it's the effort to have all the nice things all at once that keeps people in debt and poor. Once the house is paid off, that's $1200 a month I'll have for other nice things. In the meantime, the nice thing I have is a nice house.

  22. Re:No big secrets here on Technology Makes It Harder To Save Money · · Score: 1

    MagicJack is all of about $30 a year.. TracFone is probably the cheapest pre-paid plan you can get. You can call 911 even if you don't have any minutes or service days left. If the kids want more minutes have them earn them. Otherwise, 911 is all you as a parent really care they can use. I recently switched from TracFone to Virgin Mobile which is also pre-paid, no contract stuff. $37 a month for unlimited data and 300 talk minutes. Kids mostly text anyway and that's part of the unlimited data. I barely manage to use the 300 minutes of talk time.

    Personally, I only care about what bills come in. That's my budget. Anything I earn above that is negotiable for where it goes. I look at my bills and see which I can get rid of. Subtract bills from income (not food or gas) and that's the money you can split between food, gas and fun.

    Depending on how old you are, saving money now could be a waste of time. Inflation makes your current dollars worth pennies when you retire. I plan to wait until I'm 45 to even begin saving. That gives me about 15 years to pay off debt instead. I'll be entirely debt free (house and all) which will make the 20 years of saving add up ridiculously fast and I'll easily have a million even without counting interest. And that will be 35 years into the future millions. Not current day millions that will be worthless in 35 years. My current rate of return for paying off debt is about 6.5% guaranteed. I can guarantee significantly more than that with investments so my best investment is mathematically just paying off debt.

    Also my year 45 dollars will be worth a lot more than my current year 32 dollars when I'm living year 65.

    Also teenagers can get jobs. Set a price limit and make them get jobs if they want something fancier.

  23. Common Misconceptions on Florida Thinks Their Students Are Too Stupid To Know the Right Answers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You have to realize that teachers teach those misconceptions so they can pretend to teach a particular concept when other essential prior knowledge has not been covered yet. This happens a lot in math as well. For example we covered a problem that could be solved without the mid-point formula but the mid-point formula drastically reduced the complexity. Most teachers would just find a way to fudge it. I went ahead and taught the midpoint formula.

    It really is up for debate how much a kid and handle and if we should teach all the essentials or just give them a few hacks so we can teach other parts of the whole. Personally I despise teaching misconceptions but I haven't been around long enough to say conclusively it's not necessary. I just haven't found a particular case yet where it is.

  24. Wrong problem on Intel Aims 'One Tablet Per Child' Program at Developing Countries · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The textbook companies love digital because they can control it and prevent resale. I bought a copy of the textbook my classroom uses for all of about $8 off Amazon. It's something like $100 new. If it were digital only, you can't buy used.

    If you want to usurp the textbook companies, you need to start providing cheap, community generated alternatives. Plenty of teachers already ignore the textbooks for the most part. There's no reason Intel and other companies couldn't provide free digital content for various topics that individual schools can then assemble to fit their curriculum.

    I'm currently working Khan Academy where appropriate into my classroom so students are more motivated to use it on their own time. But ultimately, I'd like to replace every chapter in the book with free alternative resources that teachers can use. "Infinite Math" is a really slick program that doesn't cost much that can generate problems for many levels of math which takes care of in class practice, homework and tests.

  25. Re:Like a wife on As Nuclear Reactors Age, the Money To Close Them Lags · · Score: 2

    My ex-wife's student loan debt was around $65,000 and I never "made enough" for her and she had no real ambition really to ever work to pay off her debt herself. Which I wouldn't have had much of an issue with if she actually respected how hard I worked and the money I was able to bring in. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a highly educated stay at home mom. The divorce cost $30K. The way I look at it, I saved $35K plus life long pain and suffering.

    I also walked away with 50/50 custody of our 5 year old daughter, no child support and no alimony. So I also saved $10s of thousands on those areas by spending money on a good lawyer and by self-educating myself to properly handle the personal side of the divorce. It's the stupid shit you do after the divorce process starts that generally gets people in trouble. I also did a lot of work myself so the lawyer had less to do. He was pretty impressed with my fact finding and organizations skills. I didn't waste his time with useless unorganized crap.

    So really, the divorce was a bargain.

    A spouse should never be a financial or emotional drain.