Programming is all about solving problems and you can't sort out your own monitor. Might be a good time to find a new profession. I program on my laptop screen and have the browser open in the full hd monitor. I also have a standard mouse attached because touch pads are irritating to me.
I couldn't stand a regular 9-5 job. Almost 4 years ago now, I was fired from the last I worked at and haven't looked back. In the last 30 days I've worked on about 16 different projects for various clients. That's typical for the last three years. Many of those projects are long term, multi-year, projects but none of them occupy all my working time. I work on them, take a couple days off for the client to review and give me feedback, and then I repeat the process. It's very rare now that a single project takes up all my time for more than a week.
You just need to embrace your ADD and find diverse work to do. Then you can distract yourself with productive things to do.
The other thing to do is start getting paid hourly. If you're not being productive you can just clock out and come back when your brain is ready to cooperate. Being paid for 8 hours whether you do nothing or something is probably not helping.
The other ADD friendly thing for me is having a backlog of tickets. If I have one thing to do, my brain tends to shut down because it's bored by the prospect of doing one thing. I need to be close to overwhelmed with tickets in order to maximize productivity for extended hours.
The thing is, the "slower" drives are plenty fast enough for Tivos and whatnot. The drive is not the limiting factor on streaming recorded HD content. It's the CPU that determines whether your digital recorder/player can do full 1080.
The other issue is that faster RPMs doesn't necessarily mean better performance for your application. When dealing with large media files, it's pretty irrelevant since you're doing sequential IO the vast majority of the time.
I don't remember that last time I bought a hard drive and looked at the RPM rating on it. SSDs have been around long enough that it's now a question of whether you want to spend the extra money on an SSD for better performance. And with my home server, all I care about is cheap for the drives I know are going to fail and put an end of life sticker on them 1 to 2 years out to start a rotation so I replace them before they fail. And for drives that just need to store a large amount of rarely accessed data, I just care about capacity. I don't need 1/3rd more RPMs to run a robocopy. It's not a race to back up the drives. It just needs to happen.
High performance standard hard drives are like mid grade fuel. I don't know who buys that stuff.
They actually did a study in which kids were paid for good grades. There was zero positive impact. It simply isn't a motivating factor.
Kids need problems to solve. Hobbies. And if they see that a computer can be used to solve their problem, they'll use it.
I didn't learn programming because it was "fun" when I was 8 or so. I learned programming because it solved problems I was interested in. Namely, making games and creating animation. I made some pretty lengthy ASCII animations back in the day. I was interested in animation and computers were a way to solve the problem since I didn't have an 8mm camera and money to spend on developing film as would be required if I tried to use stop motion as the means to solve the problem.
I still use programming primarily to solve problems. I just solve different problems and get paid more to do it now.
Students shouldn't be allowed to use things they don't understand. Calculators are for solving thousands of calculations and calculations with large numbers. Students should know how to do the same work by hand using smaller sets of calculations and smaller numbers.
If you don't understand the math, you won't be able to know if the answer your calculator gave you is right or how to find the problem if it's wrong.
It's not about making math "too easy." It's about actually understanding math. It's about learning how to actually solve problems and think logically. Just plugging it into a calculator doesn't teach you much. Any monkey can do that.
That's what most companies are looking for. This is why I'm a freelancer. I have enough work to keep me busy well over 40 hours a week and get paid for every single hour I work.
It's a balance. If you can't do the job with as high of quality as someone else in the same time or faster, you're going to lose out to the other guy.
Master chef's can turn out much higher quality food much faster than your average cook. That's why they work for fancy restaurants and get paid lots of money.
When people want quality and speed, they want experts.
I have Century Link with 20Mb down and 5Mb down for $60 a month including a static IP which adds all of $5 a month to the cost. They even opened up port 25 at no cost so I can run outbound SMTP if I need it for testing user registration, etc. Incoming is blocked.
I always run a home server because I have no restrictions on disk space or services I can run, I need the system anyway, I need the internet connection anyway, etc. So there's no additional out of pocket cost except $5 a month for the static IP. I'm certainly not running anything that's going to use up the available bandwidth.
If what you're doing on your server brings in enough money to warrant an upgrade, then upgrade. There's no reason to shell out extra money for something that brings in no money. Unless that's just what you want to spend your money on.
Meanwhile, the people who were smart enough to figure out how to make today's tech, didn't have today's tech to learn with. Today's kids are too busy playing video games to know what math is good for. Something they'd see no end of if they had actual hobbies.
Doesn't matter to me though. This idiotic obsession with technology just makes me more valuable in the work force.
People who make a living with technology know what it's good for.
That's why they use is sparingly (and to greater benefit) than instructors that fully embrace a bunch of expensive junk with no actual educational value.
Whiteboard, projector, laptop, document camera. That's my ideal set of technology for a classroom.
Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. Governments have murdered far more people than religion has. In fact, that's exactly why we have the second amendment. The government has a much harder time killing innocent people when they are armed.
The governments of the world have murdered far more children than citizens ever have.
The only person who we should even consider giving tech to is the teacher.
What kills the SmartBoard and tablets in the class is the low resolution. It's like drawing with a crayon. And it's difficult to face the students when using it.
I've found the best alternative is a simple document camera that can be built with an HD webcam (requires a minimum 1024x768 projector as well) and some free software I wrote. And yes, I used this in an actual classroom during my student teaching.
I put together the $1000 classroom to try this stuff out. Give me a steady supply of dry erase markers for students to use and a document camera and I'm happy. With the document camera I can sit or stand facing the students while I write. And everyone can see clearly what I'm writing. For student interaction, they come up and write on the board.
But, this is why I'm not rich. I'm not in the business of selling overpriced worthless crap to the education system.
A LeapPad 2 can be had for $100 and the software is $25 a pop or a little less if it's on sale.
It doesn't sound like the OLPC thing will get to the $100 mark and what's the quality and quantity of the educational software?
And since it's all Android, what is the incentive to buy their tablet over any other Android based tablet?
At the end of the day, the device is the least of the cost and value. It's the software. Who cares if the tablet is $50 if there's no good software for it? Or if I can get the same software on my smart phone?
I bought a Toy Story Lego train set for $50. Two of them actually, when Walmart had them steeply discounted. My daughter has one she can play with. One is still in the box. They're now selling for $83 on Amazon at minimum. I tried selling it once, got to UPS who wanted $30 to ship it, and promptly cancelled the sale. Amazon charged the customer only a few dollars for shipping.
Sure the price has gone up (or rather, stayed steady since the original price was around $80) but shipping costs make it so that the only one making any money on it is the shipping company.
Not much of an investment when the "gain" will go to shipping it to the buyer.
You don't need a CS degree which is more likely to require lab/classroom time. I tried to the CS program and couldn't stand it. I finally ended up with a degree in Math and that's perfectly suitable for a career in programming. I was working full time and taking classes to finish that up. I imagine it's a lot easier to find on-line math classes.
You know, there's a huge market for cheap plastic crap. All those lazy kids that just sit around playing video games might be able to make a living having their makerbot(s) print out a bunch of crap to sell while they continue to sit around playing video games.
We think the US shouldn't enforce it's laws on companies operating outside the US (see pirate sites) but believe that the Germans have a right to dictate the policies of a US company.
Good on Facebook. It sets a horrible precedent. If Germans don't want to use their real names on Facebook, they are free to not use Facebook.
"The world isn't going to end because the Mayan Calendar says so."
Science cannot predict world ending/mass extinction asteroid strikes much in advance.
Science cannot predict catastrophic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
The world is going to end when the world is going to end. We simply don't have technology to predict when really bad things are going to happen.
"As of the end of 2004, astronomers had discovered more than two thirds of the larger Near Earth Asteroids (diameter greater than 1 km). None of the known asteroids is a threat, but we have no way of predicting the next impact from an unknown object. "
His mom bought the guns legally. He stole them from her. He tried to buy a gun and was turned down because he wouldn't go through a background check or wait as the law required.
Turns out, psychopaths don't follow the law and find ways around it.
More like, Store A is charging $20 for a loaf of bread, I'll go to store B where I can get it for $5.
Google isn't stealing money. The government is.
The irony is in the politicians these companies choose to support knowing those politicians want to jack up taxes on them. They like the populism of that thought, but not so much the consequences.
When the cost of war does not include lives on your side, there's zero motivation to end the war with peaceful, equitable treaty. And when there's no cost to you, there's little incentive to avoid going to war to begin with.
No wonder we're trapped in endless wars. The government just prints money so there's no limiting factor there and as long as our guys don't die, the public doesn't care.
Fantastic world we live in.
We need to get a Republican elected to president so we can start caring again.
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Science has proven light can exist without a source.
Funny that you mock it.
Because that's exactly what Science teaches as part of the big bang theory.
No other creation myths say that light came first.
and you fail.
Programming is all about solving problems and you can't sort out your own monitor. Might be a good time to find a new profession. I program on my laptop screen and have the browser open in the full hd monitor. I also have a standard mouse attached because touch pads are irritating to me.
I couldn't stand a regular 9-5 job. Almost 4 years ago now, I was fired from the last I worked at and haven't looked back. In the last 30 days I've worked on about 16 different projects for various clients. That's typical for the last three years. Many of those projects are long term, multi-year, projects but none of them occupy all my working time. I work on them, take a couple days off for the client to review and give me feedback, and then I repeat the process. It's very rare now that a single project takes up all my time for more than a week.
You just need to embrace your ADD and find diverse work to do. Then you can distract yourself with productive things to do.
The other thing to do is start getting paid hourly. If you're not being productive you can just clock out and come back when your brain is ready to cooperate. Being paid for 8 hours whether you do nothing or something is probably not helping.
The other ADD friendly thing for me is having a backlog of tickets. If I have one thing to do, my brain tends to shut down because it's bored by the prospect of doing one thing. I need to be close to overwhelmed with tickets in order to maximize productivity for extended hours.
The thing is, the "slower" drives are plenty fast enough for Tivos and whatnot. The drive is not the limiting factor on streaming recorded HD content. It's the CPU that determines whether your digital recorder/player can do full 1080.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/how-higher-rpm-hard-drives-rip-you-off/322
The other issue is that faster RPMs doesn't necessarily mean better performance for your application. When dealing with large media files, it's pretty irrelevant since you're doing sequential IO the vast majority of the time.
I don't remember that last time I bought a hard drive and looked at the RPM rating on it. SSDs have been around long enough that it's now a question of whether you want to spend the extra money on an SSD for better performance. And with my home server, all I care about is cheap for the drives I know are going to fail and put an end of life sticker on them 1 to 2 years out to start a rotation so I replace them before they fail. And for drives that just need to store a large amount of rarely accessed data, I just care about capacity. I don't need 1/3rd more RPMs to run a robocopy. It's not a race to back up the drives. It just needs to happen.
High performance standard hard drives are like mid grade fuel. I don't know who buys that stuff.
They actually did a study in which kids were paid for good grades. There was zero positive impact. It simply isn't a motivating factor.
Kids need problems to solve. Hobbies. And if they see that a computer can be used to solve their problem, they'll use it.
I didn't learn programming because it was "fun" when I was 8 or so. I learned programming because it solved problems I was interested in. Namely, making games and creating animation. I made some pretty lengthy ASCII animations back in the day. I was interested in animation and computers were a way to solve the problem since I didn't have an 8mm camera and money to spend on developing film as would be required if I tried to use stop motion as the means to solve the problem.
I still use programming primarily to solve problems. I just solve different problems and get paid more to do it now.
Students shouldn't be allowed to use things they don't understand. Calculators are for solving thousands of calculations and calculations with large numbers. Students should know how to do the same work by hand using smaller sets of calculations and smaller numbers.
If you don't understand the math, you won't be able to know if the answer your calculator gave you is right or how to find the problem if it's wrong.
It's not about making math "too easy." It's about actually understanding math. It's about learning how to actually solve problems and think logically. Just plugging it into a calculator doesn't teach you much. Any monkey can do that.
That's what most companies are looking for. This is why I'm a freelancer. I have enough work to keep me busy well over 40 hours a week and get paid for every single hour I work.
It's a balance. If you can't do the job with as high of quality as someone else in the same time or faster, you're going to lose out to the other guy.
Master chef's can turn out much higher quality food much faster than your average cook. That's why they work for fancy restaurants and get paid lots of money.
When people want quality and speed, they want experts.
I have Century Link with 20Mb down and 5Mb down for $60 a month including a static IP which adds all of $5 a month to the cost. They even opened up port 25 at no cost so I can run outbound SMTP if I need it for testing user registration, etc. Incoming is blocked.
I always run a home server because I have no restrictions on disk space or services I can run, I need the system anyway, I need the internet connection anyway, etc. So there's no additional out of pocket cost except $5 a month for the static IP. I'm certainly not running anything that's going to use up the available bandwidth.
If what you're doing on your server brings in enough money to warrant an upgrade, then upgrade. There's no reason to shell out extra money for something that brings in no money. Unless that's just what you want to spend your money on.
Meanwhile, the people who were smart enough to figure out how to make today's tech, didn't have today's tech to learn with. Today's kids are too busy playing video games to know what math is good for. Something they'd see no end of if they had actual hobbies.
Doesn't matter to me though. This idiotic obsession with technology just makes me more valuable in the work force.
People who make a living with technology know what it's good for.
That's why they use is sparingly (and to greater benefit) than instructors that fully embrace a bunch of expensive junk with no actual educational value.
Whiteboard, projector, laptop, document camera. That's my ideal set of technology for a classroom.
If kids would turn off the video games and go explore the world. Clock's ticking, assholes. I want my hover-board.
Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. Governments have murdered far more people than religion has. In fact, that's exactly why we have the second amendment. The government has a much harder time killing innocent people when they are armed.
The governments of the world have murdered far more children than citizens ever have.
oh for ... sake.
The SmartBoard physical device can be replaced with a $50 Wiimote ($20 clone) and infrared light pen ($30)
The SmartBoard software, on the other hand, is what you're really paying for.
Here's a free alternative to the software:
http://open-sankore.org/
The only person who we should even consider giving tech to is the teacher.
What kills the SmartBoard and tablets in the class is the low resolution. It's like drawing with a crayon. And it's difficult to face the students when using it.
I've found the best alternative is a simple document camera that can be built with an HD webcam (requires a minimum 1024x768 projector as well) and some free software I wrote. And yes, I used this in an actual classroom during my student teaching.
http://coteach.org/1000-classroom/
I put together the $1000 classroom to try this stuff out. Give me a steady supply of dry erase markers for students to use and a document camera and I'm happy. With the document camera I can sit or stand facing the students while I write. And everyone can see clearly what I'm writing. For student interaction, they come up and write on the board.
But, this is why I'm not rich. I'm not in the business of selling overpriced worthless crap to the education system.
A LeapPad 2 can be had for $100 and the software is $25 a pop or a little less if it's on sale.
It doesn't sound like the OLPC thing will get to the $100 mark and what's the quality and quantity of the educational software?
And since it's all Android, what is the incentive to buy their tablet over any other Android based tablet?
At the end of the day, the device is the least of the cost and value. It's the software. Who cares if the tablet is $50 if there's no good software for it? Or if I can get the same software on my smart phone?
I bought a Toy Story Lego train set for $50. Two of them actually, when Walmart had them steeply discounted. My daughter has one she can play with. One is still in the box. They're now selling for $83 on Amazon at minimum. I tried selling it once, got to UPS who wanted $30 to ship it, and promptly cancelled the sale. Amazon charged the customer only a few dollars for shipping.
Sure the price has gone up (or rather, stayed steady since the original price was around $80) but shipping costs make it so that the only one making any money on it is the shipping company.
Not much of an investment when the "gain" will go to shipping it to the buyer.
You don't need a CS degree which is more likely to require lab/classroom time. I tried to the CS program and couldn't stand it. I finally ended up with a degree in Math and that's perfectly suitable for a career in programming. I was working full time and taking classes to finish that up. I imagine it's a lot easier to find on-line math classes.
You know, there's a huge market for cheap plastic crap. All those lazy kids that just sit around playing video games might be able to make a living having their makerbot(s) print out a bunch of crap to sell while they continue to sit around playing video games.
We think the US shouldn't enforce it's laws on companies operating outside the US (see pirate sites) but believe that the Germans have a right to dictate the policies of a US company.
Good on Facebook. It sets a horrible precedent. If Germans don't want to use their real names on Facebook, they are free to not use Facebook.
"The world isn't going to end because the Mayan Calendar says so."
Science cannot predict world ending/mass extinction asteroid strikes much in advance.
Science cannot predict catastrophic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
The world is going to end when the world is going to end. We simply don't have technology to predict when really bad things are going to happen.
"As of the end of 2004, astronomers had discovered more than two thirds of the larger Near Earth Asteroids (diameter greater than 1 km). None of the known asteroids is a threat, but we have no way of predicting the next impact from an unknown object. "
http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/intro_faq.cfm
NASA isn't debunking anything. The world is as likely to end on the 21st as any other day.
His mom bought the guns legally. He stole them from her. He tried to buy a gun and was turned down because he wouldn't go through a background check or wait as the law required.
Turns out, psychopaths don't follow the law and find ways around it.
More like, Store A is charging $20 for a loaf of bread, I'll go to store B where I can get it for $5.
Google isn't stealing money. The government is.
The irony is in the politicians these companies choose to support knowing those politicians want to jack up taxes on them. They like the populism of that thought, but not so much the consequences.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm
Lots of things cause climate change.
When the cost of war does not include lives on your side, there's zero motivation to end the war with peaceful, equitable treaty. And when there's no cost to you, there's little incentive to avoid going to war to begin with.
No wonder we're trapped in endless wars. The government just prints money so there's no limiting factor there and as long as our guys don't die, the public doesn't care.
Fantastic world we live in.
We need to get a Republican elected to president so we can start caring again.