Touche, PurpleBob. Actually, I'm not sure if it would hit the electronics in the car, or if the metal frame would provide enough shielding. Conversely, that means that it wouldn't blank out the stereos on other cars either. I hadn't thought about the pacemaker aspect though. Everyone with a filling, plate, or implant would jump when you turned it on:-)
I am pretty sure a portable Tesla coil would blank out most of the RF in the immediate area. It would kill all the cell phones, and all those annoying people with boom-boxes and extra loud car stereos, too (nothing like listening to 100 db whote noise).
Our TA in high school was also the computer science teacher. Every month or so, we would take over the computer lab for an afternoon and play net DOOM, or Rise of The Triad, or Descent, or whatever. It was a blast. Mad props if you're out there, Mark.
I was talking about this with one of my co-workers the other day. We both agreed that the deviousness of the computer viruses seems to have declined in the past few years. Now instead of doing fun and exciting things with the low-level file system, they just mess around with the Outlook scripting engine (not that that doesn't have any "hack" value, but it just feels like doing systems type stuff requires more confidence than writing some evil batch files and launching a DoS attack).
This reminds me, I seem to recall recently reading an article on Slashdot about people figuring out how to hide data files in the unused space at the end of the data sectors of hard drives. I remember thinking that this technique was old news, because virus writers were using this back in the 80's to hid viruses on DOS machines.
Perhaps someone with more experience can comment, but didn't the old DOS viruses seem a lot more like rootkits than today's Outlook viruses?
I suppose the argument one might make is that most movies today are tripe targeting the lowest denominators, and that the director's intent is something more financial than artistic. Then of course some intelligent person can put a better film together, because the original film wasn't put together well to begin with. It includes all sorts of extra dongles and widgets that were put in to improve the draw of the movie in the theater, or provide a convenient hook for some mass-marketed product later on, not to advance the plot. Our digitally-empowered critic just has to remove all of the stuff that's put in for marketing purposes, and in principle that shouldn't be so hard for anyone with experience in storytelling.
For example, consider the editing process that was applied in "The Phantom Edit". I haven't seen this myself, but from the Salon article someone posted, it sounds like all the editor did was chop out the kiddie stuff (eg: Jar-Jar) and a little of the extranious filler. Not that the kiddie stuff is bad, but it seems that it was put into the movie as a way to lure children to the film, and not to advance the plotline in a meaningful way. It would probably be a lot harder to do the same thing to "A Clockwork Orange" for example, because it probably wasn't designed to be marketed later on (though I suppose a set of Clockwork Orange action figure would be an interesting message to send to your children).
Anyway, I'm probably completely wrong with all of this, but it is late, and I'm not a film critic by any means.
I wrote the parent of this comment after a particularly difficult week (and it was written on a Tuesday!), and I see from ShavenYak and yerricde 's comments that I should have put some more thought into it. I am especially chagrinned by the observation that SY made that most projects involve multiple files of different types because I've had a number of those in past couple of months and have been doing something quite similar to what s/he described. Back to the drawing board, then.
I think I can relate some of the stuff that this article brings up to something that I have been thinking about for a while.
I observed from the several times that my Mom has called me from work with problems, that she seems to do most of her file manipulation through whatever application she has open (usually Word). Yes, I (through her) have done some medium lifting on her filesystem through the Word Open File dialog box.
But think about this for a second. Isn't this a sensiable way to do things. Think of your computer like the network hierarchy. At the top is the application layer, which has all the neat stuff you want to do, and it just works, without any thought. Lower down you have the transport and network layers that do all the dirty stuff.
If I were to ever design a desktop environment, no user would ever, EVER, see a file system. They would log in and get desktop that had all their applications with nothing else. To access something, they would have to run the application that created the object (by clicking on it on the desktop, or selecting it from a menu like the "Start" button), and then use the application open and save dialoges to access their saved documents. These might be dialoges similar to the ones in Windows, or something else. And they may show part of the filesystem, or they may not. In any case the user wouldn't be told what they were showing except for "This is how this program opens/saves stuff".
I am not suggesting that hierarchical filesystems be scrapped, but that we completely abstract away from them.
Interestingingly, there is a a parasite that sort-of does reorder the host's DNA. There is a wasp that lays its eggs tobacco hornworm. It also injects a virus into the hornworm to disable the hornworm's immune cells, and mess up some other biological systems. Here is a link the researcher, but I couldn't find a link to an article explaining exactly what happens.
It appears that something chopped out the URL I put in for LizardTech. Their home page is http://www.lizardtech.com, and there is a link on that page for the DjVu product.
When I was looking up some information on wavelets, I came across a company called LizardTech . They offer a product called DjVu, which they advertise as an alternative to the PDF. I have never used the product, so I don't know how well it performs, but they offer a IE/NS plug-in right on the web site.
For those of you who are updating your libraries, you might also want to check out Sphereland by Dionys Burger. This is another sequel to Flatland which appearently talks about Einstein's theories of space-time in a Flatlander context. I say appearently because I read the book so long ago I have forgotten most of the contents, and had to be reminded by the review at Amazon.com.
In many scientific/scientific fields, (eg, physics), I have heard from my professors that the Master's degree is regarded as something of a consolation prize (as mentioned by a previous poster). However, in the more technical fields, it is still considered to be a useful piece of paper.
Because CS has a lot of technical elements to it, a Master's degeee should be fine if all you want to do is work in industry. However, if you see yourself as doing research in the future, you might to seriously consider getting the doctorate. One question to consider is whether you would like to get the doctorate now, while you are fresh out of, and probably somewhat sick of, school, or do you think you could go back to school later on and get the degree? I have heard some people have a hard time going back.
Another item to ponder is how much do you like computer science. Gettting a doctorate is not an easy task. Seriously think if you want to jump through all of the hoops to get one.
This is off-topic, but another environmental advantage to LCD-vs-CRT monitors is the reduced lead content. From what I have read, most CRT's have a couple of pounds of lead in them. I believe Massachusettes considers CRT's to be hazardous waste.
Of course, I don't have a good reference for any of this, so I could just be talking crazy-talk.
and we can start to work with this. We can then also approximate sled dogs as spheres, and imagine that they are rolling, and dragging the sled behind them. So if we know the radius of a dog sphere, and the radius of a hamster sphere, the ratio between them should give us some idea of the proportionally constant between the number of dogs and the number of hamsters we need to pull a sled. Of course, I don't know how big a dog sphere or hamster sphere would be, so someone help me out.
The other problem is how to give the hamsters the traction they need to pull the sled. The idea of the plastic balls with hamsters inside is a good one, but you would also need some cleats on the balls to let them bit into the snow and give the hamsters purchase.
That's the first thing that I thought when I saw the trailer for this movie. I guess the Wheel of Reincarnation has gone full circle again. Look at Brendan Fraser's movie Bedazzled. The first time my friend and I saw the trailer for this movie, we turned to each other at the the same time and said "That looks like Weird Science."
The previous links are all to the IMDb. Here is the IMDb page on Daryl.
At my school, we have set up network file space for everyone as well. It is 20 megs of space which is accessable as a network drive from all the labs and from all the dorm rooms as well. Once the student is shown how the system works, they don't used floppies very much at all.
The only downside is that we are an all-Microsoft campus, so if you have a MAC you need to shell out some money to get a third-party program to map the network space as a drive in your room. But FTP works fine, and is quite inexpensive.
I seem to remember reading one study that indicated that having a DARE program in certain school districts actually increased the chances that the students would use drugs. It seems that the program was piquing the childrens' interest in drugs, and they used their DARE learning to decide which drugs to try.
Of course, I have no references or strong memories for this study, so I could just be making this up.
In reference to MathML, I know that Mathematica (a professional mathematics package) has an option of saving documents in an HTML/MathML format. Of course, that still doesn't tell us what opens the files (I haven't quite figured out how to open them in Mathematica), but at least the functionality exists.
In the article, it was pointed out that many people don't even have the rudimentary knowledge of whom to call if they are having a problem with their computer.
I was thinking about something like this the other day. At all ages and levels, people learn by observing and emulating the actions of others. This sort of learning is probably especially important during the early stages of learning, when people either don't know what questions to ask, or are afraid of appearing foolish by asking a really basic question.
The difficulty is that because computers have not been arround for very long, we don't have many good models to emulate. Think about a car. When you were a kid, you rode along with a parent (or whomever) and watched what they did. You got to see how to steer and how to get gas, and what to do if you had a flat tire. So by the time you started to drive, you probably had a reasonable level of functional knowledge on how to operate and maintain an automobile. Now you can take that dirt-basic stuff and ask good questions or take shop classes and extend you knowledge as far as you want.
Or take the handgun. I would bet that everyone in America has some functional knowledge of how to fire and reload a pistol. We've seen enough movies to know how to hold a gun (barrel facing away), and how to pull a trigger, and maybe even that the little lever on the side lets you change clips (or you flip out the cylinder to add more bullets).
So perhaps things will become better when enough years have gone by that we have adults competent enough to operate computers and show their kids how, and we have movies that offer accurate portrayals of how computers are actually used (no more cracking alien computer systems with Mac laptops:P )
Of course, VCR's are simpler, and have probably had consumer penetration longer, but my mom still doesn't know how to progam it.
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Touche, PurpleBob. Actually, I'm not sure if it would hit the electronics in the car, or if the metal frame would provide enough shielding. Conversely, that means that it wouldn't blank out the stereos on other cars either. I hadn't thought about the pacemaker aspect though. Everyone with a filling, plate, or implant would jump when you turned it on :-)
I am pretty sure a portable Tesla coil would blank out most of the RF in the immediate area. It would kill all the cell phones, and all those annoying people with boom-boxes and extra loud car stereos, too (nothing like listening to 100 db whote noise).
Our TA in high school was also the computer science teacher. Every month or so, we would take over the computer lab for an afternoon and play net DOOM, or Rise of The Triad, or Descent, or whatever. It was a blast. Mad props if you're out there, Mark.
I was talking about this with one of my co-workers the other day. We both agreed that the deviousness of the computer viruses seems to have declined in the past few years. Now instead of doing fun and exciting things with the low-level file system, they just mess around with the Outlook scripting engine (not that that doesn't have any "hack" value, but it just feels like doing systems type stuff requires more confidence than writing some evil batch files and launching a DoS attack).
This reminds me, I seem to recall recently reading an article on Slashdot about people figuring out how to hide data files in the unused space at the end of the data sectors of hard drives. I remember thinking that this technique was old news, because virus writers were using this back in the 80's to hid viruses on DOS machines.
Perhaps someone with more experience can comment, but didn't the old DOS viruses seem a lot more like rootkits than today's Outlook viruses?
I suppose the argument one might make is that most movies today are tripe targeting the lowest denominators, and that the director's intent is something more financial than artistic. Then of course some intelligent person can put a better film together, because the original film wasn't put together well to begin with. It includes all sorts of extra dongles and widgets that were put in to improve the draw of the movie in the theater, or provide a convenient hook for some mass-marketed product later on, not to advance the plot. Our digitally-empowered critic just has to remove all of the stuff that's put in for marketing purposes, and in principle that shouldn't be so hard for anyone with experience in storytelling.
For example, consider the editing process that was applied in "The Phantom Edit". I haven't seen this myself, but from the Salon article someone posted, it sounds like all the editor did was chop out the kiddie stuff (eg: Jar-Jar) and a little of the extranious filler. Not that the kiddie stuff is bad, but it seems that it was put into the movie as a way to lure children to the film, and not to advance the plotline in a meaningful way. It would probably be a lot harder to do the same thing to "A Clockwork Orange" for example, because it probably wasn't designed to be marketed later on (though I suppose a set of Clockwork Orange action figure would be an interesting message to send to your children).
Anyway, I'm probably completely wrong with all of this, but it is late, and I'm not a film critic by any means.
So this new chip will be the asshammer?
I wrote the parent of this comment after a particularly difficult week (and it was written on a Tuesday!), and I see from ShavenYak and yerricde 's comments that I should have put some more thought into it. I am especially chagrinned by the observation that SY made that most projects involve multiple files of different types because I've had a number of those in past couple of months and have been doing something quite similar to what s/he described. Back to the drawing board, then.
I think I can relate some of the stuff that this article brings up to something that I have been thinking about for a while.
I observed from the several times that my Mom has called me from work with problems, that she seems to do most of her file manipulation through whatever application she has open (usually Word). Yes, I (through her) have done some medium lifting on her filesystem through the Word Open File dialog box.
But think about this for a second. Isn't this a sensiable way to do things. Think of your computer like the network hierarchy. At the top is the application layer, which has all the neat stuff you want to do, and it just works, without any thought. Lower down you have the transport and network layers that do all the dirty stuff.
If I were to ever design a desktop environment, no user would ever, EVER, see a file system. They would log in and get desktop that had all their applications with nothing else. To access something, they would have to run the application that created the object (by clicking on it on the desktop, or selecting it from a menu like the "Start" button), and then use the application open and save dialoges to access their saved documents. These might be dialoges similar to the ones in Windows, or something else. And they may show part of the filesystem, or they may not. In any case the user wouldn't be told what they were showing except for "This is how this program opens/saves stuff".
I am not suggesting that hierarchical filesystems be scrapped, but that we completely abstract away from them.
Interestingingly, there is a a parasite that sort-of does reorder the host's DNA. There is a wasp that lays its eggs tobacco hornworm. It also injects a virus into the hornworm to disable the hornworm's immune cells, and mess up some other biological systems. Here is a link the researcher, but I couldn't find a link to an article explaining exactly what happens.
It appears that something chopped out the URL I put in for LizardTech. Their home page is http://www.lizardtech.com, and there is a link on that page for the DjVu product.
When I was looking up some information on wavelets, I came across a company called LizardTech . They offer a product called DjVu, which they advertise as an alternative to the PDF. I have never used the product, so I don't know how well it performs, but they offer a IE/NS plug-in right on the web site.
For those of you who are updating your libraries, you might also want to check out Sphereland by Dionys Burger. This is another sequel to Flatland which appearently talks about Einstein's theories of space-time in a Flatlander context. I say appearently because I read the book so long ago I have forgotten most of the contents, and had to be reminded by the review at Amazon.com.
In many scientific/scientific fields, (eg, physics), I have heard from my professors that the Master's degree is regarded as something of a consolation prize (as mentioned by a previous poster). However, in the more technical fields, it is still considered to be a useful piece of paper.
Because CS has a lot of technical elements to it, a Master's degeee should be fine if all you want to do is work in industry. However, if you see yourself as doing research in the future, you might to seriously consider getting the doctorate. One question to consider is whether you would like to get the doctorate now, while you are fresh out of, and probably somewhat sick of, school, or do you think you could go back to school later on and get the degree? I have heard some people have a hard time going back.
Another item to ponder is how much do you like computer science. Gettting a doctorate is not an easy task. Seriously think if you want to jump through all of the hoops to get one.
This is off-topic, but another environmental advantage to LCD-vs-CRT monitors is the reduced lead content. From what I have read, most CRT's have a couple of pounds of lead in them. I believe Massachusettes considers CRT's to be hazardous waste.
Of course, I don't have a good reference for any of this, so I could just be talking crazy-talk.
and we can start to work with this. We can then also approximate sled dogs as spheres, and imagine that they are rolling, and dragging the sled behind them. So if we know the radius of a dog sphere, and the radius of a hamster sphere, the ratio between them should give us some idea of the proportionally constant between the number of dogs and the number of hamsters we need to pull a sled. Of course, I don't know how big a dog sphere or hamster sphere would be, so someone help me out.
The other problem is how to give the hamsters the traction they need to pull the sled. The idea of the plastic balls with hamsters inside is a good one, but you would also need some cleats on the balls to let them bit into the snow and give the hamsters purchase.
The previous links are all to the IMDb. Here is the IMDb page on Daryl.
At my school, we have set up network file space for everyone as well. It is 20 megs of space which is accessable as a network drive from all the labs and from all the dorm rooms as well. Once the student is shown how the system works, they don't used floppies very much at all.
The only downside is that we are an all-Microsoft campus, so if you have a MAC you need to shell out some money to get a third-party program to map the network space as a drive in your room. But FTP works fine, and is quite inexpensive.
I seem to remember reading one study that indicated that having a DARE program in certain school districts actually increased the chances that the students would use drugs. It seems that the program was piquing the childrens' interest in drugs, and they used their DARE learning to decide which drugs to try.
Of course, I have no references or strong memories for this study, so I could just be making this up.
In reference to MathML, I know that Mathematica (a professional mathematics package) has an option of saving documents in an HTML/MathML format. Of course, that still doesn't tell us what opens the files (I haven't quite figured out how to open them in Mathematica), but at least the functionality exists.
In the article, it was pointed out that many people don't even have the rudimentary knowledge of whom to call if they are having a problem with their computer.
:P )
I was thinking about something like this the other day. At all ages and levels, people learn by observing and emulating the actions of others. This sort of learning is probably especially important during the early stages of learning, when people either don't know what questions to ask, or are afraid of appearing foolish by asking a really basic question.
The difficulty is that because computers have not been arround for very long, we don't have many good models to emulate. Think about a car. When you were a kid, you rode along with a parent (or whomever) and watched what they did. You got to see how to steer and how to get gas, and what to do if you had a flat tire. So by the time you started to drive, you probably had a reasonable level of functional knowledge on how to operate and maintain an automobile. Now you can take that dirt-basic stuff and ask good questions or take shop classes and extend you knowledge as far as you want.
Or take the handgun. I would bet that everyone in America has some functional knowledge of how to fire and reload a pistol. We've seen enough movies to know how to hold a gun (barrel facing away), and how to pull a trigger, and maybe even that the little lever on the side lets you change clips (or you flip out the cylinder to add more bullets).
So perhaps things will become better when enough years have gone by that we have adults competent enough to operate computers and show their kids how, and we have movies that offer accurate portrayals of how computers are actually used (no more cracking alien computer systems with Mac laptops
Of course, VCR's are simpler, and have probably had consumer penetration longer, but my mom still doesn't know how to progam it.