Sleep requirements vary from individual to individual. You might need 9 hours, somebody else might need 4. The great majority of us need somewhere between 7 and 8.5 hours a night.
The most brilliant person that I knew in college (and there were a lot of brilliant people there) was my freshman roommate. He would go to bed at 1 pm and wake up at 6 am everyday. In the meantime I was going to bed whenever I felt like it an waking up when I could/had to.
Discussing this on/. is all well and good, but if he is really astroturfing, and it appears that he is, someone that understands what is going on should submit a response article to the New Architect site. The do accept submissions. Check out http://www.newarchitectmag.com/guidelines/. I would do it, but I am not an expert on setting up mail servers or on the effectiveness of the black list.
I agree about the Hegemon/Peter thing. Why would Peter want to "have" Achilles when he had Bean, Petra, Suri, and Virlomi? How is Achilles more valuable to him than Bean?
In fact, it seems that in each of the Bean/Ender books the characters are less brilliant in each book. Think about the crazy/complex situations that Ender and Bean "solved" in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Then think of Ender in CotM. Now look at what Bean has to in Shadow Pupets. The major strategizing that he does is about Achilles. SPOLIER ALERT It turns out that he could have walked in there without having thought about the situation at all and he would have been fine. In the end he did go in without a plan, but he sure fretted about it a bunch beforehand. Maybe I am over-simplifing it, but Suri had made it so clear in the rescue that he knew how to fool Achilles that it was pretty clear to the reader what would happen.
I felt that the last book was a bit sparse as well. When I read that he had initially intended to write one book covering the events of these two I knew what to expect. Of course he did the same thing with Xenocide and CotM, but they were filled with enough interesting stuff. Maybe in the next Bean book Bean (and his family) will be smart enough to hop on a colony ship and use time dilation to his advantage, letting the science advance enough to cure him while he zips around the galaxy at high speed. If he went far enough into the future he could meet up with Ender again and maybe even use the philotic web to cure his disease. At least he doesn't have a bad case of OCD.
I thought that he was the focal point of about half of the book. The strange thing is that he became a typical teenager who is annoyed by his parents. This struck me as pretty unnatural. Also, Petra's constant clamoring for babies seemed to make her a bit one-dimensional.
I have high hopes for the next book. Card seems to run out of steam in his series though.
I've been using VAJ for over three years and once I got used to its quirks I found it to be very powerful and never felt constrained by it.
If you REALLY need to do something that the IDE isn't capable of then you can write your own tools. VAJ provides a Java API for this and it is really easy to use. You can then make the IDE do anything that you want, as long as you are able to code that behavior in Java. You can also you vi and Emacs to edit your code in VAJ if you really want to.
Whoever built this thing should have made it taller, much taller, say, 10 feet. Also, it should have been made with enough pitch to last 500 years. That would have been cool. As it is, the last drop of pitch didn't even completely fall. Soon there will be no more drops, just a continuous flow of pitch, because the setup is too short. Also, look at the container at the bottom. Can it hold all the pitch that is coming its way? I doubt it. Sooner of later this is going to make a big sticky mess.
Even if there are different versions that are "marked" in some way, what would that prove? That gnutella was more "evil" than some other p2p program? Or that the copy released on one found its way over to another p2p network? So what?
Revealing data gleened using watermarks means revealing the versions WERE marked and that the leak was ON PURPOSE. Such a revelation will seriously undercut the legitimacy of any study done. Also anyone prosecuted for distributing a copy will cry "Entrapment!" whether they are justified in doing so or not. The public loves to hear about cases of supposed entrapment and will be more sympathetic to the pirates than they otherwise would be.
Finally, if everyone figures out that the movie was released on purpose they will see it as a publicity move, and view it as legitimizing piracy. This is very bad for the studio in the long run.
In short, even if there are watermarks, I can't see any way in which making the existence of those marks public without the movie studio doing more harm to itself than good.
We were told at the outset of the project that we would all get the same grade without taking into account who made what effort. Other classes weren't like that.
So there are two required courses at Stanford in CS. One is 00 programming and the other is operating systems. CS 108, the OO class, had (has?) a final project known as Bunny World. It is a group project to make a game and game editor for a simplified version of Myst.
Bunny World is a three week project and is done in groups of three. It is due on a Thursday at 2 pm. On the Sunday prior to the due date one of the guys in the group says, "Hey, I have two other projects and they are both more important to me than this one, so I'm sorry." So me and the remaining guy figure out that there is no way that we can complete his code as well as our own in time.
I go to bed Sunday night and wake up Monday morning and begin to code in the "Yost Code Loft", which I was the proud owner of that year after lusting after it the previous year. By continually consuming Dr. Pepper, Starbursts, and Led Zeppelin bootlegs I coded like never before.
Hours flew by and soon it was Thursday and I hadn't slept since Monday morning.
The code was flowing from me. We got mostly done, but not all. B+
What made me mad was that the guy who dumped on us got the B+ too.
In college I could do that. Not anymore. I can put in 15 hour days here and there, and feel like I enter a state of coding clarity, but maybe my mind is just cloded.
And everyone knows that the right tool for a robot programming contest is Karel the Robot! Karel is the obvious choice for robot control since Karel is in fact a robot! Nevermind the fact that he is obessed with beepers and can't turn left! Karel will frag all other robot languages!
Either that or a robot. On page 17 he goes off on the "GNU/Linux" thing without provocation. Unless you consider the word "Linux" provocation. Anyhow, I just had to laugh. I guess I should have seen it coming but the FSF guy replied to to question in such a normal way and RMS had been replying so normally that it caught me off-guard.
Shouldn't you blame MS for this? Obviously WinME broke something that WP relied upon. This is a standard MS tactic. Of course WP could give you a cheeaper upgrade, but is it their fault that you need one?
In Brazil I often ran into people who when asked what religion they belonged to would say, "I'm not religious, I'm Catholic." or some variation of that.
After which you arrive at Million Million, which is a Billion in the UK.
p.s. The US way of doing it makes ore sense to me. With the UK way you might end up saying "thousand" two times to read the number 22,222,222,222. That strikes me as repetitive.
If OSX ever did run x86 then you would only need VMWare or something of that sort to get to Windows and Windows apps. Alternately you could run Windows or Linux as the base OS and then run OSX in VMWare.
Supporting evidence please? I think she is using OSX based on the following:
Maybe it was his pitch about the intuitiveness and femininity of the Mac -- its smooth operating system, its sleek curves, its bouncy icons that enlarge when you touch them, the way the documents slide onto the screen, the glossy surface and undulating pastel screen savers...
I take "bouncy icons" as evidence of OSX.
This person sure does like to whine though. First she is unhappy when the Apple keys are gone in grade school. Then she complains that it never makes sense, but that the Ctrl key gave her a sense of "control"? Notice that she never exactly sings the praises of Windows. I wonder if this article is astro-turfing in action...
In other words, switchers appear to be adopting Mac OS X at twice the rate of Mac OS 9 users. Linux users, and Windows users who also use Linux or another Unix, appear to be the most common switchers.
Does anybody else see something wrong with this statement? First, what percentage of his sample of alpha-geeks used Mac OS 9? We don't know. In general Mac has what, 5% of the market? So lets make things really simple and assume that the list he emailed consists of 1000 people. 50 of them use Macs. Of these 50, 5 have switched to OSX, a rate of 10%. Of the remaining 950, 10 people have switched to OSX, a rate of 1.05%. So what does "rate" mean to Tim?
More interesting is his claim that OSX is more appealing to those who already use some flavor of Unix as opposed to those who currently use Windows.
Gnome 32.52%
KDE 30.05%
Mac 2.3%
Pure Text 8.37%
Windows 3.56%
Other 23.19%
Since when is 32.52% a majority? This is less than one third, and certainly not more than half, which is waht was indicated by the summary. Of course, I am an idiot for expecting accuracy on/., right?
By the way, it has already been mentioned, but deserves repeating: Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java is a great book. And it is FREE! You can download it from his website. At one time I carried around a CD that had a copy of that plus the current JavaDocs from Sun. Anytime somebody had a question we would copy the entire CD over to their machine, show them the resources, and see if they could find the answer to their problem. This was at work and not in school. The temptation in school is to be too helpful too quickly. That majically goes away once you start working.
CS is a very popular major where I went to school. Now the reason for that isn't entirely that a bunch of people that go there knowing that it has a great program. The reason is that nearly all the undergrads hear that the intro course ( CS106a) is good by word of mouth and so lots of them take it. Since it really is a good course lots of people get turned on to CS by it. Seriously, there were people who had never used a computer before ending up as CS majors.
Why is this course so popular? First of all they choose the best professors and lecturers to teach it. They are able to explain things clearly and they are very personable/funny/approachable.
Second, the programming assignments are well designed. I always knew WHY I was doing a particular assignment. I have since helped people from other universities with their CS assignments and I can say that assignment design is a big deal. Some profs just throw some random problem at the kids without thinking about the purpose of it. They don't provide clear goals. They don't provide any libraries to use. The documentation provided with assignment needs to be clear and complete.
The most important reason that these classes were both popular and productive was the section leaders. These were CS students in their senior or junior year that taught section once a week. The position was prestigious and it paid well. They got some of the best CS students that way. It is describe briefly in this article. (Search for CS198 if you don't want to read the whole thing.) The sections were very productive. You would write code to do some particular task and the section leader would help/critique. There was almost always a section leader "on call" in a cube in the lab that you could go to for help on an assignment. More than one near the due dates. They could find a bug in 2 seconds flat. But they would just show it to you, they would "help" you see it yourself. But the most important thing they did was "interactive grading". They would go through a printout of your code line by line and write comments both good and bad while grading your program. Then they would have a 20 minute one one one session with the student and explain what was good and what was bad about thier coding. Whether the program actually functioned or not was of secondary importance, especially early in the quarter. They made sure that your code made sense, was well documented, that you had variable names that made sense, etc.
Many schools just give grades based on functionality and never even look at the code produced. This sink or swim attitude might bring to light a few naturally good coders. The mentoring aspects of the program at I just described produce a lot of great coders.
In summary:
1. Choose good instructors.
2. Give assingments with a purpose. Document them.
3. Give the students detailed feedback and lots of support early on whether they think they need it or not.
I find it strange that so many people are griping about the images in this story yet nobody has mentioned that it was written by Pee Wee Herman. Ok, maybe it isn't him, but the picture of his head above the article makes me wonder.
Slashdot Mirror
The most brilliant person that I knew in college (and there were a lot of brilliant people there) was my freshman roommate. He would go to bed at 1 pm and wake up at 6 am everyday. In the meantime I was going to bed whenever I felt like it an waking up when I could/had to.
Discussing this on /. is all well and good, but if he is really astroturfing, and it appears that he is, someone that understands what is going on should submit a response article to the New Architect site. The do accept submissions. Check out http://www.newarchitectmag.com/guidelines/. I would do it, but I am not an expert on setting up mail servers or on the effectiveness of the black list.
is no longer accurate. You aren't banned anymore.
In fact, it seems that in each of the Bean/Ender books the characters are less brilliant in each book. Think about the crazy/complex situations that Ender and Bean "solved" in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Then think of Ender in CotM. Now look at what Bean has to in Shadow Pupets. The major strategizing that he does is about Achilles. SPOLIER ALERT It turns out that he could have walked in there without having thought about the situation at all and he would have been fine. In the end he did go in without a plan, but he sure fretted about it a bunch beforehand. Maybe I am over-simplifing it, but Suri had made it so clear in the rescue that he knew how to fool Achilles that it was pretty clear to the reader what would happen.
I felt that the last book was a bit sparse as well. When I read that he had initially intended to write one book covering the events of these two I knew what to expect. Of course he did the same thing with Xenocide and CotM, but they were filled with enough interesting stuff. Maybe in the next Bean book Bean (and his family) will be smart enough to hop on a colony ship and use time dilation to his advantage, letting the science advance enough to cure him while he zips around the galaxy at high speed. If he went far enough into the future he could meet up with Ender again and maybe even use the philotic web to cure his disease. At least he doesn't have a bad case of OCD.
I thought that he was the focal point of about half of the book. The strange thing is that he became a typical teenager who is annoyed by his parents. This struck me as pretty unnatural. Also, Petra's constant clamoring for babies seemed to make her a bit one-dimensional.
I have high hopes for the next book. Card seems to run out of steam in his series though.
If you REALLY need to do something that the IDE isn't capable of then you can write your own tools. VAJ provides a Java API for this and it is really easy to use. You can then make the IDE do anything that you want, as long as you are able to code that behavior in Java. You can also you vi and Emacs to edit your code in VAJ if you really want to.
Whoever built this thing should have made it taller, much taller, say, 10 feet. Also, it should have been made with enough pitch to last 500 years. That would have been cool. As it is, the last drop of pitch didn't even completely fall. Soon there will be no more drops, just a continuous flow of pitch, because the setup is too short. Also, look at the container at the bottom. Can it hold all the pitch that is coming its way? I doubt it. Sooner of later this is going to make a big sticky mess.
Revealing data gleened using watermarks means revealing the versions WERE marked and that the leak was ON PURPOSE. Such a revelation will seriously undercut the legitimacy of any study done. Also anyone prosecuted for distributing a copy will cry "Entrapment!" whether they are justified in doing so or not. The public loves to hear about cases of supposed entrapment and will be more sympathetic to the pirates than they otherwise would be.
Finally, if everyone figures out that the movie was released on purpose they will see it as a publicity move, and view it as legitimizing piracy. This is very bad for the studio in the long run.
In short, even if there are watermarks, I can't see any way in which making the existence of those marks public without the movie studio doing more harm to itself than good.
We were told at the outset of the project that we would all get the same grade without taking into account who made what effort. Other classes weren't like that.
Bunny World is a three week project and is done in groups of three. It is due on a Thursday at 2 pm. On the Sunday prior to the due date one of the guys in the group says, "Hey, I have two other projects and they are both more important to me than this one, so I'm sorry." So me and the remaining guy figure out that there is no way that we can complete his code as well as our own in time.
I go to bed Sunday night and wake up Monday morning and begin to code in the "Yost Code Loft", which I was the proud owner of that year after lusting after it the previous year. By continually consuming Dr. Pepper, Starbursts, and Led Zeppelin bootlegs I coded like never before.
Hours flew by and soon it was Thursday and I hadn't slept since Monday morning. The code was flowing from me. We got mostly done, but not all. B+
What made me mad was that the guy who dumped on us got the B+ too.
In college I could do that. Not anymore. I can put in 15 hour days here and there, and feel like I enter a state of coding clarity, but maybe my mind is just cloded.
And everyone knows that the right tool for a robot programming contest is Karel the Robot! Karel is the obvious choice for robot control since Karel is in fact a robot! Nevermind the fact that he is obessed with beepers and can't turn left! Karel will frag all other robot languages!
http://www.octools.com/index.cgi?caller=articles/s ubmersion/submersion.html
I am not sure about this unless by fame you mean hacker-cred.
Either that or a robot. On page 17 he goes off on the "GNU/Linux" thing without provocation. Unless you consider the word "Linux" provocation. Anyhow, I just had to laugh. I guess I should have seen it coming but the FSF guy replied to to question in such a normal way and RMS had been replying so normally that it caught me off-guard.
Shouldn't you blame MS for this? Obviously WinME broke something that WP relied upon. This is a standard MS tactic. Of course WP could give you a cheeaper upgrade, but is it their fault that you need one?
In Brazil I often ran into people who when asked what religion they belonged to would say, "I'm not religious, I'm Catholic." or some variation of that.
VA is not the Dell of Linux hardware!
After which you arrive at Million Million, which is a Billion in the UK.
p.s. The US way of doing it makes ore sense to me. With the UK way you might end up saying "thousand" two times to read the number 22,222,222,222. That strikes me as repetitive.
If OSX ever did run x86 then you would only need VMWare or something of that sort to get to Windows and Windows apps. Alternately you could run Windows or Linux as the base OS and then run OSX in VMWare.
Maybe it was his pitch about the intuitiveness and femininity of the Mac -- its smooth operating system, its sleek curves, its bouncy icons that enlarge when you touch them, the way the documents slide onto the screen, the glossy surface and undulating pastel screen savers...
I take "bouncy icons" as evidence of OSX.
This person sure does like to whine though. First she is unhappy when the Apple keys are gone in grade school. Then she complains that it never makes sense, but that the Ctrl key gave her a sense of "control"? Notice that she never exactly sings the praises of Windows. I wonder if this article is astro-turfing in action...
In other words, switchers appear to be adopting Mac OS X at twice the rate of Mac OS 9 users. Linux users, and Windows users who also use Linux or another Unix, appear to be the most common switchers.
Does anybody else see something wrong with this statement? First, what percentage of his sample of alpha-geeks used Mac OS 9? We don't know. In general Mac has what, 5% of the market? So lets make things really simple and assume that the list he emailed consists of 1000 people. 50 of them use Macs. Of these 50, 5 have switched to OSX, a rate of 10%. Of the remaining 950, 10 people have switched to OSX, a rate of 1.05%. So what does "rate" mean to Tim?
More interesting is his claim that OSX is more appealing to those who already use some flavor of Unix as opposed to those who currently use Windows.
Gnome 32.52%
KDE 30.05%
Mac 2.3%
Pure Text 8.37%
Windows 3.56%
Other 23.19%
Since when is 32.52% a majority? This is less than one third, and certainly not more than half, which is waht was indicated by the summary. Of course, I am an idiot for expecting accuracy on /., right?
By the way, it has already been mentioned, but deserves repeating: Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java is a great book. And it is FREE! You can download it from his website. At one time I carried around a CD that had a copy of that plus the current JavaDocs from Sun. Anytime somebody had a question we would copy the entire CD over to their machine, show them the resources, and see if they could find the answer to their problem. This was at work and not in school. The temptation in school is to be too helpful too quickly. That majically goes away once you start working.
Why is this course so popular? First of all they choose the best professors and lecturers to teach it. They are able to explain things clearly and they are very personable/funny/approachable.
Second, the programming assignments are well designed. I always knew WHY I was doing a particular assignment. I have since helped people from other universities with their CS assignments and I can say that assignment design is a big deal. Some profs just throw some random problem at the kids without thinking about the purpose of it. They don't provide clear goals. They don't provide any libraries to use. The documentation provided with assignment needs to be clear and complete.
The most important reason that these classes were both popular and productive was the section leaders. These were CS students in their senior or junior year that taught section once a week. The position was prestigious and it paid well. They got some of the best CS students that way. It is describe briefly in this article. (Search for CS198 if you don't want to read the whole thing.) The sections were very productive. You would write code to do some particular task and the section leader would help/critique. There was almost always a section leader "on call" in a cube in the lab that you could go to for help on an assignment. More than one near the due dates. They could find a bug in 2 seconds flat. But they would just show it to you, they would "help" you see it yourself. But the most important thing they did was "interactive grading". They would go through a printout of your code line by line and write comments both good and bad while grading your program. Then they would have a 20 minute one one one session with the student and explain what was good and what was bad about thier coding. Whether the program actually functioned or not was of secondary importance, especially early in the quarter. They made sure that your code made sense, was well documented, that you had variable names that made sense, etc.
Many schools just give grades based on functionality and never even look at the code produced. This sink or swim attitude might bring to light a few naturally good coders. The mentoring aspects of the program at I just described produce a lot of great coders.
In summary:
1. Choose good instructors.
2. Give assingments with a purpose. Document them.
3. Give the students detailed feedback and lots of support early on whether they think they need it or not.
I find it strange that so many people are griping about the images in this story yet nobody has mentioned that it was written by Pee Wee Herman. Ok, maybe it isn't him, but the picture of his head above the article makes me wonder.