I second your memory vs. physical space observation. I can't tell you how many times my mother/grandmother/girlfriend/roommates have said "My computer is full...should I get more memory?" or "My computer is running slow...should I get another hard disk?". And it doesn't help to try to explain it to them, either. Explain till you're blue in the face. I'm convinced until they've had a malloc/fwrite blow up on them it's a lost cause.
I wouldn't place all the blame on Microsoft, they're only responsible for a single jargon word..."Operating System". Once you can figure that one out, MS doesn't have anything else to confuse you with (besides the bells and whistles of different interfaces).
It's the hardware companies that have a need to educate people and confuse them with jargon. Take a look at the short (stupid) quiz that's in the article...DVR, PDA, Bluetooth...all hardware. Software, while difficult to understand at the interoperation level, has to be user oriented, especially if it has a user interface. Hardware, on the other hand, just has to 'work'. The user doesn't have to understand it because they don't deal with it on a daily basis, except through user interfaces which are typically software (or stylus, or keyboard, but you get the picture).
Microsoft isn't responsible for THIS fault, I'm quicker to blame Dell and the PDA and cell phone companies.
For me, it's hockey. I got started in college playing pick-up roller with some friends in my dorm. Lost interest when I moved off campus. Started coaching ice with a buddy of mine at work who had been coaching for 8 years. Loved it, working with the kids was incredibly rewarding. Nevermind that it was a travel team and all the kids were way better skaters than I was, we still got along and had a blast. Watching and coaching convinced me to play, so I joined a couple of leagues in the area.
First off, it's great exercise and, being a coder, that's something I don't get very often. Second, it's the fastest game on earth. Third, it's just plain fun...it's one of those sports where not only do you have to be proficient with your stick (passing, shooting, puck handling), but you're doing it while on ice.
Popeye had a POW block, but I don't remember if it was on the bottom floor or what...hitting it caused Brutus to fall over or something.
SMB2 definitely had the POW block in the ground, but I only remember getting like 2 of them in the entire game. I wonder if they just forgot to add it everywhere else?
...except it wasn't called Super Mario, it was just Mario Bros. You ran around bopping turtles and flies from underneath to get them flipped on their back so you could kick em off. I think that was either the first or second game to have a POW (block that would knock everything over) on screen...although Popeye for the Atari may have come out before it.
No, that is a company who values its insurance. When I was in college, I worked two jobs...a tech crew/lighting technician job and a server admin/developer. With the server admin job, they didn't care when I came in to get work done, add new software, etc...I could do it at 2am on a sunday. I came in once on a saturday to resolder some cable connections for my tech crew job and got chewed out (nicely, but still reprimanded) for coming in when I wasn't scheduled. I didn't understand why until they told me if anything had happened to me, the school could get sued. With this company, it's the same thing...any job where your life is potentially at risk, the company has insurance issues if people are at work when they're not supposed to be.
Most of the time, when people say that PKing is needed, I would agree with this caveat...PKing is one of many different ways to play a game. Exploration, questing, building, these are all important too. PKers are important, IMHO, because they add and indeterminate amount of danger to a world.
Imagine a world with no PKing...what mortal dangers does your character really face. It's not a real world simulation if you can't kill each other. Now, as many have pointed out, your typical PKer would walk into a room with you, slay you, and be headed off to the next room to kill your buddy before you could type 'Ho there!'. Most players could probably be described as 'jackasses'. That doesn't mean, however they aren't necessary. What is necessary is a way to curtail the behavior so that, just as in the real world, there are consequences for your actions. If you kill another player that happens to be good alignment, I would imagine the local authorities aren't going to like you. As with the real world, you best make sure you can handle the authorities and the gangs of do-gooders that will come around looking to snag the price on your head.
I do think PKing is essential...I don't a game should promote ONLY PKing (a lot of MUDs advertised for that, and I failed to see how they kept a user base).
The real point is that LFSPs (Language for Smart People) have a much greater support for abstraction, and in particular for defining your own abstractions, than LFMs (Language for the Masses)....has anyone declared Perl *the* LFSP? I can't think of a more abstract and unreadable language off the top of my head (Cobol doesn't count just because the younger generation has never used it).
I'm missing something here...I understand all of the other corrolations, but why does red blood in America turn green in Australia? Have our neighbors down under become infested with Klingons?
I always thought Javascript/DHTML would be a great tutorial language for multiple reasons...
1) You don't get all the same structures (queues, linked lists) to work with, but you do get the basics 2) Java is bloody simple...every class name is like written english, so they're very easy to remember 3) Good mix of functional/OOP 4) Easy to see GUI results with DHTML...loading graphics is as easy as
img = new Image(); img.src = "filename.jpg";
5) It's already threadsafe since it's running under the IE/Netscape JVM
Just my $.02, but when I get bored at work I tend to write stupid little games (tetris, boxxle) in JS.
Inheritance tax actually effects a totally different demographic than what people think. Most people, when asked, think that inheritance tax affects the rich family fortunes in an okay way, causing them to invest their fortunes in the economy or risk losing millions in savings. In fact, the people that inheritance tax most hurts is farmers. They have millions in assets, but it's all tied up in their farms so when they die, their heirs owe a ton of money and have to either liquidate the farm or outright sell it.
This is one reason why the independant farmers are closing up shop and selling to the big guys...they can't afford the farm after their parents have died.
You're kidding, right? Nintendo sold a boat load of GBAs when it was first released, touted so highly because of all the new cool games and the backwards compatibility. Now they're selling a boatload of GBA:SPs...so they've essentially doubled (well, not quite) their sales by releasing two different handhelds.
I liken it to LOTR selling that first edition DVD that had 2 discs, then coming out with the behemoth 5 disc set a few months later. Half my buddies bought both, friggin morons.
Dude, we're talking 80's...virus detection wasn't sophisticated. MOST people didn't have any virus protection at all, those of us who did only had it because we got a lot of files from BBS's.
Yeah, they all did have identical signatures, but that didn't keep them from getting past even McAffee on occasion, especially the boot sector viruses that were popular back then.
I should have been more precise...there was never a programmng book I cracked in college for anything other than doing the homework. Programming is a completely different beast. You memorize the algorithms and then you use a reference chart for syntax. There weren't a lot of algorithms I needed notes on (maybe some of my Operating Systems classes...priority queueing and such), adding to a stack is pretty simple. That would be like taking notes on how to get to work (typically called 'directions')...unlike doing transforms, after the first couple of times you have it memorized because it's the same each time (like a stack implementation). Transforms or are different each time...subtley so, but still different.
My mom took this approach when I was young and playing video games (NES/Atari days, but still applicable). She would watch me play occasionally and say stuff like "Eeww!" or "Gross!" or "That's nasty!" whenever someone exploded or got shot. I thought it was funny at the time, but looking back it reinforced the concept that killing people/things was a violent and 'gross' thing to do. Subtle, but it got her point across.
Amen. I remember back in the late 80's, early 90's, a program that was popular among pirate BBS's, The Virus Creation Kit. It would basically take a set of destructive instructions (format HD, delete files, self-replicate, etc) and attach itself to an executable. Very nice little tool, any moron could have used it.
This is nothing new. Anyone that complains about Wired's 'lack of responsibility' or other PC complaints is just ill-informed.
I have no idea what kind of classes you are/were taking, but the notes were definitely not 'all in the book' in my engineering classes. It was a common and proven notion that if you didn't attend class and take rigorous notes and ask questions to concepts you didn't get, you would fail. Engineering professors (electrical, in my case) teach a great deal of concepts outside of the book or, at least, in a different manor. Try to learn Laplace and Fourier transforms without the aid of notes and only relying on your notes, I'd like to see that grade.
Out of curiosity, what is your curriculum? Using a computer to take notes would have been an exercise in futility for me. I can type over 100 WPM, and I still wouldn't have been able to capture everything I did in the same context as with a pencil and notebook. To single out a few points...
* Computers are loud. I can't imagine sitting in freshman Chemistry (population: 350) and listening to all those people type at once. Shoot me now. Likewise, I can't imagine a wireless group all receiving IMs at various times throughout the lecture because they forgot to turn their sound off.
* Computers break. It would suck to have a GPF (which doesn't happen much anymore) in the middle of class, or have your computer lock up. Doesn't happen with pen and paper (carry an extra pen).
* How do you capture diagrams efficiently? I can, on the same page, take down 3 paragraphs of notes, highlight/underline/bold whatever, whenever, draw my circuit schematic, change my circuit schematic because my prof was on the wrong page of his notes, add effective arrows from the diagram to written notes reminding me why we add a resisor here/there/everywhere and still be able to write down, tear out and give my number and address to the chick sitting next to me
* No matter how fast I type, I still spend lots more time concentrating on my typing/deleting than I do writing.
Just some thoughts, i came through college just before everyone got wired in classes (Class of 2000) and can't imagine taking a laptop with me everywhere.
I was a CpE in school, on the ACM programming team, etc, but my political and social views were still largely affected by the conversations had while sitting around at 5a on a tuesday, drunk, talking to my fraternity brothers in the KA house basement.
You can't help but be affected by the college atmosphere, it's a completely different world than what 90% of the kids knew growing up. No parents, no curfews, complete (mostly) freedom. It's the first taste of adult life where you're on your own and required to make life altering decisions.
Has computing changed college? Absolutely. Has it changed social interaction? Not that much. Whereas the computer nerds congregated in darkened labs in the 70's, they now sit at their own desks IMing, IRCing and posting to message boards. You'll always have that. If anything, a computer on every desk has given people MORE time for social interaction, since they don't have to spend hours correcting misspellings on a type writer and can instead word process.
Re:They do have a point, I suppose
on
Geocaching Crackdown?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
there's no agency regulating what people can leave behind when they go on a hiking trip, is there?
Technically, I think there is. Most parks have fines for littering, and under the letter of the law geocaching is nothing more than intentional littering (leaving non-natural items). It's not a problem now because it's so new and caches are supposed to be hard to find, which means the average tourist won't be bothered by them. It still is, however, another form of littering.
Don't get me wrong, I'm dying to buy a hand held GPS and try this out, there are two sites within 5 miles of my house that I want to explore, but I can certainly understand the parks' attitudes.
I couldn't agree more. If you're asking/., I'm willing to bet you're a tech oriented person and your major reflects that. If it's engineering or CS, you're going to spend half your notes drawing circuit diagrams, flow diagrams and memory maps or the like. The rest of your notes will be short paragraphs, making the computer hardly worthwhile. Also, I don't know about you, but after writing for 13+ years, my hand was pretty instinctive, even more so than typing, and I could actually concentrate on what the prof said rather than trying to think about typing it. Unless you're a perfect typist, you're going to have to delete/backspace. No matter who you are, this interrupts the linear thought process which is key for taking down notes and absorbing them at the same time.
My GF is a comm/finance major, and having looked at her notes I can assure you the business/comm people don't have much better notes for a computer. Still lots of diagrams, only these are mostly graphs or pie charts or statistics. None of these transfer over to typing well and they can all be pretty non-linear, at least top-bottom like a word processor likes.
Well, for Guinness this isn't a problem since it comes in a dark can or a bottle with an opaque label that covers 95% of it. Also, sunlight/heat skunk beer over a much longer period of time than it's going to take to drink it...days or weeks, not minute or hours.
--trb
Re:hopefully this will be for more than just uni's
on
Computing's Lost Allure
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Eh, I'm gonna go out on a limb and disagree with you, to a certain degree. Yes, you should have a balanced life, but like with anything it's difficult to pick up the finer points of a subject unless you spend some of your free time tinkering with it. In general, those who would list computers as a hobby (I would ask specifics...computer programming? graphics? building? hacking?) are going to be better informed, have a greater love and enjoy working more. I know some people at work who hate computers...were it not for doing their taxes and checking email they probably wouldn't have them at home. Not to say they aren't good developers, but they also haven't kept up with recent technologies (read: Java), nor were they able to repair hardware if needed or realize that a small perl script could accomplish what a huge honkin c program could.
Not to say they weren't good employees either, but I can see where the parent poster is coming from...given the choice between two equal candidates, I would be more inclined to take the one with a computer hobby, so long as it wasn't his only hobby.
Slashdot Mirror
I second your memory vs. physical space observation. I can't tell you how many times my mother/grandmother/girlfriend/roommates have said "My computer is full...should I get more memory?" or "My computer is running slow...should I get another hard disk?". And it doesn't help to try to explain it to them, either. Explain till you're blue in the face. I'm convinced until they've had a malloc/fwrite blow up on them it's a lost cause.
--trb
I wouldn't place all the blame on Microsoft, they're only responsible for a single jargon word..."Operating System". Once you can figure that one out, MS doesn't have anything else to confuse you with (besides the bells and whistles of different interfaces).
It's the hardware companies that have a need to educate people and confuse them with jargon. Take a look at the short (stupid) quiz that's in the article...DVR, PDA, Bluetooth...all hardware. Software, while difficult to understand at the interoperation level, has to be user oriented, especially if it has a user interface. Hardware, on the other hand, just has to 'work'. The user doesn't have to understand it because they don't deal with it on a daily basis, except through user interfaces which are typically software (or stylus, or keyboard, but you get the picture).
Microsoft isn't responsible for THIS fault, I'm quicker to blame Dell and the PDA and cell phone companies.
--trb
Blizzard will treat its customers far better than Sony does.
Anyone else get a cold chill reading this statement?
--trb
For me, it's hockey. I got started in college playing pick-up roller with some friends in my dorm. Lost interest when I moved off campus. Started coaching ice with a buddy of mine at work who had been coaching for 8 years. Loved it, working with the kids was incredibly rewarding. Nevermind that it was a travel team and all the kids were way better skaters than I was, we still got along and had a blast. Watching and coaching convinced me to play, so I joined a couple of leagues in the area.
:)
First off, it's great exercise and, being a coder, that's something I don't get very often. Second, it's the fastest game on earth. Third, it's just plain fun...it's one of those sports where not only do you have to be proficient with your stick (passing, shooting, puck handling), but you're doing it while on ice.
--trb
PS...ice skating also makes for a great date
Popeye had a POW block, but I don't remember if it was on the bottom floor or what...hitting it caused Brutus to fall over or something.
SMB2 definitely had the POW block in the ground, but I only remember getting like 2 of them in the entire game. I wonder if they just forgot to add it everywhere else?
--trb
...except it wasn't called Super Mario, it was just Mario Bros. You ran around bopping turtles and flies from underneath to get them flipped on their back so you could kick em off. I think that was either the first or second game to have a POW (block that would knock everything over) on screen...although Popeye for the Atari may have come out before it.
--trb
No, that is a company who values its insurance. When I was in college, I worked two jobs...a tech crew/lighting technician job and a server admin/developer. With the server admin job, they didn't care when I came in to get work done, add new software, etc...I could do it at 2am on a sunday. I came in once on a saturday to resolder some cable connections for my tech crew job and got chewed out (nicely, but still reprimanded) for coming in when I wasn't scheduled. I didn't understand why until they told me if anything had happened to me, the school could get sued. With this company, it's the same thing...any job where your life is potentially at risk, the company has insurance issues if people are at work when they're not supposed to be.
--trb
Most of the time, when people say that PKing is needed, I would agree with this caveat...PKing is one of many different ways to play a game. Exploration, questing, building, these are all important too. PKers are important, IMHO, because they add and indeterminate amount of danger to a world.
Imagine a world with no PKing...what mortal dangers does your character really face. It's not a real world simulation if you can't kill each other. Now, as many have pointed out, your typical PKer would walk into a room with you, slay you, and be headed off to the next room to kill your buddy before you could type 'Ho there!'. Most players could probably be described as 'jackasses'. That doesn't mean, however they aren't necessary. What is necessary is a way to curtail the behavior so that, just as in the real world, there are consequences for your actions. If you kill another player that happens to be good alignment, I would imagine the local authorities aren't going to like you. As with the real world, you best make sure you can handle the authorities and the gangs of do-gooders that will come around looking to snag the price on your head.
I do think PKing is essential...I don't a game should promote ONLY PKing (a lot of MUDs advertised for that, and I failed to see how they kept a user base).
--trb
It's technical, GPLed, and has to do with Google
It's a geek hattrick!
given this statement
...has anyone declared Perl *the* LFSP? I can't think of a more abstract and unreadable language off the top of my head (Cobol doesn't count just because the younger generation has never used it).
The real point is that LFSPs (Language for Smart People) have a much greater support for abstraction, and in particular for defining your own abstractions, than LFMs (Language for the Masses).
--trb
I'm missing something here...I understand all of the other corrolations, but why does red blood in America turn green in Australia? Have our neighbors down under become infested with Klingons?
--trb
I always thought Javascript/DHTML would be a great tutorial language for multiple reasons...
1) You don't get all the same structures (queues, linked lists) to work with, but you do get the basics
2) Java is bloody simple...every class name is like written english, so they're very easy to remember
3) Good mix of functional/OOP
4) Easy to see GUI results with DHTML...loading graphics is as easy as
img = new Image();
img.src = "filename.jpg";
5) It's already threadsafe since it's running under the IE/Netscape JVM
Just my $.02, but when I get bored at work I tend to write stupid little games (tetris, boxxle) in JS.
--trb
Inheritance tax actually effects a totally different demographic than what people think. Most people, when asked, think that inheritance tax affects the rich family fortunes in an okay way, causing them to invest their fortunes in the economy or risk losing millions in savings. In fact, the people that inheritance tax most hurts is farmers. They have millions in assets, but it's all tied up in their farms so when they die, their heirs owe a ton of money and have to either liquidate the farm or outright sell it.
This is one reason why the independant farmers are closing up shop and selling to the big guys...they can't afford the farm after their parents have died.
--trb
Not backlighting the first GBA
You're kidding, right? Nintendo sold a boat load of GBAs when it was first released, touted so highly because of all the new cool games and the backwards compatibility. Now they're selling a boatload of GBA:SPs...so they've essentially doubled (well, not quite) their sales by releasing two different handhelds.
I liken it to LOTR selling that first edition DVD that had 2 discs, then coming out with the behemoth 5 disc set a few months later. Half my buddies bought both, friggin morons.
--trb
Dude, we're talking 80's...virus detection wasn't sophisticated. MOST people didn't have any virus protection at all, those of us who did only had it because we got a lot of files from BBS's.
Yeah, they all did have identical signatures, but that didn't keep them from getting past even McAffee on occasion, especially the boot sector viruses that were popular back then.
--trb
I should have been more precise...there was never a programmng book I cracked in college for anything other than doing the homework. Programming is a completely different beast. You memorize the algorithms and then you use a reference chart for syntax. There weren't a lot of algorithms I needed notes on (maybe some of my Operating Systems classes...priority queueing and such), adding to a stack is pretty simple. That would be like taking notes on how to get to work (typically called 'directions')...unlike doing transforms, after the first couple of times you have it memorized because it's the same each time (like a stack implementation). Transforms or are different each time...subtley so, but still different.
--trb
My mom took this approach when I was young and playing video games (NES/Atari days, but still applicable). She would watch me play occasionally and say stuff like "Eeww!" or "Gross!" or "That's nasty!" whenever someone exploded or got shot. I thought it was funny at the time, but looking back it reinforced the concept that killing people/things was a violent and 'gross' thing to do. Subtle, but it got her point across.
--trb
Amen. I remember back in the late 80's, early 90's, a program that was popular among pirate BBS's, The Virus Creation Kit. It would basically take a set of destructive instructions (format HD, delete files, self-replicate, etc) and attach itself to an executable. Very nice little tool, any moron could have used it.
This is nothing new. Anyone that complains about Wired's 'lack of responsibility' or other PC complaints is just ill-informed.
--trb
I have no idea what kind of classes you are/were taking, but the notes were definitely not 'all in the book' in my engineering classes. It was a common and proven notion that if you didn't attend class and take rigorous notes and ask questions to concepts you didn't get, you would fail. Engineering professors (electrical, in my case) teach a great deal of concepts outside of the book or, at least, in a different manor. Try to learn Laplace and Fourier transforms without the aid of notes and only relying on your notes, I'd like to see that grade.
--trb
Out of curiosity, what is your curriculum? Using a computer to take notes would have been an exercise in futility for me. I can type over 100 WPM, and I still wouldn't have been able to capture everything I did in the same context as with a pencil and notebook. To single out a few points...
* Computers are loud. I can't imagine sitting in freshman Chemistry (population: 350) and listening to all those people type at once. Shoot me now. Likewise, I can't imagine a wireless group all receiving IMs at various times throughout the lecture because they forgot to turn their sound off.
* Computers break. It would suck to have a GPF (which doesn't happen much anymore) in the middle of class, or have your computer lock up. Doesn't happen with pen and paper (carry an extra pen).
* How do you capture diagrams efficiently? I can, on the same page, take down 3 paragraphs of notes, highlight/underline/bold whatever, whenever, draw my circuit schematic, change my circuit schematic because my prof was on the wrong page of his notes, add effective arrows from the diagram to written notes reminding me why we add a resisor here/there/everywhere and still be able to write down, tear out and give my number and address to the chick sitting next to me
* No matter how fast I type, I still spend lots more time concentrating on my typing/deleting than I do writing.
Just some thoughts, i came through college just before everyone got wired in classes (Class of 2000) and can't imagine taking a laptop with me everywhere.
--trb
I was a CpE in school, on the ACM programming team, etc, but my political and social views were still largely affected by the conversations had while sitting around at 5a on a tuesday, drunk, talking to my fraternity brothers in the KA house basement.
You can't help but be affected by the college atmosphere, it's a completely different world than what 90% of the kids knew growing up. No parents, no curfews, complete (mostly) freedom. It's the first taste of adult life where you're on your own and required to make life altering decisions.
Has computing changed college? Absolutely. Has it changed social interaction? Not that much. Whereas the computer nerds congregated in darkened labs in the 70's, they now sit at their own desks IMing, IRCing and posting to message boards. You'll always have that. If anything, a computer on every desk has given people MORE time for social interaction, since they don't have to spend hours correcting misspellings on a type writer and can instead word process.
there's no agency regulating what people can leave behind when they go on a hiking trip, is there?
Technically, I think there is. Most parks have fines for littering, and under the letter of the law geocaching is nothing more than intentional littering (leaving non-natural items). It's not a problem now because it's so new and caches are supposed to be hard to find, which means the average tourist won't be bothered by them. It still is, however, another form of littering.
Don't get me wrong, I'm dying to buy a hand held GPS and try this out, there are two sites within 5 miles of my house that I want to explore, but I can certainly understand the parks' attitudes.
--trb
make heavy use of diagrams
/., I'm willing to bet you're a tech oriented person and your major reflects that. If it's engineering or CS, you're going to spend half your notes drawing circuit diagrams, flow diagrams and memory maps or the like. The rest of your notes will be short paragraphs, making the computer hardly worthwhile. Also, I don't know about you, but after writing for 13+ years, my hand was pretty instinctive, even more so than typing, and I could actually concentrate on what the prof said rather than trying to think about typing it. Unless you're a perfect typist, you're going to have to delete/backspace. No matter who you are, this interrupts the linear thought process which is key for taking down notes and absorbing them at the same time.
I couldn't agree more. If you're asking
My GF is a comm/finance major, and having looked at her notes I can assure you the business/comm people don't have much better notes for a computer. Still lots of diagrams, only these are mostly graphs or pie charts or statistics. None of these transfer over to typing well and they can all be pretty non-linear, at least top-bottom like a word processor likes.
--trb
Well, for Guinness this isn't a problem since it comes in a dark can or a bottle with an opaque label that covers 95% of it. Also, sunlight/heat skunk beer over a much longer period of time than it's going to take to drink it...days or weeks, not minute or hours.
--trb
Eh, I'm gonna go out on a limb and disagree with you, to a certain degree. Yes, you should have a balanced life, but like with anything it's difficult to pick up the finer points of a subject unless you spend some of your free time tinkering with it. In general, those who would list computers as a hobby (I would ask specifics...computer programming? graphics? building? hacking?) are going to be better informed, have a greater love and enjoy working more. I know some people at work who hate computers...were it not for doing their taxes and checking email they probably wouldn't have them at home. Not to say they aren't good developers, but they also haven't kept up with recent technologies (read: Java), nor were they able to repair hardware if needed or realize that a small perl script could accomplish what a huge honkin c program could.
Not to say they weren't good employees either, but I can see where the parent poster is coming from...given the choice between two equal candidates, I would be more inclined to take the one with a computer hobby, so long as it wasn't his only hobby.
--trb