I hate to help Slashdot repeat itself, but the zen garden was linked from here a week or so back. It shows how much you can do just by swapping stylesheets. Pretty much anyone who works in web development could benefit from taking a look at it.
The other side of this is that Java also has however many years of developer experience. Almost any time you run into a problem when coding Java you can do a quick search on the web and find other people who had the same problem and how they solved it. There just isn't the depth of developer history in the.net languages and that means that it is hard to find solutions to those obscure and poorly documented errors when they do come up.
And another thing- if you did have a singer with perfect pitch they are likely to be thrown if any of the instruments they are working with is out of tune at all. What you really want from a singer is excellent relative pitch, not objective perfect pitch.
Bollocks to aerodynamics, shaving your legs is equally useful to a mountain biker when the time comes to take off those plasters a day or two after you have stacked and injured yourself.
I would suggest that rather than being an expression of hacking, this is a side-effect of the ephemeral nature of playing games with data and chips. If you spend that much time, usually in and out of work, working with computers I think maybe you start thinking about the things that last after the power switch goes off.
Perhaps there is a reaction to the fake plastic lifestyle that the economists want us all to buy into (and keep buying, and keep buying) and the loss of sense of place and time that globalisation offers. A feeling that there must be something concrete, something more than concrete. This kind of environment perhaps inclines one to think of how things used to be, in some rose-tinted past.
Ultimately, a hobby is a hobby. It is appealing to think "when civilisation collapses I will be more valuable because I do X" but probably either civilisation won't collapse, or it will collapse in such a catastrophic way that you would be unlikely to survive anyway. The point is, you don't need to talk it up as anything more than it is - most of these passtimes are rewarding in themselves. If you make your own bread and it comes out well, you feel good about yourself. Since my girlfriend has bought a horse and we have had to spend at least an hour working with it each day I have felt more like I'm doing something real than in years.
In the meantime it's always fun to read what ifs about the end of civilisation...
I'm fairly sure that this has already happened actually - I seem to remember EMI came on very heavy with OLGA, and although the site seems to have survived they seemed to lose a lot of impetus at that point. I think that may originally have been to do with lyrics as well.
Funny thing is, I had bought albums after finding songs I liked on OLGA.
Supposing I quote two lines of a lyric, is that allowed? What if I quote a verse? Where does something become a breach of copyright? Can I have a whole song with a couple of incorrect words or could it be a three word phrase that is recognisably from a given song?
This seems to be another excessive move from the recording industry. It seems to me that every time they take a step like this, the big record companies make themselves more obselete. Ultimately, artists won't want to be associated with their vile behaviour- there have been issues over artistic control of recordings for years and the more that viable alternatives arise, the more the creators of music will want to escape the machine.
Hopefully soon we will start to see the big kids of the music industry adding financial bancruptcy to their moral and creative bancruptcies.
Lets not forget that keeping people in prison is a very expensive activity, which the tax payer is going to end up paying for.
The US justice system is very punishment based- whereas in many European countries the aim is not to get even with criminals for having broken the law but to try and make sure that at the end of their sentence they are not going to go and break the law again. Typically the public perception is that this is "easy on criminals" but the ultimate consequence is less crime and greater public safety.
When it comes to sentencing it makes absolutely no difference if the punishment for stealing a chocolate bar is a slap on the wrist, six months imprisonment, life imprisonment or the death penalty- pretty much no-one commits a crime with any thought to the punishment if they get caught. People typically commit crimes under the expectation they are going to get away with it.
I was kind of hoping that games would become an art form and be taken as seriously as films, records or books by the creative establishment. Instead we have bypassed the artistic stage altogether and fallen straight into the hollywood cash-cow wasteland. I cant even see how games could get out of that, although Peter Molyneux seems to have some ideas judging by yesterday's article.
Almost forgot! If Iain M Banks wrote fantasy it would be very like K J Parker - look out for recent novel Shadow for some of the most dark and twisting fantasy written.
I strongly recommend Mark Chadbourne - his Age of Misrule series ("World's End" / "Darkest Hour" / "Always forever" ) deal with the idea of the Age of Reason collapsing around our ears and old gods returning to wreak havoc on civilisation. Absolutely brilliant.
Tim Powers is also a very original and compelling fantasy writer- "The Anubis Gates" and "The Drawing of the Dark" are both good starting points.
On ths sci-fi side I would recommend Eugene Byrne his "Thigmoo" is clever and funny. It would also be criminal to ignore the brilliant and original work of Jeff Noon, who I would recommend as a great writer although he tends to be a imaginative rather than technical which annoys a portion of hard sf fans. "Vurt" is a good starting point. It would be a terrible shame for anyone to have missed out on Mary Doria Russell - "The Sparrow" and it's sequel "Children of God" are very powerful writing by anyone's standards.
Although it's been said before, "Mythago Wood" by Robert Holdstock (author of "The Dark Wheel", Elite fans) is one of the greatest moments of fantasy fiction.
It seems to me that every time I see a story like this, or pretty much any other US Political news at the moment it marks the corporate industrial power base entrenching itself more deeply in the mechanism of the state. That means stagnation, it means the suppression of innovation by vested interests and ultimately it means that the US has had its time as Top Nation and just like every previous empire it is slowly slipping down to the after show party with all of the "We were once great, you know" nations of Western Europe.
It won't happen immediately, but it is looking increasingly as though the energy and vitality that once defined the United States' global profile is being slowly washed away, or perhaps caged by those who fear innovation.
Sigh... what wonders have been lost but for the crushing weight of dull, grey, uninspired, witless corporate bureaucracy.
Well I wouldn't know, but anyone who played Bullfrog games will notice that after EA bought them out they stopped producing any of the cool and original stuff they were doing before and turned into a theme-park/hospital/toilet sequel factory instead.
Its seems so obvious that a big company buys out a small creative one and crushes its originality to turn it into a safe, sequel building money machine that it is almost cliche, but apparently that is exactly how EA works.
I'm glad someone has said this- people start talking about people like Koontz (he has written one, passable, book roughly 47 times with different names), King (some good moments but will largely be ignored as trash) and people like Weiss and Hickman (I swear that the Dragonlance books are the worst thing I have ever read) or Terry Brooks (Shannara was middle earth after having all the colour and originality leached out of it, although some of his others are enjoyable in an instantly forgettable sort of way) and yet not one person has mentioned any of the great original and contemporary fantasy and horror that is out there. Barker's fantasy stuff, especially "Imajica" is awesome. And what about Tim Powers, Robert Holdstock, Michael Scott Rohan or Philip Pullman? These writers will stand the test of time far better than most of the people mentioned on this thread- I would say Ursula Le Guin and Iain Banks will both still be remembered in the future but again no one mentions Doris Lessing's brilliant "Canopus in Argos Archives" series or even Jeff Noon, I mean come on people, what have you been readings? Recycling the same old ideas and concepts with no original twist at all is not the makings of classic fiction.
I believe that this would actually be illegal in the UK because it discriminates against some disabled people who are not necessarily able to read at the same speed as average.
I can't give any definite statistics but both my parents work in crime reduction and I believe that Britain has the second worst crime rate in the western world. Australia is the worst.
Nuclear is also pretty slow and expensive to build.
A good stopgap is to build quickburn wood reactors. Because they are burning wood they don't add carbon to the system in the way fossil fuels do, the wood is grown in fields that would otherwise be growing food to bolster surplusses, improving matters for farmers and it is very easy to convert a coal power station to wood consumption.
Its all the rage in Sweden, aparently.
For general stuff about dynamic sites, as well as pretty much everything else web design related, you might find some useful articles on webmonkey. Its unbiased in terms of platforms and has information on programming, serverside stuff and design. Pretty much all the web stuff I do started from things I read there.
I think you're getting confused over the letter "d".
Powder cords are quite a common thing to have on your skis if you are going out on deep powder, so you don't have to spend all week looking for them int the powder after you have fallen over.
Theory is all well and good, but in computer science that would make it all to easy for students to come out with a good qualification and no practical experience. That doesn't help them and it doesn't help people who would otherwise want to give them jobs, accept them for university places etc (english- no idea where exactly AP falls in the whole us education system.) I'm sure that will illicit indignant cries of 'but I would get practical experience' and I'm sure that many people here would. I doubt many people here were lazy students looking for an easy route to an employable qualification.
If you are going to use a single language (imagine trying to teach a class where most people are going for the easy option and using Visual Basic, three people are using perl, a few are using java, some are using C++ a couple are using C and there is some smartass playing with Assembly and you might see a reason that you would want to do this) then you probably want to choose a language that is freely available, that can write applications that run at the command line, windowed apps, serverside processing and web based applets.
Another big advantage of Java as an instruction language is that it is far harder to crash your system completely than in C or C++. At worst you sink the VM. And you don't have the C style memory allocation problems. The style and syntax prepares people for a C++ type language if they want to get into that sort of coding without having quite so many pitfalls. How many students are going to be writing stuff that really needs the famous speed advantage of C?
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to help Slashdot repeat itself, but the zen garden was linked from here a week or so back. It shows how much you can do just by swapping stylesheets. Pretty much anyone who works in web development could benefit from taking a look at it.
The other side of this is that Java also has however many years of developer experience. Almost any time you run into a problem when coding Java you can do a quick search on the web and find other people who had the same problem and how they solved it. There just isn't the depth of developer history in the .net languages and that means that it is hard to find solutions to those obscure and poorly documented errors when they do come up.
For a bit of background there is a comparative review here of all the nominees for best novel.
And another thing- if you did have a singer with perfect pitch they are likely to be thrown if any of the instruments they are working with is out of tune at all. What you really want from a singer is excellent relative pitch, not objective perfect pitch.
Bollocks to aerodynamics, shaving your legs is equally useful to a mountain biker when the time comes to take off those plasters a day or two after you have stacked and injured yourself.
But it's not fair! Opera is just better!
I know it's not a well argued case, but it's true.
I would suggest that rather than being an expression of hacking, this is a side-effect of the ephemeral nature of playing games with data and chips. If you spend that much time, usually in and out of work, working with computers I think maybe you start thinking about the things that last after the power switch goes off.
Perhaps there is a reaction to the fake plastic lifestyle that the economists want us all to buy into (and keep buying, and keep buying) and the loss of sense of place and time that globalisation offers. A feeling that there must be something concrete, something more than concrete. This kind of environment perhaps inclines one to think of how things used to be, in some rose-tinted past.
Ultimately, a hobby is a hobby. It is appealing to think "when civilisation collapses I will be more valuable because I do X" but probably either civilisation won't collapse, or it will collapse in such a catastrophic way that you would be unlikely to survive anyway. The point is, you don't need to talk it up as anything more than it is - most of these passtimes are rewarding in themselves. If you make your own bread and it comes out well, you feel good about yourself. Since my girlfriend has bought a horse and we have had to spend at least an hour working with it each day I have felt more like I'm doing something real than in years.
In the meantime it's always fun to read what ifs about the end of civilisation...
I'm fairly sure that this has already happened actually - I seem to remember EMI came on very heavy with OLGA, and although the site seems to have survived they seemed to lose a lot of impetus at that point. I think that may originally have been to do with lyrics as well.
Funny thing is, I had bought albums after finding songs I liked on OLGA.
Supposing I quote two lines of a lyric, is that allowed? What if I quote a verse? Where does something become a breach of copyright? Can I have a whole song with a couple of incorrect words or could it be a three word phrase that is recognisably from a given song?
This seems to be another excessive move from the recording industry. It seems to me that every time they take a step like this, the big record companies make themselves more obselete. Ultimately, artists won't want to be associated with their vile behaviour- there have been issues over artistic control of recordings for years and the more that viable alternatives arise, the more the creators of music will want to escape the machine.
Hopefully soon we will start to see the big kids of the music industry adding financial bancruptcy to their moral and creative bancruptcies.
Lets not forget that keeping people in prison is a very expensive activity, which the tax payer is going to end up paying for.
The US justice system is very punishment based- whereas in many European countries the aim is not to get even with criminals for having broken the law but to try and make sure that at the end of their sentence they are not going to go and break the law again. Typically the public perception is that this is "easy on criminals" but the ultimate consequence is less crime and greater public safety.
When it comes to sentencing it makes absolutely no difference if the punishment for stealing a chocolate bar is a slap on the wrist, six months imprisonment, life imprisonment or the death penalty- pretty much no-one commits a crime with any thought to the punishment if they get caught. People typically commit crimes under the expectation they are going to get away with it.
I was kind of hoping that games would become an art form and be taken as seriously as films, records or books by the creative establishment. Instead we have bypassed the artistic stage altogether and fallen straight into the hollywood cash-cow wasteland. I cant even see how games could get out of that, although Peter Molyneux seems to have some ideas judging by yesterday's article.
And you only ever listen to an album once? No wonder you think they're overpriced.
Almost forgot! If Iain M Banks wrote fantasy it would be very like K J Parker - look out for recent novel Shadow for some of the most dark and twisting fantasy written.
A few writers other people seem to have missed:
I strongly recommend Mark Chadbourne - his Age of Misrule series ("World's End" / "Darkest Hour" / "Always forever" ) deal with the idea of the Age of Reason collapsing around our ears and old gods returning to wreak havoc on civilisation. Absolutely brilliant.
Tim Powers is also a very original and compelling fantasy writer- "The Anubis Gates" and "The Drawing of the Dark" are both good starting points.
On ths sci-fi side I would recommend Eugene Byrne his "Thigmoo" is clever and funny. It would also be criminal to ignore the brilliant and original work of Jeff Noon, who I would recommend as a great writer although he tends to be a imaginative rather than technical which annoys a portion of hard sf fans. "Vurt" is a good starting point. It would be a terrible shame for anyone to have missed out on Mary Doria Russell - "The Sparrow" and it's sequel "Children of God" are very powerful writing by anyone's standards.
Although it's been said before, "Mythago Wood" by Robert Holdstock (author of "The Dark Wheel", Elite fans) is one of the greatest moments of fantasy fiction.
You should post that over to fortean times - they love that kind of stuff.
It seems to me that every time I see a story like this, or pretty much any other US Political news at the moment it marks the corporate industrial power base entrenching itself more deeply in the mechanism of the state. That means stagnation, it means the suppression of innovation by vested interests and ultimately it means that the US has had its time as Top Nation and just like every previous empire it is slowly slipping down to the after show party with all of the "We were once great, you know" nations of Western Europe.
It won't happen immediately, but it is looking increasingly as though the energy and vitality that once defined the United States' global profile is being slowly washed away, or perhaps caged by those who fear innovation.
Sigh... what wonders have been lost but for the crushing weight of dull, grey, uninspired, witless corporate bureaucracy.
Well I wouldn't know, but anyone who played Bullfrog games will notice that after EA bought them out they stopped producing any of the cool and original stuff they were doing before and turned into a theme-park/hospital/toilet sequel factory instead.
Its seems so obvious that a big company buys out a small creative one and crushes its originality to turn it into a safe, sequel building money machine that it is almost cliche, but apparently that is exactly how EA works.
I'm glad someone has said this- people start talking about people like Koontz (he has written one, passable, book roughly 47 times with different names), King (some good moments but will largely be ignored as trash) and people like Weiss and Hickman (I swear that the Dragonlance books are the worst thing I have ever read) or Terry Brooks (Shannara was middle earth after having all the colour and originality leached out of it, although some of his others are enjoyable in an instantly forgettable sort of way) and yet not one person has mentioned any of the great original and contemporary fantasy and horror that is out there. Barker's fantasy stuff, especially "Imajica" is awesome. And what about Tim Powers, Robert Holdstock, Michael Scott Rohan or Philip Pullman? These writers will stand the test of time far better than most of the people mentioned on this thread- I would say Ursula Le Guin and Iain Banks will both still be remembered in the future but again no one mentions Doris Lessing's brilliant "Canopus in Argos Archives" series or even Jeff Noon, I mean come on people, what have you been readings? Recycling the same old ideas and concepts with no original twist at all is not the makings of classic fiction.
I believe that this would actually be illegal in the UK because it discriminates against some disabled people who are not necessarily able to read at the same speed as average.
A reverse DOS?
you sod.
I can't give any definite statistics but both my parents work in crime reduction and I believe that Britain has the second worst crime rate in the western world. Australia is the worst.
Nuclear is also pretty slow and expensive to build. A good stopgap is to build quickburn wood reactors. Because they are burning wood they don't add carbon to the system in the way fossil fuels do, the wood is grown in fields that would otherwise be growing food to bolster surplusses, improving matters for farmers and it is very easy to convert a coal power station to wood consumption. Its all the rage in Sweden, aparently.
For general stuff about dynamic sites, as well as pretty much everything else web design related, you might find some useful articles on webmonkey. Its unbiased in terms of platforms and has information on programming, serverside stuff and design. Pretty much all the web stuff I do started from things I read there.
I think you're getting confused over the letter "d". Powder cords are quite a common thing to have on your skis if you are going out on deep powder, so you don't have to spend all week looking for them int the powder after you have fallen over.
Theory is all well and good, but in computer science that would make it all to easy for students to come out with a good qualification and no practical experience. That doesn't help them and it doesn't help people who would otherwise want to give them jobs, accept them for university places etc (english- no idea where exactly AP falls in the whole us education system.) I'm sure that will illicit indignant cries of 'but I would get practical experience' and I'm sure that many people here would. I doubt many people here were lazy students looking for an easy route to an employable qualification.
If you are going to use a single language (imagine trying to teach a class where most people are going for the easy option and using Visual Basic, three people are using perl, a few are using java, some are using C++ a couple are using C and there is some smartass playing with Assembly and you might see a reason that you would want to do this) then you probably want to choose a language that is freely available, that can write applications that run at the command line, windowed apps, serverside processing and web based applets.
Another big advantage of Java as an instruction language is that it is far harder to crash your system completely than in C or C++. At worst you sink the VM. And you don't have the C style memory allocation problems. The style and syntax prepares people for a C++ type language if they want to get into that sort of coding without having quite so many pitfalls. How many students are going to be writing stuff that really needs the famous speed advantage of C?