Most people don't make their choice of OS based on any sort of relevant information, including benchmarks. Windows fanboys will shout "I told you Windows was better!" FOSS evangelists will claim it's good enough, and worth it to 1) not have to pay for an OS and 2) not have to support a corrupt corporation. MAC fanboys will say "You two and your little fight are cute. I'm going to go pay a lot of money to purchase something that's exactly the same as the last one I purchased".
Technology holy wars are no better than politics. Vet all data against your preexisting beliefs, and ignore everything that doesn't match them.
The comments here are boring. I was hoping for a conspiracy theorist that would point out that it's unfathomable for us to have been to Mars, since even our moon landing took place in a studio on Earth.
On a side note, this is my favorite argument against the faked-moon-landing theory: https://xkcd.com/1074/
... a notoriously difficult language to learn and particularly, to speak
If the Chinese language is really such a notoriously difficult language to learn (and to speak) there ought to be no one using it anymore, right?
I dunno about you, but I do think/. has gone way too hyperbole !!
Actually, it is considered a notoriously difficult language for westerners to learn. I don't think that is hyperbole. "The hardest language and nearly impossible to learn" would be hyperbole. As someone who did learn Mandarin and spent a couple years in Asia speaking Mandarin with people on the streets pretty much all day every day, I can tell you it's about as different from English as you can get. Having also studied French, I can tell you it's much more difficult than picking up a Romance language.
If you wanted to pick apart a section of the quoted text as inaccurate, it would be "particularly, to speak". You could pick apart the fact misplaced comma, or you could just look directly at his meaning. That implies that of the parts of learning the language, speaking is the most difficult. This couldn't be more wrong for Chinese. If you break language into four tasks: speaking, listening, reading and writing, then speaking is by far the easiest. Reading an writing in Chinese is something that most foreigners I met in Asia never even attempted.
Easy way to make a progressive consumption tax: Exclude groceries and rent/mortgage on primary housing. For poor people who pay nearly everything they have to those two categories, their effective tax rate is 0%. For those who make more (and therefore can afford to spend more on non-necessary items), their tax rate would effectively be higher.
Nobody claims there are no vulnerabilities in open source code. But I bet you'd see some interesting differences if you compare the time between when an open-source vulnerability is reported and when it is fixed to the same interval for a commercial, closed source alternative, you'd see that known vulnerabilities exist for a much shorter time in a well-supported open source product. No, I don't have any source to back that up, just my experience with how long known vulnerabilities go unpatched in Windows, Adobe products, etc.
It depends on the state. In many states, an employer can fire you for any reason or no reason at all (with exception of legally protected statuses that cannot be used in hiring/firing decisions such as race, age, gender, etc).
I take my cues from the two major U.S. political parties. There will be no compromises. Better for America to go down in flame than for my rivals to gain any sort of victory
There are plenty of people in the world who will maintain your vehicle for a reasonable price. Same with your computers.
Yes, and so long as you either 1) don't rely on your vehicle or 2) always schedule your vehicle's problems for times and locations where such a person is available, then relying on them is great. However, if you are driving on a freeway and have your car overheat in an area where there is no cellular coverage (I know there are a lot of urban dwellers here who will never visit a place without cell coverage, but I live in a more rural area where it's spotty at best), and you can't even locate the radiator cap, much less figure out how to add fluid, then you are SOL. Everyone should know how to do basic troubleshooting on anything that they rely on. If an item breaking down is just a minor inconvenience, then it's fine to rely on 9-5 service centers. However, if the item breaking down will seriously disrupt your life or business, then assuming it'll always just work when you need it and giving it no further thought is just reckless.
If you think regular checkups removes your responsibility to have a fundamental understanding of how eating a bunch of hydrogenated fat, binge drinking, smoking or simply having a sedentary lifestyle will affect your body, then feel free to die at 45.
But the course is titled "an introduction to computer science". Why then does the curriculum of the course not introduce the students to any topics in computer science (except, of course, cryptography). We're not saying an introductory course should go in-depth about any topic in computer science, but it should introduce the field.
If I were a freshman and unsure if I should go into CS or CIT, I would want to take an introductory course for each and have them be sufficiently different for me to make an educated decision on which I would prefer.
Not sure why that should be an apparent problem or concern. I fly frequently - yet I couldn't build or pilot a plane. I routinely benefit from medical care - yet I couldn't perform heart surgery. I drive a car nearly every day - yet I couldn't build or repair one myself.
Contrary to popular Slashdot-aspie opinion, understanding the deep internals of computers is not a requirement for daily life. A small degree of computer literacy is useful in most professional fields, but it is by no means a universal requirement or even universally worthwhile as a pursuit.
I don't need to know how to design a processor to browse the web, type a research paper, or play Angry Birds.
The parent doesn't claim everyone should know how to repair, design, or build their computing device, merely have a general grasp of how it's doing what it's doing. You do not own a plane. You probably don't need to worry about that. If you own a car, then yes, You really ought to know enough about how it works to perform routine maintenance (oil changes, etc). And if you don't have a general understanding of how your body works, there's probably a reason you have to go benefit from medical care so routinely (an apple a day keeps the doctor away, etc).
No. Meaning every good astronomer can use a telescope, but not everyone that can use a telescope is an astronomer. You really should know how to program to do computer science, but programming computers is not computer science.
Allowing encryption on the ham bands sounds like a great idea, especially to slashdotters, because we all really love the idea of our government not being able to listen to everything we say. Unfortunately, there are a lot of governments who really don't like that idea. The only reason Ham operators in your favorite semi-free country of choice can talk to people in much less free parts of the world is because of the ban on encryption. If the UK allows encrypted signals over ham, and a UK ham operator can get signals hitting all over the world, you better believe the Iranian, Chinese, and all other heavy-handed governments that make no effort to hide their censorship efforts will start rounding up ham equipment because who knows what sort of ideas are streaming in from the UK.
Global encryption bans are the only thing allowing ham to operate in large portions of the country. All it takes is one country lifting that ban to spoil it for everyone. There are plenty of other avenues for those who want to encrypt their communications.
You misread that. I wasn't claiming the existence of dinosaurs was a debate. I was referring to those who embrace the Standard Model of physics as dinosaurs (an example of useless name calling).
It's better to devote your time to improving your logic, design and architecture skills. If your career is tied to the continued usefulness of a given language, you're almost guaranteed to eventually find yourself unemployed or forever locked into a maintenance job that doesn't allow you to create anything new or interesting. Hardly what I'd call a "great job", which you seem to believe you must paint yourself into a corner to obtain.
Stop focusing on being a coder and start focusing on being a software developer. Learn about algorithm analysis and optimization. Learn about design patterns. Learn about software architecture. Apply those to whatever language the "great job" employer wants you to use.
I love the global warming debate. You are either an environmentalist nut-job or an anti-science global warming denier. We spend almost no time analyzing reports, comparing data and questioning our preconceived notions (a.k.a. rational thought), and instead dig around the internet for articles supporting our side of the argument and name-calling anyone who has any doubts about the methods or conclusions from our pet article.
In any other scientific debate, you never hear about "Higgs Boson Deniers" or "String Theory Fanatics" or "Standard Model dinosaurs". As a matter of fact, this is pretty much the only scientific area where EVERY commentator acts as though they are experts. Whenever I see a/. article where global warming is the subject, I can rest assured that at least 95% of the comments will either be by or in response to trolls. It's like I'm on reddit or something.
Yes, it's the largest creature to ever walk on land, but that's only because no whale has ever walked on land.
Disclaimer: I have not done any research to substantiate this claim, and I realize it's impossible to prove a negative, but I'm fairly certain there are no documented cases of walking whales.
Unless, of course, you count the Vancouver Canucks mascott
Yes, it's the largest creature to ever walk on land, but that's only because no whale has ever walked on land.
Disclaimer: I have not done any research to substantiate this claim, and I realize it's impossible to prove a negative, but I'm fairly certain there are no documented cases of walking whales.
As has already been pointed, out, 190 tons > 65 tons. The author of the summary could well have done his research today, and said "wow. This new article claims that the Dreadnoughtus schrani is roughly 65 tons. If only it had been 2 tons lighter, I could have claimed the blue whale to be 3 times the size of the largest dinosaur, rather than just "more than twice much".
Yes, it's the largest creature to ever walk on land, but that's only because no whale has ever walked on land.
FreePascal: logical and bitwise 'and' and 'or' are the same operator, it just chooses one for you based on the operands. Example: "if (i < 5 and j < 10)". The compiler tries to do a bitwise and of 5 and J, then compare it to i, and then it gets confused about how that result (a boolean) can be less than 10
Speaking of which do the writers have any background in science, or do they just call in the science adviser every now and then to double check things?
A quick wikipedia search indicates that both the creators are TV people to the core, with no involvement in science. Chuck Lorre spent 2 years in college where he "majored in rock 'n' roll and pot and minored in LSD", but has no other academic credentials. Bill Prary's page does at least suggest he did some work on Star Trek: Voyager, but that's the only connection he has to the show's sci-fi loving characters.
Pardon my grammer. I realize "every Americans" is incorrect and quite ironic in its placement in a sentence about the intelligence of average Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
"Okay. I found 5 restaurants like 'calculate takeoff thrust' near you"
Most people don't make their choice of OS based on any sort of relevant information, including benchmarks. Windows fanboys will shout "I told you Windows was better!" FOSS evangelists will claim it's good enough, and worth it to 1) not have to pay for an OS and 2) not have to support a corrupt corporation. MAC fanboys will say "You two and your little fight are cute. I'm going to go pay a lot of money to purchase something that's exactly the same as the last one I purchased". Technology holy wars are no better than politics. Vet all data against your preexisting beliefs, and ignore everything that doesn't match them.
The comments here are boring. I was hoping for a conspiracy theorist that would point out that it's unfathomable for us to have been to Mars, since even our moon landing took place in a studio on Earth. On a side note, this is my favorite argument against the faked-moon-landing theory: https://xkcd.com/1074/
If the Chinese language is really such a notoriously difficult language to learn (and to speak) there ought to be no one using it anymore, right?
I dunno about you, but I do think /. has gone way too hyperbole !!
Actually, it is considered a notoriously difficult language for westerners to learn. I don't think that is hyperbole. "The hardest language and nearly impossible to learn" would be hyperbole. As someone who did learn Mandarin and spent a couple years in Asia speaking Mandarin with people on the streets pretty much all day every day, I can tell you it's about as different from English as you can get. Having also studied French, I can tell you it's much more difficult than picking up a Romance language. If you wanted to pick apart a section of the quoted text as inaccurate, it would be "particularly, to speak". You could pick apart the fact misplaced comma, or you could just look directly at his meaning. That implies that of the parts of learning the language, speaking is the most difficult. This couldn't be more wrong for Chinese. If you break language into four tasks: speaking, listening, reading and writing, then speaking is by far the easiest. Reading an writing in Chinese is something that most foreigners I met in Asia never even attempted.
Easy way to make a progressive consumption tax: Exclude groceries and rent/mortgage on primary housing. For poor people who pay nearly everything they have to those two categories, their effective tax rate is 0%. For those who make more (and therefore can afford to spend more on non-necessary items), their tax rate would effectively be higher.
Nobody claims there are no vulnerabilities in open source code. But I bet you'd see some interesting differences if you compare the time between when an open-source vulnerability is reported and when it is fixed to the same interval for a commercial, closed source alternative, you'd see that known vulnerabilities exist for a much shorter time in a well-supported open source product. No, I don't have any source to back that up, just my experience with how long known vulnerabilities go unpatched in Windows, Adobe products, etc.
It depends on the state. In many states, an employer can fire you for any reason or no reason at all (with exception of legally protected statuses that cannot be used in hiring/firing decisions such as race, age, gender, etc).
I take my cues from the two major U.S. political parties. There will be no compromises. Better for America to go down in flame than for my rivals to gain any sort of victory
There are plenty of people in the world who will maintain your vehicle for a reasonable price. Same with your computers.
Yes, and so long as you either 1) don't rely on your vehicle or 2) always schedule your vehicle's problems for times and locations where such a person is available, then relying on them is great. However, if you are driving on a freeway and have your car overheat in an area where there is no cellular coverage (I know there are a lot of urban dwellers here who will never visit a place without cell coverage, but I live in a more rural area where it's spotty at best), and you can't even locate the radiator cap, much less figure out how to add fluid, then you are SOL. Everyone should know how to do basic troubleshooting on anything that they rely on. If an item breaking down is just a minor inconvenience, then it's fine to rely on 9-5 service centers. However, if the item breaking down will seriously disrupt your life or business, then assuming it'll always just work when you need it and giving it no further thought is just reckless.
If you think regular checkups removes your responsibility to have a fundamental understanding of how eating a bunch of hydrogenated fat, binge drinking, smoking or simply having a sedentary lifestyle will affect your body, then feel free to die at 45.
But the course is titled "an introduction to computer science". Why then does the curriculum of the course not introduce the students to any topics in computer science (except, of course, cryptography). We're not saying an introductory course should go in-depth about any topic in computer science, but it should introduce the field.
If I were a freshman and unsure if I should go into CS or CIT, I would want to take an introductory course for each and have them be sufficiently different for me to make an educated decision on which I would prefer.
Not sure why that should be an apparent problem or concern. I fly frequently - yet I couldn't build or pilot a plane. I routinely benefit from medical care - yet I couldn't perform heart surgery. I drive a car nearly every day - yet I couldn't build or repair one myself.
Contrary to popular Slashdot-aspie opinion, understanding the deep internals of computers is not a requirement for daily life. A small degree of computer literacy is useful in most professional fields, but it is by no means a universal requirement or even universally worthwhile as a pursuit.
I don't need to know how to design a processor to browse the web, type a research paper, or play Angry Birds.
The parent doesn't claim everyone should know how to repair, design, or build their computing device, merely have a general grasp of how it's doing what it's doing. You do not own a plane. You probably don't need to worry about that. If you own a car, then yes, You really ought to know enough about how it works to perform routine maintenance (oil changes, etc). And if you don't have a general understanding of how your body works, there's probably a reason you have to go benefit from medical care so routinely (an apple a day keeps the doctor away, etc).
No. Meaning every good astronomer can use a telescope, but not everyone that can use a telescope is an astronomer. You really should know how to program to do computer science, but programming computers is not computer science.
Linux, cryptography, HTML and JavaScript.
That's computer science?
Cryptography is. The rest isn't.
Allowing encryption on the ham bands sounds like a great idea, especially to slashdotters, because we all really love the idea of our government not being able to listen to everything we say. Unfortunately, there are a lot of governments who really don't like that idea. The only reason Ham operators in your favorite semi-free country of choice can talk to people in much less free parts of the world is because of the ban on encryption. If the UK allows encrypted signals over ham, and a UK ham operator can get signals hitting all over the world, you better believe the Iranian, Chinese, and all other heavy-handed governments that make no effort to hide their censorship efforts will start rounding up ham equipment because who knows what sort of ideas are streaming in from the UK.
Global encryption bans are the only thing allowing ham to operate in large portions of the country. All it takes is one country lifting that ban to spoil it for everyone. There are plenty of other avenues for those who want to encrypt their communications.
You misread that. I wasn't claiming the existence of dinosaurs was a debate. I was referring to those who embrace the Standard Model of physics as dinosaurs (an example of useless name calling).
It's better to devote your time to improving your logic, design and architecture skills. If your career is tied to the continued usefulness of a given language, you're almost guaranteed to eventually find yourself unemployed or forever locked into a maintenance job that doesn't allow you to create anything new or interesting. Hardly what I'd call a "great job", which you seem to believe you must paint yourself into a corner to obtain.
Stop focusing on being a coder and start focusing on being a software developer. Learn about algorithm analysis and optimization. Learn about design patterns. Learn about software architecture. Apply those to whatever language the "great job" employer wants you to use.
I love the global warming debate. You are either an environmentalist nut-job or an anti-science global warming denier. We spend almost no time analyzing reports, comparing data and questioning our preconceived notions (a.k.a. rational thought), and instead dig around the internet for articles supporting our side of the argument and name-calling anyone who has any doubts about the methods or conclusions from our pet article. /. article where global warming is the subject, I can rest assured that at least 95% of the comments will either be by or in response to trolls. It's like I'm on reddit or something.
In any other scientific debate, you never hear about "Higgs Boson Deniers" or "String Theory Fanatics" or "Standard Model dinosaurs". As a matter of fact, this is pretty much the only scientific area where EVERY commentator acts as though they are experts. Whenever I see a
Let me be more specific then: no blue whale has ever walked on land. Again, this claim is made without any research done by me.
Yes, it's the largest creature to ever walk on land, but that's only because no whale has ever walked on land.
Disclaimer: I have not done any research to substantiate this claim, and I realize it's impossible to prove a negative, but I'm fairly certain there are no documented cases of walking whales.
Unless, of course, you count the Vancouver Canucks mascott
Yes, it's the largest creature to ever walk on land, but that's only because no whale has ever walked on land.
Disclaimer: I have not done any research to substantiate this claim, and I realize it's impossible to prove a negative, but I'm fairly certain there are no documented cases of walking whales.
As has already been pointed, out, 190 tons > 65 tons. The author of the summary could well have done his research today, and said "wow. This new article claims that the Dreadnoughtus schrani is roughly 65 tons. If only it had been 2 tons lighter, I could have claimed the blue whale to be 3 times the size of the largest dinosaur, rather than just "more than twice much".
Yes, it's the largest creature to ever walk on land, but that's only because no whale has ever walked on land.
FreePascal: logical and bitwise 'and' and 'or' are the same operator, it just chooses one for you based on the operands. Example: "if (i < 5 and j < 10)". The compiler tries to do a bitwise and of 5 and J, then compare it to i, and then it gets confused about how that result (a boolean) can be less than 10
Speaking of which do the writers have any background in science, or do they just call in the science adviser every now and then to double check things?
A quick wikipedia search indicates that both the creators are TV people to the core, with no involvement in science. Chuck Lorre spent 2 years in college where he "majored in rock 'n' roll and pot and minored in LSD", but has no other academic credentials. Bill Prary's page does at least suggest he did some work on Star Trek: Voyager, but that's the only connection he has to the show's sci-fi loving characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Pardon my grammer. I realize "every Americans" is incorrect and quite ironic in its placement in a sentence about the intelligence of average Americans.