You're right. I received a BS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and worked as a successful C programmer for a couple years before getting my hands on a debugger. I didn't learn a thing. I didn't learn BASIC, C, Fortran, assembly language, Pascal, LISP, and I certainly wasn't able to write a game or ace the senior-level Assembly Language class or write a theorem prover in Lisp or write a scheduling program or database application for my summer job because I didn't have a debugger. I certainly haven't written thousands of lines of advanced Persistence of Vision raytracing scripts because there isn't a debugger. Nope. Can't be done.
This is exactly right. I received a CS bachelor's degree in 1987 and do you know what the primary devlopment platform was that we used?
Pascal on the a Vax 11/780 running VMS.
Did that affect my ability to go out and get good jobs programming C and later C++ under DOS (and later Windows?). Of course not, because I knew how to think and therefore could learn new platforms easily.
In fact, I was hired as a C programmer with no C experience, later hired as a C++ programmer with no C++ experience and now have been hired as a Java programmer with no Java experience.
The ability to learn quickly (because I practiced thinking rather than memorizing), do some work on my own time (usually part of a hobby project), have enabled me to become productive very quickly.
The concepts I learned in school were much more generic and honed my abilities to think and learn, not memorize a lot of rote material (despite a lot of marginal professors trying to teach that way).
Actually, the most useful class I took was Symbolic Logic, which was a math/philosophy class.
It seems to me that carrying ethanol around in sealed plastic containers (similar to fountain pen cartridges according to the article) could hardly be dangerous.
1. They're sealed. It's not like people will be opening a cap on their laptops and pouring the stuff in... it would be more like replacing an ink jet cartridge.
2. They're small. I don't know how much methanol it takes to run your laptop for 20 hours, but if the fuel cells are comparable in size to batteries and lighter, I hardly think someone will be walking around with a pint of ethanol... unless perhaps he or she is going off to hike the Appalachian trail for a month and bought a gross of methanol cartidges at Wal-Mart to run a laptop.
How does butane compare to methanol? Probably not as flammable and has a much higher flash point, but still people don't worry about folks carrying around butane lighters whereever they go.
How does this "suck" compared to what we have now?
Let's use laptops as an example:
Right now, you use a laptop for two hours then you're out of juice and must wait until you can get to an electrical outlet for an extended period of time.
On the plane? Sorry.
At the poolside finishing up the cerebral implant drivers so Linux can run Quake 7? Sorry.
On a road trip? Sorry, unless you have an inverter and a spare cigarette lighter.
Let's not even get into having to replace the batteries....
With the ethanol fuel cell, after 20 hours of use, you reach in your backpack and pull out a 20-cent methanol cartridge (that's a guess, but how much could it cost?) and pop it in the cell(certainly without having to remove it and possibly without having to power down (small internal reservoir, etc)) and you keep on going. You would never be tied to the electrical grid if you didn't want to be and the fuel (methanol) would be comparably cheap to the electricity you use now. The cell would probably last longer because there aren't all those fancy chemicals to degrade over time.
Now how could this possibly be annoying or inconvenient compared to what we have now?
Solar might be OK if you are outside or your laptop runs the Crusoe Mark V that only draws 0.05 watts (not to mention the display and storage, etc), or you don't mind your solar panel being the size of a Buick.
Kinetic works well for watches (mechanically anyway), but I'd really hate to have to stop working and shake my laptop to recharge it... imagine the Etch-a-Sketch jokes.
But seriously, this seems like a phenomenal improvement in cost, longevity and convenience over batteries. Of course, the standard "3 - 5 years down the road" clause is in effect, so I guess we'll know in about 2004.
Almost every person I ever knew who would qualify as a nerd had a serious interest in most or all of the following: comic books, role-playing games, science fiction _and_ MST3K (not to mention progressive music). I know I do. I don't know what your definition of nerd is, but it's certainly the not the same as the rest of the world!
I personally like forays into other topics. There's more to life than computers. And to repeat an old cliche: If you aren't interested, don't read it.
>>Shouldn't they just make the best movie they can and forget the mainstream?
Sure, if they care about art and don't care about making as much money as possible. And how often does that happen? When's the last time there was a Science Fiction or Fantasy movie that had any literary integrity to it? OK, I think Contact counts, but it was an anomaly.
I really hope the movie turns out to be good, but I'm not holding my breath for it to be anything other than a loosely strung together series of CG shots.
We all get a good laugh over the silly reactions of people to RPG's, but I have to wonder since I see the exact same types of reactions from many/.ers whenever the topic of religion comes up. As a proud religious conservative and veteran of many years of RPG's, I find there's enough bigotry and narrow-mindedness to go around.
Back to the topic at hand... when I was in college and angling for a degree in RPG's, based on the number of hours I spent...:) I discovered my parents had some alarmist and largely incoherent pamphlet decrying D&D. The ironic thing was that every single reference to the AD&D books was wrong. If these poeple can't even get their page numbers or even book volumes right, how can we believe they have any idea what they are talking about? My friends and I had many laughs over this.
To their credit, they had one quote I actually agreed with from Dr. Joyce Brothers to the effect of "If you are messed up in the head to start with, D&D might not be good for you."
Anyhow, I hope the movie turns out good and we don't see another volley of "RPG's are evil".
Besides, there are plenty of people who talks squeaky... ever hear Kathy Ireland in "Alien from L.A."? How about Yeardley Smith from the Simpsons? Or Dr. Ruth? Proof positive that nitrogen can make you squeak.
Seriously though, we all know that it's really laughing gas (hydrogen cyanide) that causes you to squeak when you breathe it.
Um... your analogy was clever, but, I think it is wrong.
A B&W TV can still watch color TV signals, but an NTSC TV cannot watch digital TV signals without additional hardware. Basically, no one was forced to upgrade their B&W TVs to color, but eliminating NTSC would force many people to upgrade their hardware to support DTV... and let's face it, many of these people cannot afford to or don't want to spend the money.
Well, to be fair to Microsoft MMC was an attempt to gather up all system management tools into one place.
Of course, what they ended up with is a sprawling mazelike mess that is far more difficult to use than the disparate tools it replaces. I went back from IIS 4 to IIS 2 because it was took me about 20 minutes of wandering aimlessly just to configure basic ftp server functionality. And since everything is so random, you end up having to wander through aimlessly every time you use because nothing is intuitive. It's all just an endless maze of twisty little options all the same.
I don't know what the User Interface experts have been doing for the last ten years, because in my opinion, GUI's are steadily and consistently getting worse.
You know you're in trouble when they threw out the fairly useful interface in version 4 in favor of hooking into the Microsoft Management Console. The program also seems to run in real-mode priority regardless of what you tell it. My machine took 20 minutes to repaint the screen so I could shut the d*mn thing down.
User Interface Hell... and it locks up your computer. I never had trouble with DK until version 5 and have just switched back to 4, no useful functionality lost either.
I agree, right or wrong, the FBI can totally screw you if they have a reason. It's easy to trumpet free speech when you're just some anonymous coward on a Web forum, but when that notice comes in the mail on government letterhead, I think a lot of us would be really scared. Not everyone is willing to spend thousands of dollars or risk jail time just to make a point. It takes a lot of courage to make that stand knowing you might lose despite being in the right.
Ironically if all you have is an education degree, you are probably not qualified to teach either, but that doesn't stop the teachers unions...
I don't know what the true motivations of the teachers unions are, but they act as if their motivations are to keep their standards so low that any semi-literate fool can become a teacher (much to the dismay of the dedicated and compentant teacher that are out there I would imagine) and keep the children ignornat and pliable to their political manipulations.
I got into computers ultimately through my interest in numbers. When I was about 7, a scientific calculator cost about $200, and basically consisted of powers, roots, and trig functions. My Dad, being an engineer, let me play with his and that was the start. Over the years, I discovered quite a few cool properties of numbers and calculated all the the prime numbers up to 1000 by hand for a sizth grade project.
Believe it for not, seeing a BASIC program with a for loop counting to 10 completely blew my mind, because I immediately saw the potential of programming.
I never got my hands on a computer for more than a few minutes until my high school picked up about 6 Apple ]['s quite a few years later, but by then my interest in computers was inevitable....
On the other hand, my oldest son could use a mouse and launch software before he was 2.
>People want to make it so the states have more power.
That's the way the country was created! A fairly loose group of sovereign states united by a federal government with very limited explicitly enumerated powers. It's in this quaint little document they wrote in 1789. And that's the way the country worked until, starting in 1861, because of a (perhaps unfortunate) clause outlawing seccession, the centralized government started to accrete power for itself. Fifty years later the federal governments ability to levy income tax was started to finance the Great War, and it was a pittance compared to what is collected now. The state governments are quite capable of doing stupid things (and often do), but so is the Federal government. The states have a great advantage of being more responsive to their particular slice of the great American diveristy. Tell me for a minute that every issue in COnnecticut is equally relevant in California.
>Now for the burning question: why does everyone hate the government so much? Do you really think that other countries are any better?
Just because some of has serious problems with the government doesn't mean we want to abolish it, nor does it mean that we don't realize that other countries are worse. However, being the best government in the world (IMO), does not mean the U.S. Government does everything well and does not mean it is not subject to a whole lot of stupidity. When it comes to keeping the Commies out and maintaining the safety of our food and water supplies, roads and keeping the monetary system working well (and many other things that don't come immediately to mind) I think our governments (Federal, State, local) do a damn fine job. But I will also be happy to site innumerable examples of total governmental stupidity to anyone who wants to listen for hours.
The biggest problem with Internet regulation is not what the legislatures want to accomplish, I think we all agree the ends sought are for the most part good and desirable, but the fact that the people making the decisions have only the most superficial understanding of what they are doing (CDA anyone?), and seem unwilling or unable to educate themselves enough to make informed decisions. That's a recipe for disaster in any endevour!
You know it's ironic that the Supreme Court can manufacture a "right to privacy" from the Constitution (it must be in Article XIII, or perhaps Article XLII) to allow it to rule that abortion is legal, a connection that is tenuous at best and completely non sequitir in my opinion, yet the legislature and courts seem strangely silent when it comes to matters of actual privacy.
...but there have been loopy fundamentalists predicting the end of the world every couple of years since Jesus and they always manage to come up with a good excuse when the world doesn't cooperate.
Besides, we all know the world will really end in 2038 when the epoch wraps.
You seem to miss the point. If it's not the kind of stuff that would drive people to panic, why would it be on TV?
Who's going to watch a special movie of the week about a bunch of system administrators sitting around wondering if they got all the right NT hot fixes in place for the Big Day?
Let's face it. The most intelligent people are out changing the world or at least doing something truly productive. Most of the rest of us watch some TV.
Now the most intelligent TV watchers wouldn't bother with the silly networks (except for maybe the Simpsons and the X-Files, and I have doubts lately about the latter), when there is such meaty fare as A&E, Discovery, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, etc.
So who is left? You guessed it. Stupid people.
The networks have always targeted the lowest common denominator, but with cable, the Internet, and that perennial favorite of mine, books available there just aren't as many people watching any more.
Does anyone remember "The Day After"? Does anyone remember that they dramatized the aftermath of nuclear war without really showing some of the worst effects? Do we really expect any better from organizations that have edged out shows like "A Current Affair" and "Hard Copy" with their own Network News.
Do we really expect any better in a world where "Mystery Science Theater 3000" has been cancelled?!
Let's face it, it doesn't matter that NBC is showing some silly, wildly inaccurate story about y2k, because if people were interested in really becoming more informed, they would be. Most people are willing to sit back and be spoon-fed most things and the networks are happy to oblige (to wit: the tripe passing for news most of the time). After all, if the audience doesn't really care about the facts, why should they?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. I received a BS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and worked as a successful C programmer for a couple years before getting my hands on a debugger. I didn't learn a thing. I didn't learn BASIC, C, Fortran, assembly language, Pascal, LISP, and I certainly wasn't able to write a game or ace the senior-level Assembly Language class or write a theorem prover in Lisp or write a scheduling program or database application for my summer job because I didn't have a debugger. I certainly haven't written thousands of lines of advanced Persistence of Vision raytracing scripts because there isn't a debugger. Nope. Can't be done.
This is exactly right. I received a CS bachelor's degree in 1987 and do you know what the primary devlopment platform was that we used?
Pascal on the a Vax 11/780 running VMS.
Did that affect my ability to go out and get good jobs programming C and later C++ under DOS (and later Windows?). Of course not, because I knew how to think and therefore could learn new platforms easily.
In fact, I was hired as a C programmer with no C experience, later hired as a C++ programmer with no C++ experience and now have been hired as a Java programmer with no Java experience.
The ability to learn quickly (because I practiced thinking rather than memorizing), do some work on my own time (usually part of a hobby project), have enabled me to become productive very quickly.
The concepts I learned in school were much more generic and honed my abilities to think and learn, not memorize a lot of rote material (despite a lot of marginal professors trying to teach that way).
Actually, the most useful class I took was Symbolic Logic, which was a math/philosophy class.
It seems to me that carrying ethanol around in sealed plastic containers (similar to fountain pen cartridges according to the article) could hardly be dangerous.
1. They're sealed. It's not like people will be opening a cap on their laptops and pouring the stuff in... it would be more like replacing an ink jet cartridge.
2. They're small. I don't know how much methanol it takes to run your laptop for 20 hours, but if the fuel cells are comparable in size to batteries and lighter, I hardly think someone will be walking around with a pint of ethanol... unless perhaps he or she is going off to hike the Appalachian trail for a month and bought a gross of methanol cartidges at Wal-Mart to run a laptop.
How does butane compare to methanol? Probably not as flammable and has a much higher flash point, but still people don't worry about folks carrying around butane lighters whereever they go.
How does this "suck" compared to what we have now?
Let's use laptops as an example:
Right now, you use a laptop for two hours then you're out of juice and must wait until you can get to an electrical outlet for an extended period of time.
On the plane? Sorry.
At the poolside finishing up the cerebral implant drivers so Linux can run Quake 7? Sorry.
On a road trip? Sorry, unless you have an inverter and a spare cigarette lighter.
Let's not even get into having to replace the batteries....
With the ethanol fuel cell, after 20 hours of use, you reach in your backpack and pull out a 20-cent methanol cartridge (that's a guess, but how much could it cost?) and pop it in the cell(certainly without having to remove it and possibly without having to power down (small internal reservoir, etc)) and you keep on going. You would never be tied to the electrical grid if you didn't want to be and the fuel (methanol) would be comparably cheap to the electricity you use now. The cell would probably last longer because there aren't all those fancy chemicals to degrade over time.
Now how could this possibly be annoying or inconvenient compared to what we have now?
Solar might be OK if you are outside or your laptop runs the Crusoe Mark V that only draws 0.05 watts (not to mention the display and storage, etc), or you don't mind your solar panel being the size of a Buick.
Kinetic works well for watches (mechanically anyway), but I'd really hate to have to stop working and shake my laptop to recharge it... imagine the Etch-a-Sketch jokes.
But seriously, this seems like a phenomenal improvement in cost, longevity and convenience over batteries. Of course, the standard "3 - 5 years down the road" clause is in effect, so I guess we'll know in about 2004.
This is a troll if I ever saw it.
Almost every person I ever knew who would qualify as a nerd had a serious interest in most or all of the following: comic books, role-playing games, science fiction _and_ MST3K (not to mention progressive music). I know I do. I don't know what your definition of nerd is, but it's certainly the not the same as the rest of the world!
I personally like forays into other topics. There's more to life than computers. And to repeat an old cliche: If you aren't interested, don't read it.
>>Shouldn't they just make the best movie they can and forget the mainstream?
Sure, if they care about art and don't care about making as much money as possible. And how often does that happen? When's the last time there was a Science Fiction or Fantasy movie that had any literary integrity to it? OK, I think Contact counts, but it was an anomaly.
I really hope the movie turns out to be good, but I'm not holding my breath for it to be anything other than a loosely strung together series of CG shots.
We all get a good laugh over the silly reactions of people to RPG's, but I have to wonder since I see the exact same types of reactions from many /.ers whenever the topic of religion comes up. As a proud religious conservative and veteran of many years of RPG's, I find there's enough bigotry and narrow-mindedness to go around.
:) I discovered my parents had some alarmist and largely incoherent pamphlet decrying D&D. The ironic thing was that every single reference to the AD&D books was wrong. If these poeple can't even get their page numbers or even book volumes right, how can we believe they have any idea what they are talking about? My friends and I had many laughs over this.
Back to the topic at hand... when I was in college and angling for a degree in RPG's, based on the number of hours I spent...
To their credit, they had one quote I actually agreed with from Dr. Joyce Brothers to the effect of "If you are messed up in the head to start with, D&D might not be good for you."
Anyhow, I hope the movie turns out good and we don't see another volley of "RPG's are evil".
Rick
Ummm... he was very obviously joking.
Besides, there are plenty of people who talks squeaky... ever hear Kathy Ireland in "Alien from L.A."? How about Yeardley Smith from the Simpsons? Or Dr. Ruth? Proof positive that nitrogen can make you squeak.
Seriously though, we all know that it's really laughing gas (hydrogen cyanide) that causes you to squeak when you breathe it.
Um... your analogy was clever, but, I think it is wrong.
A B&W TV can still watch color TV signals, but an NTSC TV cannot watch digital TV signals without additional hardware. Basically, no one was forced to upgrade their B&W TVs to color, but eliminating NTSC would force many people to upgrade their hardware to support DTV... and let's face it, many of these people cannot afford to or don't want to spend the money.
I think that was the original poster's point.
Well, to be fair to Microsoft MMC was an attempt to gather up all system management tools into one place.
Of course, what they ended up with is a sprawling mazelike mess that is far more difficult to use than the disparate tools it replaces. I went back from IIS 4 to IIS 2 because it was took me about 20 minutes of wandering aimlessly just to configure basic ftp server functionality. And since everything is so random, you end up having to wander through aimlessly every time you use because nothing is intuitive. It's all just an endless maze of twisty little options all the same.
I don't know what the User Interface experts have been doing for the last ten years, because in my opinion, GUI's are steadily and consistently getting worse.
the Kia "Sportage" sounds like some kind of 1337 talk.
H3Y D00DZ, tH3 GAM3Z ON! l37Z G0 WA7CH S0M3 Sp0RtAG3.
Of course it's also one letter from "shortage".
I wouldn't be surprised to find Bill Gates evolved from a clam...
Don't use version 5... I had a similar problem.
You know you're in trouble when they threw out the fairly useful interface in version 4 in favor of hooking into the Microsoft Management Console.
The program also seems to run in real-mode priority regardless of what you tell it. My machine took 20 minutes to repaint the screen so I could shut the d*mn thing down.
User Interface Hell... and it locks up your computer. I never had trouble with DK until version 5 and have just switched back to 4, no useful functionality lost either.
I agree, right or wrong, the FBI can totally screw you if they have a reason. It's easy to trumpet free speech when you're just some anonymous coward on a Web forum, but when that notice comes in the mail on government letterhead, I think a lot of us would be really scared. Not everyone is willing to spend thousands of dollars or risk jail time just to make a point. It takes a lot of courage to make that stand knowing you might lose despite being in the right.
Ironically if all you have is an education degree, you are probably not qualified to teach either, but that doesn't stop the teachers unions...
I don't know what the true motivations of the teachers unions are, but they act as if their motivations are to keep their standards so low that any semi-literate fool can become a teacher (much to the dismay of the dedicated and compentant teacher that are out there I would imagine) and keep the children ignornat and pliable to their political manipulations.
My kids attend private school...
I got into computers ultimately through my interest in numbers. When I was about 7, a scientific calculator cost about $200, and basically consisted of powers, roots, and trig functions. My Dad, being an engineer, let me play with his and that was the start. Over the years, I discovered quite a few cool properties of numbers and calculated all the the prime numbers up to 1000 by hand for a sizth grade project.
Believe it for not, seeing a BASIC program with a for loop counting to 10 completely blew my mind, because I immediately saw the potential of programming.
I never got my hands on a computer for more than a few minutes until my high school picked up about 6 Apple ]['s quite a few years later, but by then my interest in computers was inevitable....
On the other hand, my oldest son could use a mouse and launch software before he was 2.
>People want to make it so the states have more power.
That's the way the country was created! A fairly loose group of sovereign states united by a federal government with very limited explicitly enumerated powers. It's in this quaint little document they wrote in 1789. And that's the way the country worked until, starting in 1861, because of a (perhaps unfortunate) clause outlawing seccession, the centralized government started to accrete power for itself. Fifty years later the federal governments ability to levy income tax was started to finance the Great War, and it was a pittance compared to what is collected now. The state governments are quite capable of doing stupid things (and often do), but so is the Federal government. The states have a great advantage of being more responsive to their particular slice of the great American diveristy. Tell me for a minute that every issue in COnnecticut is equally relevant in California.
>Now for the burning question: why does everyone hate the government so much? Do you really think that other countries are any better?
Just because some of has serious problems with the government doesn't mean we want to abolish it, nor does it mean that we don't realize that other countries are worse. However, being the best government in the world (IMO), does not mean the U.S. Government does everything well and does not mean it is not subject to a whole lot of stupidity. When it comes to keeping the Commies out and maintaining the safety of our food and water supplies, roads and keeping the monetary system working well (and many other things that don't come immediately to mind) I think our governments (Federal, State, local) do a damn fine job. But I will also be happy to site innumerable examples of total governmental stupidity to anyone who wants to listen for hours.
The biggest problem with Internet regulation is not what the legislatures want to accomplish, I think we all agree the ends sought are for the most part good and desirable, but the fact that the people making the decisions have only the most superficial understanding of what they are doing (CDA anyone?), and seem unwilling or unable to educate themselves enough to make informed decisions. That's a recipe for disaster in any endevour!
You know it's ironic that the Supreme Court can manufacture a "right to privacy" from the Constitution (it must be in Article XIII, or perhaps Article XLII) to allow it to rule that abortion is legal, a connection that is tenuous at best and completely non sequitir in my opinion, yet the legislature and courts seem strangely silent when it comes to matters of actual privacy.
Hello, U.S. government, which way is it?
More specifically, you would know how much money you had, or what account it is in, but not both...
:)
Don't say it, man! The Scientologists will shut down Slashdot!
...but there have been loopy fundamentalists predicting the end of the world every couple of years since Jesus and they always manage to come up with a good excuse when the world doesn't cooperate.
Besides, we all know the world will really end in 2038 when the epoch wraps.
In hindsight it was so-o-o predictable, and yet I nearly wet myself laughing.
Didn't you see the Simpsons Halloween Special?
There'll be planes dropping on your lawn all day.
"Whoops! There goes the clothesline!"
And watch out for your applicances!
You seem to miss the point. If it's not the kind of stuff that would drive people to panic, why would it be on TV?
Who's going to watch a special movie of the week about a bunch of system administrators sitting around wondering if they got all the right NT hot fixes in place for the Big Day?
Let's face it. The most intelligent people are out changing the world or at least doing something truly productive. Most of the rest of us watch some TV.
Now the most intelligent TV watchers wouldn't bother with the silly networks (except for maybe the Simpsons and the X-Files, and I have doubts lately about the latter), when there is such meaty fare as A&E, Discovery, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, etc.
So who is left? You guessed it. Stupid people.
The networks have always targeted the lowest common denominator, but with cable, the Internet, and that perennial favorite of mine, books available there just aren't as many people watching any more.
Does anyone remember "The Day After"? Does anyone remember that they dramatized the aftermath of nuclear war without really showing some of the worst effects? Do we really expect any better from organizations that have edged out shows like "A Current Affair" and "Hard Copy" with their own Network News.
Do we really expect any better in a world where "Mystery Science Theater 3000" has been cancelled?!
Let's face it, it doesn't matter that NBC is showing some silly, wildly inaccurate story about y2k, because if people were interested in really becoming more informed, they would be. Most people are willing to sit back and be spoon-fed most things and the networks are happy to oblige (to wit: the tripe passing for news most of the time). After all, if the audience doesn't really care about the facts, why should they?
Oh, well.