Remember those SAT analogy games? I have one for you:
Spectrum:Wheelbarrow,Athlon XP:_____?
I think I'd have to fill in the blank with "car" if I was looking at it in terms of complexity.
It's a lot easier to understand a wheelbarrow than it is a car, isn't it?
This is actually why I was such a big fan of my TI-85 calc in high school. Everything about the hardware was easy to find out and manipulate via assembly instructions, and the operating system is single-tasking, so you can take total control of the hardware without needing to understand semaphores or the other things that most people can't easily learn on their own without help.
Other than Calcs, the only option for such learning is Lego Mindstorms, I think.
Well, the Peltier does accomplish one thing: it covers that unsightly CPU. I made my Macrame peltier (actually, I prefer the term "CPU Cozy") using simple macaroni, construction paper, but decorated with markers and some stickers from the craft shop.
The inside of my case looks much better now. Except that it keeps catching on fire when I play games.
I've always taken the view that the verb form is not the important bit (though if you took that view, you have obviously shown that it still doesn't make a lot of sense). It's the argument form that is.
The logical fallacy in the exercise, I think, is to blame any general problem on human error (so ending everything with "people cause problem") simply because it's a good source of problems.
You've probably never tried to get multi-input recording with zero latency monitoring working in linux - you know, the parts that make a soundcard expensive.
It's a lot harder than "download appropriate drivers and put them in the right spot" and "add DRI to X." More along the lines of "check PCI id" and "edit kernel source" then...
-Errors in MS products behaviour due to stupid user errors. -Security breaches in Microsoft's products due to plugins. -Worst hurricane season in Florida in recorded history due to a cyclic weather phenomenon. -Global warming due to increased levels of CO2.
Okay, maybe Microsoft didn't cause those last couple, but I say we blame them anyway. They've been transferring it just a little too often, and I think it's about time they take on their share.
So, Microsoft, what are you going to do to reduce world emissions? And have you hired out enough landscaping companies to clear away all the downed trees? You better jump on this stuff. You wouldn't want to be declared the cause of cancer, would you? 'Cause I'll do it.
As a TA, I've often felt that students who ignore errors should should get points marked off for reasons they can't understand. After all, if they're going to make me do more work because they can't be bothered with simple comprehension, shouldn't I give them the same?
Old comments: -1 Missing ";" -1 Changed case of variable; not recognized by the compiler. -2 Need a closing bracket "}" -3 Trying to write from an unassigned pointer.
New comments: -1 Missing weasels exception error. -1 I just felt like taking a point off here. -2 For great justice -3 Disco Inferno at this point in the code.
I never got up enough nerve to actually do it. Plus, I don't really want to risk any students suing the school.
The more modern approach that I use for the same thing is creating module/class declarations/headers before I actually code it.
The skeleton tells me where the crap is going to go, and then I put it there.
But...sometimes I succumb to temptation and just use a fourth generation language that makes the code so small I hardly need to plan. Just looking at it I can tell what it's supposed to do conceptually.
Why not compare IE to Lynx while you're at it? I bet lynx can load pages faster than IE as well.
Opera isn't DOM compliant (it is very, very limited by comparison), so it can optimize page loading.
That doesn't have anything to do with security checks, or at least not much. I suppose you could think of using DOM as bloated, but it has many, many advantages for people who do development.
Yeah, but the software is buggy. Sometimes it crashes, and it won't start over from the same point.
It's getting better, though.
FAR better than realtime? Dang. You must have a fast machine. I use transcode, and it take 1.5x as long on my Athlon 1.2Ghz (before the numbers thing), and 3x as long on my PIII-500.
Of course, whenever the mplayer people decide to do mpeg encoding for DVDs, things could speed up considerably. Or if I figure out how to convert mplayer-encoded mpeg2 files into DVD friendly videos.
Yeah? What about if you have a bunch of cartoons you recorded from television and converted to DIVX and you want to make a DVD?
Do you have any idea how long rerendering to MPEGII takes? Not only that, but you have to create some kind of menu system to even read the files!
I'd much prefer the hour or two it takes to Burn to the eight hours of computation + hour of human labor of creating a DVD from scratch. I can even do that right before bed and have a brand new DVD waiting for me in the morning.
You know what would really be useful on shopping carts? Calculators.
It wouldn't even have to be good ones. If they duct taped $1 solar calculators to them, people could use them to figure out price per volume, how much they're paying, etc.
They're not fragile, and probably one of the more directly useful (without any specialization towards grocery stores, that is) pieces of technology for grocery store use.
I've lived in the Midwest US, and the SouthEast, and I can tell you that there are no major chains that even have calculators.
My guess is that the people making this know something that we don't. Perhaps a race of aliens is coming, and they consider grocery shopping the greatest form of entertainment in existence. Certainly better shopping cards will help keep certain companies in favor.
These inventors, for one, will welcome our new grocery-shopping overlords.
Delta function - the Dirac delta function, a.k.a. the impulse function. People use both terms - impulse more often in engineering and delta more often in physics.
Where did you hear about it?
Orthographic and orthonormal, by comparison, are two different things.
EMI? No, it'll make you mutate and give you super-powers, but only if you're pure of heart.
Or if you have a name like "Doktor Devious."
Seriously, though, is this one of those religious things? I've heard this before, but didn't really believe that people would follow it then. Mysterious rays that you can't see cause cancer because everything does? EMI from a device like this is in the form of visible light, radio, and microwaves. Same for cell-phones, microwaves, TVs, etc. The worst you can get is burned. Like when hot things burn you.
Well...you know, if you do nothing but write - you don't eat, drink, or sleep, then you'll probably die by the time you get to 50,000 words, just like the Kamakaze pilots during WWII.
It'd probably make the end of the book kind of interesting, what with the psychosis that you get from sleep depravation.
Yeah. But for a good programmer, it only takes slightly longer to figure out how to write in the underlying coding language than one written for nongraphical programming.
The new "Codeless Development" coding process: 1) Write a bunch of the code with graphical tools. The tools are handled by monkeys/people who were fired from McDonalds. 2) Hire a coder to do the part you couldn't do without him.
Unfortunately, the coding portion of the codeless development probably ends up longer, because the code it spits out will probably be generated by Microsoft, and therefore inherently hard to read and as complicated as MSFC.
By the time it comes along, though, marketing hype will be so fantastically powerful that people will buy codeless development environments for everything. This will, of course, lead to the collapse of society as we know it when something critical - like the detonation system on a nuclear weapon - fails to work correctly.
And when that day comes, my friends, it will truly be the demise of the programmer.
Can't draw, but wish that you could create ink drawings? Spend a couple of weeks making some 3d meshes for the Inkulator 9000, and you'll be more determined to learn!
It doesn't have to be boring, but it's...you know...hard.
Hence the name? Lot's 'o math. A lot of people find things boring if they can't understand them immediately. Soft science - applied sciences - are easier to visualize and have fun with. Easy, not as useful, and you can learn it faster reading a book, usually. Why bother with it if all we can get is the easy stuff?
What would happen if they started trying?
Hey kids! Today we're learning about the impulse function. It's got an infinite height, no width. an area of one, and is on the y-axis in a rectangular cartesian coordinate system! Yay!
Now lets go make our own impulse functions, with the help of this infinitely long sheet of construction paper and scissors that can cut infinitely thinly...
Boy that was fun. Lets convolve the impulse function with this sinusiod!
Coming up next week: Building wavelets from othographic functions!
Slashdot Mirror
Remember those SAT analogy games? I have one for you:
Spectrum:Wheelbarrow,Athlon XP:_____?
I think I'd have to fill in the blank with "car" if I was looking at it in terms of complexity.
It's a lot easier to understand a wheelbarrow than it is a car, isn't it?
This is actually why I was such a big fan of my TI-85 calc in high school. Everything about the hardware was easy to find out and manipulate via assembly instructions, and the operating system is single-tasking, so you can take total control of the hardware without needing to understand semaphores or the other things that most people can't easily learn on their own without help.
Other than Calcs, the only option for such learning is Lego Mindstorms, I think.
Well, the Peltier does accomplish one thing: it covers that unsightly CPU. I made my Macrame peltier (actually, I prefer the term "CPU Cozy") using simple macaroni, construction paper, but decorated with markers and some stickers from the craft shop.
The inside of my case looks much better now. Except that it keeps catching on fire when I play games.
I don't know. Most of the intelligence-gathering technology is classified.
I don't think it's fair to rule it out as a cause of problems just because human error might be one, though.
I've always taken the view that the verb form is not the important bit (though if you took that view, you have obviously shown that it still doesn't make a lot of sense). It's the argument form that is.
The logical fallacy in the exercise, I think, is to blame any general problem on human error (so ending everything with "people cause problem") simply because it's a good source of problems.
I think you're thinking of the "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." slogan and trying to generalize it to fit other things.
It doesn't work. Let me provide you with some obviously false counter-examples:
Chicken doesn't taste like chicken. People taste like chicken.
Computers aren't made of silicon. People are made of silicon.
People don't make mistakes. People make mistakes.
As you can see, just making the claim isn't enough for it to be true. That last one doesn't even make sense.
On that note, technology fails all the time. Almost enough to say that it is a property of technology.
You've probably never tried to get multi-input recording with zero latency monitoring working in linux - you know, the parts that make a soundcard expensive.
...
It's a lot harder than "download appropriate drivers and put them in the right spot" and "add DRI to X." More along the lines of "check PCI id" and "edit kernel source" then
-Errors in MS products behaviour due to stupid user errors.
-Security breaches in Microsoft's products due to plugins.
-Worst hurricane season in Florida in recorded history due to a cyclic weather phenomenon.
-Global warming due to increased levels of CO2.
Okay, maybe Microsoft didn't cause those last couple, but I say we blame them anyway. They've been transferring it just a little too often, and I think it's about time they take on their share.
So, Microsoft, what are you going to do to reduce world emissions? And have you hired out enough landscaping companies to clear away all the downed trees? You better jump on this stuff. You wouldn't want to be declared the cause of cancer, would you? 'Cause I'll do it.
I just started programming with other people for the first time in a while. It was strange.
We're allowed to use whatever we want to program in, so I use C++ and he uses C.
Guess whose pointer errors we spend the most time debugging? (Hint: while I have variables that come from the heap, I don't use any pointers).
Thank you, Spider Robinson.
As a TA, I've often felt that students who ignore errors should should get points marked off for reasons they can't understand. After all, if they're going to make me do more work because they can't be bothered with simple comprehension, shouldn't I give them the same?
Old comments:
-1 Missing ";"
-1 Changed case of variable; not recognized by the compiler.
-2 Need a closing bracket "}"
-3 Trying to write from an unassigned pointer.
New comments:
-1 Missing weasels exception error.
-1 I just felt like taking a point off here.
-2 For great justice
-3 Disco Inferno at this point in the code.
I never got up enough nerve to actually do it. Plus, I don't really want to risk any students suing the school.
The more modern approach that I use for the same thing is creating module/class declarations/headers before I actually code it.
The skeleton tells me where the crap is going to go, and then I put it there.
But...sometimes I succumb to temptation and just use a fourth generation language that makes the code so small I hardly need to plan. Just looking at it I can tell what it's supposed to do conceptually.
Why not compare IE to Lynx while you're at it? I bet lynx can load pages faster than IE as well.
Opera isn't DOM compliant (it is very, very limited by comparison), so it can optimize page loading.
That doesn't have anything to do with security checks, or at least not much. I suppose you could think of using DOM as bloated, but it has many, many advantages for people who do development.
OTOH, when a IE recieves a bad page load it won't crash, unlike Firefox (it's done this to me many times).
What about this bloated and slow issue? Are you serious? Do you find that IE takes a long time to render things?
My experience is that Mozilla only caught up with IE in terms of speed last year (when rendering hard to render things).
Don't get me wrong, though. It doesn't run all of DOM correctly, which has caused me untold amounts of problems.
No, they're raising money to create Chuckie dolls. It's a way to generate revenue: Chuckie dolls cause injuries, and hospitals fix 'em.
It's kind of like how programmers sometimes support Microsoft...
Yeah, but the software is buggy. Sometimes it crashes, and it won't start over from the same point.
It's getting better, though.
FAR better than realtime? Dang. You must have a fast machine. I use transcode, and it take 1.5x as long on my Athlon 1.2Ghz (before the numbers thing), and 3x as long on my PIII-500.
Of course, whenever the mplayer people decide to do mpeg encoding for DVDs, things could speed up considerably. Or if I figure out how to convert mplayer-encoded mpeg2 files into DVD friendly videos.
Yeah? What about if you have a bunch of cartoons you recorded from television and converted to DIVX and you want to make a DVD?
Do you have any idea how long rerendering to MPEGII takes? Not only that, but you have to create some kind of menu system to even read the files!
I'd much prefer the hour or two it takes to Burn to the eight hours of computation + hour of human labor of creating a DVD from scratch. I can even do that right before bed and have a brand new DVD waiting for me in the morning.
You know what would really be useful on shopping carts? Calculators.
It wouldn't even have to be good ones. If they duct taped $1 solar calculators to them, people could use them to figure out price per volume, how much they're paying, etc.
They're not fragile, and probably one of the more directly useful (without any specialization towards grocery stores, that is) pieces of technology for grocery store use.
I've lived in the Midwest US, and the SouthEast, and I can tell you that there are no major chains that even have calculators.
My guess is that the people making this know something that we don't. Perhaps a race of aliens is coming, and they consider grocery shopping the greatest form of entertainment in existence. Certainly better shopping cards will help keep certain companies in favor.
These inventors, for one, will welcome our new grocery-shopping overlords.
Delta function - the Dirac delta function, a.k.a. the impulse function. People use both terms - impulse more often in engineering and delta more often in physics.
Where did you hear about it?
Orthographic and orthonormal, by comparison, are two different things.
EMI? No, it'll make you mutate and give you super-powers, but only if you're pure of heart.
Or if you have a name like "Doktor Devious."
Seriously, though, is this one of those religious things? I've heard this before, but didn't really believe that people would follow it then. Mysterious rays that you can't see cause cancer because everything does?
EMI from a device like this is in the form of visible light, radio, and microwaves. Same for cell-phones, microwaves, TVs, etc. The worst you can get is burned. Like when hot things burn you.
Feeling burned? No?
Then everything is fine.
I plan to be the first person to cause a fender-bender from a chatroom.
Well...you know, if you do nothing but write - you don't eat, drink, or sleep, then you'll probably die by the time you get to 50,000 words, just like the Kamakaze pilots during WWII.
It'd probably make the end of the book kind of interesting, what with the psychosis that you get from sleep depravation.
Yeah. I was tired.
Still...I bet that even here most people don't know what either term means and just associate both with hard science.
Yeah. But for a good programmer, it only takes slightly longer to figure out how to write in the underlying coding language than one written for nongraphical programming.
The new "Codeless Development" coding process:
1) Write a bunch of the code with graphical tools. The tools are handled by monkeys/people who were fired from McDonalds.
2) Hire a coder to do the part you couldn't do without him.
Unfortunately, the coding portion of the codeless development probably ends up longer, because the code it spits out will probably be generated by Microsoft, and therefore inherently hard to read and as complicated as MSFC.
By the time it comes along, though, marketing hype will be so fantastically powerful that people will buy codeless development environments for everything. This will, of course, lead to the collapse of society as we know it when something critical - like the detonation system on a nuclear weapon - fails to work correctly.
And when that day comes, my friends, it will truly be the demise of the programmer.
Can't draw, but wish that you could create ink drawings? Spend a couple of weeks making some 3d meshes for the Inkulator 9000, and you'll be more determined to learn!
It doesn't have to be boring, but it's...you know...hard.
Hence the name? Lot's 'o math. A lot of people find things boring if they can't understand them immediately. Soft science - applied sciences - are easier to visualize and have fun with. Easy, not as useful, and you can learn it faster reading a book, usually. Why bother with it if all we can get is the easy stuff?
What would happen if they started trying?
Hey kids! Today we're learning about the impulse function. It's got an infinite height, no width. an area of one, and is on the y-axis in a rectangular cartesian coordinate system! Yay!
Now lets go make our own impulse functions, with the help of this infinitely long sheet of construction paper and scissors that can cut infinitely thinly...
Boy that was fun. Lets convolve the impulse function with this sinusiod!
Coming up next week: Building wavelets from othographic functions!