That smell is also really bad for you. The Ozone oxidizes the inside of your nose and throat. If you breathe in a large quantity, you'll get a sore throat fairly quickly, and can die...
On the other hand, it's heavier than air, so isn't very dangerous. It'll sink to the ground and stay there until it dissipates.
The effects of ozone absorption are pretty much entirely temporary; your throat will heal, the ozone will turn into O2 or something else and be absorbed by you, etc. It also doesn't take much to smell it. You'll smell it in much smaller quantities than will be really bad for you.
So I think the best we can do to talk about the dangerousness of ozone is change its "harmless" status to "mostly harmless."
You can't just study art and think that it will work any more than...
Clearly your post is is going to be an opinion of graphic and/or web design based upon experience, which I almost read.
May I submit that anyone that posts a message that long without a single paragraph break has no expert advice to offer as a graphic designer? That's so basic that even non-designers are taught it by heart fairly early in their lives.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not today. Maybe tomorrow you can pretend to be a lawyer and get away with it.
There is nothing about being a "geek" or knowing HTML, CSS, or javascript that magically grants someone designer chops.
And there's one other *extremely important* fact that I've learned: there's nothing that being a graphic designer learns that magically grants them webpage design chops.
If the web was run by graphics designers, all the pages would be extremely pretty. Most would be stored as individual flash files, but some of the less important text would just be as represented as images. No text would actually be stored as text, and each page would contain roughly a sentence or two worth of actual text. To find anything meaningful would require somewhere in the neighborhood of eight clicks.
In other words, they can make the web fluffy. Today, the place of the graphic artist is starting to be more and more just devoted to logos, banners, and advertisements - like they were before the web (mostly because the web used to be just those things for a lot of companies, and is now becoming a lot more than that). The usability people are taking up the task of writing pages, and those people are very much geeks. They're the ones who make new kinds of widgets that work the way that they do for desktop apps - with things like autocomplete, AJAX, unified designs, usage of CSS, etc, standard layout and standard widget usage. These are pretty much always two different groups. Usability people fight to make things look and work naturally, while graphic artists fight to make their pages stand out and work different from everyone else's. So you aren't likely to be both.
So if I were in your position (and I actually am in my company), I'd focus on cognitive science usability studies and take my ideas of how to make things nicer from that. People who actually try to get information out of your site will appreciate it...whereas they mostly won't care much what it looks like for more than the first three seconds or so (for most companies, anyway. If you happen to sell something that's main feature is it's prettiness, then you might consider making a pretty site more important than one that you can find out about your business from).
..and the fact that this study presents something that people think of is obvious is the only reason it's getting news.
They only ran the test on 22 people, and all they did was play a single video game. How can they possibly draw any meaningful conclusions from that?
And how is the an issue with "the male brain" rather than, for example, "men living in America who have had previous exposure to video games." How can they be even a little sure that the entire history of guys liking games more than girls isn't cultural (I'm not saying that it is, btw. Just that this study does nothing to account for anything like that).
He might as well be basing his study on Phrenology, for all the science that he's putting into this.
This is better? I don't trust Dell to be ethical unless they lose business because they're not.
Which means that I generally trust Dell to be ethical.
Sure, I expect them to try to squeeze as much money out of me as they possibly can, because while this is unethical, it's difficult to prove that this is what they're doing. I also expect that if they ship me something DOA, that they're going to replace it because it's very easy to prove it if they do this.
Hypocrisy definitely has it's place, and for a great many people, I'm glad they practice it (real morals would be better, of course, but I'll take what I can get). A crook that's honest when you can watch him is much better than one that will rob you blind no matter what you do.
I'd say we can build things much stronger than the waterbags we operate in.
Do you have an example? Last I heard mechanical systems were something like an order of magnitude off from the efficiency of muscles. Remember the issue is strength-to-weight-ratio, not strength. You can make a machine that can lift as much as 10 men could, but it'll weigh a lot more than 10 men (including the weight of whatever is powering it, of course).
What we cannot match, however, is self-maintenance and repair.
Then again, metal fatigue takes a lot longer than organic fatigue. This is not necessarily a problem. There are many mechanical systems designed to last several hundred years. We can start worrying about how long these things will last when we start having humans that last that long. Efficiency is a much bigger concern.
* Smaller population (9 million). Although we are do not have a high population density (20/km compared to 31/km for the US), the problem does not scale in a linear fashion.
So you should be able to get it in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. You can't get it anywhere - even when the population is extremely concentrated.
* We've paid for it.
So did we. We aren't centralized, but virtually every single state wants fiber at the state level. They just can't force the telecos to do it.
Well, that is actually something the Wiimote can tell. The distance between the two IR dots from the sensorbar tells you how far you are away from the screen, at least as long as the player is pointing to the screen.
That would only be true if it can pick out the exact position of the dots in the image. I'm not entirely sure the image sensor has that kind of control. If so, then you're right.
Developers can of course try to interpret the accelerometer data in a meaningful way, maybe combine it with data from the IR sensor
Acceleration+relative distance=3d position.
Sure, they can't actually tell you how far you are from the screen, but they can tell you that you've moved forward or backwards, and can rather trivially calibrate the system to give full 3d in a few fairly easy ways. So far, no one has.
But even relative position without calibration (2.5D, as another poster put it) is still extremely useful for games.
Devil's Advocate: the Wii brings 2 independently held motion sensing controls with an option for mouse pointer like capability.
That's it. Virtual Console's been done, everything else has been done.
This is wrong. It has two independent controls that track 3d-position, not merely motion. There is not another game system that includes this functionality. I'm not sure that there's another piece of off-the-shelf hardware that includes this functionality.
The Wii is an amazing console, and the moment there's a game that makes use of that 3-d info in a meaningful way is the moment I start trying to buy one. It's the first console that really makes an attempt at letting people use control mechanisms that they already know rather than requiring them to learn ones specifically for it.
IMHO, this is the biggest leap forward that we've had in home electronics since the introduction of CDs. I can't wait to see what it's going to be like when it actually works the way that it's supposed to.
What about if you do this: 1) Buy five licenses of Windows XP, and $2000 worth of other software. Five copies of each, mind you. 2) You install it on one machine. 3) To save yourself time, you clone your install four times.
Or how about this: 1) Buy 30 machines that come with Windows XP, Office 2007, and Word. 2) Five of the machines get hit by a meteor. You buy five new machines, and install your original copies of XP and office 2007 on these machines.
Depending on the draconianness of the install license, you might get fined by the BSA. Hard to be sure. You have exactly the same number of licenses as installs, but you still get fined because the laws don't protect against stupid technicalities.
*Tons* of businesses end up with things like this. Probably more as VMs become more popular.
I think we need some kind of area of law that specifically deals with COTS software licensing. I want to see a legal requirement to the tune of "all licenses are transferable (making the second case allowable), and fall into distinct categories - per user, or per computer, and licensing is based on license type, not license number (making the first case allowable)" Further, if the license is only valid for a specific period of time, then it should have an expiration date built into the software itself so that it stops working. This confusing unintentional license violation needs to go away.
"I only know Java" I've used 14 languages and counting for development projects, including at least one of each of the interesting language types I know about (script, HDL, functional, pure imperative, assembly, compiled, bytecode compiled, purely graphical), . Ruby is among them. If you know another language or VM that gives IoC capability, why not share with the whole class? Java is heavy for my development tastes, and if I could get IoC in a 5MB footprint, I'd be all over that language.
"I didn't know that IoC is a 20 year old pattern" How old was OOP when it started being used for real development? 80 years old or so? 20 years is new for a design pattern. This isn't really relevant, though, is it? It isn't implemented many places, even if it is really old.
"I don't know that IoC and event-driven programming are almost completely isomorphic" This can be said about OOP and functional programming, and about iteration and recursion, and is often used as an argument against using OOP. But the point isn't if they work the same way. The point is that it's easier for humans to do things that way.
But I know that you're wrong about IoC. IoC's functionality is a superset of traditional event-driven programming's. There's also the ways that you use it to handle cross-cutting concerns that can't really be done just using events. For that matter, most languages don't let you define events like "entering a function in class X" or "leaving a function in class X," but the availability of these "events" are an automatic side-effect of using an IoC system (pretty darn useful, too).
Couple of things: toy object model that gets forced upon you all the time 1) Hibernate makes Active Record look like a toy. If you have to deal with database systems that don't fit all the constraints of active record, you're pretty much out of luck. Not so with Hibernate. Hibernate basically converts a relational database into an object oriented database because of the availability of HQL. It's very different from just getting an OOP API on top of a relational database - which is essentially what Active Record is.
Incidentally, if you've got legacy data with a compound key, how hard is that to deal with in Rails? It's pretty easy with Hibernate. (hint: extremely difficult)
2) Spring eliminates glue more than anything else. Inversion of control is an advanced concept to do this, and unless your system has something like it, you have to write glue code (usually in your controller). There is nothing I know like it for any other language (ironically, there are several Java projects that do this. That alone makes it worth using languages that compile to Java bytecode even if you aren't using Java.
Those are the modern sensibilities - design patterns that haven't yet caught on in any other language. As to the bloated, overengineered bit, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Why don't you tell the whole class?
3) This sounds like a poor man's Rails.
More like a rich man's rails - where "rich" means "well educated in design pattern theory." For that matter, Java projects tend to be better funded and less buggy than rails projects, so rich man's rails probably fits in the traditional sense of "rich."
Perl has far more tools to support making clean MVC web separation stuff than ruby. The issue is that what represents "good" or "clean" code is domain specific. All the things are showed you are things that are good for the specific problem of document templating for the web. I'd be willing to say that Perl's flexibility lets you code in pretty much any domain cleanly...if you set up your environment to facilitate that.
A book like Hitchhikers Guide would make a poor game (IMO).
I think it made an absolutely fantastic game. Of course, it was only loosely related to the book, and was also a text adventure written by Douglas Adams himself, but it does still go a little way towards my point.
It's not really about the medium. It's about the artist who uses that medium. If the person translating from one medium to another isn't as good as the original artist, then neither will be the translation.
You got modded inciteful for this pretentious crap? When I was in High School, graduated '99, understanding of trig identities combined with AP Calculus made physics easy. Every time the teacher wrote an arbitrary algebraic equation for some obscure purpose on the board, I was figuring out how to derive it using calculus. Watch what you say about public schools, some of the smartest people I know got damn good educations from them.
understanding of trig identities...which you memorized, and have a pattern for determining how to apply.
combined with AP Calculus Which is a culmination of about 30 different algebraic tricks to make it easy (I know. I took that test, went to math competitions, etc., and missed very, very few of the answers). Knowing when to do what is just applying a pattern recognition algorithm. It's simple stuff.
You'd probably be surprised how much of what you do is done by applying general algorithms over and over.
Continuous math => All of arithmetic, algebra, trig, geometry, calculus taught in public schools in America. Discrete math is almost not taught at all outside of CS, and I wanted to make it clear that we weren't talking about that. The phrase "discrete system" versus the phrase "continuous system" does not mean the same thing as "discrete math" versus "continuous math." Roughly speaking, a good test of discrete math is that it is the kind that can be performed without an algebra.
If you punch somebody in the nose, you transfer their lost happiness to yourself.
Yeah, but if you hug someone, you give some to someone else, but you still get to keep the same amount yourself (or possibly lose or gain, depending on how much you like/dislike the other person). Plus, I don't think that the amount of happiness transferred is equal to the amount of pain inflicted, and some people *like* pain, so get extra happiness from being punched. There's probably some coefficient of transfer that applies to both the hitter and the hittee.
Same with the hugging.
Clearly, this problem needs to be studied more in depth. I volunteer. I am willing to punch and/or hug various people to see how happy or unhappy this makes me. If I can make some recommendations, I think that a few sleazy law firms in the area would make an excellent choice for supplying hittees, while a few of the local college cheerleading teams will make excellent sources for hugees.
If all goes well, we can extend the program to stabbing, and...uh...other things to see what kind of transfer functions those produce.
monkey-see-monkey-do education is partly responsible for our dumb high-school grads
Spoken like someone without much math experience. Until you get *past* diff-Eq, virtually all useful continuous math is wrote memorization (except perhaps proofs...that's mostly covered in geometry). Further, it's pretty much all memorization of algorithms. If you're not teaching algorithms, you're not teaching kids to understand math.
Further, if you're not teaching the most efficient mechanism for arithmetic, you're not going to set anyone up to be able to do advanced arithmetic in their heads - which is necessary for the intuitive leaps needed to understand quite a few proofs. Do you expect all the famous mathematics papers to be rewritten to coddle you because you didn't learn arithmetic?
The monkey-see-monkey-do portions of US education are GOING AWAY. The rest of the world still has them, but the lack of them is killing math and science education in the US compared to its peers. Creativity does need to be encouraged at an early age - which is what literature, music, and art do. Losing those would definitely be worse than losing science or math, IMHO. We need to not lose those.
But we can't shift creativity into early science or math education. You've got to just memorize things for a really long time in those areas before you can start contributing actually useful creative notions.
Each harddrive read or write shortens its lifespan. A harddrive that you don't use lasts longer because no wear is put on the moving parts. This should be obvious, and if it isn't, I suggest you spend five or so minutes searching for "moving parts wear out when used" on google.
After that it's trivial to determine from a few hundred thousand use-case examples you can find of Windows that the time when the hard drive is used the most on a desktop machine is during bootup because the OS and all the little services that run have to be loaded from the harddrive into memory.
Of course, if your OS is fairly small, this may not be true. You might have trimmed your main OS way back so that only games are the things that take any time to load.
Or forget traditional transporting at all. Transporting seems to take about 30 seconds or so. How about just having a magical tractor beam that can compensate for inertia and can move something at a fast, yet non-relativistic speed (and that forces air molecules out of it's way)?
The speed of sound (Mach 1) is 340.29 m/s. The diameter of the earth is 12756.1 km. At mach 100, you could circumnavigate in 6.2 minutes.
As long as we're talking about moving around on earth, or moving around within a small region around earth, these speeds are sufficient. Heck, go for 1000 times the speed of sound and *everything* is seconds away.
And in case anyone's wondering, the speed of light is 880,991x the speed of sound, so that's not even coming close to relativistic problems.
I think that some kind of efficient way of having high velocity, low friction traveling is probably the real thing we're going to see that resembles transporters.
I had a 5.2 coming into college because my college weighted GPA like this: Value of an A: Nonacedemic class (PE, shop, etc.): 0.0 Honors Class: 5.0 Gifted Class: 5.0 AP Class : 6.0
Since I took a ridiculously large number of AP and gifted classes, I did really well.
'Course, I'd never have gotten a full ride from the state's merit-based scholarship program if my high school hadn't reported my GPA as 3.8.
I wish my high school had the same thing. The only thing they weighted was AP. The valedictorian was only first because the saluditorian took driver's ed one summer and lowered her GPA.
When I was in grad school, I was a TA teaching people up to ten years younger than me.
My students were not quite old enough to drink, and I was about 5 years older than them. I've also got two sisters that are 7 and 8 years younger than me, respectively. Today, some of my friends are college students who fall into that age range.
Many are used to Google, and they can phrase searches in ways that return results, but nearly all of them are searching for subsets of English. Thinking about word rarity, phrase rarity, likelihood of finding an exact unique match, and culling bad results with a negation never enter their thinking. Best they get is "try again with a different set of keywords," like you said.
I was doing all those things in hour 2 that I used google (which occurred in my junior year of college - about a month after Google came into existance).
Sure, I'd pit any of them against my parents - who are boomers, but most of these people are no match for me. Home computers started coming out in the late 70s, and that's really the starting point. Anyone who grew up around computers and who used them a lot is going to be more capable than someone who didn't. That means you can be anywhere between 10 and about 45 and be heads and shoulders above the new generation who grew up on Google.
Have you played Guitar Hero? One of the Nintendo party games? Any of the myriad of Tetris-like games? Dance Dance Revolution?
All of those games are pretty much like what you describe (assuming that game==level - which is arguably true for all of these games). And all of them are newer than SMB3 (except tetris classic, but there are many, many more tetris games than the original). They're all a lot of fun in a group.
I was there near the beginning. I had an intellivision, and felt like I was way ahead for having something so advanced. In the arcades, I was a big fan of Centipede and Gorf. But I guess the difference between us is that I've moved on to lots of other kinds of games.
They're not all party games. Other kinds are good too.
Slashdot Mirror
That smell is also really bad for you. The Ozone oxidizes the inside of your nose and throat. If you breathe in a large quantity, you'll get a sore throat fairly quickly, and can die...
On the other hand, it's heavier than air, so isn't very dangerous. It'll sink to the ground and stay there until it dissipates.
The effects of ozone absorption are pretty much entirely temporary; your throat will heal, the ozone will turn into O2 or something else and be absorbed by you, etc. It also doesn't take much to smell it. You'll smell it in much smaller quantities than will be really bad for you.
So I think the best we can do to talk about the dangerousness of ozone is change its "harmless" status to "mostly harmless."
You can't just study art and think that it will work any more than...
Clearly your post is is going to be an opinion of graphic and/or web design based upon experience, which I almost read.
May I submit that anyone that posts a message that long without a single paragraph break has no expert advice to offer as a graphic designer? That's so basic that even non-designers are taught it by heart fairly early in their lives.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not today. Maybe tomorrow you can pretend to be a lawyer and get away with it.
There is nothing about being a "geek" or knowing HTML, CSS, or javascript that magically grants someone designer chops.
And there's one other *extremely important* fact that I've learned: there's nothing that being a graphic designer learns that magically grants them webpage design chops.
If the web was run by graphics designers, all the pages would be extremely pretty. Most would be stored as individual flash files, but some of the less important text would just be as represented as images. No text would actually be stored as text, and each page would contain roughly a sentence or two worth of actual text. To find anything meaningful would require somewhere in the neighborhood of eight clicks.
In other words, they can make the web fluffy. Today, the place of the graphic artist is starting to be more and more just devoted to logos, banners, and advertisements - like they were before the web (mostly because the web used to be just those things for a lot of companies, and is now becoming a lot more than that). The usability people are taking up the task of writing pages, and those people are very much geeks. They're the ones who make new kinds of widgets that work the way that they do for desktop apps - with things like autocomplete, AJAX, unified designs, usage of CSS, etc, standard layout and standard widget usage. These are pretty much always two different groups. Usability people fight to make things look and work naturally, while graphic artists fight to make their pages stand out and work different from everyone else's. So you aren't likely to be both.
So if I were in your position (and I actually am in my company), I'd focus on cognitive science usability studies and take my ideas of how to make things nicer from that. People who actually try to get information out of your site will appreciate it...whereas they mostly won't care much what it looks like for more than the first three seconds or so (for most companies, anyway. If you happen to sell something that's main feature is it's prettiness, then you might consider making a pretty site more important than one that you can find out about your business from).
..and the fact that this study presents something that people think of is obvious is the only reason it's getting news.
They only ran the test on 22 people, and all they did was play a single video game. How can they possibly draw any meaningful conclusions from that?
And how is the an issue with "the male brain" rather than, for example, "men living in America who have had previous exposure to video games." How can they be even a little sure that the entire history of guys liking games more than girls isn't cultural (I'm not saying that it is, btw. Just that this study does nothing to account for anything like that).
He might as well be basing his study on Phrenology, for all the science that he's putting into this.
At least the squatters don't claim to be ethical.
This is better? I don't trust Dell to be ethical unless they lose business because they're not.
Which means that I generally trust Dell to be ethical.
Sure, I expect them to try to squeeze as much money out of me as they possibly can, because while this is unethical, it's difficult to prove that this is what they're doing.
I also expect that if they ship me something DOA, that they're going to replace it because it's very easy to prove it if they do this.
Hypocrisy definitely has it's place, and for a great many people, I'm glad they practice it (real morals would be better, of course, but I'll take what I can get). A crook that's honest when you can watch him is much better than one that will rob you blind no matter what you do.
I'd say we can build things much stronger than the waterbags we operate in.
Do you have an example? Last I heard mechanical systems were something like an order of magnitude off from the efficiency of muscles. Remember the issue is strength-to-weight-ratio, not strength. You can make a machine that can lift as much as 10 men could, but it'll weigh a lot more than 10 men (including the weight of whatever is powering it, of course).
What we cannot match, however, is self-maintenance and repair.
Then again, metal fatigue takes a lot longer than organic fatigue. This is not necessarily a problem. There are many mechanical systems designed to last several hundred years. We can start worrying about how long these things will last when we start having humans that last that long. Efficiency is a much bigger concern.
* Smaller population (9 million). Although we are do not have a high population density (20/km compared to 31/km for the US), the problem does not scale in a linear fashion.
So you should be able to get it in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. You can't get it anywhere - even when the population is extremely concentrated.
* We've paid for it.
So did we. We aren't centralized, but virtually every single state wants fiber at the state level. They just can't force the telecos to do it.
*sigh*
Sadly, it will cost 100 billion to upgrade that to modern levels, too.
And you have a little demo app that demonstrates that, right?
Not mine, but yes.
Well, that is actually something the Wiimote can tell. The distance between the two IR dots from the sensorbar tells you how far you are away from the screen, at least as long as the player is pointing to the screen.
That would only be true if it can pick out the exact position of the dots in the image. I'm not entirely sure the image sensor has that kind of control. If so, then you're right.
Developers can of course try to interpret the accelerometer data in a meaningful way, maybe combine it with data from the IR sensor
Acceleration+relative distance=3d position.
Sure, they can't actually tell you how far you are from the screen, but they can tell you that you've moved forward or backwards, and can rather trivially calibrate the system to give full 3d in a few fairly easy ways. So far, no one has.
But even relative position without calibration (2.5D, as another poster put it) is still extremely useful for games.
Devil's Advocate: the Wii brings 2 independently held motion sensing controls with an option for mouse pointer like capability.
That's it. Virtual Console's been done, everything else has been done.
This is wrong. It has two independent controls that track 3d-position, not merely motion. There is not another game system that includes this functionality. I'm not sure that there's another piece of off-the-shelf hardware that includes this functionality.
The Wii is an amazing console, and the moment there's a game that makes use of that 3-d info in a meaningful way is the moment I start trying to buy one. It's the first console that really makes an attempt at letting people use control mechanisms that they already know rather than requiring them to learn ones specifically for it.
IMHO, this is the biggest leap forward that we've had in home electronics since the introduction of CDs. I can't wait to see what it's going to be like when it actually works the way that it's supposed to.
What about if you do this:
1) Buy five licenses of Windows XP, and $2000 worth of other software. Five copies of each, mind you.
2) You install it on one machine.
3) To save yourself time, you clone your install four times.
Or how about this:
1) Buy 30 machines that come with Windows XP, Office 2007, and Word.
2) Five of the machines get hit by a meteor. You buy five new machines, and install your original copies of XP and office 2007 on these machines.
Depending on the draconianness of the install license, you might get fined by the BSA. Hard to be sure. You have exactly the same number of licenses as installs, but you still get fined because the laws don't protect against stupid technicalities.
*Tons* of businesses end up with things like this. Probably more as VMs become more popular.
I think we need some kind of area of law that specifically deals with COTS software licensing. I want to see a legal requirement to the tune of "all licenses are transferable (making the second case allowable), and fall into distinct categories - per user, or per computer, and licensing is based on license type, not license number (making the first case allowable)" Further, if the license is only valid for a specific period of time, then it should have an expiration date built into the software itself so that it stops working. This confusing unintentional license violation needs to go away.
"I only know Java"
I've used 14 languages and counting for development projects, including at least one of each of the interesting language types I know about (script, HDL, functional, pure imperative, assembly, compiled, bytecode compiled, purely graphical), . Ruby is among them. If you know another language or VM that gives IoC capability, why not share with the whole class? Java is heavy for my development tastes, and if I could get IoC in a 5MB footprint, I'd be all over that language.
"I didn't know that IoC is a 20 year old pattern"
How old was OOP when it started being used for real development? 80 years old or so? 20 years is new for a design pattern. This isn't really relevant, though, is it? It isn't implemented many places, even if it is really old.
"I don't know that IoC and event-driven programming are almost completely isomorphic"
This can be said about OOP and functional programming, and about iteration and recursion, and is often used as an argument against using OOP. But the point isn't if they work the same way. The point is that it's easier for humans to do things that way.
But I know that you're wrong about IoC. IoC's functionality is a superset of traditional event-driven programming's. There's also the ways that you use it to handle cross-cutting concerns that can't really be done just using events. For that matter, most languages don't let you define events like "entering a function in class X" or "leaving a function in class X," but the availability of these "events" are an automatic side-effect of using an IoC system (pretty darn useful, too).
Couple of things:
toy object model that gets forced upon you all the time
1) Hibernate makes Active Record look like a toy. If you have to deal with database systems that don't fit all the constraints of active record, you're pretty much out of luck. Not so with Hibernate. Hibernate basically converts a relational database into an object oriented database because of the availability of HQL. It's very different from just getting an OOP API on top of a relational database - which is essentially what Active Record is.
Incidentally, if you've got legacy data with a compound key, how hard is that to deal with in Rails? It's pretty easy with Hibernate. (hint: extremely difficult)
2) Spring eliminates glue more than anything else. Inversion of control is an advanced concept to do this, and unless your system has something like it, you have to write glue code (usually in your controller). There is nothing I know like it for any other language (ironically, there are several Java projects that do this. That alone makes it worth using languages that compile to Java bytecode even if you aren't using Java.
Those are the modern sensibilities - design patterns that haven't yet caught on in any other language.
As to the bloated, overengineered bit, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Why don't you tell the whole class?
3) This sounds like a poor man's Rails.
More like a rich man's rails - where "rich" means "well educated in design pattern theory." For that matter, Java projects tend to be better funded and less buggy than rails projects, so rich man's rails probably fits in the traditional sense of "rich."
Perl is neutral on that spectrum.
No it is not.
Perl has far more tools to support making clean MVC web separation stuff than ruby. The issue is that what represents "good" or "clean" code is domain specific. All the things are showed you are things that are good for the specific problem of document templating for the web. I'd be willing to say that Perl's flexibility lets you code in pretty much any domain cleanly...if you set up your environment to facilitate that.
A book like Hitchhikers Guide would make a poor game (IMO).
I think it made an absolutely fantastic game. Of course, it was only loosely related to the book, and was also a text adventure written by Douglas Adams himself, but it does still go a little way towards my point.
It's not really about the medium. It's about the artist who uses that medium. If the person translating from one medium to another isn't as good as the original artist, then neither will be the translation.
Also, they offer certification you can get. They make money on that, and companies can know they're getting some kind of standard for DBAs.
You got modded inciteful for this pretentious crap? When I was in High School, graduated '99, understanding of trig identities combined with AP Calculus made physics easy. Every time the teacher wrote an arbitrary algebraic equation for some obscure purpose on the board, I was figuring out how to derive it using calculus. Watch what you say about public schools, some of the smartest people I know got damn good educations from them.
...which you memorized, and have a pattern for determining how to apply.
understanding of trig identities
combined with AP Calculus
Which is a culmination of about 30 different algebraic tricks to make it easy (I know. I took that test, went to math competitions, etc., and missed very, very few of the answers). Knowing when to do what is just applying a pattern recognition algorithm. It's simple stuff.
You'd probably be surprised how much of what you do is done by applying general algorithms over and over.
Continuous math? That's practically graduate level engineering, definitely advanced for undergrad.
Continuous math => All of arithmetic, algebra, trig, geometry, calculus taught in public schools in America. Discrete math is almost not taught at all outside of CS, and I wanted to make it clear that we weren't talking about that. The phrase "discrete system" versus the phrase "continuous system" does not mean the same thing as "discrete math" versus "continuous math." Roughly speaking, a good test of discrete math is that it is the kind that can be performed without an algebra.
If you punch somebody in the nose, you transfer their lost happiness to yourself.
Yeah, but if you hug someone, you give some to someone else, but you still get to keep the same amount yourself (or possibly lose or gain, depending on how much you like/dislike the other person). Plus, I don't think that the amount of happiness transferred is equal to the amount of pain inflicted, and some people *like* pain, so get extra happiness from being punched. There's probably some coefficient of transfer that applies to both the hitter and the hittee.
Same with the hugging.
Clearly, this problem needs to be studied more in depth. I volunteer. I am willing to punch and/or hug various people to see how happy or unhappy this makes me. If I can make some recommendations, I think that a few sleazy law firms in the area would make an excellent choice for supplying hittees, while a few of the local college cheerleading teams will make excellent sources for hugees.
If all goes well, we can extend the program to stabbing, and...uh...other things to see what kind of transfer functions those produce.
monkey-see-monkey-do education is partly responsible for our dumb high-school grads
Spoken like someone without much math experience. Until you get *past* diff-Eq, virtually all useful continuous math is wrote memorization (except perhaps proofs...that's mostly covered in geometry). Further, it's pretty much all memorization of algorithms. If you're not teaching algorithms, you're not teaching kids to understand math.
Further, if you're not teaching the most efficient mechanism for arithmetic, you're not going to set anyone up to be able to do advanced arithmetic in their heads - which is necessary for the intuitive leaps needed to understand quite a few proofs. Do you expect all the famous mathematics papers to be rewritten to coddle you because you didn't learn arithmetic?
The monkey-see-monkey-do portions of US education are GOING AWAY. The rest of the world still has them, but the lack of them is killing math and science education in the US compared to its peers. Creativity does need to be encouraged at an early age - which is what literature, music, and art do. Losing those would definitely be worse than losing science or math, IMHO. We need to not lose those.
But we can't shift creativity into early science or math education. You've got to just memorize things for a really long time in those areas before you can start contributing actually useful creative notions.
Each harddrive read or write shortens its lifespan. A harddrive that you don't use lasts longer because no wear is put on the moving parts. This should be obvious, and if it isn't, I suggest you spend five or so minutes searching for "moving parts wear out when used" on google.
After that it's trivial to determine from a few hundred thousand use-case examples you can find of Windows that the time when the hard drive is used the most on a desktop machine is during bootup because the OS and all the little services that run have to be loaded from the harddrive into memory.
Of course, if your OS is fairly small, this may not be true. You might have trimmed your main OS way back so that only games are the things that take any time to load.
Or forget traditional transporting at all. Transporting seems to take about 30 seconds or so.
How about just having a magical tractor beam that can compensate for inertia and can move something at a fast, yet non-relativistic speed (and that forces air molecules out of it's way)?
The speed of sound (Mach 1) is 340.29 m/s. The diameter of the earth is 12756.1 km. At mach 100, you could circumnavigate in 6.2 minutes.
As long as we're talking about moving around on earth, or moving around within a small region around earth, these speeds are sufficient. Heck, go for 1000 times the speed of sound and *everything* is seconds away.
And in case anyone's wondering, the speed of light is 880,991x the speed of sound, so that's not even coming close to relativistic problems.
I think that some kind of efficient way of having high velocity, low friction traveling is probably the real thing we're going to see that resembles transporters.
I had a 5.2 coming into college because my college weighted GPA like this:
Value of an A:
Nonacedemic class (PE, shop, etc.): 0.0
Honors Class: 5.0
Gifted Class: 5.0
AP Class : 6.0
Since I took a ridiculously large number of AP and gifted classes, I did really well.
'Course, I'd never have gotten a full ride from the state's merit-based scholarship program if my high school hadn't reported my GPA as 3.8.
I wish my high school had the same thing. The only thing they weighted was AP. The valedictorian was only first because the saluditorian took driver's ed one summer and lowered her GPA.
When I was in grad school, I was a TA teaching people up to ten years younger than me.
My students were not quite old enough to drink, and I was about 5 years older than them. I've also got two sisters that are 7 and 8 years younger than me, respectively. Today, some of my friends are college students who fall into that age range.
Many are used to Google, and they can phrase searches in ways that return results, but nearly all of them are searching for subsets of English. Thinking about word rarity, phrase rarity, likelihood of finding an exact unique match, and culling bad results with a negation never enter their thinking. Best they get is "try again with a different set of keywords," like you said.
I was doing all those things in hour 2 that I used google (which occurred in my junior year of college - about a month after Google came into existance).
Sure, I'd pit any of them against my parents - who are boomers, but most of these people are no match for me. Home computers started coming out in the late 70s, and that's really the starting point. Anyone who grew up around computers and who used them a lot is going to be more capable than someone who didn't. That means you can be anywhere between 10 and about 45 and be heads and shoulders above the new generation who grew up on Google.
Have you played Guitar Hero? One of the Nintendo party games? Any of the myriad of Tetris-like games? Dance Dance Revolution?
All of those games are pretty much like what you describe (assuming that game==level - which is arguably true for all of these games). And all of them are newer than SMB3 (except tetris classic, but there are many, many more tetris games than the original). They're all a lot of fun in a group.
I was there near the beginning. I had an intellivision, and felt like I was way ahead for having something so advanced. In the arcades, I was a big fan of Centipede and Gorf. But I guess the difference between us is that I've moved on to lots of other kinds of games.
They're not all party games. Other kinds are good too.