As others have pointed out, the goal of your education is to give you the theoretical underpinnings of a wide range of topics in CS. Once you have that, learning a particular job skill is trivial.
But I'll go one step further and say Dan Zamboni is an idiot. He is unable to recognize the difference between an entirely theoretical pursuit and one that gives you an immediate job skill.
He says "Embedded Systems" has little relevance to the job market. Huh? That's like a quarter of all jobs! Which means Zamboni is giving job advice without actually knowing much about the job market.
He says "compiler engineering" is similarly a theoretical pursuit. But that gives you fundamental background on parsing, state machine, regexps that are terribly useful in real life. It also makes you deal with some of the most complex data structures you'll see during school, which in my mind counts as good practice for real life.
Meanwhile he thinks you should waste your education time on stuff that might not even exist (or be recognizable) in 10 years like XML and UML! He wants you to know all about Databases and SQL, but there are fewer SQL jobs than Embedded Systems jobs! Argh!
I will say that I agree that AI, Machine Learning, and Bayesian stuff are all pretty worthless -- for example, AI has been a solution in search of a problem for about 25 years now. If they appeal to you, go for it and enjoy yourself! But don't think it's useful.
over here we don't have a history of multiple eruptions each year.
Yes, yes, you do. In 1854, Baker, Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Chaos Crags were all active. In the same decade, Shasta and Hood were also awake. ("Fire Mountains of the West" is a good overview).
You are being deceived by the 1900s, which were unusually quiet in the Cascades with only two events St Helens (1980-99) and Lassen (1914-17). By comparison, the events in the 1800s were longer and more frequent: St Helens (1800-57), Rainier (1800-54, 73, 79, 82), Baker (1843-80), Chaos Crags (1854-57), Shasta (1855), Hood (1859, 65, 66)
For the last several hundred years pretty much every large predator in North America has been brought to the brink of extinction except one, humans.
Nonsense. Mountain lions have never been on the "brink of extinction." Unless you redefine the phrase to mean "wiped out from parts of the continent" even when populations in other areas (Nevada) were virtually untouched.
The last time daylight savings policy was changed nationwide, I was at UC Berkeley. Instead of merely changing the relatively-hard coded savings times, they converted to using the zoneinfo library where they can specify how daylight savings occurs, and which years use which rules for each timezone (so given a UTC time in 1974, the library can cough up the equivalent PST time that was correct for that year). OS X and Linux both appear to use the same library.
I guess I order from Amazon with free ship more than you...
With free shipping, if it ships from Nevada, I get it overnight here in California. But if it ships from Texas or Kentucy the physical shipment always takes a week.
Also, because I use free shipping, they physically ship it when they damn well feel like it... which can be up to another four days.
So depending upon the number of shipments you do per year, this could be cheaper than always using 2-day. But yeah, do the math first.
No these aren't Wirth's charts. The linked article says that the syntax on this poster is based on Wirth's... except that Raskin corrected a number of errors (the exact nature of the errors is not mentioned in the article).
Any geologist know why they could not be volcanic and still be spherical?
I'm not a geologist, but I've read the press release that explained this.
The spheres appear uniformly through the strata laid down. Volcanic or meteor sources would be more likely to appear in layers of spheres -- one layer of spheres per erruption or meteor impact.
Secondly, in this picture here, you can see that some of the spheres have merged as they met. If it was volcanic, they would have melted together (and flowed together) rather than merely intersecting. To a geologist, the shape of the merged spheres has "molecular compound formed on-site" written all over it.
Frog Just Doing What Comes Naturally
on
Three Headed Frog
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's not a mutant frog. That's frog porn.
Doesn't anybody remember this
hoax which turned out to be pretty much the same thing? Here is a good discussion of the issue
I wasn't aware that Arthur C. Clarke was an "authority" on aerial photography:-).
And yes, the radial symetrey is very interesting! And to my mind, that alone makes it a worthwhile target for the new High-Resolution orbiter than will be at Mars soon. However, I find it difficult to beleive that any crystaline formation could manage to stay symetric as it grows to a kilometer across; impurities and landform deformations alone should cause major asymetries.
On the other hand, I can think of dozens of geological processes which could create a round feature of that size:
craters exposing underlying dark material
craters providing wind shelter in which crystal dew could form
meteror impact creates a bit of "hard glass" in a dune field. Later erosion makes it into a plateau.
Lava dome.
Caldera. (No, not the SCO kind)
Hydrothermal spring in a very flat area (just kidding)
Salt pan (now that's a reach!)
Based solely on Earth observations, I vote Lava dome since those things are just wildly abunant on this planet. And the little bits scattered about could be just larger ejecta. Of course, like Arthur C. Clarke, I know nothing about interpreting aerial photography, so my opinion is worthless.
Also, if it were vegatation, what is the advantage to the plant in bunching up like that? Seems to me that in the low lighting scenario of a Martian freaking Pole, each plant is going to need light desparately, so the plants should be spread out, not bunched (near the treeline here on Earth, trees tend to spread out just before the region where they can't grow at all).
And why vegatation at the pole instead of near the equator?
The "interesting image" on the conspiracy theory website at least has the decency to link to the original source at NASA.
If you follow the NASA link you too can discover a little piece of info that the conspiracists can't be bothered to tell you: in the narrow direction, the image of "plant life" is 2.83 kilometers across! This means each of those big bundles in the image is about 1000 meters/yards.... which is the same as ten American football fields put end-to-end.
That'd be a really big freaking tree. Or you might consider that it's a reasonable size for a geological feature.
Moral of the story: unless you have experience in interpreting geology from biology when looking at Earth images, you probably shouldn't bother trying to use Mars as your first experience in interpreting aerial imagery.
I know nothing about interpreting these images. Me, all I see is two different surface types. One of which sometimes is round with radial patterns in it. It means nothing to me.
Nothing in the link supports the allegation that "they are aware of this and don't seem to care." In the linked article, they just "we don't support your PC."
Also in the linked discussion board, it seems like multiple problems are being reported as a single problem. For example, one guy reverted to old iPod software and still had problems. Another guy has problems only with music downloaded from iTunes. Another guy only has problems with CDs he ripped.
Every consumer device has issues and flaming mad customers. The real question is, is the problem widespread. The other question is, why has Cliff posted three "an Apple consumer is having a problem" articles in the last couple of days (the first two seemed to be pretty damn stupid and non-widespread to me).
Orson Scott Card has answered this question here. Here's a brief sample:
In short, I just don't think that publishing is going to be affected negatively by digital copying. That's why I used to make my manuscripts available online for free during the months between my writing the books and their publication. There were sometimes hundreds of downloads -- but as far as we know, most or all of the people who downloaded it went on to buy the book when it came out in print -- and during the months when the book was only available online, those who read those advance copies were helping sell the book when it did appear by talking about it with their friends!
His website also has the first couple of chapters from each of his novels, so go check out a couple of his books before you buy!
His next novel, Walking on Water is currently being serialized on his website. Probably only of interest to folks who have already read the previous books in the Alvin Maker series though.
Florida and the Central US are running out of water not just because they waste it (although that is probably a factor) but also because, unlike California, they have never been forced to build massive reservoirs to store water. Yes, I know there are some, but nothing like the number and volume California stores in the Sierra Nevada. Back east they just assume that if they wait a few weeks, it will rain again because it always does, so why bother storing much? California goes without rain for six months at a time (but not today, oddly enough) and is forced to store it.
When they build the needed reservoirs, they will have to kill their rivers (by diverting most river output). The processed waste tossed into the Mississippi should make that an interesting project....
That or they can build lots of nukes to power desalination plants.
Life's tough. Without the death of Lake Tulare, California would produce far less crops to feed the world. Without the Three Gorges Dam, China would have to build lots of fossil fuel or nuke plants.
It's always bad when we lose a valuable and unique ecosystem like the Aral Sea, but sometimes we humans must make tradeoffs. I have no clue whether the death of the Aral is an appropriate one, but I think we should not presume that the Aral's death is all bad. For example, do more people get fed by selling irrigated cotton that would have been fed by fishing?
The complaint is that with more and more efficient vehicles, the damage to the roads will continue at the same rate while the income to maintain those roads will come down
Untrue. My gas guzzling Suburban is really freaking heavy and does WAY more damage to the pavement than a flyweight hybrid.
And if there is an insuffcient revenue problem, just raise the gas tax as needed to keep the roads up. That would INCREASE the incentive for fuel effciency, which would also be a Good Thing.
Taxing miles driven? Heck no! Tax the gas used so that a person who drives a fuel efficient hybrid gets an INCENTIVE versus folks (like me) who drive gas guzzling Suburbans.
I just find it hard to believe that anyone with strollers or a disabilty would not know that in any two-level store, the elevator is almost always in the back (with the rest of the mechanical)
I didn't know that. But maybe that's because I've been in a Macy's where it's at the front, and a Target where it's in the middle. Come to think of it... I can't think of even one store I've been to which has an elevator in the back. But I don't get out much either now that my kids are no longer strapped down in a stroller.
The OSX patch, which was large as you noted, is only available to commercial developers like me. And the Trolls email us directly every time there is a patch release.
So there really is no need for Slashdot to post about such a trivial patch release.
On the other hand, since I get emailed directly by the Trolls before they announce new releases in any other fashion, perhaps this is just an invitation for me to become a Karma Whore:-(
I read the patent abstract. They've described a subset of a video server. Video servers in the professional broadcast market predate the patent filing by at least five years. For example, the HP (now Pinnacle) MediaStream video servers or the Tektronics (now GVG) Profile video disk recorders both constitute prior art for this Completely Bogus Patent.
I don't see anything in this patent which was not thought of, implemented, and shipped to customers by HP and Tek prior to the filing of this patent. I'm amazed that the Patent Office did such a remarkable bad job at checking the prior art in this case.
I don't think Amtrak's sharing of info is worrisome for a good reason: Amtrak have no idea who is on their trains. When there's an accident and people die, Amtrak doesn't even know how many people are on the train, nevermind who they really are.
Right now, all it takes to get on Amtrak is cash, a "name", and absolutely no ID. If a drug runner is stupid enough to use the same name and commute too often to actually stay in a city long enough to work or live there, than I'd say we have a drug runner with insufficient brain cells.
This discussion should probably ignore Amtrak, and focus instead on the hypothetical notion of an Amtrak who knows their own passengers:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I've never heard of anyone being hacked through sendmail either.. but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Uh... the very first internet worm in 1988, which effectively shutdown most of the net, ran on sendmail.
As others have pointed out, the goal of your education is to give you the theoretical underpinnings of a wide range of topics in CS. Once you have that, learning a particular job skill is trivial.
But I'll go one step further and say Dan Zamboni is an idiot. He is unable to recognize the difference between an entirely theoretical pursuit and one that gives you an immediate job skill.
He says "Embedded Systems" has little relevance to the job market. Huh? That's like a quarter of all jobs! Which means Zamboni is giving job advice without actually knowing much about the job market.
He says "compiler engineering" is similarly a theoretical pursuit. But that gives you fundamental background on parsing, state machine, regexps that are terribly useful in real life. It also makes you deal with some of the most complex data structures you'll see during school, which in my mind counts as good practice for real life.
Meanwhile he thinks you should waste your education time on stuff that might not even exist (or be recognizable) in 10 years like XML and UML! He wants you to know all about Databases and SQL, but there are fewer SQL jobs than Embedded Systems jobs! Argh!
I will say that I agree that AI, Machine Learning, and Bayesian stuff are all pretty worthless -- for example, AI has been a solution in search of a problem for about 25 years now. If they appeal to you, go for it and enjoy yourself! But don't think it's useful.
over here we don't have a history of multiple eruptions each year.
Yes, yes, you do. In 1854, Baker, Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Chaos Crags were all active. In the same decade, Shasta and Hood were also awake. ("Fire Mountains of the West" is a good overview).
You are being deceived by the 1900s, which were unusually quiet in the Cascades with only two events St Helens (1980-99) and Lassen (1914-17). By comparison, the events in the 1800s were longer and more frequent: St Helens (1800-57), Rainier (1800-54, 73, 79, 82), Baker (1843-80), Chaos Crags (1854-57), Shasta (1855), Hood (1859, 65, 66)
Nonsense. Mountain lions have never been on the "brink of extinction." Unless you redefine the phrase to mean "wiped out from parts of the continent" even when populations in other areas (Nevada) were virtually untouched.
The last time daylight savings policy was changed nationwide, I was at UC Berkeley. Instead of merely changing the relatively-hard coded savings times, they converted to using the zoneinfo library where they can specify how daylight savings occurs, and which years use which rules for each timezone (so given a UTC time in 1974, the library can cough up the equivalent PST time that was correct for that year). OS X and Linux both appear to use the same library.
Wow, that is so New Math.
I guess I order from Amazon with free ship more than you...
With free shipping, if it ships from Nevada, I get it overnight here in California. But if it ships from Texas or Kentucy the physical shipment always takes a week.
Also, because I use free shipping, they physically ship it when they damn well feel like it... which can be up to another four days.
So depending upon the number of shipments you do per year, this could be cheaper than always using 2-day. But yeah, do the math first.
Uh.... how many batteries do you have to lug around backpacking to take that many pictures? Do they weight as much as a laptop?
No these aren't Wirth's charts. The linked article says that the syntax on this poster is based on Wirth's... except that Raskin corrected a number of errors (the exact nature of the errors is not mentioned in the article).
The spheres appear uniformly through the strata laid down. Volcanic or meteor sources would be more likely to appear in layers of spheres -- one layer of spheres per erruption or meteor impact.
Secondly, in this picture here, you can see that some of the spheres have merged as they met. If it was volcanic, they would have melted together (and flowed together) rather than merely intersecting. To a geologist, the shape of the merged spheres has "molecular compound formed on-site" written all over it.
Doesn't anybody remember this hoax which turned out to be pretty much the same thing? Here is a good discussion of the issue
And yes, the radial symetrey is very interesting! And to my mind, that alone makes it a worthwhile target for the new High-Resolution orbiter than will be at Mars soon. However, I find it difficult to beleive that any crystaline formation could manage to stay symetric as it grows to a kilometer across; impurities and landform deformations alone should cause major asymetries.
On the other hand, I can think of dozens of geological processes which could create a round feature of that size:
- craters exposing underlying dark material
- craters providing wind shelter in which crystal dew could form
- meteror impact creates a bit of "hard glass" in a dune field. Later erosion makes it into a plateau.
- Lava dome.
- Caldera. (No, not the SCO kind)
- Hydrothermal spring in a very flat area (just kidding)
- Salt pan (now that's a reach!)
Based solely on Earth observations, I vote Lava dome since those things are just wildly abunant on this planet. And the little bits scattered about could be just larger ejecta. Of course, like Arthur C. Clarke, I know nothing about interpreting aerial photography, so my opinion is worthless.Also, if it were vegatation, what is the advantage to the plant in bunching up like that? Seems to me that in the low lighting scenario of a Martian freaking Pole, each plant is going to need light desparately, so the plants should be spread out, not bunched (near the treeline here on Earth, trees tend to spread out just before the region where they can't grow at all).
And why vegatation at the pole instead of near the equator?
That'd be a really big freaking tree. Or you might consider that it's a reasonable size for a geological feature.
Moral of the story: unless you have experience in interpreting geology from biology when looking at Earth images, you probably shouldn't bother trying to use Mars as your first experience in interpreting aerial imagery.
I know nothing about interpreting these images. Me, all I see is two different surface types. One of which sometimes is round with radial patterns in it. It means nothing to me.
Also in the linked discussion board, it seems like multiple problems are being reported as a single problem. For example, one guy reverted to old iPod software and still had problems. Another guy has problems only with music downloaded from iTunes. Another guy only has problems with CDs he ripped.
Every consumer device has issues and flaming mad customers. The real question is, is the problem widespread. The other question is, why has Cliff posted three "an Apple consumer is having a problem" articles in the last couple of days (the first two seemed to be pretty damn stupid and non-widespread to me).
Orson Scott Card has answered this question here. Here's a brief sample:
His website also has the first couple of chapters from each of his novels, so go check out a couple of his books before you buy!
His next novel, Walking on Water is currently being serialized on his website. Probably only of interest to folks who have already read the previous books in the Alvin Maker series though.
Florida and the Central US are running out of water not just because they waste it (although that is probably a factor) but also because, unlike California, they have never been forced to build massive reservoirs to store water. Yes, I know there are some, but nothing like the number and volume California stores in the Sierra Nevada. Back east they just assume that if they wait a few weeks, it will rain again because it always does, so why bother storing much? California goes without rain for six months at a time (but not today, oddly enough) and is forced to store it.
When they build the needed reservoirs, they will have to kill their rivers (by diverting most river output). The processed waste tossed into the Mississippi should make that an interesting project....
That or they can build lots of nukes to power desalination plants.
In other news, the largest freshwater lake in the United States west of the Mississippi no longer exists.
Life's tough. Without the death of Lake Tulare, California would produce far less crops to feed the world. Without the Three Gorges Dam, China would have to build lots of fossil fuel or nuke plants.
It's always bad when we lose a valuable and unique ecosystem like the Aral Sea, but sometimes we humans must make tradeoffs. I have no clue whether the death of the Aral is an appropriate one, but I think we should not presume that the Aral's death is all bad. For example, do more people get fed by selling irrigated cotton that would have been fed by fishing?
And if there is an insuffcient revenue problem, just raise the gas tax as needed to keep the roads up. That would INCREASE the incentive for fuel effciency, which would also be a Good Thing.
Taxing miles driven? Heck no! Tax the gas used so that a person who drives a fuel efficient hybrid gets an INCENTIVE versus folks (like me) who drive gas guzzling Suburbans.
I just find it hard to believe that anyone with strollers or a disabilty would not know that in any two-level store, the elevator is almost always in the back (with the rest of the mechanical)
I didn't know that. But maybe that's because I've been in a Macy's where it's at the front, and a Target where it's in the middle. Come to think of it... I can't think of even one store I've been to which has an elevator in the back. But I don't get out much either now that my kids are no longer strapped down in a stroller.
Wouldn't the real advantage of being airborne be that you have a lot less air between you and the ICBM defocusing the laser?
The OSX patch, which was large as you noted, is only available to commercial developers like me. And the Trolls email us directly every time there is a patch release.
:-(
So there really is no need for Slashdot to post about such a trivial patch release.
On the other hand, since I get emailed directly by the Trolls before they announce new releases in any other fashion, perhaps this is just an invitation for me to become a Karma Whore
I read the patent abstract. They've described a subset of a video server. Video servers in the professional broadcast market predate the patent filing by at least five years. For example, the HP (now Pinnacle) MediaStream video servers or the Tektronics (now GVG) Profile video disk recorders both constitute prior art for this Completely Bogus Patent.
I don't see anything in this patent which was not thought of, implemented, and shipped to customers by HP and Tek prior to the filing of this patent. I'm amazed that the Patent Office did such a remarkable bad job at checking the prior art in this case.
Right now, all it takes to get on Amtrak is cash, a "name", and absolutely no ID. If a drug runner is stupid enough to use the same name and commute too often to actually stay in a city long enough to work or live there, than I'd say we have a drug runner with insufficient brain cells.
This discussion should probably ignore Amtrak, and focus instead on the hypothetical notion of an Amtrak who knows their own passengers