However, I would not suggest heavily political books to avoid needless controversy, or big doorstoppers that might discourage some kids.
On the contrary, I would use whatever metric is used in any other literature class as to the content, length, or difficulty of the novel. The main reason this post is interesting to slashdotters is that someone is trying to acknowledge sci-fi and fantasy is just as worth studying in an academic environment as other literary works. If that's true, it should be treated the same way, and not tailored to suit political sensitivities or short attention spans.
It's kdawson, if Microsoft somehow cured the common cold his headline would be "Microsoft technology responsible for deaths of trillions of living organisms".
Nothing wrong with a 2nd grade education when you're running a farm. But I'd prefer that my doctor stick it out a bit longer. I'm sure your grandfather was happy that his vet, the engineers who designed his farm equipment, the scientists who developed the resistant crop strains, insecticides, and fertilizers, and many thousands of other people who gained critical knowledge for their profession in school did, too.
There are many ways to earn a living, but to trivialize higher education in general is pretty spectacularly short-sighted. Unless your family is Amish. But then the whole slashdot-posting thing would be a bit confusing.
Nice. I was hoping someone would continue the analogy;)
Actually, my (minimal) experience (more as an indirect user/bystander than integrator) isn't that far off from your description - you way too much to get what you didn't really want, and then hire an army of highly paid line cooks (consultants) to try to modify it to be something edible:)
I do know that my company tried to use Apache Ofbiz, and the "consultants" (who happened to be the lead devs of the project) ended up taking 5x as long and costing 10x originally projected, the SW is still a total POS and bottleneck to our business, and in the end it's being rewritten from scratch. Almost makes SAP seem palatable...
Since when was "Woz in a garage" part of "information technology"? I think this term has become waaay to broad in recent years. Basically the media and trade organizations have tried to appropriate it to anything and everything that even comes near a computer. Of course, slashdot is definitely one of those...
I do and always will associate "information technology" as an APPLICATION SPECIFIC use of computers for the storage and manipulation of "information" (even even then, how vague is that term!?), not basic the R&D of computer engineering itself.
Open source is about as customer driven as preparing dinner at home vs preparing dinner in a restaurant. We're having steak, it's going to be medium rare, no, you don't get a vegetarian option. Basically, it's customer driven for a customer of one (the developer). At least for new projects... yes, once it becomes popular, you get more cooks involved and a better chance that one of them will add your required features.
Not that it's a negative for me (or most of my dinner guests) - 90% of the time I'd prefer a good home cooked meal. But a lot of people don't cook, and don't want to learn.
Ok, now I'm stretching this analogy to the limits... but I'm picturing, say someone like SAP as the high end restaurant - they'll customize your order and give you whatever you want, just don't ask how much it will cost. And Microsoft is the McDonald's - bland but consistent, and relatively cheap (compared to making it yourself). But you feel just a bit queasy afterwards...
Microsoft has already started moving/building data centers out of Washington state, which is both perfectly legal and bound to hurt the shortsighted WA state govt that thought it could just start changing tax laws on companies without any repercussions.
I agree with a previous poster that trying to blame Microsoft (a company that is probably one of the biggest sources of economic growth in the Seattle metropolitan area) for their budget problems is idiotic. All companies by nature will look for ways to get breaks and increase their bottom line. Consider Boeing, which received over $3B in TAX BREAKS (yet, officially given away by the WA govt) to keep manufacturing plants in the state - which they are barely living up to, anyway.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ehhhh... I think with the statement "warp into a system" he has already decided he wants to add in some non-Newtonian physics... (though it would have been nice if he noticed that;)
In practice, he wants what everyone wants with the holy grail of space sims - seamless transitions between extraplanatary, solar system, and terrestrial environments. Ideally with seamless transitions between "inside the ship" and "outside the ship", whether it's on a space station, planet, or just ejected into the void. Honestly, if they want to simulate "travelling really fast", all the better (especially if they make it look like "the jump to light speed"!) As long as you have total control over your 1st (or evern 3rd) person character throughout the various transitions it's going to be a pretty amazing experience...
Are you joking, or just a troll? Comic book-based movies have pretty much dominated the Hollywood box office for a decade or more. I bet if anyone sat down and thought about it they could easily name 50+ comic book-based movies that have grossed many billons in all. It's BIG business, and yes, people older than 10 do go watch movies.
Sparkling wine is correct - though you it's mostly the French-owned companies (like Chandon) that call it that, plenty of the CA wineries call their sparking wine "champagne" (no capital C at least...)
But "powdered cheese"?!? You my friend, have clearly never made it past basic Kraft cheese food products. Have you ever had good Parmesean reggiano? Or in your culinary world, does Velveeta == cheddar?
Why in the world would anyone ban hoodies, and how would they stay in business if they actively enforced such a ban? Seriously, that's like banning jeans in your store.
Not quite the same. Most store security cameras are located at head height or higher, making the faces of people wearing hoodies nearly invisible. I don't know about the UK, but in the US, the courts are over-worked enough that the police are likely to drop any shoplifting case unless there is solid evidence that the person they have in custody actually tried to steal something. Anyone caught shoplifting in a store wearing a hoodie is unlikely to be prosecuted, unless they did it right in front of a security guard, so banning them is an understandable move.
I'm going to have to completely disagree, considering they are a major RETAILER OF HOODIES!
More on Tesco's perfectly "understandable" position: "Tesco has defended itself against accusations of hypocrisy after a security guard told a six-year-old boy to remove his hooded top that had been bought in the supermarket."
Not all communications satellites are in geosync orbit. Iridium satellites are in LEO and rely on the fact that there are a ton of them up there. The ground-based device just hops between them as necessary (not a particularly new thing since that's what all cell phones already do, of course).
And fuck the waivers. What the hell has this country come to when we need people to sign waivers to RUN?
It's come to about 65% of the population being overweight and 35% being obese. But I'm sure that convincing parents that basic exercise is so hazardous your heart should be monitored at all times will help that...
I can't wait for the courts to have to decide what the legal definition of "fair use" is for an inane 140 character post usually consisting of so many stupid tags/abbreviations it's unreadable to 99% of the population.
Or maybe Haiku has finally found its niche!
Quoted Twitter post RT @bob On the crapper! Lawsuit may ensue.
Just like you don't have to be in a space shuttle to be killed by one.
But in either case, it's absurd to try to equate the odds, since bystander risk is MANY orders of magnitude less. The OP was correct - his individual odds are clearly way less than 1 in 83.
I think that's true... but at the same time, with a car it's not just a FEELING of control over the odds (like say, a train vs a plane... people feel safer on trains but it's probably still not any safer than air travel) - for the most part in a car you actually CAN influence the outcome.
How many of those people who died in a car crash were drunk, distracted, driving recklessly, or riding with someone who was? Probably a significant percentage. Don't drink and drive (or text and drive, etc), don't run red lights, and drive defensively, and you will definitely reduce your chances of getting in a serious accident.
China has at least 400 nuclear warheads, and missiles perfectly capably of striking anywhere in the world. That's plenty to destroy the world as we know it many times over. The Western world isn't really in a much better position than it was with the USSR during the cold war. Taking their resources by force means taking over their land, and you better believe that would be a nuclear showdown...
Where we are in a vastly better position is that unlike the Soviet Union, most of China's growth is based on exports of goods to Western countries (often manufactured by Western countries in Chinese factories). I think it's pretty clear they are just playing poker on the international stage like everyone else. They have no interest in anyone calling their bluff...
Ok, I give, I give! While, yes, acknowledging your insults, I was trying to be somewhat friendly, even make a little joke, and wondering what story you may in fact have about MS and higher education gone wrong... but in the end you clearly are the most versed in dialectic discourse, and I concede.
Could have been an interesting discussion, sorry you took it so personally. I guess the LMGTFY link was a bit over the top, but it WAS the first search result I found and I was dying to use it today:)
One thing I have learned that has rarely been untrue is the first to resort to personal insults is the one with the fewest facts to provide...
In fact, I can pretty much tell you are a very experienced, intelligent, technically minded person just from reading a few previous posts of yours. I believe I mostly agreed with your OP but was confused by the vitriol towards a teaching software license that upon reading seems fairly open. Unless you have evidence to the contrary? (which I will gladly accept if provided!)
Beyond that, you have again provided no concrete information yet bring ANOTHER non sequitur into the conversation... are you calling me a Dolphin?!?
I'm a bit confused, what about that publication provides ANY additional information to the thread?
Or are you insinuating I need a crash course in "computers"? Kernighan is a legend and a good writer but I would be surprised if the average IEEE journal reader didn't already know everything he wrote about...
In my intro to operating systems class, Stanford used "NACHOS" (not another completely heuristic operating system). I loved that course, but it looks like they have switched to "Pintos" more recently.
This (in my opinion) shows there is of course no perfect model, and I'll give the benefit of the doubt that a good teacher will always search out what they think will help students the most...
I have no idea why you think using the kernel from the most popular OS in the world as a study aid is a bad thing. Personally, the last few set-top boxes I have worked on have been Linux, and I think that whole industry is pretty much dominated by the Linux kernel. I haven't done any serious Windows development in years. But for many new grads a solid understanding of the Windows kernel would be invaluable to their future jobs. In the end, at the kernel level most of the fundamental design principles are pretty much the same - what *I* am amazed at is how many candidates I interview don't even know the basics of virtual memory, disk I/O, process scheduling, multithreading/sychronization, etc.
Once again, I'm trying not to pass judgement... but read your post and decide if it added anything useful. The only concrete phrase in the whole thing was "direct observation and investigation", which yes, is provable, and no, you haven't shown that the MS program does not include.
While I agree with your first statement (a good OS course involves assignments that extend and/or reimplement the core features), you really should do your research before passing judgement...
I was about to agree with your second statement, but I decided to look for proof... and it turns out it's nothing of the sort.
Hey, touch-typing is more of a basic motor skill, not specific set of finger-memory attained
Almost all touch typing programs in fact say that it IS based on learning the location of keys through motor memory. I'm pretty sure "finger-memory" is a concept you just made up:)
The majority of people *I* know, at least, have no problem touch typing, but most learned through the necessity of rote learning by repetition rather than some Newtoninan epiphany of an apple falling on their head and an exclamation like "Eureka! Now I can master touch typing!"
Can non-ionizing EM radiation have an effect on biological systems? You are, quite literally, looking at the answer.
Excellent example - you beat me to it:) In case the OP is a bit slow (likely!): a photon in the visible light spectrum is non-ionizing, yet it is able to excite photoreceptor cells in the retina by causing a molecule (appropriately named retinal) to isomerize, which catalyzes a whole chain of chemical reactions.
For that matter... if you really wanted to rub it in you could have even pointed out that heat receptors do roughly the same thing, so "an increase in temperature" directly causes chemical reactions in your skin!
Why is it always the people with the fewest facts who are the most arrogant, and start throwing around insults first?;)
Of course, that being said, I'm sure we all agree that the ELF is a bunch of wackos, and your body absorbs thousands of times more radiation standing outside for a few minutes than it ever would from an AM antenna. We better be careful, their next terrorist act may be to destroy the sun!
Slashdot Mirror
However, I would not suggest heavily political books to avoid needless controversy, or big doorstoppers that might discourage some kids.
On the contrary, I would use whatever metric is used in any other literature class as to the content, length, or difficulty of the novel. The main reason this post is interesting to slashdotters is that someone is trying to acknowledge sci-fi and fantasy is just as worth studying in an academic environment as other literary works. If that's true, it should be treated the same way, and not tailored to suit political sensitivities or short attention spans.
It's kdawson, if Microsoft somehow cured the common cold his headline would be "Microsoft technology responsible for deaths of trillions of living organisms".
Nothing wrong with a 2nd grade education when you're running a farm. But I'd prefer that my doctor stick it out a bit longer. I'm sure your grandfather was happy that his vet, the engineers who designed his farm equipment, the scientists who developed the resistant crop strains, insecticides, and fertilizers, and many thousands of other people who gained critical knowledge for their profession in school did, too.
There are many ways to earn a living, but to trivialize higher education in general is pretty spectacularly short-sighted. Unless your family is Amish. But then the whole slashdot-posting thing would be a bit confusing.
Nice. I was hoping someone would continue the analogy ;)
Actually, my (minimal) experience (more as an indirect user/bystander than integrator) isn't that far off from your description - you way too much to get what you didn't really want, and then hire an army of highly paid line cooks (consultants) to try to modify it to be something edible :)
I do know that my company tried to use Apache Ofbiz, and the "consultants" (who happened to be the lead devs of the project) ended up taking 5x as long and costing 10x originally projected, the SW is still a total POS and bottleneck to our business, and in the end it's being rewritten from scratch. Almost makes SAP seem palatable...
Since when was "Woz in a garage" part of "information technology"? I think this term has become waaay to broad in recent years. Basically the media and trade organizations have tried to appropriate it to anything and everything that even comes near a computer. Of course, slashdot is definitely one of those...
I do and always will associate "information technology" as an APPLICATION SPECIFIC use of computers for the storage and manipulation of "information" (even even then, how vague is that term!?), not basic the R&D of computer engineering itself.
Open source is about as customer driven as preparing dinner at home vs preparing dinner in a restaurant. We're having steak, it's going to be medium rare, no, you don't get a vegetarian option. Basically, it's customer driven for a customer of one (the developer). At least for new projects... yes, once it becomes popular, you get more cooks involved and a better chance that one of them will add your required features.
Not that it's a negative for me (or most of my dinner guests) - 90% of the time I'd prefer a good home cooked meal. But a lot of people don't cook, and don't want to learn.
Ok, now I'm stretching this analogy to the limits... but I'm picturing, say someone like SAP as the high end restaurant - they'll customize your order and give you whatever you want, just don't ask how much it will cost. And Microsoft is the McDonald's - bland but consistent, and relatively cheap (compared to making it yourself). But you feel just a bit queasy afterwards...
Not only that, but many people who are lactose intolerant are able to have goat's milk/cheese without problems.
Microsoft has already started moving/building data centers out of Washington state, which is both perfectly legal and bound to hurt the shortsighted WA state govt that thought it could just start changing tax laws on companies without any repercussions.
I agree with a previous poster that trying to blame Microsoft (a company that is probably one of the biggest sources of economic growth in the Seattle metropolitan area) for their budget problems is idiotic. All companies by nature will look for ways to get breaks and increase their bottom line. Consider Boeing, which received over $3B in TAX BREAKS (yet, officially given away by the WA govt) to keep manufacturing plants in the state - which they are barely living up to, anyway.
Ehhhh... I think with the statement "warp into a system" he has already decided he wants to add in some non-Newtonian physics... (though it would have been nice if he noticed that ;)
In practice, he wants what everyone wants with the holy grail of space sims - seamless transitions between extraplanatary, solar system, and terrestrial environments. Ideally with seamless transitions between "inside the ship" and "outside the ship", whether it's on a space station, planet, or just ejected into the void. Honestly, if they want to simulate "travelling really fast", all the better (especially if they make it look like "the jump to light speed"!) As long as you have total control over your 1st (or evern 3rd) person character throughout the various transitions it's going to be a pretty amazing experience...
If that's so, why is it a bad thing? Probably way more than my damn iPhone these days...
Are you joking, or just a troll? Comic book-based movies have pretty much dominated the Hollywood box office for a decade or more. I bet if anyone sat down and thought about it they could easily name 50+ comic book-based movies that have grossed many billons in all. It's BIG business, and yes, people older than 10 do go watch movies.
Sparkling wine is correct - though you it's mostly the French-owned companies (like Chandon) that call it that, plenty of the CA wineries call their sparking wine "champagne" (no capital C at least...)
But "powdered cheese"?!? You my friend, have clearly never made it past basic Kraft cheese food products. Have you ever had good Parmesean reggiano? Or in your culinary world, does Velveeta == cheddar?
Not quite the same. Most store security cameras are located at head height or higher, making the faces of people wearing hoodies nearly invisible. I don't know about the UK, but in the US, the courts are over-worked enough that the police are likely to drop any shoplifting case unless there is solid evidence that the person they have in custody actually tried to steal something. Anyone caught shoplifting in a store wearing a hoodie is unlikely to be prosecuted, unless they did it right in front of a security guard, so banning them is an understandable move.
I'm going to have to completely disagree, considering they are a major RETAILER OF HOODIES!
http://www.clothingattesco.com/mens/jackets.html
More on Tesco's perfectly "understandable" position: "Tesco has defended itself against accusations of hypocrisy after a security guard told a six-year-old boy to remove his hooded top that had been bought in the supermarket."
Not all communications satellites are in geosync orbit. Iridium satellites are in LEO and rely on the fact that there are a ton of them up there. The ground-based device just hops between them as necessary (not a particularly new thing since that's what all cell phones already do, of course).
And fuck the waivers. What the hell has this country come to when we need people to sign waivers to RUN?
It's come to about 65% of the population being overweight and 35% being obese. But I'm sure that convincing parents that basic exercise is so hazardous your heart should be monitored at all times will help that...
I can't wait for the courts to have to decide what the legal definition of "fair use" is for an inane 140 character post usually consisting of so many stupid tags/abbreviations it's unreadable to 99% of the population.
Or maybe Haiku has finally found its niche!
Quoted Twitter post
RT @bob On the crapper!
Lawsuit may ensue.
Just like you don't have to be in a space shuttle to be killed by one.
But in either case, it's absurd to try to equate the odds, since bystander risk is MANY orders of magnitude less. The OP was correct - his individual odds are clearly way less than 1 in 83.
I think that's true... but at the same time, with a car it's not just a FEELING of control over the odds (like say, a train vs a plane... people feel safer on trains but it's probably still not any safer than air travel) - for the most part in a car you actually CAN influence the outcome.
How many of those people who died in a car crash were drunk, distracted, driving recklessly, or riding with someone who was? Probably a significant percentage. Don't drink and drive (or text and drive, etc), don't run red lights, and drive defensively, and you will definitely reduce your chances of getting in a serious accident.
China has at least 400 nuclear warheads, and missiles perfectly capably of striking anywhere in the world. That's plenty to destroy the world as we know it many times over. The Western world isn't really in a much better position than it was with the USSR during the cold war. Taking their resources by force means taking over their land, and you better believe that would be a nuclear showdown...
Where we are in a vastly better position is that unlike the Soviet Union, most of China's growth is based on exports of goods to Western countries (often manufactured by Western countries in Chinese factories). I think it's pretty clear they are just playing poker on the international stage like everyone else. They have no interest in anyone calling their bluff...
Ok, I give, I give! While, yes, acknowledging your insults, I was trying to be somewhat friendly, even make a little joke, and wondering what story you may in fact have about MS and higher education gone wrong... but in the end you clearly are the most versed in dialectic discourse, and I concede.
Could have been an interesting discussion, sorry you took it so personally. I guess the LMGTFY link was a bit over the top, but it WAS the first search result I found and I was dying to use it today :)
One thing I have learned that has rarely been untrue is the first to resort to personal insults is the one with the fewest facts to provide...
In fact, I can pretty much tell you are a very experienced, intelligent, technically minded person just from reading a few previous posts of yours. I believe I mostly agreed with your OP but was confused by the vitriol towards a teaching software license that upon reading seems fairly open. Unless you have evidence to the contrary? (which I will gladly accept if provided!)
Beyond that, you have again provided no concrete information yet bring ANOTHER non sequitur into the conversation... are you calling me a Dolphin?!?
I'm a bit confused, what about that publication provides ANY additional information to the thread?
Or are you insinuating I need a crash course in "computers"? Kernighan is a legend and a good writer but I would be surprised if the average IEEE journal reader didn't already know everything he wrote about...
In my intro to operating systems class, Stanford used "NACHOS" (not another completely heuristic operating system). I loved that course, but it looks like they have switched to "Pintos" more recently.
This (in my opinion) shows there is of course no perfect model, and I'll give the benefit of the doubt that a good teacher will always search out what they think will help students the most...
I have no idea why you think using the kernel from the most popular OS in the world as a study aid is a bad thing. Personally, the last few set-top boxes I have worked on have been Linux, and I think that whole industry is pretty much dominated by the Linux kernel. I haven't done any serious Windows development in years. But for many new grads a solid understanding of the Windows kernel would be invaluable to their future jobs. In the end, at the kernel level most of the fundamental design principles are pretty much the same - what *I* am amazed at is how many candidates I interview don't even know the basics of virtual memory, disk I/O, process scheduling, multithreading/sychronization, etc.
Once again, I'm trying not to pass judgement... but read your post and decide if it added anything useful. The only concrete phrase in the whole thing was "direct observation and investigation", which yes, is provable, and no, you haven't shown that the MS program does not include.
While I agree with your first statement (a good OS course involves assignments that extend and/or reimplement the core features), you really should do your research before passing judgement...
I was about to agree with your second statement, but I decided to look for proof... and it turns out it's nothing of the sort.
http://tinyurl.com/krt29g
Hey, touch-typing is more of a basic motor skill, not specific set of finger-memory attained
Almost all touch typing programs in fact say that it IS based on learning the location of keys through motor memory. I'm pretty sure "finger-memory" is a concept you just made up :)
The majority of people *I* know, at least, have no problem touch typing, but most learned through the necessity of rote learning by repetition rather than some Newtoninan epiphany of an apple falling on their head and an exclamation like "Eureka! Now I can master touch typing!"
Can non-ionizing EM radiation have an effect on biological systems? You are, quite literally, looking at the answer.
Excellent example - you beat me to it :) In case the OP is a bit slow (likely!): a photon in the visible light spectrum is non-ionizing, yet it is able to excite photoreceptor cells in the retina by causing a molecule (appropriately named retinal) to isomerize, which catalyzes a whole chain of chemical reactions.
For that matter... if you really wanted to rub it in you could have even pointed out that heat receptors do roughly the same thing, so "an increase in temperature" directly causes chemical reactions in your skin!
Why is it always the people with the fewest facts who are the most arrogant, and start throwing around insults first? ;)
Of course, that being said, I'm sure we all agree that the ELF is a bunch of wackos, and your body absorbs thousands of times more radiation standing outside for a few minutes than it ever would from an AM antenna. We better be careful, their next terrorist act may be to destroy the sun!