I think you're just tuned into the wrong demographic. I am the kind of person the parent was working for.
I enjoy what Linux stands for, and would like to gradually migrate to using it full time, but to be honest I'm quite busy. Jumping in neck-deep just isn't a viable option because of all the things I do on a daily basis I've got to work out how they'll work in Linux and using OSS. Now, if I could start installing all the little apps one at a time on my Windows box to get used to how they work, after awhile, it would be a simple matter to transition over.
As it stands, it'll be quite some time before I'm using Linux for my primary machine. It'll be relegated to hobby status or the "when I have time" machine that I run.
A person who can predict future disasters will only ever receive my respect for doing so if their prediction turns out false because they did something tangible to prevent it!
Anyone can sit on their ass and say that they predicted the Oklahoma bombing or the World Trade Centre, but they are only kooks and despicable scum if what they claim is true and did nothing to prevent it.
I will keep my sympathy for the survivors, my respects for the dead, and my honours for the people who risked their lives to help.
Your parents seem to be the kind of people I generally recommend a Mac for. They are not power users, and most likely not doing anything that is specialized enough that PC vs Mac really makes any sort of difference. I find that the End-User Experience on a Mac is elegant enough, easy to understand, and significantly less prone to catastrophic failure that its value is much higher for people who simply use it and don't concern themselves with all the bells and whistles that we find impossible to live without.
Turn em all off except for one blinking on the very end of the line. When you're neighbours ask, tell them its command line is simply waiting for input.
You're welcome, I hope you have as much fun as we've had:). Settler's has become almost an official passtime among the students at my university faculty. They've had to send for replacement cards & pieces on more than one occasion due to wear from use already. (This is an accomplishment, the pieces are wood, and the board is heavy-duty cardboard... and not an easy thing to wear out).
One of my friends went out and bought his own set so we could at least play regularily (about 4-5 games a week or so) because the faculty society's sign-out set was becoming impossible to get.
And yet, the US seems to be doing an admirable job at just that *despite* the original article's premise that the US lags behind in getting access to the latest and greatest.
Congratulations! You have successfully recorded an American attitude to *new and shiny things*, the primary reason WHY the Japanese have access to the latest and greatest while the US must wait.
Ah, I gotcha. Unfortunatly subtle sarcasm does not come through well in writing. Its gotta be a bit over-the-top or easily risk being missed. I've encountered more than enough people who seriously defend rather absurd (IMO) positions that its generally easier just to take things at face value.
Well, when we usually play most people consider and are ready with their options when their turn comes about, and its simply a matter of executing. Sometimes if a person gets a big windfall just before their turn it might take them a bit longer to sort new possibilities but generally a 'long' turn by one player is in the realm of 30 seconds or less. I have one friend who likes to dither though, and he usually starts getting evil looks if he takes a minute to do everything.
But more commonly you get a number of rolls that don't cause many resources to be picked up, so entire rounds around the table have gone buy with only perfunctory "trade sheep for grain?" queries that are usually snapped up quickly or refused euqally quickly. A quick round like that sometimes takes less than 20 seconds to complete. But I'd say the average ends up being 10-15 seconds for an individual turn as all it takes is to snatch your cards for the roll, drop a few down to building something and drop it on the map. Strategy is for the down-time while other people are doing there thing, and with settlers its usually straight-forward enough that short-term strategy can be done on the fly.
We also actively discourage dithering or contemplation when you have the dice in your hand because since other players cannot do anything, they can only trade with the current player, it means things get done in a hurry unless active bartering is taking place.
I guess that means we have a mutual inability to comprehend. The longest single game of settlers I've ever played took slightly less than an hour, and that was when 3 people who had never played before (including me) were being introduced to the game with 1 experienced player doing the instruction. I could see it taking longer if 4 new people came to the game trying to figure it out for the first time, but for me its always been the perfect way to spend the hour when I have a spare period between classes and be able to get a snack at the same time.
Now, I make a disclaimer, technically I've had games of Settlers last significantly longer, however that was due to the fact that the Settlers game itself was only a secondary consideration. We spent much more time discussing other things and the game only served as background noise for the discussion. In those cases sometimes single turns took 10 minutes, and I discount those as anomalous because we really weren't playing the game.
Longest road map-division is a very difficult thing to accomplish (especially with 4 players!) and an unreliable strategy at best. Yes it can sink someone new to the game, but 2 points for longest road is a very simple rule to learn and not one that I would consider as a barrier to entry. Yes it takes a little while for someone new to the game to become good at it, and develop targetted strategies, but that applies to any game and doesn't detract from the fun of playing:).
Besides, that is where maxing out the number of players is a bonus to introducing new people. There is enough luck involved in the game that a good strategy doesn't guarantee victory. Heck, in big games I've won with only 4 settlements (well, cities actually after upgrading). I built exactly 3 roads the entire game in addition to my starting 2.
Yes it is, but it doesn't interperet HTML code according to HTML specifications. Therefore coding it *just* for IE doesn't mean that its valid according to W3C. The web is more than IE, there is a reason for standards.
Settlers of Catan! Quick to pick up, 30-45 minutes for a 4 player game (6 with the expansion tiles) great fun and addictive, no game is complete without loud good-natured badgering of your fellows and monty python quotes.
Works best after a case or two when the phrase "Pressing wood into sheep" takes on whole new meanings.
I think that it could be taken as elitest, but I don't think of it that way. I love to learn, and I enjoy mathematics, its a statement that I look to for inspiration. That no matter how much you know, there are always more challanges ahead, bigger and more difficult problems. The more you know, the bigger your problems become. And I think, if I have difficulty with the stuff I'm doing now, this is trivial compared to what he did, and if I want to be better I have to work harder.
I'm also not anywhere near as callous as I pretended in my last post. I enjoy helping people learn as much as I enjoy learning myself. I've only ever pointed at it when I've had big assignments due the next day and no time for distractions:).
Just want to give a congrats for a good job by Canadian students, ranking 3rd in reading and tied for 5th in math.
The report also cited Canada as one of the countries having great equality across income and employment ranges. Which puts things in a bit of perspective after the moderately large amount of media/newspaper coverage we have had lately over the disparaties in our education system and the need to improve it due to the fact that recent immigrants are consistently performing below expectation and require more support services to help them adapt.
Slight correction... Many advertising companies don't code their advertisements correctly thus causing them to only render as intended on Internet Explorer.
Its not the browser's fault when you don't code to spec.
Yes, draconian AND tough... my, I bet they're pretty strong too.
If it works for you, then by all means do not let me argue against it. But I personally don't agree with the way you run things because I would never have discovered what I love to do under your rules. Very simply I fell in love with all things computer related through games. I credit them with showing me the path to be able to do something I truely enjoy as a living, and that is programming. Without them I would never have been as involved as I am with computers, and I credit my parents foresight by exposing me to them as a kid at a very young age (when computers in the home were still a very new thing) and showing me what I could become.
I don't entirely disagree with how you run things, but for her sake at least expose your child to these kinds of things at some point, supervision and restrictions are good things, but she's going to learn what she likes soon enough anyway, why not in the home where you can oversee things. Otherwise if she finds that she really loves computer games (as an example) she'll be going somewhere else to play, someplace where you aren't there to supervise.
I guess I'm of the opinion to allow kids to do what they want (exception of things that are not permissable for public consumption) with restrictions, rules, and guidance so that they have freedom to choose what they do, but so I can remain watchful.
I don't think that divides it down far enough. Just being geeky/intelligent and not caring or caring little about details doesn't necessarily a bad student make. In my high school I was one of the geeky computer guys, and although I didn't care about the boring crap that I had to go through in class, it came easily enough to me and I was aware enough about the impact on the future that I was right near the top of my class (not #1, but in the top 10 or so of about 300 students).
However, I have a friend who was in the exact same situation as I, except he didn't bother in the slightest with school work and didn't do nearly as well as I did in class. We went to different universities studying the same sort of things, I'm doing reasonably well, enough so that I'm happy with what I've accomplished and will graduate in a few months. He on the otherhand finally discovered something challanging that he enjoyed, and he's now working on his Masters degree.
I know what you mean... and I really detest it when what I want to do is play Half-life 2, but what I should be doing is my homework assignment. Why? Because I procrastinate by not doing homework, but I feel guilty and frustrated so I don't get any enjoyment out of Half-Life 2, so instead of doing either... I post here. Damn. I really should get back to work.
What's worse though is I've wasted entire hours staring at my computer's wallpaper...
Like some other people were mentioning, unless your transfer to school is at the very top (MIT in particular) it won't matter. If you're transferring from a middle of the road school to a higher, but still middle of the road school then the pain of transferring will far outweight the negligable gain you'd get from having a different name on your degree.
I have a friend (up here in Canada btw) who transferred schools halfway through, and he's had to work his ass off for a year before they agreed to transfer most of his credits. Even still its pushed him back a ways from graduation because some credits don't transfer. I personally think that if you're just going into the same program but with a different name, then it would be better to not have to take extra semesters because the bureacracy decided not to let some credits transfer, and use that time working instead.
Really, work experience is what counts, a started job out of university will be much more beneficial in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're just tuned into the wrong demographic. I am the kind of person the parent was working for.
I enjoy what Linux stands for, and would like to gradually migrate to using it full time, but to be honest I'm quite busy. Jumping in neck-deep just isn't a viable option because of all the things I do on a daily basis I've got to work out how they'll work in Linux and using OSS. Now, if I could start installing all the little apps one at a time on my Windows box to get used to how they work, after awhile, it would be a simple matter to transition over.
As it stands, it'll be quite some time before I'm using Linux for my primary machine. It'll be relegated to hobby status or the "when I have time" machine that I run.
This is where the disclaimer word *tangible* came into play...
A person who can predict future disasters will only ever receive my respect for doing so if their prediction turns out false because they did something tangible to prevent it!
Anyone can sit on their ass and say that they predicted the Oklahoma bombing or the World Trade Centre, but they are only kooks and despicable scum if what they claim is true and did nothing to prevent it.
I will keep my sympathy for the survivors, my respects for the dead, and my honours for the people who risked their lives to help.
Your parents seem to be the kind of people I generally recommend a Mac for. They are not power users, and most likely not doing anything that is specialized enough that PC vs Mac really makes any sort of difference. I find that the End-User Experience on a Mac is elegant enough, easy to understand, and significantly less prone to catastrophic failure that its value is much higher for people who simply use it and don't concern themselves with all the bells and whistles that we find impossible to live without.
Turn em all off except for one blinking on the very end of the line. When you're neighbours ask, tell them its command line is simply waiting for input.
You're welcome, I hope you have as much fun as we've had :). Settler's has become almost an official passtime among the students at my university faculty. They've had to send for replacement cards & pieces on more than one occasion due to wear from use already. (This is an accomplishment, the pieces are wood, and the board is heavy-duty cardboard... and not an easy thing to wear out).
One of my friends went out and bought his own set so we could at least play regularily (about 4-5 games a week or so) because the faculty society's sign-out set was becoming impossible to get.
And yet, the US seems to be doing an admirable job at just that *despite* the original article's premise that the US lags behind in getting access to the latest and greatest.
Must be all the weaponry...
Congratulations! You have successfully recorded an American attitude to *new and shiny things*, the primary reason WHY the Japanese have access to the latest and greatest while the US must wait.
Ah, I gotcha. Unfortunatly subtle sarcasm does not come through well in writing. Its gotta be a bit over-the-top or easily risk being missed. I've encountered more than enough people who seriously defend rather absurd (IMO) positions that its generally easier just to take things at face value.
RTFA, the headline written by the slashdot editors is a lie.
The Reuters headline is "U.S. officials raid stores,arrest 2 in game piracy".
Well, when we usually play most people consider and are ready with their options when their turn comes about, and its simply a matter of executing. Sometimes if a person gets a big windfall just before their turn it might take them a bit longer to sort new possibilities but generally a 'long' turn by one player is in the realm of 30 seconds or less. I have one friend who likes to dither though, and he usually starts getting evil looks if he takes a minute to do everything.
But more commonly you get a number of rolls that don't cause many resources to be picked up, so entire rounds around the table have gone buy with only perfunctory "trade sheep for grain?" queries that are usually snapped up quickly or refused euqally quickly. A quick round like that sometimes takes less than 20 seconds to complete. But I'd say the average ends up being 10-15 seconds for an individual turn as all it takes is to snatch your cards for the roll, drop a few down to building something and drop it on the map. Strategy is for the down-time while other people are doing there thing, and with settlers its usually straight-forward enough that short-term strategy can be done on the fly.
We also actively discourage dithering or contemplation when you have the dice in your hand because since other players cannot do anything, they can only trade with the current player, it means things get done in a hurry unless active bartering is taking place.
I guess that means we have a mutual inability to comprehend. The longest single game of settlers I've ever played took slightly less than an hour, and that was when 3 people who had never played before (including me) were being introduced to the game with 1 experienced player doing the instruction. I could see it taking longer if 4 new people came to the game trying to figure it out for the first time, but for me its always been the perfect way to spend the hour when I have a spare period between classes and be able to get a snack at the same time.
Now, I make a disclaimer, technically I've had games of Settlers last significantly longer, however that was due to the fact that the Settlers game itself was only a secondary consideration. We spent much more time discussing other things and the game only served as background noise for the discussion. In those cases sometimes single turns took 10 minutes, and I discount those as anomalous because we really weren't playing the game.
Deeper strategy does not a flawed game make.
:).
Longest road map-division is a very difficult thing to accomplish (especially with 4 players!) and an unreliable strategy at best. Yes it can sink someone new to the game, but 2 points for longest road is a very simple rule to learn and not one that I would consider as a barrier to entry. Yes it takes a little while for someone new to the game to become good at it, and develop targetted strategies, but that applies to any game and doesn't detract from the fun of playing
Besides, that is where maxing out the number of players is a bonus to introducing new people. There is enough luck involved in the game that a good strategy doesn't guarantee victory. Heck, in big games I've won with only 4 settlements (well, cities actually after upgrading). I built exactly 3 roads the entire game in addition to my starting 2.
Yes it is, but it doesn't interperet HTML code according to HTML specifications. Therefore coding it *just* for IE doesn't mean that its valid according to W3C. The web is more than IE, there is a reason for standards.
Settlers of Catan! Quick to pick up, 30-45 minutes for a 4 player game (6 with the expansion tiles) great fun and addictive, no game is complete without loud good-natured badgering of your fellows and monty python quotes.
Works best after a case or two when the phrase "Pressing wood into sheep" takes on whole new meanings.
I think that it could be taken as elitest, but I don't think of it that way. I love to learn, and I enjoy mathematics, its a statement that I look to for inspiration. That no matter how much you know, there are always more challanges ahead, bigger and more difficult problems. The more you know, the bigger your problems become. And I think, if I have difficulty with the stuff I'm doing now, this is trivial compared to what he did, and if I want to be better I have to work harder.
:).
I'm also not anywhere near as callous as I pretended in my last post. I enjoy helping people learn as much as I enjoy learning myself. I've only ever pointed at it when I've had big assignments due the next day and no time for distractions
I'm in the Math Faculty at university (taking computer science). I have that quote plastered on my wall, when someone asks for help I point at it.
Just want to give a congrats for a good job by Canadian students, ranking 3rd in reading and tied for 5th in math.
The report also cited Canada as one of the countries having great equality across income and employment ranges. Which puts things in a bit of perspective after the moderately large amount of media/newspaper coverage we have had lately over the disparaties in our education system and the need to improve it due to the fact that recent immigrants are consistently performing below expectation and require more support services to help them adapt.
Slight correction... Many advertising companies don't code their advertisements correctly thus causing them to only render as intended on Internet Explorer.
Its not the browser's fault when you don't code to spec.
Isn't that supposed to be "Seig Heil!"?
" and they are draconian, but tough."
Yes, draconian AND tough... my, I bet they're pretty strong too.
If it works for you, then by all means do not let me argue against it. But I personally don't agree with the way you run things because I would never have discovered what I love to do under your rules. Very simply I fell in love with all things computer related through games. I credit them with showing me the path to be able to do something I truely enjoy as a living, and that is programming. Without them I would never have been as involved as I am with computers, and I credit my parents foresight by exposing me to them as a kid at a very young age (when computers in the home were still a very new thing) and showing me what I could become.
I don't entirely disagree with how you run things, but for her sake at least expose your child to these kinds of things at some point, supervision and restrictions are good things, but she's going to learn what she likes soon enough anyway, why not in the home where you can oversee things. Otherwise if she finds that she really loves computer games (as an example) she'll be going somewhere else to play, someplace where you aren't there to supervise.
I guess I'm of the opinion to allow kids to do what they want (exception of things that are not permissable for public consumption) with restrictions, rules, and guidance so that they have freedom to choose what they do, but so I can remain watchful.
I don't think that divides it down far enough. Just being geeky/intelligent and not caring or caring little about details doesn't necessarily a bad student make. In my high school I was one of the geeky computer guys, and although I didn't care about the boring crap that I had to go through in class, it came easily enough to me and I was aware enough about the impact on the future that I was right near the top of my class (not #1, but in the top 10 or so of about 300 students).
However, I have a friend who was in the exact same situation as I, except he didn't bother in the slightest with school work and didn't do nearly as well as I did in class. We went to different universities studying the same sort of things, I'm doing reasonably well, enough so that I'm happy with what I've accomplished and will graduate in a few months. He on the otherhand finally discovered something challanging that he enjoyed, and he's now working on his Masters degree.
I know what you mean... and I really detest it when what I want to do is play Half-life 2, but what I should be doing is my homework assignment. Why? Because I procrastinate by not doing homework, but I feel guilty and frustrated so I don't get any enjoyment out of Half-Life 2, so instead of doing either... I post here. Damn. I really should get back to work.
What's worse though is I've wasted entire hours staring at my computer's wallpaper...
Well as to that... the potential WAS there, but then you went ahead and re-elected Bush. ;)
Like some other people were mentioning, unless your transfer to school is at the very top (MIT in particular) it won't matter. If you're transferring from a middle of the road school to a higher, but still middle of the road school then the pain of transferring will far outweight the negligable gain you'd get from having a different name on your degree.
I have a friend (up here in Canada btw) who transferred schools halfway through, and he's had to work his ass off for a year before they agreed to transfer most of his credits. Even still its pushed him back a ways from graduation because some credits don't transfer. I personally think that if you're just going into the same program but with a different name, then it would be better to not have to take extra semesters because the bureacracy decided not to let some credits transfer, and use that time working instead.
Really, work experience is what counts, a started job out of university will be much more beneficial in the long run.