If we're going to compute in 3 dimensions, we may as well go the whole way and discard the notion of two-dimensional windows. I'm thinking in terms of, say, a cuboid with buttons on it -- sort of like, say, a gamepad, which has controls all over, and can be held with the hand. So, for instance, you can have cubes containing documents in some sort of representation. Of course, in order to represent text, you'd probably have to retain some sort of two-dimensional object.
This could revolutionalize integrated development environments, where you could have a 3D representation of each module, and visualize how they fit in together. Also, things like database management systems (to visualize relations between fields across databases), file managers (viewing hierarchies and files within directories/folders), audio and video players (easier random access selection), presentation creators, multimedia creators, etc. would benefit from such an arrangement. I don't see how a word processor or spreadsheet program would be helped, because text is inherently two-dimensional, and for any kind of usability, one would need to keep these on a plane.
One requirement of such a system would be to build input devices for this sort of interaction. Perhaps some sort of cameras or laser-based tracking devices in all the corners of a room tracking, say, head and arm movement? This is just going way beyond my imagination now.:-)
What is rarely mentioned is that most of the lives lost in the Hiroshima bombing were civilian lives, while an invasion would most likely have led to a larger military loss.
Also, I'm shocked that some people tend not to count non-U.S. populations as people, so they only see the statistics for the U.S. as opposed to world statistics.
Your original point still remains true, though. The advantages of nuclear power may well outweigh its disadvantages, though when disaster occurs with nuclear power (due to human error or otherwise), it's far more destructive in its effect as opposed to more conventional power sources.
And I'm not going to argue the points of nulear weapons; it's now almost a given that they have more drawbacks than advantages.
(p.s. isn't this thread offtopic? What does this have to do with the robots?)
Those prices are only for the Creative 3D Blaster Annihiliator. Here are listings based on the keyword "GeForce". (They include the Guillemot 3D Prophet, Elsa Erazor X and LeadTek WinFast GeForce 256 among others.)
Clones (or modified clones with a "dumbed down" nervous system) are every bit as human as you or I. If some government decides they will start producing clones for labor, defense, etc., they'll in effect be doing not much different than what happened in the US and other countries when slavery was legal and rampant. Basically, you'd have a clone "race" discriminated against and racism not unlike that encountered during the slavery era, except that now you'd be considering these clones as subhuman.
It's fairly unlikely such a thing will happen now, considering that the practice of slavery has been abolished from the majority of countries in the world, and I'm fairly certain that if some government decided to discriminate against the clones, they'd fine themselves in a lot of trouble - be it external pressure or internal rebellion - either from naturally born people or the clones thereof. So I don't find much reason to be worried about such misuse.
This is what I've gathered from the article and previous posts:
college is a waste of time because it teaches one skills that can be easily learnt in Real Life (tm)
This really depends on the skills one is considering. College imparts a manner of thinking (problem-solving, thinking critically) and teaches one to communicate effectively (make a good argument worth defending, and come up with reasoning to defend that argument). It's not just about technical skills (programming in a given language, or even programming itself), though it does give students tried and tested knowledge and experience of others, distilled and concentrated to make effective people out of them. What makes these skills so unimportant that a person is unwilling to spend three to four years in a good university to obtain them? As one person wrote in the old thread, one is enriching one's life through college.
There isn't anything interesting or challenging in college
This suggests to me that the persons who write this were in the wrong field. It would help to put a lot of thought into one's interests and goals in life before choosing a career and the corresponding field of study. I have noticed (as many others have, I am sure) that high schoolers often have no developed aim. It would definitely help if parents took more interest in their offspring's life and activities, and helped them decide what they wanted to do. Part of the problem is that very often, adults themselves do not have a spiritual aim - they just have an interest in amassing wealth and spending it.
An issue of money
Many have said that degrees can help getting a good job, and with a larger pay, and many others have cited examples where they saw larger pays to people without a formal higher education. Let's differentiate between the rule and the exception. In general, higher pays and better jobs go to people with degrees. This is because it is more likely that they have learnt to solve problems and have learnt techniques that people without degrees probably haven't. Sure, there are exceptions, but I speak of the majority. Even many opponents of college have admitted that going to college would have helped them in certain situations. But remember, we're talking about individual cases, not a general proportion of geeks, many of whom would benefit from an academic atmosphere.
A "fit"
There may be two sorts of universities - one where technical skills (e.g. programming in certain languages) are emphasized, with faculty of lower competence prevail, and better institutes where the faculty know what they're doing, and don't restrict classes to technical skills (unlike many IS departments). In fact, I think we can also divide academic programs in the same manner - many IS/IT degrees deal with the technical details that are implicitly left to students to learn on their own time by other programs, such as CS programs offered by more reputable universities, which focus on the theoretical aspects, and as the university I attend does, try to make it a broad experience by fiving a student the choice to fill in the gaps, leaving as many classes as possible as restricted electives, so that one can take e.g. psych classes to get a different perspective of things as well.
A lot of people drop out of college because they might not have fit in this scheme of things - i.e., their curiosity is limited to the technical aspect, in a narrow, one-dimensional world view. They haven't committed themselves to an education, which is what a proper university program intends to impart. Because of this, they find classes boring and think they're wasting their time getting an education. Education never was meant for everyone in the first place - it is only those who seek it that will find it. A side effect of the education, however, is that it may impart a certain degree of wisdom to a person, and perhaps make them more intelligent people. This will definitely make them better at what they do. But in the end, they're improving the quality of their lives, which IMO is more important than, for instance, getting four years more worth of experience in the field of one's career, which won't give them the broad spectrum of experience that study and interaction with one's peers and faculty members would.
What really matters is what one intends to do with one's life. If a person wants to spend their life doing one kind of activity all their life, with less emphasis on personal development, then college is not meant for that person. However, if a person wants to become a better member of society, with more effective interaction, and as a side effect, to rise in their career (and possibly others), college is the way to go. It isn't just a sense of elitism which leads to the observation that the average intelligence of a university graduate is higher than that of the general population, a fact that holds even for geeks.
Their 128K L2 is not enough to make them good server chips. Pentium IIs and IIIs have 512K which is good enough. Xeons extend the cache even further, which is why they are even better suited to server situations.
A dual Celeron box might be good for CAD or something - a decent workstation, but you probably won't want to extend it to performance-hungry situations.
If they found it so hard to get through the course that they had to _quit_their_jobs_, why didn't they drop the course? That's _far_ more sensible than blamin the school for _their_own_ failures. If they didn't have the sense to do such a simple thing, I doubt they could have had the sense to learn how to use those MS apps.
Here at my university, they've been creating a network-specific distribution of Linux, which is not only optimized with respect to the network environment (tied in with AFS, ability to access programs across the network, kerberos, zephyr, etc.), but is also configured to be as secure as possible. This is offered to anyone new to the OS, who want to give it a try.
In addition, the Network Development group has configuration guidelines and suggestions handed out to people who are bringing computers to campus. These include security guidelines as well. Anyone who is detected not following the guidelines has their machines disconnected from the network for a given length of time (a few weeks to a year). If well-enforced by a Computing Services group, this could be very effective as a deterrent if people don't follow guidelines.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're going to compute in 3 dimensions, we may as well go the whole way and discard the notion of two-dimensional windows. I'm thinking in terms of, say, a cuboid with buttons on it -- sort of like, say, a gamepad, which has controls all over, and can be held with the hand. So, for instance, you can have cubes containing documents in some sort of representation. Of course, in order to represent text, you'd probably have to retain some sort of two-dimensional object.
:-)
This could revolutionalize integrated development environments, where you could have a 3D representation of each module, and visualize how they fit in together. Also, things like database management systems (to visualize relations between fields across databases), file managers (viewing hierarchies and files within directories/folders), audio and video players (easier random access selection), presentation creators, multimedia creators, etc. would benefit from such an arrangement. I don't see how a word processor or spreadsheet program would be helped, because text is inherently two-dimensional, and for any kind of usability, one would need to keep these on a plane.
One requirement of such a system would be to build input devices for this sort of interaction. Perhaps some sort of cameras or laser-based tracking devices in all the corners of a room tracking, say, head and arm movement? This is just going way beyond my imagination now.
What is rarely mentioned is that most of the lives lost in the Hiroshima bombing were civilian lives, while an invasion would most likely have led to a larger military loss.
Also, I'm shocked that some people tend not to count non-U.S. populations as people, so they only see the statistics for the U.S. as opposed to world statistics.
Your original point still remains true, though. The advantages of nuclear power may well outweigh its disadvantages, though when disaster occurs with nuclear power (due to human error or otherwise), it's far more destructive in its effect as opposed to more conventional power sources.
And I'm not going to argue the points of nulear weapons; it's now almost a given that they have more drawbacks than advantages.
(p.s. isn't this thread offtopic? What does this have to do with the robots?)
Those prices are only for the Creative 3D Blaster Annihiliator. Here are listings based on the keyword "GeForce". (They include the Guillemot 3D Prophet, Elsa Erazor X and LeadTek WinFast GeForce 256 among others.)
Listings on PriceWatch
As it turns out, the cheapest pre-orders are (as of now) for the Creative 3D Blaster Annihiliator.
Clones (or modified clones with a "dumbed down" nervous system) are every bit as human as you or I. If some government decides they will start producing clones for labor, defense, etc., they'll in effect be doing not much different than what happened in the US and other countries when slavery was legal and rampant. Basically, you'd have a clone "race" discriminated against and racism not unlike that encountered during the slavery era, except that now you'd be considering these clones as subhuman.
It's fairly unlikely such a thing will happen now, considering that the practice of slavery has been abolished from the majority of countries in the world, and I'm fairly certain that if some government decided to discriminate against the clones, they'd fine themselves in a lot of trouble - be it external pressure or internal rebellion - either from naturally born people or the clones thereof. So I don't find much reason to be worried about such misuse.
This really depends on the skills one is considering. College imparts a manner of thinking (problem-solving, thinking critically) and teaches one to communicate effectively (make a good argument worth defending, and come up with reasoning to defend that argument). It's not just about technical skills (programming in a given language, or even programming itself), though it does give students tried and tested knowledge and experience of others, distilled and concentrated to make effective people out of them. What makes these skills so unimportant that a person is unwilling to spend three to four years in a good university to obtain them? As one person wrote in the old thread, one is enriching one's life through college.
This suggests to me that the persons who write this were in the wrong field. It would help to put a lot of thought into one's interests and goals in life before choosing a career and the corresponding field of study. I have noticed (as many others have, I am sure) that high schoolers often have no developed aim. It would definitely help if parents took more interest in their offspring's life and activities, and helped them decide what they wanted to do. Part of the problem is that very often, adults themselves do not have a spiritual aim - they just have an interest in amassing wealth and spending it.
Many have said that degrees can help getting a good job, and with a larger pay, and many others have cited examples where they saw larger pays to people without a formal higher education. Let's differentiate between the rule and the exception. In general, higher pays and better jobs go to people with degrees. This is because it is more likely that they have learnt to solve problems and have learnt techniques that people without degrees probably haven't. Sure, there are exceptions, but I speak of the majority. Even many opponents of college have admitted that going to college would have helped them in certain situations. But remember, we're talking about individual cases, not a general proportion of geeks, many of whom would benefit from an academic atmosphere.
There may be two sorts of universities - one where technical skills (e.g. programming in certain languages) are emphasized, with faculty of lower competence prevail, and better institutes where the faculty know what they're doing, and don't restrict classes to technical skills (unlike many IS departments). In fact, I think we can also divide academic programs in the same manner - many IS/IT degrees deal with the technical details that are implicitly left to students to learn on their own time by other programs, such as CS programs offered by more reputable universities, which focus on the theoretical aspects, and as the university I attend does, try to make it a broad experience by fiving a student the choice to fill in the gaps, leaving as many classes as possible as restricted electives, so that one can take e.g. psych classes to get a different perspective of things as well.
A lot of people drop out of college because they might not have fit in this scheme of things - i.e., their curiosity is limited to the technical aspect, in a narrow, one-dimensional world view. They haven't committed themselves to an education, which is what a proper university program intends to impart. Because of this, they find classes boring and think they're wasting their time getting an education. Education never was meant for everyone in the first place - it is only those who seek it that will find it. A side effect of the education, however, is that it may impart a certain degree of wisdom to a person, and perhaps make them more intelligent people. This will definitely make them better at what they do. But in the end, they're improving the quality of their lives, which IMO is more important than, for instance, getting four years more worth of experience in the field of one's career, which won't give them the broad spectrum of experience that study and interaction with one's peers and faculty members would.
What really matters is what one intends to do with one's life. If a person wants to spend their life doing one kind of activity all their life, with less emphasis on personal development, then college is not meant for that person. However, if a person wants to become a better member of society, with more effective interaction, and as a side effect, to rise in their career (and possibly others), college is the way to go. It isn't just a sense of elitism which leads to the observation that the average intelligence of a university graduate is higher than that of the general population, a fact that holds even for geeks.
so you can read it.
Their 128K L2 is not enough to make them good server chips. Pentium IIs and IIIs have 512K which is good enough. Xeons extend the cache even further, which is why they are even better suited to server situations.
A dual Celeron box might be good for CAD or something - a decent workstation, but you probably won't want to extend it to performance-hungry situations.
If they found it so hard to get through the course that they had to _quit_their_jobs_, why didn't they drop the course? That's _far_ more sensible than blamin the school for _their_own_ failures. If they didn't have the sense to do such a simple thing, I doubt they could have had the sense to learn how to use those MS apps.
Here at my university, they've been creating a network-specific distribution of Linux, which is not only optimized with respect to the network environment (tied in with AFS, ability to access programs across the network, kerberos, zephyr, etc.), but is also configured to be as secure as possible. This is offered to anyone new to the OS, who want to give it a try.
In addition, the Network Development group has configuration guidelines and suggestions handed out to people who are bringing computers to campus. These include security guidelines as well. Anyone who is detected not following the guidelines has their machines disconnected from the network for a given length of time (a few weeks to a year). If well-enforced by a Computing Services group, this could be very effective as a deterrent if people don't follow guidelines.