The problem is that we realize that we're geeks and that we just don't care anymore. I mean, three years ago I was a code perfectionist; now I really don't give a rats ass. Project after useless project, we just get bored of the same ol' thing over and over again. For example, the school I'm at has penis envy for the ivy-leagues, and so they make the CS major as difficult as possible because they don't have the rep they would like. But it's silly, why make the courses so unneccessarily difficult? The average GPA in my major is less that 3.0!!! They don't even bother to hire enough lectures to teach sufficient number of sections, and we get all the rejects from Cal, because they have some hoity-toity agreement that they don't have to take but the ones they want, and we have to take all the top 10% of high-schools' graduating class. Oh yeah, and the other problem is that dorks (geek wannabes) that want to make $100k / year think that they'll learn CS because it's EZ money. CS is hard! In our microwave-instant-gratification society, people want instant results without effort. (Perl?) That's my 2.0e-2 dollars.
First, I got my trusty 32SII in jr high, about 1991. Then I got my 48G in high school about 1994, and when people saw what it could do, everyone wanted one. My friend (who later moved on to MIT) did some hacking and even got the debugger, compiler, and editor burned onto a ROM (he had a GX, i was so jealous =P). Anyhow, you can't beat the productivity of side-ways Tetris!
I still have that 48, but it's kinda ratty as I pried it apart a few times, and I'm still thinking of hacking it to give it 4MB. Hmm, 32K seems insufficient. What's funny is that I can run HP48 EMU many times faster than the real thing, and I can enter data with a real keyboard.
NTTC says "Open Channel Software (OCS) is an Internet-based organization that publishes, distributes and commercializes software created at academic and research institutions"
NTTC describes themselves as a "research commericialization center."
What are we paying tax dollars for if we have to pay to use the products of Federally Funded research? I thought the whole point of federally funded research was to do the jobs that typically wouldn't be undertaken in a commercial environment. Now these Special-Interest Groups (SIGs) and lobbyists are trying to sell-out the system. What gives? By the way, I work in a federally funded security research lab, so I have a basic idea of how the 'System' works.
Re:Be flexible but go with your strengths
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, as more and more work gets farmed out to consultants and foreign-based coding sweat-shops the technical middle-management and soon-to-be-middle-management better hone their skills. Be this coding, people skills, etc.
yeah, I get those weird noises only when i run norton disk doctor. I dont have any reported bad sectors or any other probs (im running ez-smart in windoze). I run an Abit kt7a-raid + normal clocked 1.1G tbird + 65GB 60gxp + 40GB 75gxp (that's the chipset w/ the A at the end). I dunno anymore, i installed rh7.1 on the 75gxp and no prob so far. =)
Leave it to marketing to lie about the product (misrepresent, confuse or mislead), sell using FUD, and generally attempt to mess with the design process w/o regard to small things like "details."
Oh yeah, and they can draw pretty pictures that are supposed to grab your (the consumer's) attention.
Why don't they just do like Sony and keep everything a "secret," limit supply, and fix prices so people will want it even more? (e.g.,
PS2)
Or you can buy things sold by spam or go to the store you know you hate (Fry's Electronics), because it might be $0.01 cheaper, wait 10hrs in line, and have to spend another 40 hours returning it. They're not hurting, their marketing people can't even proof read their own ads! Some time in 1993-1994. "OS/2 WRAP" (sic) (WARP) in 200 pt font; I'm not joking, 4"(9cm)-high font, full page color, San Jose Mercury News.... and still people shop there.
It's kind of like M$FT windoze in a way...
You'd have to completely destroy and erase LA and Las Vegas first. Those two cities are all about big, megalomanical, show-off consumerism. Case in point: lots of old, gas-guzzling cars w/ speakers loud enough to register on seismometers. Btw, I live in CA, so I know what I'm talking about.
Update: I'm sending back the 75GXP for a refurb. This one has the wierd problem mentioned. The tech thinks it's a firmware prob or a media prob. But windoze reports no bad sectors! The firmware is either detecting real errors and reallocating, detecting errors that don't exist, or just plain doesn't work.
Hmm... IBM should diagnose and fix it, why should I have to do their job for them?
I have the same drive. I can't run Norton Disk Doctor on my computer for some reason. I thought I had a driver problem. Maybe it's the same prob? Btw, I ran the DFT 2.10 on both drives (the long test) and they all passed ok. I'm going to take this dude out and see if NDD will work.
The only problem I ever had wasn't with the drives, but I would get random 1 bit errors because the hd controller drivers were screwed up some how. I formatted and reinstalled Windoze (no comments on windows please). That didn't help. I tossed the Asus A7V board and bought an Abit KT7A-RAID. Note I use the EZ-SMART application and have NO entries in the firmware records on ANY errors on any of these drives. Note: you don't need ez-smart to be running to log these errors, the firmware on the drive does this itself.
I got lucky, I just now see that my vender substituted a 60GXP for a 75GXP. Note all my IBM hd's run really hot. Much hotter than older 3600/5400 RPM WD Caviars. Note again, newer WD drives now use many IBM OEM parts for their drives, I wonder if they are having any probs?
Note I have the following drives:
1) 60GXP 60 GB 7200 RPM, puchased May, 2001
Model#: IC35L060AVER07-0
Firmware: ER6O
The 747 cargo version can a heavy load. I'm sorry, you are mistaken. The B-47 once had flew w/ a whole fission reactor, but it was not tied in (they used gas-driven props). I don't think we want flying reactors, though. Bad enuf they (gov/mil) use them in extended-mission spy satellites and such.
Exactly... fuel cells aren't very safe either. Hydrogen combining with oxygen is an *EXOTERMIC* reaction. It also makes a big explosion. My chem professor used a voltage source to split water molecules to obtain hydrogen in a beaker, and he ignited it w/ a match on the end of a LONG-pair of tongs. ***BOOM***
They also use hydrogen as a propellant on the space shuttle. Remember Challenger? (But that was due to a faulty O-ring seal on the solid rocket booster, but the results were still disastrous.)
I'd rather be in a plane carrying 10 tons of dry-type batteries and solar cells that powers electric motor + propellers. Maybe take 10 times longer, but you'll get there in one piece.
Then again, a plane can still be used as a kinetic energy weapon (ie: hammer, club, car, train, etc.). Nothing will stop that unless they remove the pilots from the plane and fly these things on auto-pilot the whole way. Btw, the space shuttle only has human input at about the last minute of flight. Why can't they have emergency crews on the ground flying by tele-presence, that can take over from the pilot and lock-out terrorists from the controls? They already have simulators that do just about the same thing. And NASA/AMES has a giant, surround environment that can be used for full emersion. All they need is a dedicated link to a satellite (notwithstanding jamming, etc) to some central ground control center (FAA, Boeing, ?) and tap into the control systems and install close-circuit cameras. They would need on the order of 50+ cameras.
I've worked in many CS course team projects, and they tend to end up in one of three situations:
1) One person does most the work.
2) The professor forces accountability and each person has to do their share.
3) The group splits up the task logically and has clear leadership and delegation.
1 & 2 are most likely, 3 is *rare*.
Btw, many big companies are spending lots of money on software engineering productivity. They've found that high-level languages like Java, VB, etc. are the cheapest to produce and maintain apps. They've also done a ton of work on "Team Coding," that's where two or three people take turns coding per machine (two+ minds are better than one). In school, there is rarely a requirement for reusability across different courses, though there should be a strong urging, if not mandate that code should be reused from course-to-course.
Are there any indications that a curriculum could be formed, whereby code and extending projects flow from one course to the next?
"QWERTIOP", two machines in the same room at Cambridge, supposedly according to here. Stanfordclaims that they were the recipient of the first data communication.
Btw, my comments in the post aren't particularly insightful; I just tried to make a funny slippery-slope assimilation fallacy to the DMCA. I agree; I'm the paying customer. I'll do what the hell I want, so long as it is not disruptive. This kindergarten mentality sux.
Yet: I have seen plenty of annoying freshmen that make it hard for everyone to learn. You'd think they'd learn by now, but I guess their high schools were all playtime. I guess it boils down to:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T: u gotta give some to get some.
SkewlD00d
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Going to grad skewl 'cause B.S. degrees are a $.10 / dozen.
The apathy and apparent cowardice of the average person is appalling. People expect the police to be everywhere all the time and same them 100% of the time, like mommy and daddy used to, which is an illusion, virtual impossibility, and pathetic. All the wishing, wanting, and praying wont do a damn thing. Citizens of the civilized world need to take their civic duty seriously, be aware of their surroundings and take the initiative, because bad guys don't take a shit w/o a plan and don't play by the rules.
Skewld00d
"You Americans; you talk and you talk and you say 'Let me tell you something...,' well you're dead now, so shut up!" -- Grim Reaper, Monty Python's Meaning of Life
Just what kids need... another excuse to not pay attention to class.
<rant>
Maybe education researchers should get off their collective asses and encourage real teaching instead of promoting "Let's watch a film now class." teaching abdication to mass-media and tech wiz-bang nonsense. Having computers solves nothing, in fact, some studies show computers take valuable teaching time away from teachers. I guess they want an open-source teacher-emulation hologram in all the schools, so they don't have to pay those under-paid and under-respected teachers. Poo on them! Academics of the world unite!
</rant>
DirectX -> Microsoft(TM) API for multimedia hardware abstraction.
OpenGL -> Platform-independent 3D (and 2D) graphics rendering.
The problem is you need something like GLUT to make OpenGL useful (which now includes a nifty full-screen gaming mode). OpenGL has no concept of a current window or device (like a 'this' pointer or current buffer handle), there is only the current OpenGL device and its state (effectively global variables). GLUT makes some strides toward platform independence, as you can create and switch OpenGL contexts among the GLUT created windows. GLUT also has the all-important callback functions for I/O message-based processing.
I think that there needs to be an equivalent API for 3D sound, music and input devices if truely portable games are going to get off the ground.
Yeah, like where's my fridge? I want an office on Mahagony Row and a female intern. That's not too much to ask. Maybe I need to run for congress. No Prima Donnas in there; just look at Rep. Condit.
Slashdot Mirror
Become a plumber. =)
The problem is that we realize that we're geeks and that we just don't care anymore. I mean, three years ago I was a code perfectionist; now I really don't give a rats ass. Project after useless project, we just get bored of the same ol' thing over and over again. For example, the school I'm at has penis envy for the ivy-leagues, and so they make the CS major as difficult as possible because they don't have the rep they would like. But it's silly, why make the courses so unneccessarily difficult? The average GPA in my major is less that 3.0!!! They don't even bother to hire enough lectures to teach sufficient number of sections, and we get all the rejects from Cal, because they have some hoity-toity agreement that they don't have to take but the ones they want, and we have to take all the top 10% of high-schools' graduating class. Oh yeah, and the other problem is that dorks (geek wannabes) that want to make $100k / year think that they'll learn CS because it's EZ money. CS is hard! In our microwave-instant-gratification society, people want instant results without effort. (Perl?) That's my 2.0e-2 dollars.
Ahhh, back-in-the-day...
First, I got my trusty 32SII in jr high, about 1991. Then I got my 48G in high school about 1994, and when people saw what it could do, everyone wanted one. My friend (who later moved on to MIT) did some hacking and even got the debugger, compiler, and editor burned onto a ROM (he had a GX, i was so jealous =P). Anyhow, you can't beat the productivity of side-ways Tetris!
I still have that 48, but it's kinda ratty as I pried it apart a few times, and I'm still thinking of hacking it to give it 4MB. Hmm, 32K seems insufficient. What's funny is that I can run HP48 EMU many times faster than the real thing, and I can enter data with a real keyboard.
See this NTTC press release on this article.
Yeah, as more and more work gets farmed out to consultants and foreign-based coding sweat-shops the technical middle-management and soon-to-be-middle-management better hone their skills. Be this coding, people skills, etc.
my 2.0e-2 dollars.
yeah, I get those weird noises only when i run norton disk doctor. I dont have any reported bad sectors or any other probs (im running ez-smart in windoze). I run an Abit kt7a-raid + normal clocked 1.1G tbird + 65GB 60gxp + 40GB 75gxp (that's the chipset w/ the A at the end). I dunno anymore, i installed rh7.1 on the 75gxp and no prob so far. =)
Leave it to marketing to lie about the product (misrepresent, confuse or mislead), sell using FUD, and generally attempt to mess with the design process w/o regard to small things like "details."
... and still people shop there.
Oh yeah, and they can draw pretty pictures that are supposed to grab your (the consumer's) attention.
Why don't they just do like Sony and keep everything a "secret," limit supply, and fix prices so people will want it even more? (e.g.,
PS2)
Or you can buy things sold by spam or go to the store you know you hate (Fry's Electronics), because it might be $0.01 cheaper, wait 10hrs in line, and have to spend another 40 hours returning it. They're not hurting, their marketing people can't even proof read their own ads! Some time in 1993-1994. "OS/2 WRAP" (sic) (WARP) in 200 pt font; I'm not joking, 4"(9cm)-high font, full page color, San Jose Mercury News.
It's kind of like M$FT windoze in a way...
Anyhow, that's my take.
You'd have to completely destroy and erase LA and Las Vegas first. Those two cities are all about big, megalomanical, show-off consumerism. Case in point: lots of old, gas-guzzling cars w/ speakers loud enough to register on seismometers. Btw, I live in CA, so I know what I'm talking about.
Where do you put the flux-capacitor?
(Btw, there is no flux through a capacitor by definition, only an electric field across two plates.)
Shameless plugging of free, open-source IP cores : opencores.org
Update: I'm sending back the 75GXP for a refurb. This one has the wierd problem mentioned. The tech thinks it's a firmware prob or a media prob. But windoze reports no bad sectors! The firmware is either detecting real errors and reallocating, detecting errors that don't exist, or just plain doesn't work.
Hmm... IBM should diagnose and fix it, why should I have to do their job for them?
SkewlD00d
I have the same drive. I can't run Norton Disk Doctor on my computer for some reason. I thought I had a driver problem. Maybe it's the same prob? Btw, I ran the DFT 2.10 on both drives (the long test) and they all passed ok. I'm going to take this dude out and see if NDD will work.
SkewlD00d
The only problem I ever had wasn't with the drives, but I would get random 1 bit errors because the hd controller drivers were screwed up some how. I formatted and reinstalled Windoze (no comments on windows please). That didn't help. I tossed the Asus A7V board and bought an Abit KT7A-RAID. Note I use the EZ-SMART application and have NO entries in the firmware records on ANY errors on any of these drives. Note: you don't need ez-smart to be running to log these errors, the firmware on the drive does this itself.
/home on linux box.
I got lucky, I just now see that my vender substituted a 60GXP for a 75GXP. Note all my IBM hd's run really hot. Much hotter than older 3600/5400 RPM WD Caviars. Note again, newer WD drives now use many IBM OEM parts for their drives, I wonder if they are having any probs?
Note I have the following drives:
1) 60GXP 60 GB 7200 RPM, puchased May, 2001
Model#: IC35L060AVER07-0
Firmware: ER6O
My main drive.
2) 75GXP 45 GB 7200 RPM, purchased Jan, 2001
Model#: IBM-DTLA-307045
Firmware: TX6D
My other drive. Nothing on it right now.
3) 20 GB 7200 RPM, purchased 2000.
Works great,
4) 9ES 9.1 GB 7200 RPM U2W SCSI, purchased 1998.
Still humming along, 0 errors. / on my linux box.
- SkewlD00d
The 747 cargo version can a heavy load. I'm sorry, you are mistaken. The B-47 once had flew w/ a whole fission reactor, but it was not tied in (they used gas-driven props). I don't think we want flying reactors, though. Bad enuf they (gov/mil) use them in extended-mission spy satellites and such.
Exactly... fuel cells aren't very safe either. Hydrogen combining with oxygen is an *EXOTERMIC* reaction. It also makes a big explosion. My chem professor used a voltage source to split water molecules to obtain hydrogen in a beaker, and he ignited it w/ a match on the end of a LONG-pair of tongs. ***BOOM***
They also use hydrogen as a propellant on the space shuttle. Remember Challenger? (But that was due to a faulty O-ring seal on the solid rocket booster, but the results were still disastrous.)
I'd rather be in a plane carrying 10 tons of dry-type batteries and solar cells that powers electric motor + propellers. Maybe take 10 times longer, but you'll get there in one piece.
Then again, a plane can still be used as a kinetic energy weapon (ie: hammer, club, car, train, etc.). Nothing will stop that unless they remove the pilots from the plane and fly these things on auto-pilot the whole way. Btw, the space shuttle only has human input at about the last minute of flight. Why can't they have emergency crews on the ground flying by tele-presence, that can take over from the pilot and lock-out terrorists from the controls? They already have simulators that do just about the same thing. And NASA/AMES has a giant, surround environment that can be used for full emersion. All they need is a dedicated link to a satellite (notwithstanding jamming, etc) to some central ground control center (FAA, Boeing, ?) and tap into the control systems and install close-circuit cameras. They would need on the order of 50+ cameras.
SkewlDood
I've worked in many CS course team projects, and they tend to end up in one of three situations:
1) One person does most the work.
2) The professor forces accountability and each person has to do their share.
3) The group splits up the task logically and has clear leadership and delegation.
1 & 2 are most likely, 3 is *rare*.
Btw, many big companies are spending lots of money on software engineering productivity. They've found that high-level languages like Java, VB, etc. are the cheapest to produce and maintain apps. They've also done a ton of work on "Team Coding," that's where two or three people take turns coding per machine (two+ minds are better than one). In school, there is rarely a requirement for reusability across different courses, though there should be a strong urging, if not mandate that code should be reused from course-to-course.
Are there any indications that a curriculum could be formed, whereby code and extending projects flow from one course to the next?
SkewlD00d
"QWERTIOP", two machines in the same room at Cambridge, supposedly according to here.
Stanford claims that they were the recipient of the first data communication.
Btw, my comments in the post aren't particularly insightful; I just tried to make a funny slippery-slope assimilation fallacy to the DMCA. I agree; I'm the paying customer. I'll do what the hell I want, so long as it is not disruptive. This kindergarten mentality sux.
Yet: I have seen plenty of annoying freshmen that make it hard for everyone to learn. You'd think they'd learn by now, but I guess their high schools were all playtime. I guess it boils down to:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T: u gotta give some to get some.
SkewlD00d
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Going to grad skewl 'cause B.S. degrees are a $.10 / dozen.
The apathy and apparent cowardice of the average person is appalling. People expect the police to be everywhere all the time and same them 100% of the time, like mommy and daddy used to, which is an illusion, virtual impossibility, and pathetic. All the wishing, wanting, and praying wont do a damn thing. Citizens of the civilized world need to take their civic duty seriously, be aware of their surroundings and take the initiative, because bad guys don't take a shit w/o a plan and don't play by the rules.
Skewld00d
"You Americans; you talk and you talk and you say 'Let me tell you something...,' well you're dead now, so shut up!" -- Grim Reaper, Monty Python's Meaning of Life
Just what kids need... another excuse to not pay attention to class.
<rant>
Maybe education researchers should get off their collective asses and encourage real teaching instead of promoting "Let's watch a film now class." teaching abdication to mass-media and tech wiz-bang nonsense. Having computers solves nothing, in fact, some studies show computers take valuable teaching time away from teachers. I guess they want an open-source teacher-emulation hologram in all the schools, so they don't have to pay those under-paid and under-respected teachers. Poo on them! Academics of the world unite!
</rant>
SkewlD00d
Why isn't there a concerted effort to develop a software 2d/3d game rendering API?
Maybe even a fast (or faster) ray-tracer/scanner/caster?
What about hardware-accelerated ray-tracing?
DirectX -> Microsoft(TM) API for multimedia hardware abstraction.
OpenGL -> Platform-independent 3D (and 2D) graphics rendering.
The problem is you need something like GLUT to make OpenGL useful (which now includes a nifty full-screen gaming mode). OpenGL has no concept of a current window or device (like a 'this' pointer or current buffer handle), there is only the current OpenGL device and its state (effectively global variables). GLUT makes some strides toward platform independence, as you can create and switch OpenGL contexts among the GLUT created windows. GLUT also has the all-important callback functions for I/O message-based processing.
I think that there needs to be an equivalent API for 3D sound, music and input devices if truely portable games are going to get off the ground.
That's my (double)2/100 of a dollar.
Yeah, like where's my fridge? I want an office on Mahagony Row and a female intern. That's not too much to ask. Maybe I need to run for congress. No Prima Donnas in there; just look at Rep. Condit.
Maybe you should read the Dilbert Guide to Management.