You lucky bastard. My school day age 13-16 (a decade ago, now, in England):
8:30am: arrive at school 5:00pm: Finish lessons 5:45pm: Finish house activity (cross country training or rugby in winter, hockey in spring) 6:15pm: Arrive home
followed by 1.5-2 hours/night of homework. 6 days a week (half day lessons saturday, but saturday school matches went on until 5-6pm). Half term was getting Saturday off.
>My colleagues in England (bless their heart) are >brilliant minds in mathematics/computer science, >but they can't write and they can't spell
I think that's more a product of the terrible level of state secondary education (up to age 16) in this country. It's got better recently, but it suffered for a long time under trendy-lefty ideas, where ideas like selecting classes by ability were considered unfair.
The English system is a little different now, I believe. You do 8-13 subjects at GCSE at 16, generally including compulsory Maths, science, English and at least one foreign language. At 16-17 most people then start four or five subjects at AS level (half an A-Level), converting three of those to A-levels studied from 17-18. In the past everyone just did three or four A-levels 16-18.
It's not true that you have to study computing from 16 onwards to be a programmer, though. In fact, a lot of the people I know who did Computing A-level actually didn't do very well at it in later life. Many people also study a range of subjects at A-level too (Drama, English and Biology, for example).
It can be a limiting system, certainly, especially as many university courses have very specific A-level entry requirements; like three Bs at Maths, Physics and Chemistry or something. But the idea of having to carry on studying English Literature at 16-18, when all I wanted to do was science, makes me shudder.
what a short-sighted view. Software companies benefit hugely from free software. For example:
- Office clones: Companies writing Office clones use Openoffice, Gnumeric etc documentation on the reverse engineering of MS Office formats. I've seen this done. I'm sure there are similar things happening with other proprietary formats. The commercial software has to add value on top of what the free software offers, of course.
- Free tools: Bison, Vi, emacs, Linux, apache, GCC . These kind of tools can save software companies thousands of dollars in licence fees and programming hours.
- Training. The free software world provides an arena for new developers to learn about the world of developing for real users. I got my current job based on work on a Free software project. The company now benefits from that experience. The large repository of high quality source code also provides learning opportunities for commercial developers.
Free software can be extremely beneficial for the software world, if companies are clever enough to take advantage of it.
VIA do seem to have had a lot of problems with reliability in the past. My last graphics card (Radeon 9200) had huge trouble with my KT-133A, and USB support has always been a bit flaky. I very much doubt it's the processor causing the problem, though. A properly installed AMD processor is just as reliable as an Intel one.
My K6-233 from 1996 is still going fine, despite being used constantly in three servers and two desktops since then, and weathering a Slashdotting recently (something like 20,000 visitors in a day, IIRC).
Like Will Smith's Converse in I, Robot? Or the T-Mobile adverts in Charlie's angels? Or Nokia phones in The Matrix? They were about as subtle as the joke pizza placement in Wayne's world.
Placements may have started off subtle, but these days it's like having ten second adverts in the middle of some films. Probably the same thing will happen here.
Maybe it's just me, but those hamsters look terribly slow? Maybe he had to drug them to lower the music tempo.
Stick my hamster in there and all you'd get would be five minutes of 180BPM techno as she sprinted up and down until she found the sensors and chewed through them.
It's not that easy to see someone typing a PIN: just don't type the PIN with one finger, place your fingers on the keypad like you would with a computer keyboard and press the keys down gently.
This happened to me too - I had £400 (that's like $2000 or something these days, right;) ) charged to my debit card for "Guard dog and security guard hire". One phone call to the bank and I had the money back within the week, subject to investigation.
Many countries (most of Europe, at least AFAIK) require PINs for credit/debit card purchases. You type it into a little keypad dealie with a cover so the person at the till can't see you typing.
They probably make it policy because a signature is no security at all. By enforcing an ID policy, they can make the staff enforce the rules more - not asking for ID is far more obvious than not checking a signature, which can be easily forged anyway.
That's the main reason most countries are switching to PIN based credit/debit card systems. Even the UK is, finally.
I use FC3 as it's seems the best GNOME 2.8/project utopia desktop at present, but the work on Ubuntu Hoary looks so promising it might make FC3 redundant.
I anyone out there using the pre-releases of Hoary? Are they usable yet?
>Fedora Core 3 is more stable and reliable then any >other desktop distro on the market currently
I wouldn't say that FC3 is the most reliable by a long shot. Out of the distros which implement the whole Hal/Gnome2.8/udev/dbus thing, it's pretty good, but it still has plenty of bugs.
For example, the recent bugfix upgrade to gamin-0.0.24 now means I can't unmount SD cards without killing gamin first, as it keeps a file descriptor open. Mounting USB devices in general is very flaky - when unmounting worked I could mount/remount a card about five times before it stopped working. Bug reports have been in bugzilla for a long time. Try maximizing xemacs in metacity - it gets stuck in an infinite loop. Nautilus frequently crashes on login: it's not important, as it restarts itself, but it is annoying.
I use FC3, but only because I'm prepared to sacrifice some reliability for usability.
The evening (TV) news has been redundant for a long time, anyway. Even the BBC's news is a waste of time these days. Not because of blogs, but because it's been simplified down to one-idea-per-story and news readers shouting at politicians to "answer the question".
I watched News at Ten the other day where a journalist was doing a voiceover saying "As the British military plane touched down...", as a C-5 with a big star and the letters "US" on the side landed. If they're making that kind of mistake, it wouldn't take much skill on the part of the bloggers to make them redundant.
News and current affairs coverage like BBC Radio 4 - "From our own correspondent", "PM", "Today in Parliament" - and Channel 4 - "Unreported World" - are the kind of real coverage that I don't believe blogs come near to.
I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though. I guess Alistair Campbell's four-letter email tirade to the BBC almost counts.
7 Million! - that's a lot of stories about people's pets. I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read. In order for there to be two-way communication, someone has to be reading those blogs;).
Blogging is important, of course - just look at how many Slashdot/OSnews etc. stories link to a blog post these days. But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.
It's an interesting phenonmemon, it's just not deserving of "Next Big Thing" status. I know of maybe five blogs where most weeks I will read something interesting I wouldn't have seen otherwise. The majority of them (mine included) are painfully dull.
planet.gnome.org is a good example - kind of a microcosm of the blog sphere. You get people like Miguel and Havoc posting interesting stuff about GTK/GNOME which provides an insight into the dev process you wouldn't get otherwise. You also have people who post "got up. read my email. fed baby" as if anyone cares.
Mario kart isn't really a racing game, it's more a racing-related party game.
Sure, you can play it seriously, blue-spark the whole way round and try to shave 0.1 seconds off your time if you want, but that's not really the point.
That said, it does annoy me that in the cube version, blue shells seem to target whoever was first when they're launched, so you can't drop back to second to avoid them. I'm sure you could do that in the N64 version.
I felt the same before I saw the first film, and just possibly a better writer could have made some good films out of the idea. After seeing the first film, all my hopes were dashed. Then I realised that the fact that episodes 4-6 leave you wanting to know more is *why* they are interesting. Actually finding out more isn't the point.
Eps4-6 relied on creating a believable background universe and history for the story. All the little details and the background history of the rebel struggle are what make the films so interesting to watch.
That's the brilliance of the very first scene in episode 4: a quick bit of text summarising "the story so far", with hints at a big story behind it all, and it cuts straight to the star destroyer rumbling overhead as it attacks Leia's ship. The audience sits up and takes notice: what's going on? Who's the evil dude with the black helmet. The audience picks things up as they go along; taking half an hour to explain galactic politics so the audience know what's going on would have been very dull.
It's the same trick used in the Lord of the Rings, the Matrix, Akira and loads of other films. You set the film/book where the interesting stuff happens, and leave the rest as backstory to be explained in glimpses. Laboriously going back and explaining the back story is not likely to be very interesting (compare the Simarillion to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example).
The tescos online ordering service is excellent: there's clearly been a lot of thought put into the user interface, it keeps your basket contents if you accidentally close the browser window. Far superior to any other online service: waitrose, for example, give online customers all the broken biscuits and nearly-out-of-date meat.
Given a choice between the time and hassle of going to the store and ordering on my laptop from the sofa while watching TV, I know which I prefer.
Don't we have six senses anyway - sight,hearing,touch,taste,smell and time. Our sense of time passing may be wildly inaccurate at times, but I can 'sense' the difference between a day and a minute pretty easily. Presumably there's some sort of time-keeping circuitry in the brain somewhere.
That would make this the seventh sense, unless there's some reason that time is never included.
I lost all respect for Moore back years ago when he made an entire program about the "evil BBC license fee" without once mentioning the fact that it pays for the fact that there are no adverts on the BBC. The licensing fee is a fair target for criticism, but not mentioning its main reason for existence is pretty cheap journalism.
Moore had a chance to make a really clever statement about the US response to 9/11 with F911, but instead made such a childish film it completely fails in its objective.
That said, it went down quite well with the average anti-war protester. But then, the most cogent argument I've managed to get out of most of them that I've talked to is "war's bad, mmm-kay". I mean, I'm as anti-Bush as most Europeans, but if you're going to go march round London about a cause, at least have some decent arguments for why you're doing it.
The problem with the prequels is that they're telling a very dull story. Once you've seen eps 4-6, you already know what happens in 1-3. There's no tension, no mystery: anakin will turn bad, padme will have two kids yadda yadda yoda.
Only just on the edge, dammit. If I don't look north or south, I could almost pretend this is a nice area. Go 20m north or south and you're in burnt-out car country, though.
Slashdot Mirror
You lucky bastard. My school day age 13-16 (a decade ago, now, in England):
8:30am: arrive at school
5:00pm: Finish lessons
5:45pm: Finish house activity (cross country training or rugby in winter, hockey in spring)
6:15pm: Arrive home
followed by 1.5-2 hours/night of homework. 6 days a week (half day lessons saturday, but saturday school matches went on until 5-6pm). Half term was getting Saturday off.
>My colleagues in England (bless their heart) are
>brilliant minds in mathematics/computer science,
>but they can't write and they can't spell
I think that's more a product of the terrible level of state secondary education (up to age 16) in this country. It's got better recently, but it suffered for a long time under trendy-lefty ideas, where ideas like selecting classes by ability were considered unfair.
The English system is a little different now, I believe. You do 8-13 subjects at GCSE at 16, generally including compulsory Maths, science, English and at least one foreign language.
At 16-17 most people then start four or five subjects at AS level (half an A-Level), converting three of those to A-levels studied from 17-18. In the past everyone just did three or four A-levels 16-18.
It's not true that you have to study computing from 16 onwards to be a programmer, though. In fact, a lot of the people I know who did Computing A-level actually didn't do very well at it in later life. Many people also study a range of subjects at A-level too (Drama, English and Biology, for example).
It can be a limiting system, certainly, especially as many university courses have very specific A-level entry requirements; like three Bs at Maths, Physics and Chemistry or something. But the idea of having to carry on studying English Literature at 16-18, when all I wanted to do was science, makes me shudder.
Thanks for that story, I needed a laugh after watching England lose at rugby *again*.
Oh, wait, there's no foot icon. Whatever they're paying you, it's too much.
what a short-sighted view. Software companies benefit hugely from free software. For example:
- Office clones: Companies writing Office clones use Openoffice, Gnumeric etc documentation on the reverse engineering of MS Office formats. I've seen this done. I'm sure there are similar things happening with other proprietary formats. The commercial software has to add value on top of what the free software offers, of course.
- Free tools: Bison, Vi, emacs, Linux, apache, GCC . These kind of tools can save software companies thousands of dollars in licence fees and programming hours.
- Training. The free software world provides an arena for new developers to learn about the world of developing for real users. I got my current job based on work on a Free software project. The company now benefits from that experience. The large repository of high quality source code also provides learning opportunities for commercial developers.
Free software can be extremely beneficial for the software world, if companies are clever enough to take advantage of it.
VIA do seem to have had a lot of problems with reliability in the past. My last graphics card (Radeon 9200) had huge trouble with my KT-133A, and USB support has always been a bit flaky.
I very much doubt it's the processor causing the problem, though. A properly installed AMD processor is just as reliable as an Intel one.
My K6-233 from 1996 is still going fine, despite being used constantly in three servers and two desktops since then, and weathering a Slashdotting recently (something like 20,000 visitors in a day, IIRC).
Like Will Smith's Converse in I, Robot? Or the T-Mobile adverts in Charlie's angels? Or Nokia phones in The Matrix? They were about as subtle as the joke pizza placement in Wayne's world.
Placements may have started off subtle, but these days it's like having ten second adverts in the middle of some films. Probably the same thing will happen here.
Maybe it's just me, but those hamsters look terribly slow? Maybe he had to drug them to lower the music tempo.
Stick my hamster in there and all you'd get would be five minutes of 180BPM techno as she sprinted up and down until she found the sensors and chewed through them.
Is that for real? There are some truly sad people out there if so.
Anyway, better do my bit to get on the list:
bugger, bollocks, bastard, arse, tit, fuck, wank, twat, cunt...
It's not that easy to see someone typing a PIN: just don't type the PIN with one finger, place your fingers on the keypad like you would with a computer keyboard and press the keys down gently.
It's certainly far more secure than signatures.
This happened to me too - I had £400 (that's like $2000 or something these days, right ;) ) charged to my debit card for "Guard dog and security guard hire". One phone call to the bank and I had the money back within the week, subject to investigation.
Many countries (most of Europe, at least AFAIK) require PINs for credit/debit card purchases. You type it into a little keypad dealie with a cover so the person at the till can't see you typing.
They probably make it policy because a signature is no security at all. By enforcing an ID policy, they can make the staff enforce the rules more - not asking for ID is far more obvious than not checking a signature, which can be easily forged anyway.
That's the main reason most countries are switching to PIN based credit/debit card systems. Even the UK is, finally.
I use FC3 as it's seems the best GNOME 2.8/project utopia desktop at present, but the work on Ubuntu Hoary looks so promising it might make FC3 redundant .
I anyone out there using the pre-releases of Hoary? Are they usable yet?
>Fedora Core 3 is more stable and reliable then any
>other desktop distro on the market currently
I wouldn't say that FC3 is the most reliable by a long shot. Out of the distros which implement the whole Hal/Gnome2.8/udev/dbus thing, it's pretty good, but it still has plenty of bugs.
For example, the recent bugfix upgrade to gamin-0.0.24 now means I can't unmount SD cards without killing gamin first, as it keeps a file descriptor open. Mounting USB devices in general is very flaky - when unmounting worked I could mount/remount a card about five times before it stopped working. Bug reports have been in bugzilla for a long time. Try maximizing xemacs in metacity - it gets stuck in an infinite loop. Nautilus frequently crashes on login: it's not important, as it restarts itself, but it is annoying.
I use FC3, but only because I'm prepared to sacrifice some reliability for usability.
The evening (TV) news has been redundant for a long time, anyway. Even the BBC's news is a waste of time these days. Not because of blogs, but because it's been simplified down to one-idea-per-story and news readers shouting at politicians to "answer the question".
I watched News at Ten the other day where a journalist was doing a voiceover saying "As the British military plane touched down...", as a C-5 with a big star and the letters "US" on the side landed. If they're making that kind of mistake, it wouldn't take much skill on the part of the bloggers to make them redundant.
News and current affairs coverage like BBC Radio 4 - "From our own correspondent", "PM", "Today in Parliament" - and Channel 4 - "Unreported World" - are the kind of real coverage that I don't believe blogs come near to.
I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though. I guess Alistair Campbell's four-letter email tirade to the BBC almost counts.
7 Million! - that's a lot of stories about people's pets. I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read. In order for there to be two-way communication, someone has to be reading those blogs ;).
Blogging is important, of course - just look at how many Slashdot/OSnews etc. stories link to a blog post these days. But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.
It's an interesting phenonmemon, it's just not deserving of "Next Big Thing" status. I know of maybe five blogs where most weeks I will read something interesting I wouldn't have seen otherwise. The majority of them (mine included) are painfully dull.
planet.gnome.org is a good example - kind of a microcosm of the blog sphere. You get people like Miguel and Havoc posting interesting stuff about GTK/GNOME which provides an insight into the dev process you wouldn't get otherwise. You also have people who post "got up. read my email. fed baby" as if anyone cares.
Mario kart isn't really a racing game, it's more a racing-related party game.
Sure, you can play it seriously, blue-spark the whole way round and try to shave 0.1 seconds off your time if you want, but that's not really the point.
That said, it does annoy me that in the cube version, blue shells seem to target whoever was first when they're launched, so you can't drop back to second to avoid them. I'm sure you could do that in the N64 version.
I felt the same before I saw the first film, and just possibly a better writer could have made some good films out of the idea. After seeing the first film, all my hopes were dashed. Then I realised that the fact that episodes 4-6 leave you wanting to know more is *why* they are interesting. Actually finding out more isn't the point.
Eps4-6 relied on creating a believable background universe and history for the story. All the little details and the background history of the rebel struggle are what make the films so interesting to watch.
That's the brilliance of the very first scene in episode 4: a quick bit of text summarising "the story so far", with hints at a big story behind it all, and it cuts straight to the star destroyer rumbling overhead as it attacks Leia's ship. The audience sits up and takes notice: what's going on? Who's the evil dude with the black helmet. The audience picks things up as they go along; taking half an hour to explain galactic politics so the audience know what's going on would have been very dull.
It's the same trick used in the Lord of the Rings, the Matrix, Akira and loads of other films. You set the film/book where the interesting stuff happens, and leave the rest as backstory to be explained in glimpses. Laboriously going back and explaining the back story is not likely to be very interesting (compare the Simarillion to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example).
The tescos online ordering service is excellent: there's clearly been a lot of thought put into the user interface, it keeps your basket contents if you accidentally close the browser window. Far superior to any other online service: waitrose, for example, give online customers all the broken biscuits and nearly-out-of-date meat.
Given a choice between the time and hassle of going to the store and ordering on my laptop from the sofa while watching TV, I know which I prefer.
Don't we have six senses anyway - sight,hearing,touch,taste,smell and time. Our sense of time passing may be wildly inaccurate at times, but I can 'sense' the difference between a day and a minute pretty easily. Presumably there's some sort of time-keeping circuitry in the brain somewhere.
That would make this the seventh sense, unless there's some reason that time is never included.
I lost all respect for Moore back years ago when he made an entire program about the "evil BBC license fee" without once mentioning the fact that it pays for the fact that there are no adverts on the BBC. The licensing fee is a fair target for criticism, but not mentioning its main reason for existence is pretty cheap journalism.
Moore had a chance to make a really clever statement about the US response to 9/11 with F911, but instead made such a childish film it completely fails in its objective.
That said, it went down quite well with the average anti-war protester. But then, the most cogent argument I've managed to get out of most of them that I've talked to is "war's bad, mmm-kay". I mean, I'm as anti-Bush as most Europeans, but if you're going to go march round London about a cause, at least have some decent arguments for why you're doing it.
The problem with the prequels is that they're telling a very dull story. Once you've seen eps 4-6, you already know what happens in 1-3. There's no tension, no mystery: anakin will turn bad, padme will have two kids yadda yadda yoda.
Oops, I meant "Only just on the edge of some dodgy estate..."
Only just on the edge, dammit. If I don't look north or south, I could almost pretend this is a nice area. Go 20m north or south and you're in burnt-out car country, though.