I've seen a few folks from the US also providing links to dead underground stations in various american cities, so I thought I'd throw this in (despite the fact I can't find any links to anything more concrete).
As far as I know, there is a half-built extension to Glasgow's underground system (it's in Scotland, UK, if your not sure), with platforms actually built at some proposed stations, but the whole project was abandoned before the new circuit could be opened.
For those that don't know, Glasgow's underground is far from the sprawling network that London's is. Glasgow's is merely a circle system, with around 15 stations in all, and it's always confused me as to where the new circle, had it ever been opened, would have connected to the existing network.
Distance is a difficult thing to judge when using the mouse without looking. I'd like to see you hit that second option every time blindfolded.
Another factor which determines how quick a menu system is would be the distance the mouse has to travel -- using a standard menu system we all know and love (or hate), we have to move further to get to some options, less for others. With a radial menu system, the distance to each option is the same.
Pie menus are a concept I've liked the look of for a while. Yes, when I tried the mozilla pie menus for the first time, they weren't the speediest things on the planet.
However, people get far, far quicker at using them when they remember *which direction* the option they want is in, whereas for a normal pop-up menu you'll always need to look at it.
It's quite impressive when you see a man blindfolded and asked to select options from the menu, and he doesn't miss a single one. Memorising the most frequently used options is not a problem for most folks.
The Atari ST, Falcon 030, and Jaguar had incredible capabilities at the time and, given the right marketing would have been much more successful and Atari as it was might still be around today.
Yes, they were all good machines. The ST was pretty powerful for when it came out (all of 17 (?) years ago), and the STe, the Mega series and the TT made for a spectacular family of machines.
After sales started to fall when the PC dominated the offices, macs publishing, and amigas/consoles for games, the music business was where the ST continued to excel, thanks to the built in MIDI ports.
The Falcon tried to be a more powerful ST, but Atari was starting to struggle and made a couple of crippling cost cutting decisions (turning up the screen resolution to anything 16 bit above 320*200 made the machine *real* sluggish, for example), and it just couldn't muscle in on the music business where people were either happy with their ST's or already buying PC's.
The Jag failed because Atari really ran out of money. It was a great machine, and it was unfortunate that lack of public exposure followed shortly after by the release of Sony's Playstation and so forth killed it off, and subsequently Atari Corp. as a company in its own right.
With the sale of the Atari brand to Infogrammes, I'm happy to see the Fuji logo and the Atari name being used in television ad's for their games again. It's not Atari as it once was, but I feel that the Atari name has a place in todays market, and should not be consigned to the history books.
I think my brother (who is far more into star trek than me, the casual viewer) explained it to me by saying that they only *completed* six galaxy class ships. They happened to have a few uncompleted galaxy class ships sitting around somewhere that had lain unused for a number of years, and when the dominion war started to heat up properly starfleet wanted every piece of phaser power they could get their hands on. It's easier (or at least quicker) to complete something already started than build from scratch.
No, you misread what I meant. I was getting at the fact I found it strange that they seemed to pick someone off the street. They'd normally end up having someone who has qualifications that allow letters after his/her name, or qualifications to allow Dr. before the name. And to clarify, I didn't state the part about waging war, she did.
Btw, generally in Europe the game goes by its proper name of football:)
I don't think the next time a significant terrorist attack comes along people will be questioning the US about it. That will be left to the nation to whom the attack happened. Once again, I note the US trying to take control of everything. One (admittedly major) terrorist attack, and suddenly you feel all terrorist attacks are somehow inferior to what happened one year ago, and therefore all should look up to you.
However, there will be serious questions asked of the Bush administration if another serious terrorist attack takes place against the US.
Just today I saw an interview with a police officer at ground zero on the BBC, who was asked how she thought America had grown, and what it had learnt since Sept. 11th.
She replied by saying the US still has to grow up. The US has to grow up in terms of its foreign policy, in order to change people's perceptions of itself. The US has to stop trying to wage war with anything that poses the slightest of threats.
I was surprised to hear a police officer stating something the rest of the world already knows.
I've said before to do nothing is often the wrong course of action. However, for as long as the US is willing to flex it's military muscle in nations of significantly less wealth, as long as the US continues to unfluence so many people outwith it's borders, as long as the US tries to police the world as we know it, there will be a significant continuing terrorist threat on it.
I feel the need to do my normal routine today. Yes, it's the day we observe 9-11, but it should also be the day that we start to get back to normal lives. We're well on our way...but the economy is still affected, and the world is still mourning.
I'd just like to point out that the markets were already tumbling before 9/11 (to use the US form of writing dates). I'm not saying the attacks didn't spur further downward trends in the stockmarkets, it simply added to the effects.
The markets are till unstable at this moment in time, but that's more to do with major scandals like Enron at this point in time than the terrorist attacks on the states a year ago.
I think in fairness the BBC did a very good job on september the 11th. So they have a consistent image, a certain on-screen look and layout they like to keep going most of the time, and there's nothing wrong with that. Its far from in-your-face, things are kept clear.
They have the technology there to quickly come up with those screens and backdrops, its not like on a major event like that they'd forget everything and just repeat the few pieces of footage they had ad-finitum (although they did plenty of that too, because they didn't have much to go on to start with). So they put a banner up saying something like 'twin towers attack'. What else were they meant to do?
Its a rarity that the BBC can be accused of hyping anything. If you want to be cynical about it, they don't hype much because they won't see the same financial gain from doing so as a commercial television operator.
It was actually meant as a joke. Living in the UK, I know that most people in Europe don't speak English as their first language, many don't speak English at all.
Its purely so that they can re-use the billboard adverts, posters, cardboard cut-outs of actors and other promotional materials again in Europe after they don't need them in the States. Saves them a couple of $$, y'see.
My dad's old Peugeot 406 had a couple of seconds wait before I could start the engine, and when I say a couple of seconds I mean a couple. With our new Volvo S40, we rarely have to wait. I've seen the glowplug sign light up briefly on the dashboard only once or twice on a cold morning.
You kind of defeated your own argument with the 'OK, more recent engines' line:)
Anyway, the wait isn't nearly as annoying in a car, because the wait insn't nearly as long, and its what the car *has* to do to get going. The DVD player doesn't physically *have* to show the warnings before it can play a dvd.
Aha, but there *was* at least one episode where they did climb stairs. Except I saw it so long ago that I can't remember where or when I saw it, who the doctor was, or how specifically they did it.
I remember a brightly lit platform the daleks used to climb a stairway. I can't really be more specific than that, but it was theirs and they used it to get up those god-damned stairs!
Once you buy a CD and take the wrapping off of it, it's yours. You can't return it or exchange it unless it's for the same CD. Sorry, bud. Whether you like it or not, it's yours.
Well, here in the UK I know that HMV have a 'no questions asked' policy, and allow you to return anything you have bought from them. They don't force you to take another copy of the same CD, but don't actually refund cash -- they give HMV vouchers if memory serves, but its good enough.
Fopp, on the other hand, have what they call a 'suck it and see' policy. You buy the CD, and if it sucks, you have two weeks to return in *and get your money back*.
I don't know where virgin megastores or anywhere else stand on this issue, because I do 90% of my music shopping in Fopp anyway, mainly because they're normally cheaper than other stores.
Much of what you say is valid. Yes, we could probably last that little bit longer with things heavily rationed if, or when, one day we suddenly find ourselves without any natural resources left.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to take note now -- considering the fact that we're burning off finite resources in greater and greater quantities (the USA is the biggest culprit on this one, burning the most energy per head in the country, IIRC) all the time.
We don't have huge reserves of coal, oil or natural gas left, and the sooner the general public realise this and we get people and countries to switch over to using renewable sources of energy, the better.
Heh, ^^^ switched to HTML formatting there, ^^^ forgot to put the line break and/or paragraph tags in... If only there was some way to edit a comment once it was submitted
"Sounds like you've been interested in this stuff since you were 8 years old. People like us are best at cutting it, although in the fourth year you will realise the futility of exams that only test complex knowledge like comparing quantitatively the scalability of RIP and EIGRP, both in bandwidth and router CPU usage terms with formulae."
I was 9, actually:) And thankyou for confirming to me that there always is more to learn. That last part pretty much flew straight over my head...
"With one crucial difference - University exams are set by professors who know what they're doing (more or less;-) ), in the real world some semi-literate recruitment agency staff or dumb ex-military hiring manager is looking at your CV. The only way to impress him is by talking about golf for an hour (this happened to my coursemate, seriously)."
Yeah, its pretty much the "he seems like a nice guy, lets hire him". I understand that one, and I know how valuable a skill being able to bluff your way through a conversation can be -- I work part time in a bar to keep my bank balance on the correct side of £0, I need to be able to talk to anyone about anything, or people won't like me and my position there could slip quickly. Two members of staff said to me within a week or two of starting that I was confident enough with the customers that I'd do well there, and I'd like to think I could pull that off in an interview situation, though the two situations really are worlds apart.
"Even in the United States there are so many highly skilled coders, etc. available that they're starting to write off people because they've been out of IT for 6 months. This is just another way to filter the CVs because they have so many, soon they'll also consider your astrological star signs and tarot cards but will still have 1,000 applicants per position. In a massive UK telecom company they've got 50 positions available and 17,000 applications. Not good."
It doesn't paint a pretty picture, does it?? The end of fourth year only two years away for me, but its also a hell of a lot of work, a hell of a lot of study and a hell of a lot of exams. By then I'll have *seriously* considered what I want to do with myself, and will probably have sent off more than a couple of applications for jobs.
Glasgow University has strong links with some large companies, and a lot of graduates do get some half-decent work at these firms (BT is the big one they're friendly with. IBM and Motorola are friendly too (which reminds me, in addition to the languages I mentioned earlier, we're also learning assembly for the MC6808 microcontroller)).
I'm studying my degree mostly to feed my interest in computing. I'm not battling through exams just to get a CS degree in the vain hope of getting a high paid job. If it happens, its a happy bonus, and there's no way I'll turn a good offer down (I know of one guy in fourth year CS here was just offered a job -- what the job was, I'm not sure, and he may not even care too much -- with a starting wage of $40k per annum. I'm not expecting it to happen to me, just saying it does happen).
Many people, unfortunately do take computing because of the promise of money. This is probably why of the 500 first year CS students that I was one of, there are now only around 230 in 2nd year. That'll probably be around 140 that get into 3rd year, and somewhere in the region of 80-100 that progress into 4th year. That means that ~80% of the people who tried it just couldn't cope. And that doesn't take into account the number of people that actually do pass the honours exams.
Its a competitive field, at university as well as in the "real world"
I'd like to point out first that the tone of your reply suggests that I suggested I expect my degree to get me a job the minute I graduate, so I'll let you look at a part of my conclusion again:
"To say 'I have a degree, I'm guaranteed a job' is bullshit, I know, but to cast it off completely and say a degree just says you know how to pass the exam, is also bullshit."
I am not saying my CS degree will land me a great job in the tech sector. Far from it. With a degree, however, I'm more likely to get a decent job (ie one that doesn't pay too badly, and we're not talking about what type of work we're involved in here) with that CS degree sitting on the CV.
As for how good my university is, I'm at the University of Glasgow. Depending what reports you read, it either 2nd in the league table for CS courses offered in the UK, or 9th. And I think that '9th' rating came from a report that took into account the number of A-level students have on admission to the university (an A-level, for those that don't know, being a grade offered in England during the pupils secondary education, equivalent to the Scottish Higher qualification offered at around the same level of education, so thats *really* what the study should have looked at, but...).
As for the IQ, I'm surprised at your accuracy -- my IQ is 121, apparently:)
And re: the lying on the CV bit, well, I'll think about that when the need arises...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, considering I use both the low level trains and the underground every day, I know which is which :)
Perhaps the unused tunnels are actually extensions to the low-level train system, I don't know. What I've heard is mostly word of mouth.
I've seen a few folks from the US also providing links to dead underground stations in various american cities, so I thought I'd throw this in (despite the fact I can't find any links to anything more concrete).
As far as I know, there is a half-built extension to Glasgow's underground system (it's in Scotland, UK, if your not sure), with platforms actually built at some proposed stations, but the whole project was abandoned before the new circuit could be opened.
For those that don't know, Glasgow's underground is far from the sprawling network that London's is. Glasgow's is merely a circle system, with around 15 stations in all, and it's always confused me as to where the new circle, had it ever been opened, would have connected to the existing network.
Distance is a difficult thing to judge when using the mouse without looking. I'd like to see you hit that second option every time blindfolded.
Another factor which determines how quick a menu system is would be the distance the mouse has to travel -- using a standard menu system we all know and love (or hate), we have to move further to get to some options, less for others. With a radial menu system, the distance to each option is the same.
Pie menus are a concept I've liked the look of for a while. Yes, when I tried the mozilla pie menus for the first time, they weren't the speediest things on the planet.
However, people get far, far quicker at using them when they remember *which direction* the option they want is in, whereas for a normal pop-up menu you'll always need to look at it.
It's quite impressive when you see a man blindfolded and asked to select options from the menu, and he doesn't miss a single one. Memorising the most frequently used options is not a problem for most folks.
The Atari ST, Falcon 030, and Jaguar had incredible capabilities at the time and, given the right marketing would have been much more successful and Atari as it was might still be around today.
Yes, they were all good machines. The ST was pretty powerful for when it came out (all of 17 (?) years ago), and the STe, the Mega series and the TT made for a spectacular family of machines.
After sales started to fall when the PC dominated the offices, macs publishing, and amigas/consoles for games, the music business was where the ST continued to excel, thanks to the built in MIDI ports.
The Falcon tried to be a more powerful ST, but Atari was starting to struggle and made a couple of crippling cost cutting decisions (turning up the screen resolution to anything 16 bit above 320*200 made the machine *real* sluggish, for example), and it just couldn't muscle in on the music business where people were either happy with their ST's or already buying PC's.
The Jag failed because Atari really ran out of money. It was a great machine, and it was unfortunate that lack of public exposure followed shortly after by the release of Sony's Playstation and so forth killed it off, and subsequently Atari Corp. as a company in its own right.
With the sale of the Atari brand to Infogrammes, I'm happy to see the Fuji logo and the Atari name being used in television ad's for their games again. It's not Atari as it once was, but I feel that the Atari name has a place in todays market, and should not be consigned to the history books.
I'd have to say 10% would probably be optimistic. 5% might even be optimistic.
I think my brother (who is far more into star trek than me, the casual viewer) explained it to me by saying that they only *completed* six galaxy class ships. They happened to have a few uncompleted galaxy class ships sitting around somewhere that had lain unused for a number of years, and when the dominion war started to heat up properly starfleet wanted every piece of phaser power they could get their hands on. It's easier (or at least quicker) to complete something already started than build from scratch.
No, you misread what I meant. I was getting at the fact I found it strange that they seemed to pick someone off the street. They'd normally end up having someone who has qualifications that allow letters after his/her name, or qualifications to allow Dr. before the name. And to clarify, I didn't state the part about waging war, she did.
:)
Btw, generally in Europe the game goes by its proper name of football
I don't think the next time a significant terrorist attack comes along people will be questioning the US about it. That will be left to the nation to whom the attack happened. Once again, I note the US trying to take control of everything. One (admittedly major) terrorist attack, and suddenly you feel all terrorist attacks are somehow inferior to what happened one year ago, and therefore all should look up to you.
However, there will be serious questions asked of the Bush administration if another serious terrorist attack takes place against the US.
Just today I saw an interview with a police officer at ground zero on the BBC, who was asked how she thought America had grown, and what it had learnt since Sept. 11th.
She replied by saying the US still has to grow up. The US has to grow up in terms of its foreign policy, in order to change people's perceptions of itself. The US has to stop trying to wage war with anything that poses the slightest of threats.
I was surprised to hear a police officer stating something the rest of the world already knows.
I've said before to do nothing is often the wrong course of action. However, for as long as the US is willing to flex it's military muscle in nations of significantly less wealth, as long as the US continues to unfluence so many people outwith it's borders, as long as the US tries to police the world as we know it, there will be a significant continuing terrorist threat on it.
I feel the need to do my normal routine today. Yes, it's the day we observe 9-11, but it should also be the day that we start to get back to normal lives. We're well on our way...but the economy is still affected, and the world is still mourning.
I'd just like to point out that the markets were already tumbling before 9/11 (to use the US form of writing dates). I'm not saying the attacks didn't spur further downward trends in the stockmarkets, it simply added to the effects.
The markets are till unstable at this moment in time, but that's more to do with major scandals like Enron at this point in time than the terrorist attacks on the states a year ago.
I think in fairness the BBC did a very good job on september the 11th. So they have a consistent image, a certain on-screen look and layout they like to keep going most of the time, and there's nothing wrong with that. Its far from in-your-face, things are kept clear.
They have the technology there to quickly come up with those screens and backdrops, its not like on a major event like that they'd forget everything and just repeat the few pieces of footage they had ad-finitum (although they did plenty of that too, because they didn't have much to go on to start with). So they put a banner up saying something like 'twin towers attack'. What else were they meant to do?
Its a rarity that the BBC can be accused of hyping anything. If you want to be cynical about it, they don't hype much because they won't see the same financial gain from doing so as a commercial television operator.
It was actually meant as a joke. Living in the UK, I know that most people in Europe don't speak English as their first language, many don't speak English at all.
Its purely so that they can re-use the billboard adverts, posters, cardboard cut-outs of actors and other promotional materials again in Europe after they don't need them in the States. Saves them a couple of $$, y'see.
lol, I only get that because I got Futurama season 1 on DVD a couple of weeks ago. Makes me laugh every time.
My dad's old Peugeot 406 had a couple of seconds wait before I could start the engine, and when I say a couple of seconds I mean a couple. With our new Volvo S40, we rarely have to wait. I've seen the glowplug sign light up briefly on the dashboard only once or twice on a cold morning.
:)
You kind of defeated your own argument with the 'OK, more recent engines' line
Anyway, the wait isn't nearly as annoying in a car, because the wait insn't nearly as long, and its what the car *has* to do to get going. The DVD player doesn't physically *have* to show the warnings before it can play a dvd.
Actually, we have an orbiter which is currently grounded.
Aha, but there *was* at least one episode where they did climb stairs. Except I saw it so long ago that I can't remember where or when I saw it, who the doctor was, or how specifically they did it.
I remember a brightly lit platform the daleks used to climb a stairway. I can't really be more specific than that, but it was theirs and they used it to get up those god-damned stairs!
Well, here in the UK I know that HMV have a 'no questions asked' policy, and allow you to return anything you have bought from them. They don't force you to take another copy of the same CD, but don't actually refund cash -- they give HMV vouchers if memory serves, but its good enough.
Fopp, on the other hand, have what they call a 'suck it and see' policy. You buy the CD, and if it sucks, you have two weeks to return in *and get your money back*.
I don't know where virgin megastores or anywhere else stand on this issue, because I do 90% of my music shopping in Fopp anyway, mainly because they're normally cheaper than other stores.
Well the environmental problem here is that the issue arises from dumped electronics.
/. ("latest kernel pre-release out!" anyone?)
Then, this story qualifies more than many stories posted on
This is indeed 'news for nerds', and quite definately 'something that matters'.
Much of what you say is valid. Yes, we could probably last that little bit longer with things heavily rationed if, or when, one day we suddenly find ourselves without any natural resources left.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to take note now -- considering the fact that we're burning off finite resources in greater and greater quantities (the USA is the biggest culprit on this one, burning the most energy per head in the country, IIRC) all the time.
We don't have huge reserves of coal, oil or natural gas left, and the sooner the general public realise this and we get people and countries to switch over to using renewable sources of energy, the better.
Heh, ^^^ switched to HTML formatting there, ^^^ forgot to put the line break and/or paragraph tags in... If only there was some way to edit a comment once it was submitted
"Sounds like you've been interested in this stuff since you were 8 years old. People like us are best at cutting it, although in the fourth year you will realise the futility of exams that only test complex knowledge like comparing quantitatively the scalability of RIP and EIGRP, both in bandwidth and router CPU usage terms with formulae." I was 9, actually :) And thankyou for confirming to me that there always is more to learn. That last part pretty much flew straight over my head...
"With one crucial difference - University exams are set by professors who know what they're doing (more or less ;-) ), in the real world some semi-literate recruitment agency staff or dumb ex-military hiring manager is looking at your CV. The only way to impress him is by talking about golf for an hour (this happened to my coursemate, seriously)."
Yeah, its pretty much the "he seems like a nice guy, lets hire him". I understand that one, and I know how valuable a skill being able to bluff your way through a conversation can be -- I work part time in a bar to keep my bank balance on the correct side of £0, I need to be able to talk to anyone about anything, or people won't like me and my position there could slip quickly. Two members of staff said to me within a week or two of starting that I was confident enough with the customers that I'd do well there, and I'd like to think I could pull that off in an interview situation, though the two situations really are worlds apart.
"Even in the United States there are so many highly skilled coders, etc. available that they're starting to write off people because they've been out of IT for 6 months. This is just another way to filter the CVs because they have so many, soon they'll also consider your astrological star signs and tarot cards but will still have 1,000 applicants per position. In a massive UK telecom company they've got 50 positions available and 17,000 applications. Not good."
It doesn't paint a pretty picture, does it?? The end of fourth year only two years away for me, but its also a hell of a lot of work, a hell of a lot of study and a hell of a lot of exams. By then I'll have *seriously* considered what I want to do with myself, and will probably have sent off more than a couple of applications for jobs.
Glasgow University has strong links with some large companies, and a lot of graduates do get some half-decent work at these firms (BT is the big one they're friendly with. IBM and Motorola are friendly too (which reminds me, in addition to the languages I mentioned earlier, we're also learning assembly for the MC6808 microcontroller)).
I'm studying my degree mostly to feed my interest in computing. I'm not battling through exams just to get a CS degree in the vain hope of getting a high paid job. If it happens, its a happy bonus, and there's no way I'll turn a good offer down (I know of one guy in fourth year CS here was just offered a job -- what the job was, I'm not sure, and he may not even care too much -- with a starting wage of $40k per annum. I'm not expecting it to happen to me, just saying it does happen).
Many people, unfortunately do take computing because of the promise of money. This is probably why of the 500 first year CS students that I was one of, there are now only around 230 in 2nd year. That'll probably be around 140 that get into 3rd year, and somewhere in the region of 80-100 that progress into 4th year. That means that ~80% of the people who tried it just couldn't cope. And that doesn't take into account the number of people that actually do pass the honours exams.
Its a competitive field, at university as well as in the "real world"
I'd like to point out first that the tone of your reply suggests that I suggested I expect my degree to get me a job the minute I graduate, so I'll let you look at a part of my conclusion again:
:)
"To say 'I have a degree, I'm guaranteed a job' is bullshit, I know, but to cast it off completely and say a degree just says you know how to pass the exam, is also bullshit."
I am not saying my CS degree will land me a great job in the tech sector. Far from it. With a degree, however, I'm more likely to get a decent job (ie one that doesn't pay too badly, and we're not talking about what type of work we're involved in here) with that CS degree sitting on the CV.
As for how good my university is, I'm at the University of Glasgow. Depending what reports you read, it either 2nd in the league table for CS courses offered in the UK, or 9th. And I think that '9th' rating came from a report that took into account the number of A-level students have on admission to the university (an A-level, for those that don't know, being a grade offered in England during the pupils secondary education, equivalent to the Scottish Higher qualification offered at around the same level of education, so thats *really* what the study should have looked at, but...).
As for the IQ, I'm surprised at your accuracy -- my IQ is 121, apparently
And re: the lying on the CV bit, well, I'll think about that when the need arises...
Cheers,
Stween