What's interesting to note is that they interviewed quite a few people, in the final days of recording Dark Side of the Moon. Just random stuff, easy stuff to begin with, which built up to questions like "Have you ever been in a fight?" and "Were you in the right?" (Which prompted the "was definitely in the right, that geezer was cruising for a bruising!" comment).
They interviewed Paul McCartney, as the Beatles were recording in Abbey Road around the same time. Paul, already being in the media spotlight, was a lot more careful about his answers that none of his were good/amusing/interesting enough for use on the album:)
While it's true that the drop in numbers of CS students can be attributed, at least in part, to the whole Web explosion and subsequent collapse, there are fears that the problems are rooted deeper than that.
I'm aware of some studies done at Glasgow which suggest that the drastic reduction in CS applicants year after year is a side-effect of the increased use of ICT in schools, and the increased teaching of ICT in schools. By the end of their secondary education, many kids think ICT is CS, they see ICT as boring, and as such never even consider CS as a potential career move.
It's important for the CS departments around the world to try and counter this trend*, as the computers of today aren't the same as yesteryear. Many efforts are ongoing, looking for new and interesting ways to teach Computing Science to schoolchildren, without which the currently fruitful field of CS could find itself drying up. Those with a natural predilection to coding/hardware/hacking/etc might never discover this interest on their parents' modern 3.xGHz P4 Dell with WinXP installed without some of these approaches. Compare kids brought up with modern PCs and parents afraid of what they've heard about viruses and hackers with kids like myself brought up in the 80's with BBC Micros and Atari STs to play with, for example.
Computing Science taught at a Secondary level, in the UK at least, is a joke, and not representative of modern CS at all. So we have ICT being pushed, and kids calling it Computing, and the ones who actually do take Computing at school not actually being given anything resembling a primer for a University level course. To solve the education problem is but one potential way of improving numbers entering CS programs.
* Some might argue that they shouldn't try to counter the trend and leave the natural selection of those interested enough in their computer to apply to go on to study CS -- then, only the truly interested and motivated fill a space on a CS program. It's wise point out that if people never get a chance to try, then we're throwing away so many potential great minds. Any good CS program should be good at weeding out the crap students from the good, though the quality of courses offered around the world is a different debate entirely.
Thumbs up on Sigur Ros. Likewise, I heard through download before buying their second album (though technically the first released here in the UK). The first track I heard was Starálfur, which can only be described as some sort of auditory orgasm.
New album out soon. Went to see them a few weeks ago; excellent stuff. It's not often you can say this, so I'll say it:
If you like your post-rock type stuff, go to their website and download some of their work.
Quoting myself: employers everywhere realise that a good degree from a good institution is worth something
You'll note that I didn't say anything about cost, or what financial pressures the organisation is under (or how greedy the decision makers are...). A firm outsourcing does not exclude them from realising that a degree is worth something.
Either that, or you're implying that employers have higher opinions of educational institutions in other parts of the world. Which is entirely likely. Certainly, I didn't make any blinkered claim that the employer should be single-minded enough so as to only consider their own country for employees.
That's called research and, by definition, there's no degree in whatever happens to be new.
A Ph.D. is, by definition, a degree in something new;) (Likewise for many Masters courses out there. Some Bachelors too, but to a much smaller level.)
A steady job in academia, unless the focus of the institution is merely on teaching, is most likely a research job. Just like a job at HP labs, Microsoft Research, Intel's research department, or any other industrial research group, is a research job. Money paid in exchange for the investigation and evaluation of new ideas.
One of the professors here at Glasgow who has spent time doing both industrial research and academic research said only that industry focusses on too much doing, and not spending enough time publishing, while academia spends too much time publishing, and not enough time doing. I can understand that viewpoint, especially in Computing Science, where it takes an age to get anything published.
I suppose you're highlighting the difference between the natural inquisitiveness of the researcher, who might be trapped in any job and need no degree to carry out his (own) research, as opposed to one who works within the research community as a published author, be they in academia or otherwise? At the end of the day, a degree offers participants a baseline knowledge from where a student, if naturally inclined to do research, can continue into a research oriented workplace, whereas one who is not can progress into any number of other computing areas not open to them prior to the degree. Research-based degrees teach how to communicate ideas, and evaluate ideas rigorously, such that they can be scrutinised by the scientific community at large.
Of course, there is disparity here between the researcher, and the genius (I'd hazard your Einstein example, some of his notable work was done without access to prior work in the area).
Agreed, I do not have a college education and I am considered a senior developer where I work. I happen to work with a few people that ARE jealous of that fact that they spent 4 years getting a computer science degree and I am at a higher level and make more money.
Then the people you work with probably took the degree simply to get a job, and perhaps shouldn't have. Perhaps they were fed bad information before University, that the degree was their best way to go.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. A degree is primarily for people interested in the subject material. A degree offers experience with a wide variety of technologies and opens the student up to ideas which would just not be seen in industry. If a kid wants money, and just wants to learn what they need to, there's a big bad job industry out there waiting.
Job-seekers and employers everywhere realise that a good degree from a good institution is worth something, and employers can see it as a good starting point for that employee, but it does not equate to real-world experience. It equates to an ability to learn, and an ability to work, without silly levels of assistance from others. The kids you work with are probably realising this the hard way, after 4 years of being told that the degree would get them places. (It did, it got them their job. They're now realising that they have to work for more than 4 years to progress further.)
People preferred the old format because it was clearer
To be fair, a cloud with raindrops beneath it and the sun edging round from the side which sat over most of central Scotland was never entirely clear either. What it said was: "Anything could happen." This was more representative of weather forecasting of days gone by, but it's constantly improving.
I've seen the new style, and I've watched with interest as the rain moves across the landscape. Yes, it still says anything could happen;) But it says it with greater accuracy.
The only real failing that I can see (now that they've tried to correct the angle they're viewing the country from) is the time advance -- it's too fast, too far. Advance time, OR swoop around the map, but both at the same time is too much. Advance time with the camera stationary, THEN let the camera swoop around and talk about what's happening at 6pm as apposed to the 3pm view we previously had, for example.
I don't think the new service is all that bad, but they're definitely chucking too much information out (or not enough information, depending on how you look at it) while they're progressing through the virtual day.
I think gaim-vv has rudimentary support for MSN webcams.
From glancing at the forums, it's probably flaky as hell just now, and probably not entirely easy to set up, but at least progress is being made. If MSN webcams is your idea of progress, that is.
All the other responses are entirely valid, and this does indeed look like a good and useful service.
It's worth pointing out though, that certainly in the UK, most 'people' won't know what a TiVo is. This is New and Exciting for them, and is perhaps a step up from Sky Plus.
Human beings can do 100x more than a rover can and more efficiently. They can also easily handle unexpected events (such as this) a lot easier since they're not limited to 4 wheels and a camera.
Don't know about anyone else here, but I hate when I get stuck in a sand dune. It's damn embarrassing, if nothing else.
Re:Why do we measure things with money?
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 1
I've often thought that it would be better if everyone worked half the hours they currently do and thus twice as many people were in the workforce.
Likewise, there are some sectors of the workforce where splitting the 7 day week into a 4 day/3 day split would
Give people more free time, since they're so good at complaining about how many hours they're working.
Open up the possibility of many more jobs, potentially cutting unemployment.
Allow more potential flexibility if money's tight (the possibility of taking on a 3 day week somewhere else for additional money).
Granted, there's a lot of reasons why it'd never really work. I think I came up with the idea off-hand one time when I was working for the Royal Mail. (Seriously early mornings for 6 day weeks gets to anybody after a while.)
Google Scholar requires academic institutions to open up their publications lists to crawlers such as Google's, otherwise stuff won't get listed automatically. A lot of them don't allow this, currently.
You do realise that if it were the other way around, and IE had tabbed browsing before Firefox, Firefox would still be labelled the better of the two? Perhaps the addition of tabbed browsing would even constitute cries of "feature-bloat!".
How long have you had that firefox session open for? I find that firefox hogs more and more memory the longer it's been running. Eventually, after a few days, things are swapping so much I have to close down firefox, wait for that 150MB to free up, then restart.
I'm on a reasonably up-to-date Debian unstable, on a 1GHz Athlon with 256MB RAM, which should be more than enough to run a browser and plenty other things besides. This, I feel, does not help firefox's cause, even though it's certainly not the usual behaviour for 'most' web users to leave their machine on overnight. I just find it convenient sometimes to keep a bunch of tabs open, especially if I'm leaving the computer on for whatever reason anyway.
It's probably more like "without attracting the attention of other golfers".
They're suspicious of new technology, you know. Rules are often that mobile phones are to be kept off at all times, so somebody talking on one is asking for trouble, golf-club stylee. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't cause for membership suspension, if they felt like it. So if on the golf course one can discretely send an SMS, all the better.
Of course, the rules are in place because of the ringer possibly interrupting other players. Your average middle-aged golfer's game is bad enough without somebody's Nokia ringer going off, and you know that that 55 year old guy with the 28 handicap will have no idea that he can turn ringer volume down.
That extra 5% is pretty meaningless on modern desktop systems. Let the kiddies play if they want to. If I can see an up to date KDE running pretty nicely without turning settings down on a 450MHz P3, then they can waste all the time they like compiling the same KDE for their 3GHz beast of a P4.
The 5% can come in useful on smaller platforms though. Now that we're seeing mobile phones on the market that people can code for, it's no longer dedicated embedded systems where every cycle matters. There are situations where those extra cycles are needed, and to this day for some embedded platforms and/or network processor systems, taking the assembly output of the compiler and hand optimising that instead is still required.
You're correct so long as you're implying that most people shouldn't really need to tweak for those few % that they'll never notice, as I suspect you are. Bear in mind the compiler is not the be-all and end-all though, there are situations where you really need to watch what it's doing to make sure you're not wasting power.
His Ph.D. involved information retrieval technology, and in particular, was what gave birth to Google. If quitting to expand his practical knowledge of CS was his intention, why has he not moved on from the Google project?
Well the issue is suddenly that people are concerned about the heat shield failing, yes? On the old rockets that went to the Moon, was it not that the heat shield was hidden almost until re-entry?
It's a design flaw in the Shuttle, essentially. They're making sure that it's less likely happen again, over the course of the Shuttle's remaining years in service. Can you imagine what would happen if the next Shuttle were to suffer the same fate as the last? They're trying to get back to space using the only workable vehicle they have just now, so that the US is back in space, not waiting for a replacement. They might as well try to carry out this risky business in as safe a way as possible, and if that means delaying by another two months, so be it.
Slashdot Mirror
Score+2; funny, yet insightful.
What's interesting to note is that they interviewed quite a few people, in the final days of recording Dark Side of the Moon. Just random stuff, easy stuff to begin with, which built up to questions like "Have you ever been in a fight?" and "Were you in the right?" (Which prompted the "was definitely in the right, that geezer was cruising for a bruising!" comment).
:)
They interviewed Paul McCartney, as the Beatles were recording in Abbey Road around the same time. Paul, already being in the media spotlight, was a lot more careful about his answers that none of his were good/amusing/interesting enough for use on the album
While it's true that the drop in numbers of CS students can be attributed, at least in part, to the whole Web explosion and subsequent collapse, there are fears that the problems are rooted deeper than that.
I'm aware of some studies done at Glasgow which suggest that the drastic reduction in CS applicants year after year is a side-effect of the increased use of ICT in schools, and the increased teaching of ICT in schools. By the end of their secondary education, many kids think ICT is CS, they see ICT as boring, and as such never even consider CS as a potential career move.
It's important for the CS departments around the world to try and counter this trend*, as the computers of today aren't the same as yesteryear. Many efforts are ongoing, looking for new and interesting ways to teach Computing Science to schoolchildren, without which the currently fruitful field of CS could find itself drying up. Those with a natural predilection to coding/hardware/hacking/etc might never discover this interest on their parents' modern 3.xGHz P4 Dell with WinXP installed without some of these approaches. Compare kids brought up with modern PCs and parents afraid of what they've heard about viruses and hackers with kids like myself brought up in the 80's with BBC Micros and Atari STs to play with, for example.
Computing Science taught at a Secondary level, in the UK at least, is a joke, and not representative of modern CS at all. So we have ICT being pushed, and kids calling it Computing, and the ones who actually do take Computing at school not actually being given anything resembling a primer for a University level course. To solve the education problem is but one potential way of improving numbers entering CS programs.
* Some might argue that they shouldn't try to counter the trend and leave the natural selection of those interested enough in their computer to apply to go on to study CS -- then, only the truly interested and motivated fill a space on a CS program. It's wise point out that if people never get a chance to try, then we're throwing away so many potential great minds. Any good CS program should be good at weeding out the crap students from the good, though the quality of courses offered around the world is a different debate entirely.
Thumbs up on Sigur Ros. Likewise, I heard through download before buying their second album (though technically the first released here in the UK). The first track I heard was Starálfur, which can only be described as some sort of auditory orgasm.
New album out soon. Went to see them a few weeks ago; excellent stuff. It's not often you can say this, so I'll say it:
If you like your post-rock type stuff, go to their website and download some of their work.
Quoting myself: employers everywhere realise that a good degree from a good institution is worth something
You'll note that I didn't say anything about cost, or what financial pressures the organisation is under (or how greedy the decision makers are...). A firm outsourcing does not exclude them from realising that a degree is worth something.
Either that, or you're implying that employers have higher opinions of educational institutions in other parts of the world. Which is entirely likely. Certainly, I didn't make any blinkered claim that the employer should be single-minded enough so as to only consider their own country for employees.
That's called research and, by definition, there's no degree in whatever happens to be new.
;) (Likewise for many Masters courses out there. Some Bachelors too, but to a much smaller level.)
A Ph.D. is, by definition, a degree in something new
A steady job in academia, unless the focus of the institution is merely on teaching, is most likely a research job. Just like a job at HP labs, Microsoft Research, Intel's research department, or any other industrial research group, is a research job. Money paid in exchange for the investigation and evaluation of new ideas.
One of the professors here at Glasgow who has spent time doing both industrial research and academic research said only that industry focusses on too much doing, and not spending enough time publishing, while academia spends too much time publishing, and not enough time doing. I can understand that viewpoint, especially in Computing Science, where it takes an age to get anything published.
I suppose you're highlighting the difference between the natural inquisitiveness of the researcher, who might be trapped in any job and need no degree to carry out his (own) research, as opposed to one who works within the research community as a published author, be they in academia or otherwise? At the end of the day, a degree offers participants a baseline knowledge from where a student, if naturally inclined to do research, can continue into a research oriented workplace, whereas one who is not can progress into any number of other computing areas not open to them prior to the degree. Research-based degrees teach how to communicate ideas, and evaluate ideas rigorously, such that they can be scrutinised by the scientific community at large.
Of course, there is disparity here between the researcher, and the genius (I'd hazard your Einstein example, some of his notable work was done without access to prior work in the area).
Agreed, I do not have a college education and I am considered a senior developer where I work. I happen to work with a few people that ARE jealous of that fact that they spent 4 years getting a computer science degree and I am at a higher level and make more money.
Then the people you work with probably took the degree simply to get a job, and perhaps shouldn't have. Perhaps they were fed bad information before University, that the degree was their best way to go.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. A degree is primarily for people interested in the subject material. A degree offers experience with a wide variety of technologies and opens the student up to ideas which would just not be seen in industry. If a kid wants money, and just wants to learn what they need to, there's a big bad job industry out there waiting.
Job-seekers and employers everywhere realise that a good degree from a good institution is worth something, and employers can see it as a good starting point for that employee, but it does not equate to real-world experience. It equates to an ability to learn, and an ability to work, without silly levels of assistance from others. The kids you work with are probably realising this the hard way, after 4 years of being told that the degree would get them places. (It did, it got them their job. They're now realising that they have to work for more than 4 years to progress further.)
Please explain to me how this isn't a paradox?
;)
Clearly you've not experienced the glorious weather we have here in the west of Scotland.
People preferred the old format because it was clearer
;) But it says it with greater accuracy.
To be fair, a cloud with raindrops beneath it and the sun edging round from the side which sat over most of central Scotland was never entirely clear either. What it said was: "Anything could happen." This was more representative of weather forecasting of days gone by, but it's constantly improving.
I've seen the new style, and I've watched with interest as the rain moves across the landscape. Yes, it still says anything could happen
The only real failing that I can see (now that they've tried to correct the angle they're viewing the country from) is the time advance -- it's too fast, too far. Advance time, OR swoop around the map, but both at the same time is too much. Advance time with the camera stationary, THEN let the camera swoop around and talk about what's happening at 6pm as apposed to the 3pm view we previously had, for example.
I don't think the new service is all that bad, but they're definitely chucking too much information out (or not enough information, depending on how you look at it) while they're progressing through the virtual day.
I think gaim-vv has rudimentary support for MSN webcams.
From glancing at the forums, it's probably flaky as hell just now, and probably not entirely easy to set up, but at least progress is being made. If MSN webcams is your idea of progress, that is.
How about a PDF version of that? :)
All the other responses are entirely valid, and this does indeed look like a good and useful service.
It's worth pointing out though, that certainly in the UK, most 'people' won't know what a TiVo is. This is New and Exciting for them, and is perhaps a step up from Sky Plus.
Human beings can do 100x more than a rover can and more efficiently. They can also easily handle unexpected events (such as this) a lot easier since they're not limited to 4 wheels and a camera.
Don't know about anyone else here, but I hate when I get stuck in a sand dune. It's damn embarrassing, if nothing else.
(Score: 5, Funny, but Entirely Disgusting)
Likewise, there are some sectors of the workforce where splitting the 7 day week into a 4 day/3 day split would
Granted, there's a lot of reasons why it'd never really work. I think I came up with the idea off-hand one time when I was working for the Royal Mail. (Seriously early mornings for 6 day weeks gets to anybody after a while.)
Google Scholar requires academic institutions to open up their publications lists to crawlers such as Google's, otherwise stuff won't get listed automatically. A lot of them don't allow this, currently.
You do realise that if it were the other way around, and IE had tabbed browsing before Firefox, Firefox would still be labelled the better of the two? Perhaps the addition of tabbed browsing would even constitute cries of "feature-bloat!".
Oh, we're a fickle lot, aren't we?
How long have you had that firefox session open for? I find that firefox hogs more and more memory the longer it's been running. Eventually, after a few days, things are swapping so much I have to close down firefox, wait for that 150MB to free up, then restart.
I'm on a reasonably up-to-date Debian unstable, on a 1GHz Athlon with 256MB RAM, which should be more than enough to run a browser and plenty other things besides. This, I feel, does not help firefox's cause, even though it's certainly not the usual behaviour for 'most' web users to leave their machine on overnight. I just find it convenient sometimes to keep a bunch of tabs open, especially if I'm leaving the computer on for whatever reason anyway.
It's probably more like "without attracting the attention of other golfers".
They're suspicious of new technology, you know. Rules are often that mobile phones are to be kept off at all times, so somebody talking on one is asking for trouble, golf-club stylee. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't cause for membership suspension, if they felt like it. So if on the golf course one can discretely send an SMS, all the better.
Of course, the rules are in place because of the ringer possibly interrupting other players. Your average middle-aged golfer's game is bad enough without somebody's Nokia ringer going off, and you know that that 55 year old guy with the 28 handicap will have no idea that he can turn ringer volume down.
You realize that alot of people use a computer to do more then just run their OS & desktop right?
Yes. You'll notice that I said "most people shouldn't really need to tweak for those few %". Emphasis added for your comprehension.
That extra 5% is pretty meaningless on modern desktop systems. Let the kiddies play if they want to. If I can see an up to date KDE running pretty nicely without turning settings down on a 450MHz P3, then they can waste all the time they like compiling the same KDE for their 3GHz beast of a P4.
The 5% can come in useful on smaller platforms though. Now that we're seeing mobile phones on the market that people can code for, it's no longer dedicated embedded systems where every cycle matters. There are situations where those extra cycles are needed, and to this day for some embedded platforms and/or network processor systems, taking the assembly output of the compiler and hand optimising that instead is still required.
You're correct so long as you're implying that most people shouldn't really need to tweak for those few % that they'll never notice, as I suspect you are. Bear in mind the compiler is not the be-all and end-all though, there are situations where you really need to watch what it's doing to make sure you're not wasting power.
His Ph.D. involved information retrieval technology, and in particular, was what gave birth to Google. If quitting to expand his practical knowledge of CS was his intention, why has he not moved on from the Google project?
My eyes darted across your post there, and I didn't see ctrun, I saw a 4 letter word containing the letters ctrun, rearranged, minus the 'r'. Hmm.
I'll bear that in mind. I don't do it often enough to have remembered a pattern in their naming scheme :)
Well the issue is suddenly that people are concerned about the heat shield failing, yes? On the old rockets that went to the Moon, was it not that the heat shield was hidden almost until re-entry?
It's a design flaw in the Shuttle, essentially. They're making sure that it's less likely happen again, over the course of the Shuttle's remaining years in service. Can you imagine what would happen if the next Shuttle were to suffer the same fate as the last? They're trying to get back to space using the only workable vehicle they have just now, so that the US is back in space, not waiting for a replacement. They might as well try to carry out this risky business in as safe a way as possible, and if that means delaying by another two months, so be it.