Why shouldn't the AP exam be in java? It's an exam for college credit, and guess what, many colleges are switching to Java. Most of the core CS classes at IU are in Java, and thank goodness. Unlike Scheme/LISP, Java has an intuitive, C-like structure and teaches good programming practices like encapsulation. An education in Java means that students'll actually understand how to use OOP in C++, which is what they'll probably find in the workplace, plus they'll have the power of the Java API to get them started.
A similar jump was done in 1960 by the Air Force. Project Excelsior was a pre-NASA experiment to see if it was possible for pilots and astronauts to eject from these kinds of altitudes (102,800 feet to be exact, which took 4 minutes and 36 seconds). They solved the spinning problem by deploying a small stabilizing chute first to slow him down. This site says Captain Kittinger almost died on the first attempt when the stabilizing chute tangled and he blacked out. Luckily, the main chute was set to deploy automatically. Apparently his landing words of wisdom were "Thank you, God, thank you."
I was at the Seattle Museum of Flight this summer and noticed that one exhibit was a hanggliding simulator where you had to follow another penguin pilot in for a landing. The other pilot appeared to be none-other-than 3D Tux.
Well, I don't care much for Geeks in Space, but according to this, The Sync, which hosts Geeks, as well as, some of the most compelling independent film and net shows on the web is broke. They weren't able to find anybody who was willing to merge with them so they have to shut down. Kinda depressing.
" Now if someone got this working with Linux, you could serve your MP3 library to multiple rooms in the house as separate streams."
Gee, I should get one of these, seeing as how I can't play sound under Linux because my Turtle Beach Montego sound card isn't supported--because Turtle Beach refuses to cooperate with open source people and release their specs. Sure, there's an Open Sound System version in beta, but only because they reverse engineered the bugger.
I'm sorry, but from what I've read about pranking ethics these guys aren't hacks in the MIT sense, but rather unoriginal vandals.
"According to the "hacker ethic," a hack must: be safe / not damage anything/ not damage anyone, either physically, mentally or emotionally / be funny, at least to most of the people who experience it "
Is there an accelerated time scale to this game? Because, it's been a while since I took the physics AP, but otherwise won't this game be incredibly boring to play considering the time involved in space travel? Today, Mars is 352*10^11 meters from earth (According to Microsoft Space Simulator, sorry ). So, starting at zero velocity... x=.5*10g*t^2... considering you've gotta start decellerating halfway through your trip... It'll take about 10 days to make the all important Mars-Earth trip.
Well, half the problem is that after about three years you can't run commercial programs on an outdated computer anymore. Sure, the average user only needs a basic word processor with a spell checker and now-a-days a WWW browser. When I'm at home for a break and need my Slashdot fix I can use the decade-old Hyundai 8088 with 640k memory to log into a shell account and read Slashdot via Lynx. But can my mom use it to boot up this year's copy of Turbotax? Why not? All the calculations in taxes are simple addition and subtractions, ya don't need a Pentium II for that. The problem is that programmers have gotten lazy, don't think about optimization anymore and God Forbid that a company writes a program that doesn't run in some bloated GUI.
>However, the problems (this was a few years ago >though) with the multi-line (AKA MBBS) version >was balance. The balance that made the one-line >version work failled when they lost the >intracacies of ship speeds with multiple turns >for movement.
The MBBS version's lack of balance, in my experience, was usually because of poor Sysoping. Many Sysops thought the game would be more fun with infinite turns or if you started out with several thousand fighters . We used to have to deal with losers who would just make a ton of aliases and kamakazi each day to rack up ten's of thousands of fighters. (Pretty difficult to contend with early in a game.) Heh, I still remember with pride the day one of them followed me into a deadend with a full ISS and I was in a merchant cruiser. I landed on the lone planet, waited a second, then used an atomic detonator after he landed too. Teehee. Who says Merchant Cruisiers aren't deadly fighters? Oh yeah, then I had one of my corp buddies block off the sector with 30 or so defensive fighters and I put that many defensive fighters in the deadend. hehehehehe. Oh, sorry. grin. Plus, typing speeds are irrelivant if you used macros and the online/offline problem existed in one line TW, too, you know.
and now all the newbies are busy getting BFG'd in Q3A and not playing text based games. It's impossible to gain a foothold in a game that's been running forever and has several elite corps. Sure, you can resort to going evil and using photons to mess around with the big guys, but any attempt at colonization will definitly be thwarted _quickly_ by any competent corps.
Call TW a waste, if you will, but knowledge of the Trade Wars universe was great for understanding data structures. What's a better metaphore for a linked list than a nice deep tunnel? And after I figured out that the way to compute the shortest route between sectors was essentially the same as a garbadge collection algorithm, I was actually motivated to write my own traversal algorithm for YATWC (yet another TW clone). Of course, this payoff occured about six years after I spent hundreds of hours blocking the Stardock instead of doing homework...
IANAL, but I am taking communications law, and you're right, the comment about Polk Street is an opinion--rhetorical hyperbole, they call it, because it's something that no intelligent person would read literally--but a comment like "sometimes Brown sneakily changes his name" sounds pretty libelous to me, if it's not true. I think I'd put my money on the professor here. He's not a public figure, and there probably wasn't any "reasonable care" taken to see whether or not the editorial was true or not. What will be interesting will be if the webmaster can be found responsible for the libel. To my knowledge, courts haven't made up their mind about that. These reviews sound a lot like newspaper editorials, though, and a newspaper can be found negligent for publishing letters to the editor that are libelous.
Very good point. According to the Hunger Site FAQ it costs about $350 to buy and transport one metric ton of food. Even if you assume you can set up a computer for $1000, that's 2.8 tons of food. Besides, what good is a computer when the _vast_ majority of your population is illiterate?
This is definitly geek news. It hits on a number of topics that Slashdot has explored lately. How about the flaws of a proprietary encription scheme and the cracking there of a la DeCSS? That's geek news. Nostalgic gaming a la MAME? Geek news. No longer commercially viable platforms? Can you say Amiga? Geek news. Not to mention, a company that goes to pains to insure that their software doesn't turn out to be vapourware. Or how about about a company that, rather than putting out a shoddy last minute product, actually takes pride in it's quality. That's gosh darn commendable. The hacker ethic is all about perservering until a problem is solved. Besides, this game looks a hell of a lot more original than Parsec which for all it's shiny 3D graphics and sound effects, doesn't look like it will provide much in the strategy department.
I've noticed a lot of Slashdot readers comment that it's okay for the government to use funding threats to censor an organization. I am not a lawyer, but I am taking communications law and I know that that is not always the case. In Stanley v. McGrath the 8th Circuit court of appeals ruled that it violated the 1st Amendment for the University of Minnesota to cut funding to a student newspaper because they didn't like it's content. "Reducing the revenues available to the newspaper is therefore forbidden by the First Amendment." Granted, libraries and student newspapers aren't quite the same animals, but libraries are traditional bastions of free speech. If people sit by and say "oh well, the government owns 'em so they can do what they want with 'em" we're totally screwed.
There's been another CAVE in the computer sci. dept at Indiana University--Bloomington for several years now. Here's their homepage: http://avl.iu.edu/index.html You can even take tours. woohoo!
Frankly, I think you have to be a pretty darn boring person if drugs are going to enhance your creativity. Some pretty creative stuff has been written by people when they weren't high, and some of it is actually readable.
If you're going to use drugs recreationally, that's you're perogative, but please don't go around telling people it makes you more creative or smarter. First of all, it's a crutch. If you need drugs to perform, then that's a sign of mental addiction.
Second of all, the drug of choice among many "innovative thinkers" is marijuana. It's not too hard to spot somebody who used pot heavily during their adolescence, because they usually lag about 5 seconds behind any conversation. Certainly there are enough successful pot users (e.g. Carl Sagan) to show that not all marijuana users will suffer "amotivational syndrome". However, I think Sagan would have been an extrodinary person no matter what. But what about joe average stoner? How many of them just sit around all day eating potato chips and watching Cheech and Chong movies?
Then there's LDS. Nevermind the people who don't have a sober friend guide them while they trip and end up killing themself in some dumb way or another, screwing with your brain chemistry has nasty effects like flashbacks later in life. Whee!
The article talked alot about how this author likes esctasy. That is some dangerous #$@*. Watch Go if you don't believe me. Whoo, apparently ecstacy can cause Parkinson's disease-type symptoms. You can be just like Dr. Hawking! yay!
Actually, the only reason I'm ranting is because I'm sick of my drug culture friends always talking about how they miss doing LSD and such. Yesterday one of them was trying to convince me that Cyberia was a great book. Apparently it deals on this whole drug culture/computer culture thing.
I hate to break into a nice flamewar in the making, but, I think the reason it's generally Linux and not GNU/Linux is because it's _easier to say_.
That being said, the FSF really needs to look into a PR department. Sure, "GNU/HURD" is a humorous little acronym, but do you think something with that name will gain popular acceptance? Come on, people, do you see many Wang computers these days? "Linux" sounds like an operating system. "HURD" doesn't.
In an OOP language, you have these entities called objects. For instance, let's say you have a Car object. In an object, data and functions are encapsulated. (i.e. The Car knows it has four passengers--data. The Car can go vroom!--a function)
This supposidly makes programming, espcially _group_ programming, easier because you don't have to know HOW the Car works in order to use it. As a matter of fact, you don't really need to know how a Car works to modify it. If you want to build a low-rider, you create a new LowRider object and "extend" the Car object. And all you need to do to have a LowRider that's exactly like a Car but outputs more vroom! is write a new vroom! function. You don't need to know anything about the turnHeadlightsOn function or the openGloveCompartment function to change the vroom!
Also, if you have a PoliceCar object, that object wouldn't be allowed to, say, look at your LowRider's MilesPerHour variable unless you wanted it to be able to.
Hope that helps. OOP is all about metaphores, so I find it's easier to explain it with them.
I don't know the first thing about MP3s, but I do know that compression algoritms like Lempel-Ziv (think gzip) just don't work with random access because you have to know what's in the beginning of the file to build a translation table.
Now that I think about it, that's just about the only reason to have a microwave hooked up to the internet. What's so incredibly hard about inventing a UPC coding scheme that would code "Cook 55 seconds; rotate 180 degrees; cook 45 seconds"? It would only take a few bytes and it would kick the middle man. "Whoops, network's down, guess that ramen'll have to wait."
Analog faking == digital faking
on
Live or Memorex?
·
· Score: 3
"CBS News' internal standards prohibit digital manipulation or other faking of news footage, but Genelius said this new technology was not yet covered by the guidelines. 'There is nothing specific in CBS News standards,' she explained. 'We're just beginning to use this.' "
The really sick thing is that, as a journalism student, this doesn't surprise me. More than once during in-class ethics discussions I've seen my peers talk about having no qualms about unethically tampering with a story as long as they could do so without getting in trouble. But, then again, most broadcasters I've seen are morons anyways, so maybe they just don't understand this right and wrong stuff. =)
> uh, > 1.if none of them talk they'd both be dead. > (Game theory)
I'm afraid you're wrong. You shouldn't go correcting people when you don't know what you're talking about. The Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't work that way. Why would the Chinese even need to interrogate them if, when neither of them fessed up and testified against the other brother, the government would kill them both? If that was the case, they'd just kill them both and be done with it.
Here's how it might have worked in this case:
Bro A silent; || Bro A rats Bro B silent -- Both 20 years in prison || A acquitted, B dies Bro B rats -- B acquitted, A dies || Both life in prison
The entire point of game theory is that the maximized mutual benefit occurs when both parties cooperate, however, when one party is greedy, the other one will suffer. Here's a tutorial on game theory.
I'm glad to hear that some of you still have online communities to hang out on. I'm sure at least one of the larger BBSes have moved to telnet in many areas. But, it's not the same. Why? At least in Portland, OR, all the big BBSes that did move to the net survived that long for one reason: Major MUD or other forms of online gaming. Intelligent conversation died in most places many years ago. If you're lucky enough to still have an intelligent community to turn to, I envy you. Why should I go play TradeWars on the UFie BBS? It won't be the same, because the fun part of TW was dominating boards where nobody was smart enough to get a commision on the first day after big bang, and then blowing them out of the water once they did. =) And sure, I get my fix for intelligent forums on Slashdot, but what all those fun religious debates between friends that never turned into flamewars? Or the bi-yearly pizza/frisbee/bowling meets? No, I'm sorry, but you can't do that with internet communities. And remember all those online women you met? Err, oh yeah, that never happened... But at least if it did, you wouldn't have to fly halfway across the country to have an awkward first meeting, you could just go to the local mall. I'm even nostalgic for the obnoxious newbies who would come in flaming their mouths off and you could tell them "Press ALT-H for Sysop access." And most annoying and depressing of all, when I'm on AOL Instant Messanger and I go "AFK" or "BRB" or "ROFL", people don't know WTF I'm talking about. Ah well, it's not like I have the time anymore to spend 12 hours online everyday photoning people who try to get to the Stardock.
Slashdot Mirror
Why shouldn't the AP exam be in java? It's an exam
for college credit, and guess what, many colleges
are switching to Java. Most of the core CS
classes at IU are in Java, and thank goodness.
Unlike Scheme/LISP, Java has an intuitive,
C-like structure and teaches good programming
practices like encapsulation. An education in
Java means that students'll actually understand how
to use OOP in C++, which is what they'll probably
find in the workplace, plus they'll have the power of the Java API to get them started.
A similar jump was done in 1960 by the Air Force. Project Excelsior was a pre-NASA experiment to see if it was possible for pilots and astronauts to eject from these kinds of altitudes (102,800 feet to be exact, which took 4 minutes and 36 seconds). They solved the spinning problem by deploying a small stabilizing chute first to slow him down. This site says Captain Kittinger almost died on the first attempt when the stabilizing chute tangled and he blacked out. Luckily, the main chute was set to deploy automatically. Apparently his landing words of wisdom were "Thank you, God, thank you."
I was at the Seattle Museum of Flight this summer and noticed that one exhibit was a hanggliding simulator where you had to follow another penguin pilot in for a landing. The other pilot appeared to be none-other-than 3D Tux.
Well, I don't care much for Geeks in Space, but according to this, The Sync, which hosts Geeks, as well as, some of the most compelling independent film and net shows on the web is broke. They weren't able to find anybody who was willing to merge with them so they have to shut down. Kinda depressing.
Is there an accelerated time scale to this game? Because, it's been a while since I took the physics AP, but otherwise won't this game be incredibly boring to play considering the time involved in space travel? Today, Mars is 352*10^11 meters from earth (According to Microsoft Space Simulator, sorry ). So, starting at zero velocity... x=.5*10g*t^2... considering you've gotta start decellerating halfway through your trip... It'll take about 10 days to make the all important Mars-Earth trip.
Well, half the problem is that after about three
years you can't run commercial programs on an
outdated computer anymore. Sure, the average user
only needs a basic word processor with a spell checker and now-a-days a WWW browser. When I'm at home for a break and need my Slashdot fix I can use the decade-old Hyundai 8088 with 640k memory to log into a shell account and read Slashdot via Lynx. But can my mom use it to boot up this year's copy of Turbotax? Why not? All the calculations in taxes are simple addition and subtractions, ya don't need a Pentium II for that. The problem is that programmers have gotten lazy, don't think about optimization anymore and God Forbid that a company writes a program that doesn't run in some bloated GUI.
>However, the problems (this was a few years ago >though) with the multi-line (AKA MBBS) version >was balance. The balance that made the one-line
>version work failled when they lost the >intracacies of ship speeds with multiple turns >for movement.
The MBBS version's lack of balance, in my experience, was usually because of poor Sysoping. Many Sysops thought the game would be more fun with infinite turns or if you started out with several thousand fighters . We used to have to deal with losers who would just make a ton of aliases and kamakazi each day to rack up ten's of thousands of fighters. (Pretty difficult to contend with early in a game.) Heh, I still remember with pride the day one of them followed me into a deadend with a full ISS and I was in a merchant cruiser. I landed on the lone planet, waited a second, then used an atomic detonator after he landed too. Teehee. Who says Merchant Cruisiers aren't deadly fighters? Oh yeah, then I had one of my corp buddies block off the sector with 30 or so defensive fighters and I put that many defensive fighters in the deadend. hehehehehe. Oh, sorry. grin.
Plus, typing speeds are irrelivant if you used macros and the online/offline problem existed in one line TW, too, you know.
and now all the newbies are busy getting BFG'd in Q3A and not playing text based games. It's impossible to gain a foothold in a game that's been running forever and has several elite corps. Sure, you can resort to going evil and using photons to mess around with the big guys, but any attempt at colonization will definitly be thwarted _quickly_ by any competent corps.
Call TW a waste, if you will, but knowledge of the Trade Wars universe was great for understanding data structures. What's a better metaphore for a linked list than a nice deep tunnel? And after I figured out that the way to compute the shortest route between sectors was essentially the same as a garbadge collection algorithm, I was actually motivated to write my own traversal algorithm for YATWC (yet another TW clone). Of course, this payoff occured about six years after I spent hundreds of hours blocking the Stardock instead of doing homework...
They said the same thing about Andy Kaufman before he died. Maybe it's just that the cancer gene and the psycho comedian gene are related.
IANAL, but I am taking communications law, and you're right, the comment about Polk Street is an opinion--rhetorical hyperbole, they call it, because it's something that no intelligent person would read literally--but a comment like "sometimes Brown sneakily changes his name" sounds pretty libelous to me, if it's not true.
I think I'd put my money on the professor here. He's not a public figure, and there probably wasn't any "reasonable care" taken to see whether or not the editorial was true or not. What will be interesting will be if the webmaster can be found responsible for the libel. To my knowledge, courts haven't made up their mind about that. These reviews sound a lot like newspaper editorials, though, and a newspaper can be found negligent for publishing letters to the editor that are libelous.
Very good point. According to the Hunger Site FAQ it costs about $350 to buy and transport one metric ton of food. Even if you assume you can set up a computer for $1000, that's 2.8 tons of food. Besides, what good is a computer when the _vast_ majority of your population is illiterate?
This is definitly geek news. It hits on a number of topics that Slashdot has explored lately. How about the flaws of a proprietary encription scheme and the cracking there of a la DeCSS? That's geek news. Nostalgic gaming a la MAME? Geek news. No longer commercially viable platforms? Can you say Amiga? Geek news. Not to mention, a company that goes to pains to insure that their software doesn't turn out to be vapourware. Or how about about a company that, rather than putting out a shoddy last minute product, actually takes pride in it's quality. That's gosh darn commendable. The hacker ethic is all about perservering until a problem is solved. Besides, this game looks a hell of a lot more original than Parsec which for all it's shiny 3D graphics and sound effects, doesn't look like it will provide much in the strategy department.
I've noticed a lot of Slashdot readers comment that it's okay for the government to use funding threats to censor an organization. I am not a lawyer, but I am taking communications law and I know that that is not always the case.
In Stanley v. McGrath the 8th Circuit court of appeals ruled that it violated the 1st Amendment for the University of Minnesota to cut funding to a student newspaper because they didn't like it's content. "Reducing the revenues available to the newspaper is therefore forbidden by the First Amendment."
Granted, libraries and student newspapers aren't quite the same animals, but libraries are traditional bastions of free speech. If people sit by and say "oh well, the government owns 'em so they can do what they want with 'em" we're totally screwed.
There's been another CAVE in the computer sci. dept at Indiana University--Bloomington for several years now. Here's their homepage: http://avl.iu.edu/index.html You can even take tours. woohoo!
Frankly, I think you have to be a pretty darn boring person if drugs are going to enhance your creativity. Some pretty creative stuff has been written by people when they weren't high, and some of it is actually readable.
If you're going to use drugs recreationally, that's you're perogative, but please don't go around telling people it makes you more creative or smarter. First of all, it's a crutch. If you need drugs to perform, then that's a sign of mental addiction.
Second of all, the drug of choice among many "innovative thinkers" is marijuana. It's not too hard to spot somebody who used pot heavily during their adolescence, because they usually lag about 5 seconds behind any conversation. Certainly there are enough successful pot users (e.g. Carl Sagan) to show that not all marijuana users will suffer "amotivational syndrome". However, I think Sagan would have been an extrodinary person no matter what. But what about joe average stoner? How many of them just sit around all day eating potato chips and watching Cheech and Chong movies?
Then there's LDS. Nevermind the people who don't have a sober friend guide them while they trip and end up killing themself in some dumb way or another, screwing with your brain chemistry has nasty effects like flashbacks later in life. Whee!
The article talked alot about how this author likes esctasy. That is some dangerous #$@*. Watch Go if you don't believe me. Whoo, apparently ecstacy can cause Parkinson's disease-type symptoms. You can be just like Dr. Hawking! yay!
Actually, the only reason I'm ranting is because I'm sick of my drug culture friends always talking about how they miss doing LSD and such. Yesterday one of them was trying to convince me that Cyberia was a great book. Apparently it deals on this whole drug culture/computer culture thing.
I hate to break into a nice flamewar in the making, but, I think the reason it's generally Linux and not GNU/Linux is because it's _easier to say_.
That being said, the FSF really needs to look into a PR department. Sure, "GNU/HURD" is a humorous little acronym, but do you think something with that name will gain popular acceptance? Come on, people, do you see many Wang computers these days? "Linux" sounds like an operating system. "HURD" doesn't.
In an OOP language, you have these entities called objects. For instance, let's say you have a Car object. In an object, data and functions are encapsulated. (i.e. The Car knows it has four passengers--data. The Car can go vroom!--a function)
This supposidly makes programming, espcially _group_ programming, easier because you don't have to know HOW the Car works in order to use it. As a matter of fact, you don't really need to know how a Car works to modify it. If you want to build a low-rider, you create a new LowRider object and "extend" the Car object. And all you need to do to have a LowRider that's exactly like a Car but outputs more vroom! is write a new vroom! function. You don't need to know anything about the turnHeadlightsOn function or the openGloveCompartment function to change the vroom!
Also, if you have a PoliceCar object, that object wouldn't be allowed to, say, look at your LowRider's MilesPerHour variable unless you wanted it to be able to.
Hope that helps. OOP is all about metaphores, so I find it's easier to explain it with them.
I don't know the first thing about MP3s, but I do know that compression algoritms like Lempel-Ziv (think gzip) just don't work with random access because you have to know what's in the beginning of the file to build a translation table.
Now that I think about it, that's just about the only reason to have a microwave hooked up to the internet. What's so incredibly hard about inventing a UPC coding scheme that would code "Cook 55 seconds; rotate 180 degrees; cook 45 seconds"? It would only take a few bytes and it would kick the middle man. "Whoops, network's down, guess that ramen'll have to wait."
> uh,
> 1.if none of them talk they'd both be dead.
> (Game theory)
I'm afraid you're wrong. You shouldn't go correcting people when you don't know what you're talking about. The Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't work that way. Why would the Chinese even need to interrogate them if, when neither of them fessed up and testified against the other brother, the government would kill
them both? If that was the case, they'd just kill them both and be done with it.
Here's how it might have worked in this case:
Bro A silent; || Bro A rats
Bro B silent -- Both 20 years in prison || A acquitted, B dies
Bro B rats -- B acquitted, A dies || Both life in prison
The entire point of game theory is that the maximized mutual benefit occurs when both parties cooperate, however, when one party is greedy, the other one will suffer. Here's a tutorial on game theory.
I'm glad to hear that some of you still have online communities to hang out on. I'm sure at least one of the larger BBSes have moved to telnet in many areas. But, it's not the same. Why? At least in Portland, OR, all the big BBSes that did move to the net survived that long for one reason: Major MUD or other forms of online gaming. Intelligent conversation died in most places many years ago. If you're lucky enough to still have an intelligent community to turn to, I envy you.
Why should I go play TradeWars on the UFie BBS? It won't be the same, because the fun part of TW was dominating boards where nobody was smart enough to get a commision on the first day after big bang, and then blowing them out of the water once they did. =)
And sure, I get my fix for intelligent forums on Slashdot, but what all those fun religious debates between friends that never turned into flamewars? Or the bi-yearly pizza/frisbee/bowling meets? No, I'm sorry, but you can't do that with internet communities.
And remember all those online women you met? Err, oh yeah, that never happened... But at least if it did, you wouldn't have to fly halfway across the country to have an awkward first meeting, you could just go to the local mall.
I'm even nostalgic for the obnoxious newbies who would come in flaming their mouths off and you could tell them "Press ALT-H for Sysop access."
And most annoying and depressing of all, when I'm on AOL Instant Messanger and I go "AFK" or "BRB" or "ROFL", people don't know WTF I'm talking about.
Ah well, it's not like I have the time anymore to spend 12 hours online everyday photoning people who try to get to the Stardock.