That's funny, I thought it was "100% of trolls give the rest a bad name".
Cell phone usage nationwide is on the order of 200 million subscribers, or roughly 2/3 of the US population. Since they aren't handing out cellphones to 3 year olds or the terminally old, that pretty much covers every adult in the US. Good luck getting a girlfriend that doesn't use a cellphone. Or a job. You can rage and complain all you want, but in the end we will crush your soul and dance on your Luddite corpse. MUAHAHAHA! (Err, where was I?) Oh right. I was pointing out the trollish absurdity of positing that 2/3 of the population are such horrible people as to deserve abuse for no reason.
- Doing things distruptive to others in public places punishable by death. How is talking loudly in a movie to your 17 year old best friend better than a cell phone? - Being a crappy driver and swerving all over the road for any reason whatsoever prohibited. - Loud ringers: already covered, see point 1. if it's loud in the privacy of one's home, who the hell cares? - Make it legal to smack people who blame the symptom and not the cause.
Seriously, how the hell did this get modded insightful? This attitude of "If only people didn't use cell phones everything would be better" is ridiculous. Obnoxious cell phone users are obnoxious because they have terrible manners and no respect for others. Do you think that taking that little device away will help? Or do you think they'll just switch over to talking loudly to friends in movies, drinking lattes and putting on their makeup while driving, and continuing to ruin the world for everyone else?
Actually, there is life, even in the arid parts of the Atacama: http://www.physorg.com/news3396.html It's one of the areas where they are testing probes that they later intend to send to Mars, because it's one of the hardest places in the world to find life. But it is there, even in the absence of water.
I predict that before long, the stack of magazines and Victorias Secret catalogs will be replaced by hotspots in the bathrooms.:) After all, wouldn't you rather read slashdot and surf for porn when you're in the john than read some 10 year old article about how anti-oxidants are the next big health craze?
I feel your pain, it took me three tries to pass Calc 2, and two to pass Calc 3. That being said, there's a couple different points here...
1. I've seen a lot of people talking about calculus as if it's the only kind of math there is. But in terms of importance as a programmer, the ability to do mathematical induction and other proofs is REALLY important. Why? Because a: it's the art of creating steps from a set of known inputs to a desired output (sounds like programming to me!) and b: the more complex a system gets, they more you need to be able to prove to yourself and everybody else that has no holes in it. When I started out running a little tiny website, I could just look at the code and be sure it would work. Then again, I was making about 36K a year.:) As my pay has gone up, so has the complexity of the systems I maintained, and now I have to actually check the correctness of my code, because it's no longer just "intuitive" that there could not possibly be any holes in it, especially when I'm maintaining thousands of lines of code I didn't write.
2. A little anecdote on the uses of calculus: We hired a summer intern this last summer. We asked him to write a stand alone tool for us that would plug into our existing build system. He wrote it, plugged it in, and promptly more doubled our build time, adding more than 14 hours to it. So, we sat him down with his code and made him do a full blown algorithmic analysis (using those pesky limits). He then, much humbled, went back and rewrote his code. It now takes an hour and 14 minutes. Now, he might have just used a profiler, and found all of the slow sections, and optimized them. But if he had done some analysis in the first place, he would have saved himself a month's worth of work rewriting code. It's a faster, smarter way to code.
3. No, to be quite honest, you probably don't need Calc 3, ever again, if all you want is to do web programming. But part of what that shiny piece of paper buys you is proof that you can stick to something. I know a lot of companies that don't care WHAT you got your degree in, but they want to know that you can finish something. Working for big corporations tends to be a lot of meaningless busy work and sitting in little rooms watching stupid people in positions of power feed their egos. College is superb preparation for that.:)
I had never seen Buffy or Angel before watching Firefly. To be quite honest, the fact that it came from the creator of Buffy really turned me off on it, because I found Buffy fans to be utterly insufferable, and what they were telling me about Buffy really wasn't making me want to watch it. It took chromatic (who's pretty picky about his entertainment) telling me that it was amazing for me to even pick up the first disk, and then I was utterly hooked. Really.
I'm not actually sure I'd even compare it to Buffy. Having finally broken down and watched a few disks, Buffy characters are really one dimensional, and the universe of Buffy is pretty simplistic. Firefly is not. I'd compare Firefly more to some of the really good predictive Sci-Fi. Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps, or Heinlein. The mish-mosh of cultures and technologies is what I would consider to be realistic (because, let's face it, even in the future, not everyone's going to have all the cool toys), and the western aspects are given a believable rationale.
However, my suggestion to you, if you're still unsure, is that you just download the pilot and watch it. It's about two hours. It's plenty to get you hooked if you are going to like it, and if not, you haven't wasted your money.
Actually, all of the recent CS grads I have talked to have studied compilers and at least the basics of machine architecture, they're required courses for a bachelors (at least here in California.) Database theory is, also. It sounds like universities are slowly starting to revamp their programs to be simultaneously more practical and cover a broader range of concepts.
A bit tangential, but it's worth pointing out that the US is one of the few places in the world where parents even consider asking that question. A lot of children in the world are exposed to violence (real violence, not even screen violence) at a very young age. Even in the US, there are plenty of kids learning to skin deer at age 7, which is a whole lot nastier than Anakin's disfiguration.
I think this sort of thing is a good opportunity for parents to talk with their kids about violence and empathy... Rather than desensitizing your kid, by just putting it in front of them, make it a a chance to talk with your kid about it.
The way my parents went about it was to warn me when a particularly nasty scene was coming up on the movie, and give me a chance to opt out. if I didn't, they'd talk with me about the scene after the movie was over, how it made me feel, what sort of empathy I had for the character, maybe remind me that even bad guys only deserved to suffer so much if I was cheering on the good guy.
YMMV, but I think I got a really strong moral grounding from it, rather than just dancing around the subject like a lot of parents do, and letting their kids be exposed to it via slumber parties at more liberal parents households.
I've actually watched someone DOS a car... A car alarm was going off every few minutes as trucks drove by during the middle of wedding preparations in a San Francisco park. The sensitivity was cranked way up on the alarm. So the best man walked up to the car and tapped his class ring on the window to set the alarm off, and then kept tapping the window every time the alarm stopped. Drained the battery in about 15-20 minutes, in plenty of time for a peaceful wedding.:) Keep this in mind the next time your neighbor's car alarm goes off at 2 AM. Sure, it takes 20 minutes, but then you get a whole night of blissfully uninterrupted sleep.:)
Eh, if you want to call anything you don't like communism, be my guest. However, the truest definition of communism, according to that Wikipedia article you probably didn't read, is when the nice democratic people vote themselves things they didn't work for. Fascist corporatism is a whole 'nother beast. Still an ugly beast, but a different one.
Actually, after reading a bit further, it sounds like they are using schemas for validation. So, you have a simple, readable, and automatically validated config file, that can use standard parsing tools. How is this a bad thing again? Yes, your config files are, on the average, about half again as long. They're also in ASCII, so it's a drop in the bucket compared to your MP3 collection.
Well architected XML with a schema is designed for human readability and to let you know what options are available, as opposed to most config files, which give you the most minimal of hints as to what you can do. Rather than having to dig through obscure manuals to find out what options are available, you could look at the schema, or better yet, open it in your favorite validating editor (emacs has a nice plugin for that). You'd never have another invalid config file, with proper use of validation.
Mind you, no one seems to be using schemas for config files yet. But I predict that it will come.
And I'm not sure why you would think a human would have trouble editing XML. Angle brackets just aren't that complicated.:)
So you're saying you're a decent human being who doesn't require validation by haranguing other people into liking the same things they do so they can feel better about themselves.
leaving the United States sitting on top of the largest intact oil reserves in the world
Funny you should say that, since China is the one sitting on top of oil reserves. They don't have the infrastructure in place to process it, but it's there. I get the impression that they are patiently waiting until there's a serious oil crisis, and the rest of the world crumbles, and THEN they'll tap their reserves, and be the only game in town.
On the contrary, the information is biased towards proving that information doesn't have a bias. The bias doesn't enter in the information itself (unless you're lying), but in the presentation and selection of information. I can make a true statement ("Thousands of US soldiers have died in Iraq"), but that has a different bias from saying "we have killed many Iraqi insurgents". Both true. Both designed to push two totally different viewpoints.
In the same sense, a physicist who throws out the one data point that doesn't prove his point, and only supplies the data that does is offering true information, with a bias.
The place where I have seen them be HUGELY popular is with graphic artists. Tablet PCs are the perfect configuration for doodling in Photoshop, doing image editing, etc. But I also have a number of programmer friends who prefer them over using a PDA, despite the extra bulk, because of the ease of jotting down notes quickly, with really good handwriting recognition. Programs like One Note just aren't available for the PDA. Which I agree that both PDAs and laptops could be massively improved, there is a niche market for the tablets, and it's enough to encourage hardware companies to keep working on them.
I have to confess, if they made them as durable as laptops, I'd rather have a tablet than a laptop myself. I don't want a watered down hybrid, I want a full force best of all worlds hybrid, and the tablet has the best potential for that.
Re:You mean, just like 3 out of 4 men?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
*shrug* I'm making a statement about standard US social conditioning. I didn't say that men were biologically required to be cocky, just that there is a social expectation placed on them. If that is sexism, then so be it. You're not going to scare me off my point by throwing labels at me.:)
The place where I see these things differing for men and for women is in the conditioning to be modest versus brash. I think you'll be more likely to see brash men in the field than women, and my (anecdotal) experience bears that out. Any one has the option to break their social conditioning, but it's a little extra handicap to overcome.
I'm glad that you happen to be a person with a conscience, because I'd like to see more of them in the world, and in IT. But I assert that you are a rarity.:)
Re:You mean, just like 3 out of 4 men?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
Thanks for bringing that up. One of the most frustrating things working as a woman in software is the tendency of my male coworkers to try and turn every meeting into an ego feeding session, even when I'm the resident expert on the subject. Because somehow admitting lack of knowledge makes them shrivel worse than cold water.
It took me a couple of years working in IT to realize that I was, in fact, shooting myself in the foot by being honest. That I wasn't going to be able to compete if I didn't puff myself up like a magpie in heat when talking about my own skills and accomplishments. That if I didn't know something, I had better not say so. Because admitting to my own limitations (which were often less than those of my male peers) made my managers think I was less competent.
So, having been brought up like a good little girl, to be modest, truthful, and all those other girl scout skills, competing in IT pretty much means I have to be someone I'm not terribly happy with. I make up for it by knowing more, so I don't have to make stuff up as often, but it means that I work harder for the same set of rewards, just because I have more ethics and less ego.
I can see a lot of women finding those sorts of situations very unpalatable, and getting frustrated when they get passed over for promotions because they're more modest and honest than their male peers... I've certainly seen a lot of male geeks who are shy about speaking up get frustrated for the same reasons, as their incompentent but louder peers move up the food chain faster.
It's a lot of social conditioning to overcome for your average female. And those of them who don't have a sincere passion for it may find that working twice as hard for less reward just isn't worth the trouble. A lot of guys aren't as passionate about it, but aren't trying to overcome the same hurdles, so they're more likely to stay.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, I thought it was "100% of trolls give the rest a bad name".
Cell phone usage nationwide is on the order of 200 million subscribers, or roughly 2/3 of the US population. Since they aren't handing out cellphones to 3 year olds or the terminally old, that pretty much covers every adult in the US. Good luck getting a girlfriend that doesn't use a cellphone. Or a job. You can rage and complain all you want, but in the end we will crush your soul and dance on your Luddite corpse. MUAHAHAHA! (Err, where was I?) Oh right. I was pointing out the trollish absurdity of positing that 2/3 of the population are such horrible people as to deserve abuse for no reason.
I have a better idea:
- Doing things distruptive to others in public places punishable by death. How is talking loudly in a movie to your 17 year old best friend better than a cell phone?
- Being a crappy driver and swerving all over the road for any reason whatsoever prohibited.
- Loud ringers: already covered, see point 1. if it's loud in the privacy of one's home, who the hell cares?
- Make it legal to smack people who blame the symptom and not the cause.
Seriously, how the hell did this get modded insightful? This attitude of "If only people didn't use cell phones everything would be better" is ridiculous. Obnoxious cell phone users are obnoxious because they have terrible manners and no respect for others. Do you think that taking that little device away will help? Or do you think they'll just switch over to talking loudly to friends in movies, drinking lattes and putting on their makeup while driving, and continuing to ruin the world for everyone else?
Actually, there is life, even in the arid parts of the Atacama: http://www.physorg.com/news3396.html
It's one of the areas where they are testing probes that they later intend to send to Mars, because it's one of the hardest places in the world to find life. But it is there, even in the absence of water.
I predict that before long, the stack of magazines and Victorias Secret catalogs will be replaced by hotspots in the bathrooms. :) After all, wouldn't you rather read slashdot and surf for porn when you're in the john than read some 10 year old article about how anti-oxidants are the next big health craze?
I feel your pain, it took me three tries to pass Calc 2, and two to pass Calc 3. That being said, there's a couple different points here...
:) As my pay has gone up, so has the complexity of the systems I maintained, and now I have to actually check the correctness of my code, because it's no longer just "intuitive" that there could not possibly be any holes in it, especially when I'm maintaining thousands of lines of code I didn't write.
:)
1. I've seen a lot of people talking about calculus as if it's the only kind of math there is. But in terms of importance as a programmer, the ability to do mathematical induction and other proofs is REALLY important. Why? Because a: it's the art of creating steps from a set of known inputs to a desired output (sounds like programming to me!) and b: the more complex a system gets, they more you need to be able to prove to yourself and everybody else that has no holes in it. When I started out running a little tiny website, I could just look at the code and be sure it would work. Then again, I was making about 36K a year.
2. A little anecdote on the uses of calculus: We hired a summer intern this last summer. We asked him to write a stand alone tool for us that would plug into our existing build system. He wrote it, plugged it in, and promptly more doubled our build time, adding more than 14 hours to it. So, we sat him down with his code and made him do a full blown algorithmic analysis (using those pesky limits). He then, much humbled, went back and rewrote his code. It now takes an hour and 14 minutes.
Now, he might have just used a profiler, and found all of the slow sections, and optimized them. But if he had done some analysis in the first place, he would have saved himself a month's worth of work rewriting code. It's a faster, smarter way to code.
3. No, to be quite honest, you probably don't need Calc 3, ever again, if all you want is to do web programming. But part of what that shiny piece of paper buys you is proof that you can stick to something. I know a lot of companies that don't care WHAT you got your degree in, but they want to know that you can finish something. Working for big corporations tends to be a lot of meaningless busy work and sitting in little rooms watching stupid people in positions of power feed their egos. College is superb preparation for that.
Chin up, best of luck to you, and don't give up.
Dead yeast contains tons of amino acids and B vitamins. You'll find brewers yeast offered as a nutritional supplement in most health stores.
I had never seen Buffy or Angel before watching Firefly. To be quite honest, the fact that it came from the creator of Buffy really turned me off on it, because I found Buffy fans to be utterly insufferable, and what they were telling me about Buffy really wasn't making me want to watch it. It took chromatic (who's pretty picky about his entertainment) telling me that it was amazing for me to even pick up the first disk, and then I was utterly hooked. Really.
I'm not actually sure I'd even compare it to Buffy. Having finally broken down and watched a few disks, Buffy characters are really one dimensional, and the universe of Buffy is pretty simplistic. Firefly is not. I'd compare Firefly more to some of the really good predictive Sci-Fi. Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps, or Heinlein. The mish-mosh of cultures and technologies is what I would consider to be realistic (because, let's face it, even in the future, not everyone's going to have all the cool toys), and the western aspects are given a believable rationale.
However, my suggestion to you, if you're still unsure, is that you just download the pilot and watch it. It's about two hours. It's plenty to get you hooked if you are going to like it, and if not, you haven't wasted your money.
Actually, all of the recent CS grads I have talked to have studied compilers and at least the basics of machine architecture, they're required courses for a bachelors (at least here in California.) Database theory is, also. It sounds like universities are slowly starting to revamp their programs to be simultaneously more practical and cover a broader range of concepts.
Sounds like you need to iron the kinks out of your Latin. But I toast your attempt at clarification. :)
Damn! Why didn't I think of using a social networking site to buy drugs? Now it's too late...
Erm, I mean, that's reprehensible. How dare they be so ingenious.
A bit tangential, but it's worth pointing out that the US is one of the few places in the world where parents even consider asking that question. A lot of children in the world are exposed to violence (real violence, not even screen violence) at a very young age. Even in the US, there are plenty of kids learning to skin deer at age 7, which is a whole lot nastier than Anakin's disfiguration.
I think this sort of thing is a good opportunity for parents to talk with their kids about violence and empathy... Rather than desensitizing your kid, by just putting it in front of them, make it a a chance to talk with your kid about it.
The way my parents went about it was to warn me when a particularly nasty scene was coming up on the movie, and give me a chance to opt out. if I didn't, they'd talk with me about the scene after the movie was over, how it made me feel, what sort of empathy I had for the character, maybe remind me that even bad guys only deserved to suffer so much if I was cheering on the good guy.
YMMV, but I think I got a really strong moral grounding from it, rather than just dancing around the subject like a lot of parents do, and letting their kids be exposed to it via slumber parties at more liberal parents households.
I've actually watched someone DOS a car... A car alarm was going off every few minutes as trucks drove by during the middle of wedding preparations in a San Francisco park. The sensitivity was cranked way up on the alarm. So the best man walked up to the car and tapped his class ring on the window to set the alarm off, and then kept tapping the window every time the alarm stopped. Drained the battery in about 15-20 minutes, in plenty of time for a peaceful wedding. :) Keep this in mind the next time your neighbor's car alarm goes off at 2 AM. Sure, it takes 20 minutes, but then you get a whole night of blissfully uninterrupted sleep. :)
Eh, if you want to call anything you don't like communism, be my guest. However, the truest definition of communism, according to that Wikipedia article you probably didn't read, is when the nice democratic people vote themselves things they didn't work for. Fascist corporatism is a whole 'nother beast. Still an ugly beast, but a different one.
Aggh. Shoot me now. I knew I should have previeed that.
Erm.. Perhaps you are confusing communism with fascism? One is an economic system, the other is a political philosophy. The fact that most communist states have also been fascist merely points to the fact that many people are greedy bastards, and won't share unless you make them.
Actually, after reading a bit further, it sounds like they are using schemas for validation. So, you have a simple, readable, and automatically validated config file, that can use standard parsing tools. How is this a bad thing again? Yes, your config files are, on the average, about half again as long. They're also in ASCII, so it's a drop in the bucket compared to your MP3 collection.
Well architected XML with a schema is designed for human readability and to let you know what options are available, as opposed to most config files, which give you the most minimal of hints as to what you can do. Rather than having to dig through obscure manuals to find out what options are available, you could look at the schema, or better yet, open it in your favorite validating editor (emacs has a nice plugin for that). You'd never have another invalid config file, with proper use of validation.
:)
Mind you, no one seems to be using schemas for config files yet. But I predict that it will come.
And I'm not sure why you would think a human would have trouble editing XML. Angle brackets just aren't that complicated.
So you're saying you're a decent human being who doesn't require validation by haranguing other people into liking the same things they do so they can feel better about themselves.
:)
What the hell are you doing on Slashdot?
leaving the United States sitting on top of the largest intact oil reserves in the world
Funny you should say that, since China is the one sitting on top of oil reserves. They don't have the infrastructure in place to process it, but it's there. I get the impression that they are patiently waiting until there's a serious oil crisis, and the rest of the world crumbles, and THEN they'll tap their reserves, and be the only game in town.
I'm supposed to cleanse my toilet bowl?! Damn it!
On the contrary, the information is biased towards proving that information doesn't have a bias. The bias doesn't enter in the information itself (unless you're lying), but in the presentation and selection of information. I can make a true statement ("Thousands of US soldiers have died in Iraq"), but that has a different bias from saying "we have killed many Iraqi insurgents". Both true. Both designed to push two totally different viewpoints.
In the same sense, a physicist who throws out the one data point that doesn't prove his point, and only supplies the data that does is offering true information, with a bias.
All your base 10 are belong to us!
The place where I have seen them be HUGELY popular is with graphic artists. Tablet PCs are the perfect configuration for doodling in Photoshop, doing image editing, etc. But I also have a number of programmer friends who prefer them over using a PDA, despite the extra bulk, because of the ease of jotting down notes quickly, with really good handwriting recognition. Programs like
One Note just aren't available for the PDA. Which I agree that both PDAs and laptops could be massively improved, there is a niche market for the tablets, and it's enough to encourage hardware companies to keep working on them.
I have to confess, if they made them as durable as laptops, I'd rather have a tablet than a laptop myself. I don't want a watered down hybrid, I want a full force best of all worlds hybrid, and the tablet has the best potential for that.
*shrug* I'm making a statement about standard US social conditioning. I didn't say that men were biologically required to be cocky, just that there is a social expectation placed on them. If that is sexism, then so be it. You're not going to scare me off my point by throwing labels at me. :)
:)
The place where I see these things differing for men and for women is in the conditioning to be modest versus brash. I think you'll be more likely to see brash men in the field than women, and my (anecdotal) experience bears that out. Any one has the option to break their social conditioning, but it's a little extra handicap to overcome.
I'm glad that you happen to be a person with a conscience, because I'd like to see more of them in the world, and in IT. But I assert that you are a rarity.
Thanks for bringing that up. One of the most frustrating things working as a woman in software is the tendency of my male coworkers to try and turn every meeting into an ego feeding session, even when I'm the resident expert on the subject. Because somehow admitting lack of knowledge makes them shrivel worse than cold water.
It took me a couple of years working in IT to realize that I was, in fact, shooting myself in the foot by being honest. That I wasn't going to be able to compete if I didn't puff myself up like a magpie in heat when talking about my own skills and accomplishments. That if I didn't know something, I had better not say so. Because admitting to my own limitations (which were often less than those of my male peers) made my managers think I was less competent.
So, having been brought up like a good little girl, to be modest, truthful, and all those other girl scout skills, competing in IT pretty much means I have to be someone I'm not terribly happy with. I make up for it by knowing more, so I don't have to make stuff up as often, but it means that I work harder for the same set of rewards, just because I have more ethics and less ego.
I can see a lot of women finding those sorts of situations very unpalatable, and getting frustrated when they get passed over for promotions because they're more modest and honest than their male peers... I've certainly seen a lot of male geeks who are shy about speaking up get frustrated for the same reasons, as their incompentent but louder peers move up the food chain faster.
It's a lot of social conditioning to overcome for your average female. And those of them who don't have a sincere passion for it may find that working twice as hard for less reward just isn't worth the trouble. A lot of guys aren't as passionate about it, but aren't trying to overcome the same hurdles, so they're more likely to stay.