In fairness, the 'telescope' question (oops, spoiler!) that's getting all the headlines is probably the dumbest question on the paper. I'm not adverse to having a question on any exam paper that pretty much anyone who has sat the course can answer.
The problem, in my opinion, is not so much the dumbing down of science for non-scientists - it's the removal of a challenging and worthwhile option for the scientists (or potential scientists). 'Combined Science' (or just 'Science') is pretty much the only GCSE (first set of formal exams, sat at 16) option in the vast majority of state schools, and it *does* seem to provide a good grounding for students whose primary focus is arts, humanities, etc. I think this much compulsory (and relatively approachable) science is a good thing - in the same way that science students should be taking some small degree of foreign languages, humanities, etc, at least up to this first level.
Science students, though, would have to be very lucky (or have parents prepared to pay) to study GCSEs specifically in Physics, Chemistry or Biology. The shallow background from a combined science course is not challenging enough for those with a real interest in one or more of the sciences, and is not enough preparation for A-level (exams at 18) where students pick a much smaller number of subjects to study in more depth, and the sciences are seperated. (Typically it's 10 subjects at GCSE, of which combined science can sometimes count as two, but three subjects (possibly with a fourth or even fifth specialisation, such as Maths, Further Maths and Statistics) at A-level). Certainly when I was at school, one of the last years of readily-available individual science GCSEs, those students who joined the A-level classes with only Science GCSEs really struggled in comparison to students with similar abilities but GCSEs in the relevent individual disciplines.
From talking to people - both staff and students - since, it seems that this bottle-neck is moving up the chain. A-levels only have a fixed 2-year window to teach, and so with having to start from a lower level to accommodate the majority of students with no prior specialisation, the level at the end of the two years is lower. This means people are coming into degree courses in Physics with the same good Physics A-level grades, but less knowledge - and so we're seeing the stretch out to 4-year courses that other posters have mentioned.
We don't 'water down' history by forcing everyone to *only* learn it in a broad-but-shallow bundle with geography, economics and sociology, or French with German, Spanish and Italian, so why is science treated in this way?
Note that I'm quite in favour of these broad-but-shallow options for 'secondary' subjects, but the opportunity should be there for students who have the aptitude and the direction to be challenged in their chosen field.
I've done this for Kingdom Hearts, including watching the ending movies, reading the script etc. Lovely graphics and soundtrack, and I was captivated by the story, but the gameplay sucked cold baboon piss through a straw.
I beg to differ. PSP is the only platform on which I have given up on a game for which I'm enjoying the gameplay, but the loading times just made the whole affair painful.
The culprit here is Breath of Fire. Walk through a dungeon, a random encounter happens. Wait 10-20s loading for music to change. Wait another 10s for characters to load their 'ready weapons' animations. Wait another 10s for the battle to actually start. Defeat random enemy. Wait 10s for victory music. Wait 10s for victory animation. Wait 10s for the 'l00t you found' prompts. Wait 10s to regain control of the gameplay.
In a dungeon where you're finding random encounters every few dozen steps, that's way more time listening to the heads shuttle back and forth across the UMD than actually playing the game. Doesn't do a lot for battery life either.
I'm still very much torn about the PSP. The screen is beautiful, it's a great portable DivX platform, and there are some good games for it. But it should have used carts, or have much better methods for caching data to the memory stick.
They throw up "Jeff Minter made some games with odd names / concepts", and then go with something relatively pedestrian (in name) like "Attack of the Mutant Camels". (Which is largely just what happens if you code while taking drugs and watching "The Empire Strikes Back", anyway). "Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time". Now *that's* a title.
It's a dreadful hack that makes *some* kind of sense for enterprises, where you don't want the devices to have real end-to-end connectivity - becuase you want the users to use the computers for what you're paying them to use them for, not whatever they want.
Unfortunately, the dreadful hack also makes a lot of sense for ISPs who don't "get" the Internet, and want it to just be TV on new technology. It makes it easier for them in that they don't have to ask their upstream / LIR / RIR (as appropriate) for more address space, and they don't have to deal with the ramifications of end-users communicating with other end users, rather than just being good little consumers of the Big Content Providers.
It's not a good security hack either - you could have a box that does exactly the same checks and tracking as NAT, but without the mangling of addresses and ports, and you'd have a (basic) stateful firewall that offered the same level of security. It should actually be *less* work, as you need to do less with the packets!
Er, the root servers are the authoritative servers for the root, ie '.'.
Not the same thing as the authoritative servers for an assortment of TLDs at all.
Historically there was a certain degree of overlap, at least between US-based roots and gTLD servers, but not really any more. Have a look at the servers returned from 'dig . ns' and compare them to 'dig com. ns' or 'dig net. ns'.
Tetris has at least one mode that you can 'win'. To complete it, I'd say you have to 'win' it on the highest difficulty settings, which starts with the screen about three-quarters full of blocks and things falling at an obscene rate. It's possible though - from memory, a fat Russian guy stands on the balcony playing the violin while the space shuttle launches.
This is the original GameBoy version, I don't know if a similar mode is universal.
Given that this is supposededly a site frequented by people who have an understanding of the Internet beyond "click the big 'E' to see the intarwebs", can we please lose this silly term?
I haven't had 'screen names' since the Amiga days, when it referred to, well, screens, due to the possibility of having multiple overlapping screen or virtual displays at different resolutions, colour depths etc that you could slide up and down behind each other. (Copper tricks like that were cool. I miss the Amiga.)
I have no idea why AOL originally pulled this term out of their collective arses - where exactly is this screen I'm supposed to be naming? What's displayed on it? - but let's not keep propagating it...
The question of the OP isn't clear, or at least a lot of the responses are mixing up a great many things.
- Domain registration, that is to say putting NS records into the appropriate gTLD / ccTLD / ccSLD (.co.uk etc)zone and registrant / contact info into whois - DNS hosting - Web hosting / redirection - Mail hosting / redirection
Now, a lot of companies will sell you any combination of the above, but without knowing what the OP wants, it's difficult to make a recommendation. Personally, I'm very happy with Joker - but only for the first item. I've never had cause to pay someone to do the other three, I have my own servers for that, so I can't comment on whether Joker's offerings are better or worse than anyone else's.
While I started on a machine with a keyboard and a screen display, around 1982, I *did* learn assembler with the big book of 6502 opcodes and a big notepad. Write the code on paper, translate to hex, calculate offsets for jumps, and feed the whole lot to the machine as a simple loop in BASIC going from DATA statements to POKE.
IME, everything-other-than-FPSes on XBL has a remarkably low population of arseholes. I can't imagine why teenage twitch-gamers would have the slightest interest in Catan. (Or Alhambra or Carcassonne, when they show up too. I'm waiting...)
Most modern employment contracts will state that the company can terminate you at any time for any reason. And most states follow "at-will" employment doctrine with exceptions to this varying wildly from state to state. The whole "two weeks notice" thing is only a courtesy, and you can bet such courtesies would be ignored if the employee is playing games with the employer (even if the employer started them).
Wow. You guys *really* need some employment legislation over there to get past the point of "Be thankful we deign to let you work for our mighty company, minion. Now bend over and grasp your ankles firmly."
I've never worked a job that has less than a one week notice period in both directions, even during an initial probationary period of employment. Four weeks is usual, and my current position (which I'm leaving in about a fortnight) is twelve. The only usual exception is for gross misconduct, which is limited to things like stealing from the company, assaulting customers and the like. There is, in the UK and in most of Europe, a statutory minimum, but I'm not sure what it is off the top of my head.
We do seem to be getting some firms towards the bottom end of the labour market trying to scam it with the "zero hours contract" - your written contract says you work for zero hours every week, for which you are paid an hourly rate of at or above the legal minimum, and any hours you actually work are discretionary overtime. This lets them give you notice without paying you any money - "sorry, we don't need you to do any hours this week". Personally, I find this a bit reprehensible.
...to ask the question would be the Board Game Designers' Forum - http://www.bgdf.com/
You're almost certainly not going to be talking to Hasbro or GW - you're going to be talking (if you're lucky!) to people like Rio Grande, Uberplay, Kosmos, Mayfair, JKLM... If those names don't mean anything to you, get yourself over to http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ and start reading:)
Starfox Adventure. Test of Fear. Well over 100 failed attempts, including all of the barrel-dodging and platform-jumping required from the previous save point. Traded-in in disgust.
I really liked the game, despite the less-than-glowing reviews - it's everything I enjoy in a Rare title, in exactly the same way I'm loving Kameo and Viva Pinata now. But that insane difficulty spike stopped me from seeing half of more of the game.
You can pretty much do the sensible version of this - which is to refuse all email that comes 'dynamic' addresses (as per various RBLs), or with malformed 'HELO' entries.
Yes, the first is a pain for the handful of genuine geeks who *are* equipped to run a properly-administered mail server that does direct-to-MX delivery from a residential DSL service. I know, I've been one. But botnets are now so prevalent, and hosting (especially virtual-hosting on something like UML or Xen) so cheap, that I'm changing my tune to the point of advocating RBL'ing dynamic space, period. (Paul Vixie has a nice article up on why this makes sense and how to go about it - see http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/)
Between the two, I've so far seen exactly one false-positive, from a very poorly administered web forum that insisted on sending registration confirmation emails from 'webadmin@localhost' - and frankly, systems like that deserve to get a kicking until they fix things! And it has taken the volume of spam that actually gets accepted into my systems through the floor.
Most of the evolution/revolution has come in the form of layout. Yes, many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc. You can't compare this to Word Perfect for DOS.
You're absolutely right. WP for DOS let you do all of those things, but let you keep control of them, and made it easy to produce coherent documents, with logical mark-up, in a user interface that didn't fight you every step of the way. (I was actually do most of my word-processing work in WP for VMS at the time, which was equally versatile.)
Word encourages you to apply effects willy-nilly, while at the same time making it really hard to apply styles properly, or see exactly what tags are applied to what elements, and in which order. (Does changing *this* change the definition of a style? Create a new style? Reformat this particular element in the style with custom local changes? Most of the time, it's anyone's guess.)
What you end up with is a document that can possibly be tweaked to look flashy, but probably unprofessional, by one person, on one PC / printer combination, for a given revision. Make changes, make changes on another machine, or (heaven forbid) let someone else make changes, and what you'll end up with is a document that quickly descends into a mess of semi-random style, formatting, language, spell-checking and other tags, with little to no hope of regaining any logical structure.
Funny, the primary purpose of my PSP is watching divx, although the couple of games I've bought (Ridge Racer and Mercury) are rather good. Your mileage may vary.
Exactly. I personally have no interest in GTA (the theme is a *total* turn-off) or Halo (hate FPS), but I'm willing to accept the prevailing view that they're good examples of their types, and more importantly that they'll sell by the bucketload.
I wouldn't mind *quite* so much the delay if there was an American to English translation happening. Mostly we get American with the other European languages added.
Out of curiosity, are any French or Spanish people able to comment on whether you get Canadian and US-Spanish versions? Assuming that there are similar problems traversing the pond as there are for American to English.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, the 'telescope' question (oops, spoiler!) that's getting all the headlines is probably the dumbest question on the paper. I'm not adverse to having a question on any exam paper that pretty much anyone who has sat the course can answer.
The problem, in my opinion, is not so much the dumbing down of science for non-scientists - it's the removal of a challenging and worthwhile option for the scientists (or potential scientists). 'Combined Science' (or just 'Science') is pretty much the only GCSE (first set of formal exams, sat at 16) option in the vast majority of state schools, and it *does* seem to provide a good grounding for students whose primary focus is arts, humanities, etc. I think this much compulsory (and relatively approachable) science is a good thing - in the same way that science students should be taking some small degree of foreign languages, humanities, etc, at least up to this first level.
Science students, though, would have to be very lucky (or have parents prepared to pay) to study GCSEs specifically in Physics, Chemistry or Biology. The shallow background from a combined science course is not challenging enough for those with a real interest in one or more of the sciences, and is not enough preparation for A-level (exams at 18) where students pick a much smaller number of subjects to study in more depth, and the sciences are seperated. (Typically it's 10 subjects at GCSE, of which combined science can sometimes count as two, but three subjects (possibly with a fourth or even fifth specialisation, such as Maths, Further Maths and Statistics) at A-level). Certainly when I was at school, one of the last years of readily-available individual science GCSEs, those students who joined the A-level classes with only Science GCSEs really struggled in comparison to students with similar abilities but GCSEs in the relevent individual disciplines.
From talking to people - both staff and students - since, it seems that this bottle-neck is moving up the chain. A-levels only have a fixed 2-year window to teach, and so with having to start from a lower level to accommodate the majority of students with no prior specialisation, the level at the end of the two years is lower. This means people are coming into degree courses in Physics with the same good Physics A-level grades, but less knowledge - and so we're seeing the stretch out to 4-year courses that other posters have mentioned.
We don't 'water down' history by forcing everyone to *only* learn it in a broad-but-shallow bundle with geography, economics and sociology, or French with German, Spanish and Italian, so why is science treated in this way?
Note that I'm quite in favour of these broad-but-shallow options for 'secondary' subjects, but the opportunity should be there for students who have the aptitude and the direction to be challenged in their chosen field.
I've done this for Kingdom Hearts, including watching the ending movies, reading the script etc. Lovely graphics and soundtrack, and I was captivated by the story, but the gameplay sucked cold baboon piss through a straw.
See www.boardgamegeek.com and geekbuddies, which does exactly that for boardgames.
:)
We just need someone to re-implement for www.videogamegeek.com
I beg to differ. PSP is the only platform on which I have given up on a game for which I'm enjoying the gameplay, but the loading times just made the whole affair painful.
The culprit here is Breath of Fire. Walk through a dungeon, a random encounter happens. Wait 10-20s loading for music to change. Wait another 10s for characters to load their 'ready weapons' animations. Wait another 10s for the battle to actually start. Defeat random enemy. Wait 10s for victory music. Wait 10s for victory animation. Wait 10s for the 'l00t you found' prompts. Wait 10s to regain control of the gameplay.
In a dungeon where you're finding random encounters every few dozen steps, that's way more time listening to the heads shuttle back and forth across the UMD than actually playing the game. Doesn't do a lot for battery life either.
I'm still very much torn about the PSP. The screen is beautiful, it's a great portable DivX platform, and there are some good games for it. But it should have used carts, or have much better methods for caching data to the memory stick.
Wow, "I, Robot". I often think no-one else has ever seen that, let alone remembered it. "The law - no jumping."
They throw up "Jeff Minter made some games with odd names / concepts", and then go with something relatively pedestrian (in name) like "Attack of the Mutant Camels". (Which is largely just what happens if you code while taking drugs and watching "The Empire Strikes Back", anyway). "Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time". Now *that's* a title.
It's a dreadful hack that makes *some* kind of sense for enterprises, where you don't want the devices to have real end-to-end connectivity - becuase you want the users to use the computers for what you're paying them to use them for, not whatever they want.
Unfortunately, the dreadful hack also makes a lot of sense for ISPs who don't "get" the Internet, and want it to just be TV on new technology. It makes it easier for them in that they don't have to ask their upstream / LIR / RIR (as appropriate) for more address space, and they don't have to deal with the ramifications of end-users communicating with other end users, rather than just being good little consumers of the Big Content Providers.
It's not a good security hack either - you could have a box that does exactly the same checks and tracking as NAT, but without the mangling of addresses and ports, and you'd have a (basic) stateful firewall that offered the same level of security. It should actually be *less* work, as you need to do less with the packets!
Er, the root servers are the authoritative servers for the root, ie '.'.
Not the same thing as the authoritative servers for an assortment of TLDs at all.
Historically there was a certain degree of overlap, at least between US-based roots and gTLD servers, but not really any more. Have a look at the servers returned from 'dig . ns' and compare them to 'dig com. ns' or 'dig net. ns'.
Tetris has at least one mode that you can 'win'. To complete it, I'd say you have to 'win' it on the highest difficulty settings, which starts with the screen about three-quarters full of blocks and things falling at an obscene rate. It's possible though - from memory, a fat Russian guy stands on the balcony playing the violin while the space shuttle launches.
This is the original GameBoy version, I don't know if a similar mode is universal.
Given that this is supposededly a site frequented by people who have an understanding of the Internet beyond "click the big 'E' to see the intarwebs", can we please lose this silly term?
I haven't had 'screen names' since the Amiga days, when it referred to, well, screens, due to the possibility of having multiple overlapping screen or virtual displays at different resolutions, colour depths etc that you could slide up and down behind each other. (Copper tricks like that were cool. I miss the Amiga.)
I have no idea why AOL originally pulled this term out of their collective arses - where exactly is this screen I'm supposed to be naming? What's displayed on it? - but let's not keep propagating it...
The question of the OP isn't clear, or at least a lot of the responses are mixing up a great many things.
- Domain registration, that is to say putting NS records into the appropriate gTLD / ccTLD / ccSLD (.co.uk etc)zone and registrant / contact info into whois
- DNS hosting
- Web hosting / redirection
- Mail hosting / redirection
Now, a lot of companies will sell you any combination of the above, but without knowing what the OP wants, it's difficult to make a recommendation. Personally, I'm very happy with Joker - but only for the first item. I've never had cause to pay someone to do the other three, I have my own servers for that, so I can't comment on whether Joker's offerings are better or worse than anyone else's.
At least you had an assembler.
While I started on a machine with a keyboard and a screen display, around 1982, I *did* learn assembler with the big book of 6502 opcodes and a big notepad. Write the code on paper, translate to hex, calculate offsets for jumps, and feed the whole lot to the machine as a simple loop in BASIC going from DATA statements to POKE.
IME, everything-other-than-FPSes on XBL has a remarkably low population of arseholes. I can't imagine why teenage twitch-gamers would have the slightest interest in Catan. (Or Alhambra or Carcassonne, when they show up too. I'm waiting...)
I've never worked a job that has less than a one week notice period in both directions, even during an initial probationary period of employment. Four weeks is usual, and my current position (which I'm leaving in about a fortnight) is twelve. The only usual exception is for gross misconduct, which is limited to things like stealing from the company, assaulting customers and the like. There is, in the UK and in most of Europe, a statutory minimum, but I'm not sure what it is off the top of my head.
We do seem to be getting some firms towards the bottom end of the labour market trying to scam it with the "zero hours contract" - your written contract says you work for zero hours every week, for which you are paid an hourly rate of at or above the legal minimum, and any hours you actually work are discretionary overtime. This lets them give you notice without paying you any money - "sorry, we don't need you to do any hours this week". Personally, I find this a bit reprehensible.
...to ask the question would be the Board Game Designers' Forum - http://www.bgdf.com/
:)
You're almost certainly not going to be talking to Hasbro or GW - you're going to be talking (if you're lucky!) to people like Rio Grande, Uberplay, Kosmos, Mayfair, JKLM... If those names don't mean anything to you, get yourself over to http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ and start reading
Starfox Adventure. Test of Fear. Well over 100 failed attempts, including all of the barrel-dodging and platform-jumping required from the previous save point. Traded-in in disgust.
I really liked the game, despite the less-than-glowing reviews - it's everything I enjoy in a Rare title, in exactly the same way I'm loving Kameo and Viva Pinata now. But that insane difficulty spike stopped me from seeing half of more of the game.
You can pretty much do the sensible version of this - which is to refuse all email that comes 'dynamic' addresses (as per various RBLs), or with malformed 'HELO' entries.
Yes, the first is a pain for the handful of genuine geeks who *are* equipped to run a properly-administered mail server that does direct-to-MX delivery from a residential DSL service. I know, I've been one. But botnets are now so prevalent, and hosting (especially virtual-hosting on something like UML or Xen) so cheap, that I'm changing my tune to the point of advocating RBL'ing dynamic space, period. (Paul Vixie has a nice article up on why this makes sense and how to go about it - see http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/)
Between the two, I've so far seen exactly one false-positive, from a very poorly administered web forum that insisted on sending registration confirmation emails from 'webadmin@localhost' - and frankly, systems like that deserve to get a kicking until they fix things! And it has taken the volume of spam that actually gets accepted into my systems through the floor.
The real time zone is, by definition, the one with the zero offset. All your strange UTC[+-][1-9][0-9]? time zones are clearly derivative.
Time was invented in Britain, at Greenwich, and you colonials should considers yourselves lucky that we let you carry on using it.
You're absolutely right. WP for DOS let you do all of those things, but let you keep control of them, and made it easy to produce coherent documents, with logical mark-up, in a user interface that didn't fight you every step of the way. (I was actually do most of my word-processing work in WP for VMS at the time, which was equally versatile.)
Word encourages you to apply effects willy-nilly, while at the same time making it really hard to apply styles properly, or see exactly what tags are applied to what elements, and in which order. (Does changing *this* change the definition of a style? Create a new style? Reformat this particular element in the style with custom local changes? Most of the time, it's anyone's guess.)
What you end up with is a document that can possibly be tweaked to look flashy, but probably unprofessional, by one person, on one PC / printer combination, for a given revision. Make changes, make changes on another machine, or (heaven forbid) let someone else make changes, and what you'll end up with is a document that quickly descends into a mess of semi-random style, formatting, language, spell-checking and other tags, with little to no hope of regaining any logical structure.
Funny, the primary purpose of my PSP is watching divx, although the couple of games I've bought (Ridge Racer and Mercury) are rather good. Your mileage may vary.
Exactly. I personally have no interest in GTA (the theme is a *total* turn-off) or Halo (hate FPS), but I'm willing to accept the prevailing view that they're good examples of their types, and more importantly that they'll sell by the bucketload.
:)
Zelda I'll always look forward to
http://www.gmtgames.com/p500/gmtp50.asp
Commit to paying for the game in advance, and when there's enough people to cover the costs, they'll build it.
Admittedly it's board games, not video games, but the concept *can* work...
Your issue with market forces at work being?
Feh. Slashdot claims to have an error with my first try, erases the text, then posts it anyway. Sorry.
I wouldn't mind *quite* so much the delay if there was an American to English translation happening. Mostly we get American with the other European languages added.
Out of curiosity, are any French or Spanish people able to comment on whether you get Canadian and US-Spanish versions? Assuming that there are similar problems traversing the pond as there are for American to English.