Unions provide an very strong check against employer abuse, but they have historically proven to be prone to corruption and overly resistant to profound shifts in the marketplace. In other words, they'll fight tooth and nail to protect jobs that are obsolete and ultimately doomed (either through the eventual loss of the job anyway, or the company going under because it is hiring too many obsolete workers).
Unions are messy, but they're the best system we have for keeping companies in check. Anybody who thinks that companies will look out for the best interests of its workers without some sort of external pressure is fooling themselves. Theoretically strong government regulation could prevent the need for unions, but in practice government is too focused on the big picture to effectively deal with the kinds of concerns that Unions address.
I suppose you complain that when someone ties a Bow in their hair that they didn't specify if it was a Compound or Reflex? I'm pretty sure they're using the third meaning of decimated.
Actors and Directors have a union, and are more or less required to get representation (sometimes even competent representation) when dealing with the studio. Agents may be slimy, but at least they're working for you, not the studio.
Musicians on the other hand have no such safety mechanisms and are pretty routinely screwed by the music labels because they have virtually no power at the bargaining table. The labels (used to) control all of the major distribution channels, so you either signed away everything to them or you stayed a no name bar band. That was literally the only two options. If you got to megastar status, you could really negotiate on the contract, but that was a one in a million chance.
With the internet the studios are losing their ironclad grip on the distribution channel and it's showing. Their profits are falling off rapidly as people discover that they don't have to sign their life away just to be heard.
That scam doesn't last too long though because anybody who isn't clueless (which admitted might take awhile to come by) will call the bank and ask about the guards, and when the bank goes "who?", they'll call the cops. It's one of those scams that will work a few times, but will inevitably get you caught if you keep trying it.
In other words its completely psychosomatic? Or maybe you were misinterpreting the high pitched hum of a flyback for something more sinister?
If you want to verify if it's all in your head, try a blind test. Make friends with someone who has authority to turn those tag sensors on and off. Then set up a test where you walk through them several times, and tell your friend if it is on or off (it should be obvious to you right?). Obviously he will randomly decide (flip of a coin) if it's on or off each time, and then mark the results down on a piece of paper. If you score better than random guessing, then maybe it's not all in your head, but I wouldn't count on it. Make sure you run this test a few dozen times so you don't go flying off of the handle after getting 2 out of 3 right by chance.
Looking at how it works, my guess is that you could brute force someone's "passwindow" card with just a handful of inputs. There are only 7 different elements for each digit, and you should be able to figure out which spots are filled in pretty quickly and what numbers they represent.
Maybe for some of the many "grab a subset of Wikipedia and give it to poor people in (insert random third world country) as an inexpensive form of an Encyclopedia". Nobody would want to have to clear the rights to hundreds of thousands of photos just for some charity work.
I've never understood why MMO developers love to build pet classes, but then can't figure out how to make the pets persist when you switch to a different server (cross zones). This can't be that hard of a problem.
A single DTN node is not terribly useful, where you see advantages is when you have multiple lossy or intermittent links along the path. In this case, TCP will perform very poorly as it can only even try to push data on the cases where all of the links are up and will suffer a lot from TCP's slow start.
Think of it like a game of Frogger: TCP only knows how to play by waiting until all of the cars and logs are line up just right so it can jump all of the way across at once. DTN plays like a human player, one step at a time while it's safe and then waiting for it to become safe for the next step.
One of the interesting aspects of DTN is that it is transport layer agnostic. This means the very same bundle can be sent over TCP, then SCPS, then USB key or whatever and the applications never have to deal with it. The applications only have to speak DTN. There are local Daemons in the network that choose the most optimal transport protocol for whatever the next hop is, and then send the bundle over that.
I think the take home lesson is that low cost is not the only factor in making a successful panel. You can't mass market a panel that degrades in 6 months, or that requires 500 times the power of normal sunlight to be efficient, or is so fragile that it breaks down if you walk near it, or involve a production process that can't scale up.
I hope that at least one of these technologies will pan out finally, but in the meantime I'm hedging my bets and looking at other forms of energy as well.
It may be fun (for awhile), but he's only playing the first 10% of the game over and over again. The rest of the game may as well not exist if you design it that way.
IMHO, probably the best compromise between the two is the often hated "checkpoint" system, where you can only save a set intervals. Sure this means that if you work at it long enough, you can beat the game even with "bad" playing, but it also means you can reasonably take risks and actually have fun instead of tediously grinding your way to godhood.
For a Roguelike, this could be implemented as an autosave every time you go down a level, with death resulting in a restart at the beginning of the level. Sure it will take the "challenge" out of picking up random potions of Blindness or Weakness and having to drink them because there's no good way to identify them otherwise (scrolls of identify being considerably more rare than the random potions you will pick up), but that is not exactly a loss that I would mourn.
I know people will argue that "but if you beat the game you won't feel the need to play it anymore!", but to be honest after a few bullcrap deaths in most Roguelikes, I don't feel like playing them anymore anyway. I'd wager that 90+% of the people who have ever played Nethack have never seen more than the first dozen levels or so, and have not played it nearly as long as a traditional RPG.
I disagree about nethack not having grind because it has permadeath. Permadeath in Nethack is the primary reason the game is almost entirely grind. If you ever find yourself in a situation where death is close, you are playing wrong, in order to succeed in Nethack (or any roguelike for that matter), you have to play conservatively, beating up on things that pose no threat to you while escaping anything that might pose a challenge. Even if you can beat a challenging monster 95% of the time, eventually that 5% will catch up to you and all of your progress will be erased by a small handful of bad rolls. This is why only obsessives play Nethack, nobody else has the patience to grind their way up to the godlike levels required to survive the games final challenges.
From the writeup, it sounds like the author is one of the players who never makes it past the mid teens, because he constantly takes risks with his character and will inevitably lose.
Do people actually use such constricted environments for actual chatting? I would think such an environment would become a ghost town populated only with macro spammers in a hurry.
Usually it's groups with names like "Concerned Parents for a Moral Tomorrow" or something like that. They won't let their kids read those kind of books (the ones that might accidentally cause their kids to start thinking on their own), and want to make sure their kids can't accidentally run across them at the library. These kinds of groups are organized enough to stack PTA meetings and get their members elected to the school board if that's what it takes.
My first thought when I read this article was BGAN, since they were throwing around the 'Broadband' term so much. BGAN stands for Broadband Global Area Network.
The downside of all of these systems (besides getting the hardware into the country) is that the airtime is fairly expensive. BGAN runs you about $3.50/Megabyte, and it's cheap for satellite data.
Heck, if you jailbreak it you can develop on the phone itself. I can't recommend that to all but the most hardened touchscreen enthusiast, but it is possible. There are packages that have gcc and development headers available on Cydia, and they do work.
Last time someone posted it the thing held up remarkably well because the author cheated a bit and made his webserver completely stateless, making the only limitation the speed of the network interface and processor. The site would take a long time to respond, but it never crashed the way most webservers (or, more often, their attached databases) do when slammed with requests.
Also, make sure they can get close enough to really see the difference. If you're on smallish (25-30") TVs like people typically use for demos and they're more than a few feet away, many people may go 'Yeah, i can see that they're different, but the Blu-Ray one isn't "better" enough to be worth the difference.' This has been a big problem with the demos I have seen. Close up the Blu-Ray wins hands down, at normal viewing distance I can't justify spending the extra.
This is why dictatorships are doomed to failure. Without a system of checks and balances on power, the people at the top will inevitably become corrupt. History has proven this time and time again.
As a CS student I had to take a lot of math. One thing that always struck me is that a lot of math is a lot like programming (this is not a coincidence) except that you're only allowed to use single letter (greek!) variable and function names.
A lot of math reads like extremely bad Perl programs too, with tons of functionality on every line and no documentation except for a giant paragraph at the top written by someone who is apparently from Mars.
On the other hand, a lot of math is just pattern recognition. Realizing when you need to use one transform over another is a fundamental part of mathematics. Maybe the language simplifies this task somehow? I'm not sure. It always seemed to obscure it more than anything else to me.
Another question to ask: Since you have graduated college and moved on to the professional field, how many times have you been asked to formally prove your work? Sure some people do it here and there, but for the majority of students it is not a useful skill. I know that the people who actually do this look down with disdain at those of us who don't, but I'd wager that in total their numbers are pretty small.
Honestly, it's the people who are really passionate about math who are the ones that are least capable of teaching it to other people. The ones I've known appreciate the subject matter too much to see it be ruined by a class full of students who couldn't care less just how elegant this theory that you're teaching is. They just want to get through the class and get back to stuff they care about.
The only way this guy would get the class he wants is to only teach elective courses that aren't pre-reqs for anything. That's the only way to make sure that your students actually care about the subject and aren't taking the class just because they were forced to. In public education this does not exist until sometimes very very late in a child's development (when it's already too late).
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Unions provide an very strong check against employer abuse, but they have historically proven to be prone to corruption and overly resistant to profound shifts in the marketplace. In other words, they'll fight tooth and nail to protect jobs that are obsolete and ultimately doomed (either through the eventual loss of the job anyway, or the company going under because it is hiring too many obsolete workers).
Unions are messy, but they're the best system we have for keeping companies in check. Anybody who thinks that companies will look out for the best interests of its workers without some sort of external pressure is fooling themselves. Theoretically strong government regulation could prevent the need for unions, but in practice government is too focused on the big picture to effectively deal with the kinds of concerns that Unions address.
I suppose you complain that when someone ties a Bow in their hair that they didn't specify if it was a Compound or Reflex? I'm pretty sure they're using the third meaning of decimated.
Actors and Directors have a union, and are more or less required to get representation (sometimes even competent representation) when dealing with the studio. Agents may be slimy, but at least they're working for you, not the studio.
Musicians on the other hand have no such safety mechanisms and are pretty routinely screwed by the music labels because they have virtually no power at the bargaining table. The labels (used to) control all of the major distribution channels, so you either signed away everything to them or you stayed a no name bar band. That was literally the only two options. If you got to megastar status, you could really negotiate on the contract, but that was a one in a million chance.
With the internet the studios are losing their ironclad grip on the distribution channel and it's showing. Their profits are falling off rapidly as people discover that they don't have to sign their life away just to be heard.
That scam doesn't last too long though because anybody who isn't clueless (which admitted might take awhile to come by) will call the bank and ask about the guards, and when the bank goes "who?", they'll call the cops. It's one of those scams that will work a few times, but will inevitably get you caught if you keep trying it.
Wow, only 6 months before I'm useful in the game? There's no chance that I would get bored and quit before then.
In other words its completely psychosomatic? Or maybe you were misinterpreting the high pitched hum of a flyback for something more sinister?
If you want to verify if it's all in your head, try a blind test. Make friends with someone who has authority to turn those tag sensors on and off. Then set up a test where you walk through them several times, and tell your friend if it is on or off (it should be obvious to you right?). Obviously he will randomly decide (flip of a coin) if it's on or off each time, and then mark the results down on a piece of paper. If you score better than random guessing, then maybe it's not all in your head, but I wouldn't count on it. Make sure you run this test a few dozen times so you don't go flying off of the handle after getting 2 out of 3 right by chance.
Looking at how it works, my guess is that you could brute force someone's "passwindow" card with just a handful of inputs. There are only 7 different elements for each digit, and you should be able to figure out which spots are filled in pretty quickly and what numbers they represent.
Maybe for some of the many "grab a subset of Wikipedia and give it to poor people in (insert random third world country) as an inexpensive form of an Encyclopedia". Nobody would want to have to clear the rights to hundreds of thousands of photos just for some charity work.
I've never understood why MMO developers love to build pet classes, but then can't figure out how to make the pets persist when you switch to a different server (cross zones). This can't be that hard of a problem.
A single DTN node is not terribly useful, where you see advantages is when you have multiple lossy or intermittent links along the path. In this case, TCP will perform very poorly as it can only even try to push data on the cases where all of the links are up and will suffer a lot from TCP's slow start.
Think of it like a game of Frogger: TCP only knows how to play by waiting until all of the cars and logs are line up just right so it can jump all of the way across at once. DTN plays like a human player, one step at a time while it's safe and then waiting for it to become safe for the next step.
One of the interesting aspects of DTN is that it is transport layer agnostic. This means the very same bundle can be sent over TCP, then SCPS, then USB key or whatever and the applications never have to deal with it. The applications only have to speak DTN. There are local Daemons in the network that choose the most optimal transport protocol for whatever the next hop is, and then send the bundle over that.
I think the take home lesson is that low cost is not the only factor in making a successful panel. You can't mass market a panel that degrades in 6 months, or that requires 500 times the power of normal sunlight to be efficient, or is so fragile that it breaks down if you walk near it, or involve a production process that can't scale up.
I hope that at least one of these technologies will pan out finally, but in the meantime I'm hedging my bets and looking at other forms of energy as well.
It may be fun (for awhile), but he's only playing the first 10% of the game over and over again. The rest of the game may as well not exist if you design it that way.
IMHO, probably the best compromise between the two is the often hated "checkpoint" system, where you can only save a set intervals. Sure this means that if you work at it long enough, you can beat the game even with "bad" playing, but it also means you can reasonably take risks and actually have fun instead of tediously grinding your way to godhood.
For a Roguelike, this could be implemented as an autosave every time you go down a level, with death resulting in a restart at the beginning of the level. Sure it will take the "challenge" out of picking up random potions of Blindness or Weakness and having to drink them because there's no good way to identify them otherwise (scrolls of identify being considerably more rare than the random potions you will pick up), but that is not exactly a loss that I would mourn.
I know people will argue that "but if you beat the game you won't feel the need to play it anymore!", but to be honest after a few bullcrap deaths in most Roguelikes, I don't feel like playing them anymore anyway. I'd wager that 90+% of the people who have ever played Nethack have never seen more than the first dozen levels or so, and have not played it nearly as long as a traditional RPG.
I disagree about nethack not having grind because it has permadeath. Permadeath in Nethack is the primary reason the game is almost entirely grind. If you ever find yourself in a situation where death is close, you are playing wrong, in order to succeed in Nethack (or any roguelike for that matter), you have to play conservatively, beating up on things that pose no threat to you while escaping anything that might pose a challenge. Even if you can beat a challenging monster 95% of the time, eventually that 5% will catch up to you and all of your progress will be erased by a small handful of bad rolls. This is why only obsessives play Nethack, nobody else has the patience to grind their way up to the godlike levels required to survive the games final challenges.
From the writeup, it sounds like the author is one of the players who never makes it past the mid teens, because he constantly takes risks with his character and will inevitably lose.
Do people actually use such constricted environments for actual chatting? I would think such an environment would become a ghost town populated only with macro spammers in a hurry.
Usually it's groups with names like "Concerned Parents for a Moral Tomorrow" or something like that. They won't let their kids read those kind of books (the ones that might accidentally cause their kids to start thinking on their own), and want to make sure their kids can't accidentally run across them at the library. These kinds of groups are organized enough to stack PTA meetings and get their members elected to the school board if that's what it takes.
Interesting, the system restore disk doesn't come with the crapware? That is very unusual in OEM world from what I've seen.
My first thought when I read this article was BGAN, since they were throwing around the 'Broadband' term so much. BGAN stands for Broadband Global Area Network.
The downside of all of these systems (besides getting the hardware into the country) is that the airtime is fairly expensive. BGAN runs you about $3.50/Megabyte, and it's cheap for satellite data.
Heck, if you jailbreak it you can develop on the phone itself. I can't recommend that to all but the most hardened touchscreen enthusiast, but it is possible. There are packages that have gcc and development headers available on Cydia, and they do work.
Last time someone posted it the thing held up remarkably well because the author cheated a bit and made his webserver completely stateless, making the only limitation the speed of the network interface and processor. The site would take a long time to respond, but it never crashed the way most webservers (or, more often, their attached databases) do when slammed with requests.
Should I be relieved that I have no idea what the heck "zebu porn" is?
Also, make sure they can get close enough to really see the difference. If you're on smallish (25-30") TVs like people typically use for demos and they're more than a few feet away, many people may go 'Yeah, i can see that they're different, but the Blu-Ray one isn't "better" enough to be worth the difference.' This has been a big problem with the demos I have seen. Close up the Blu-Ray wins hands down, at normal viewing distance I can't justify spending the extra.
This is why dictatorships are doomed to failure. Without a system of checks and balances on power, the people at the top will inevitably become corrupt. History has proven this time and time again.
As a CS student I had to take a lot of math. One thing that always struck me is that a lot of math is a lot like programming (this is not a coincidence) except that you're only allowed to use single letter (greek!) variable and function names.
A lot of math reads like extremely bad Perl programs too, with tons of functionality on every line and no documentation except for a giant paragraph at the top written by someone who is apparently from Mars.
On the other hand, a lot of math is just pattern recognition. Realizing when you need to use one transform over another is a fundamental part of mathematics. Maybe the language simplifies this task somehow? I'm not sure. It always seemed to obscure it more than anything else to me.
Another question to ask: Since you have graduated college and moved on to the professional field, how many times have you been asked to formally prove your work? Sure some people do it here and there, but for the majority of students it is not a useful skill. I know that the people who actually do this look down with disdain at those of us who don't, but I'd wager that in total their numbers are pretty small.
Honestly, it's the people who are really passionate about math who are the ones that are least capable of teaching it to other people. The ones I've known appreciate the subject matter too much to see it be ruined by a class full of students who couldn't care less just how elegant this theory that you're teaching is. They just want to get through the class and get back to stuff they care about.
The only way this guy would get the class he wants is to only teach elective courses that aren't pre-reqs for anything. That's the only way to make sure that your students actually care about the subject and aren't taking the class just because they were forced to. In public education this does not exist until sometimes very very late in a child's development (when it's already too late).