An exam on compiler design will punish a "good programmer" who doesn't understand the fundamentals of compiler design. An exam on artificial intelligence will punish a "good programmer" who doesn't understand the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. An exam on discrete math will punish a "good programmer" who doesn't understand the fundamentals of discrete math.
Get the point? Not all CS exams attempt to measure whether or not you are "a good programmer". The exams are there to test mastery of the syllabus, which, with the exception of some entry level courses, doesn't have a whole lot to do with writing code.
If you reread my post, I said "CS exams that involve programming". You even quoted that part, but obviously didn't pay attention to it.
I would never expect courses like discrete math, compulatibility theory, algorithms, etc. to be tested on computer because those courses involve little to no programming. As you said, that's not what we're supposed to learn in those courses. In fact, of the courses I've taken in my program, only 4 I felt should have been tested on computer.
I'd been programming for over a decade before I took my first CS exam, so I think I'm qualified to say that writing code on paper is unnatural. Programming is a process that's about more than what's on screen. XP has it right: Design a little, test a little, code a little. Only half of this can be done on paper. The coding part is somewhat crippled, and the most important step (testing) is missing entirely!
Written programming tests are better than nothing (or oral tests), but they're a stopgap solution that institutions seriously need to phase out ASAP.
Paper is just plainly the wrong medium for CS exams that involve programming. That became plainly obvious in my first CS exam and only got worse.
CS students should be tested on computers in at least a simulated development environment. (Controls would of course be needed to prevent cheating). Reference manuals should also be allowed as using them is a vital part of being a programmer. Forcing students to remember the parameters to fopen() or whatever is just pathetic.
If athletes were tested like computer programmers, the teams would be made up of those who could write the best description of how to play the sport, not of those who could actually play it the best. The worst part is that the intersection of those two groups is probably not very large, especially in CS, so I think some truly good programmers are being punished.
In first year CS our prof once asked us how to make the course better and I suggested the exams be held on computer. She was actually quite receptive to the idea, but as we both knew it was impractical. Computers cost $$$ and take up extra space, and testing 400 or more students on computers is just too ugly.
However, we are getting to the point where it's starting to become a lot more feasible, so I dearly hope educational institutions will start to upgrade their evaluation methods.
In the meantime, I hope instructors treat handwritten code more like a sketch than a masterpiece. We were lucky that the profs here didn't worry too much about syntax in handwritten code and instead looked for understanding of what we were doing. If we were a bit off on the syntax that was okay as long as we had the concepts down well. But we still did have to memorize a lot of stuff that was quite unnecessary and that's just Wrong.
I've known this for a long time now, didn't know t was hush-hush. If you live in Western Canada you can get the first Tier basic cable package by splitting off the cable line. Shaw doesn't have any remedies for this at all in the foreseeable future due to technical regions. So, once again, if you live in Western Canada with Shaw broadband access (80% of us) you can get free cable as well.
This is not true. I had my cable TV blocked for two years with Shaw (in Calgary) until last month when I decided I'd get cable for the summer. When I first signed up for cable Internet they left the entire package on my line. The installer even told me so (which was the only reason I used it). But one day two years later a van pulled up to the pole out back and stuck the filters in and the party was over.
The only channels I could still get were 14, 15, and 2 (the program listing channel) and they weren't very strong None of the other channels worked at all.
So obviously, they have the technology. The problem just has to get bad enough to the point where it's worth sending out their technicians to correct it. Cable techs are run ragged as it is without having to visit every customer.
I expect that here after nearly five years of increasing numbers of new users getting full cable for free they decided it was time to do something, but in most places they probably won't bother - at least not for a while.
BTW, I'm sure it's very hypocritical of me to say it, but regardless of how betrayed or contstrained you feel by the cable company's rates, pulling the cable TV from your line is still wrong (unless of course your broadband deal specifically mentions it's allowed). It might even not be legally wrong in all areas but it is morally wrong.
I mention this last point because it seems to me the main reason this story was posted was to "get back" at AT&T for the rate hike, and that's just plain Wrong.
I read the preview on GameSpot about two weeks ago. SimCity 4 just looks like more of the same. They may enhance the simulation but it's basically still the same game as the original.
Remember when SimCity 3000 was first announced? It was supposed to be a fully 3D game with a very detailed business simulation. They eventually scrapped it claiming it was too ambitious.
Okay, back them that might have taken a pretty high-end system, but why not now? I'll bet even my crummy system (P3 500, TNT2) would more than suffice. (It runs Black & White and I doubt SC4 would need to be that fancy.)
Computing power's evolved, the game hasn't. SimCity 4 may have a 3D engine but it's a long way from being fully 3D, and while the enhancements to the simulator sound good they still fall way short.
When they develop a SimCity that is what SimCity 3000 was supposed to be, I'll be the first in line to buy it. Until then, SimCity 2000 is still pretty damn fun!
Why don't the transportation departments go out and hire "starving artists" to paint their traffic signs? They could probably get them a lot cheaper than sign companies.
The department wins by saving money, the artists win by having work. The only losers might be the sign companies, but only slightly because artists won't be able to replace sign companies by any means.
Yeah this sounds an overly simplistic solution, but if it hasn't been tried then who's to say it won't work?
BTW I completely disapprove of what the guy did, but at its core it might be a good idea.
You can do refills pretty easily with some printers.
I've been refilling my Canon BJC-4000 for over 3 years now. It's not a process for the faint of heart (or those that hate to get dirty!), but it can be done.
I use the big BC-21 black ink tanks which have a plug in the top that you can get out fairly easily. Then I just inject the ink into the sponge inside with a syringe. A bit of cleanup, put the plug back in, and it's done. It takes less than 10 minutes.
Not only that, the ink from the supplier I found is, IMO, much better than Canon's. It's darker and seems to print a bit clearer.
I bought a big (500mL) bottle of ink for $99CDN and by the time I'm done with it I'll have got close to 50 refills out of it. A cartridge costs $40CDN. Do the math!
Well, actually I can only get about 3-5 refills out of a cartridge before the print head gets too clogged, at which point I still have to buy a new cartridge. But that's a lot better than buying a new one every single time!
I simply couldn't afford to own a printer without refills. It's something I intend to look into carefully when I buy my next printer. If a manufacturer goes out of the way to make refilling difficult, then I'll go out of my way to avoid buying their product.
Really cool Tron games
on
Tron 2.0 Game
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Does anybody else remember the Tron games for Intellivision? They were some of the best ever games for that system.
Tron Deadly Discs was my favourite. It wasn't like the arcade game Discs of Tron, instead you and the enemies ran around a playfield throwing discs at each other. Eventually the Recognizer would come and you'd have to hit it in just the right spot to disable it. It was pretty easy but still lots of fun.
Tron Solar Sailer was the coolest Intellivoice game. It was a pretty weird concept that I can't really describe too well, but it actually had quite a bit to do with the movie.
There was another game, Tron Maze-A-Tron which I didn't think was very good. Basically you just ran around a maze doing stuff.
Of course the arcade games were a lot of fun too but for a youngster with very little money it was a lot nicer to have something to play at home.
If that's the accepted definition of a dead-end job, then I sure hope it's true. Those of us who have coding in our blood don't want to do anything else. I've been coding since I was 8 years old and it's still the only thing I really love to do.
Die-hard coders live for the crunch of a deadline; it's when we're at our best. If it means we have to go without sleep or food or hygiene then so be it, we couldn't be more happy.
When we have spare time, we code. Utilities, games, time-wasters, whatever strikes our fancy at the time. How many people go to work doing something all day and then come home and do the exact same thing for fun, and still enjoy it?
Speaking for myself, I can live comfortably off of a senior programmer's salary all my life. The extra figures don't mean enough to me. I love every aspect of coding and have no interest in a management position. Having just completed a software engineering course that felt more like a management course, I now know more than ever that this is true.
Some of us are just born to code. Those that aren't can probably tolerate it for a while, but then they'll want to move on. I think that's largely true of any profession, not just coding.
Maybe I'm too old to understand (I'm 40, which probably makes me older than 95% of/. readers), but I consider/. to be a news site. I come here for IT/geek news. Normally my attitude is if its important in the world of computing, it will be on/..
The thing I find ironic about all this is that so often people complain about Slashdot having old news and stuff they already knew about. Today (it's still April 1st for me) we got probably the freshest set of stories seen on Slashdot for a long time - none more than 24 hours old. Yet now people are complaining for a totally different reason.
I look at it this way:
Slashdot only played one April fools joke themselves today (the stuff about ad-stories). Aside from that, Slashdot did what it's supposed to do - it reported the news for nerds. Today because of this day's nerdy nature it just happens that the news consists of jokes.
The question is, then, do jokes == news? From the looks of it, most people say no. Actually I'd probably agree with them - I'm not an April Fools Day fan, and I don't believe in so-called "practical jokes". But I respect the importance of April 1st in the traditions of "nerd culture", so I don't bitch about it.
In fact, I admit I even had a few chuckles today. All in all I actually found the whole thing quite interesting. It was different, if nothing else!
Just so long as things gets back to "normal" now that it's over...
...on GameSpot. See I don't actually know anything about the Warcraft series - never played the games or seen them as that kind of game doesn't really interst me - so I didn't pay much attention to it when I visited GameSpot earlier today.
The kicker is that I was actually on heightened alert for April Fool's jokes. I knew GameSpot would have one. I even skimmed this story just to be sure, but the article made it sound like Orcs were a new race that were supposed to be added, and like I said I didn't know any better, so I moved on.
Only now that this story has shown up here have I realized it was a pile of crap. So congrats, GameSpot, ya got me!
I bet you could convince more kids to brush if, say, you had a toothbrush that played the Barney theme song while you were brushing.
This has been done, more-or-less. Not sure if it's an only-in-Canada thing, but Colgate makes a tube of toothpaste with Barney on it that chimes our a whiney electronic version of Yankee Doodle whenever the lid is opened. My mom runs a dayhome and one of the kids keeps one of these things here.
I do not expect this product to last long on the market. For one thing, you can't shut it off! If you open it by mistake or something you're forced to listen to 70 seconds of this thing. It drives you nuts fast.
Yes, the kids do like it, but they like it too much - all the other kids kept trying to fool with it. At least the music makes it easy to catch them.:-)
Here's the worst part:
One morning I go into the bathroom to get ready for classes, and I become aware of this very high-pitched ringing. After determining it wasn't my ears, I started listening around for it.
I figured it might be air in the plumbing, so I bent down to listen to the sink. As I honed in on the sound, to my horror I realized it wasn't a sustained ring but in fact a series of very short, distinct beeps. Then I saw the Barney toothpaste, and sure enough, the thing was malfunctioning and emitting these beeps non-stop.
It took a very hard *WHACK* against the counter to get it to shut up. The thing is tucked away in a drawer now. It even started beeping once again but another whack seems to have shut it up for good - I hope.
In the case of Staroffice/OpenOffice, it seems to me that real reason behind the split is to 'force' people to use Solaris instead of Linux.
Bingo.
It seems to me (though I don't follow this too closely) that Solaris has been losing to Linux for quite some time now, and that Sun is very worried about that. So I suspect they are using StarOffice as bait to get people to switch. It's a real act of desperation. Fortunately, it won't work. StarOffice is nice but it's no killer app.
I would have been willing to pay a reasonable fee for 6.0. $40 or so for a quality program that's comparable to MS Office is quite a steal. That Sun realizes this is a good thing.
However, not charging for the Solaris version is just plain low. It's Microsoft low, to be blunt. It's an attempt (though futile) to manipulate people into switching to Solaris. I won't stand for it. So I guess I'll stick with 5.2 or maybe try OpenOffice, and hope that Sun comes to their senses soon.
Hell, when I was searching for flower delivery companies online with google during vday week, I wasn't sure who to go with -- but the advertising results gave me several great options and I wound up using two of them.
Um, two? Does that mean there were two different recipients? No wonder this was posted anonymously!
Actually, BC++ 2.0 for OS/2 was quite stable and worked very well for what I used it for. They seemed to have fixed all of the major problems, e.g. with compiling long functions. I used it for several DOS to OS/2 ports and also for some Presentation Manager applications.
The sad part was that shortly after it was released, Borland gave up on their OS/2 compiler. Had they given 2.0 a chance it might have cut into CSet and Watcom's share. (Though dropping it turned out to be a good move because OS/2 interest itself petered out soon after.)
Hopefully they will get it right for the Linux edition, both in terms of the product quality and the way they approach marketing it.
The Pro Pinball series is probably the best line of computer-specific pinball games you can get. While you need Windows to play the PC versions, the tables are generally quite well designed, the physics are very well-done, and they even have the diagnostics and statistics that real pinball machines have. There's also a web site with worldwide high scores for each game.
One of the major knocks against the Pro Pinball series was that you only got one table for the price of a normal computer game. I thought Timeshock was well worth the full price, but at any rate this is no longer a problem. Last summer I found a bundle with all four games (plus a bunch of casino and other games) for only $25 Canadian. This is a huge bargain since the games have hundreds of hours of replay value!
I see this as a sign that online shopping is starting to become less of a novelty and more of an everyday thing.
Lots of those online price breaks were to encourage people to try online shopping. As more and more people start to buy online, the need to offer incentives goes down and the need to actually profit from online business goes up. It's a classic ploy that even Homer Simpson recognized: "Get us addicted then jack up the price!"
As for the auction sites, it shows to me that sellers are starting to take them seriously. In the past people might have put up a bit of old junk to see how the auction site worked. If it sold for next to nothing, that was okay - chock it up to research. Now, sellers know there are people out there willing to pay for hard-to-find, high demand items, and they set their minimum bids accordingly.
Of course this quasi-recession we're in isn't helping matters, but I think that's only a small part of it. To me this is just the natural evolution of doing business online.
What we should do as a country is not recognize any offical religious holidays. Employeers should allow people who ask to take a personal day off for their chosen real/imaginary/weird holidays.
I totally agree with this. Being a "true" athiest I get annoyed at having religious holidays forced down my throat (so to speak).
I firmly respect people's right to believe in what they want to believe in, and to take whatever holidays are significant to them. But those of us who either want to work or simply just don't care should have the option.
Not sure about the US, but there are still some parts of Canada where it is prohibited by law to open on holidays, religious or otherwise. These anachronistic laws are gradually being overturned but it takes a long time of course.
However, even if all the laws get changed and companies are free to do as they please, it doesn't mean things are going to be any different. Logistically it'd a nightmare for many companies. If 80% of your workforce wants Dec. 25 off, it would probably be more feasible to not even bother to operate that day. So the other 20% would still have to take the day off anyhow.
As for myself, well, I don't have a job, and as a student I'm glad to get a few weeks off after a tough semester! However, I wouldn't mind being in class now if it meant I could finish my degree a few months sooner.
There's also an Intellivision version of the game mentioned here. Looks like Parker Brothers had big plans for their LOTR licence. Too bad it was just as the 80's video game market collapsed!
Slashdot Mirror
An exam on compiler design will punish a "good programmer" who doesn't understand the fundamentals of compiler design. An exam on artificial intelligence will punish a "good programmer" who doesn't understand the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. An exam on discrete math will punish a "good programmer" who doesn't understand the fundamentals of discrete math.
Get the point? Not all CS exams attempt to measure whether or not you are "a good programmer". The exams are there to test mastery of the syllabus, which, with the exception of some entry level courses, doesn't have a whole lot to do with writing code.
If you reread my post, I said "CS exams that involve programming". You even quoted that part, but obviously didn't pay attention to it.
I would never expect courses like discrete math, compulatibility theory, algorithms, etc. to be tested on computer because those courses involve little to no programming. As you said, that's not what we're supposed to learn in those courses. In fact, of the courses I've taken in my program, only 4 I felt should have been tested on computer.
I'd been programming for over a decade before I took my first CS exam, so I think I'm qualified to say that writing code on paper is unnatural. Programming is a process that's about more than what's on screen. XP has it right: Design a little, test a little, code a little. Only half of this can be done on paper. The coding part is somewhat crippled, and the most important step (testing) is missing entirely!
Written programming tests are better than nothing (or oral tests), but they're a stopgap solution that institutions seriously need to phase out ASAP.
Yes! I'm glad somebody finally brought this up.
Paper is just plainly the wrong medium for CS exams that involve programming. That became plainly obvious in my first CS exam and only got worse.
CS students should be tested on computers in at least a simulated development environment. (Controls would of course be needed to prevent cheating). Reference manuals should also be allowed as using them is a vital part of being a programmer. Forcing students to remember the parameters to fopen() or whatever is just pathetic.
If athletes were tested like computer programmers, the teams would be made up of those who could write the best description of how to play the sport, not of those who could actually play it the best. The worst part is that the intersection of those two groups is probably not very large, especially in CS, so I think some truly good programmers are being punished.
In first year CS our prof once asked us how to make the course better and I suggested the exams be held on computer. She was actually quite receptive to the idea, but as we both knew it was impractical. Computers cost $$$ and take up extra space, and testing 400 or more students on computers is just too ugly.
However, we are getting to the point where it's starting to become a lot more feasible, so I dearly hope educational institutions will start to upgrade their evaluation methods.
In the meantime, I hope instructors treat handwritten code more like a sketch than a masterpiece. We were lucky that the profs here didn't worry too much about syntax in handwritten code and instead looked for understanding of what we were doing. If we were a bit off on the syntax that was okay as long as we had the concepts down well. But we still did have to memorize a lot of stuff that was quite unnecessary and that's just Wrong.
I've known this for a long time now, didn't know t was hush-hush. If you live in Western Canada you can get the first Tier basic cable package by splitting off the cable line. Shaw doesn't have any remedies for this at all in the foreseeable future due to technical regions. So, once again, if you live in Western Canada with Shaw broadband access (80% of us) you can get free cable as well.
This is not true. I had my cable TV blocked for two years with Shaw (in Calgary) until last month when I decided I'd get cable for the summer. When I first signed up for cable Internet they left the entire package on my line. The installer even told me so (which was the only reason I used it). But one day two years later a van pulled up to the pole out back and stuck the filters in and the party was over.
The only channels I could still get were 14, 15, and 2 (the program listing channel) and they weren't very strong None of the other channels worked at all.
So obviously, they have the technology. The problem just has to get bad enough to the point where it's worth sending out their technicians to correct it. Cable techs are run ragged as it is without having to visit every customer.
I expect that here after nearly five years of increasing numbers of new users getting full cable for free they decided it was time to do something, but in most places they probably won't bother - at least not for a while.
BTW, I'm sure it's very hypocritical of me to say it, but regardless of how betrayed or contstrained you feel by the cable company's rates, pulling the cable TV from your line is still wrong (unless of course your broadband deal specifically mentions it's allowed). It might even not be legally wrong in all areas but it is morally wrong.
I mention this last point because it seems to me the main reason this story was posted was to "get back" at AT&T for the rate hike, and that's just plain Wrong.
I read the preview on GameSpot about two weeks ago. SimCity 4 just looks like more of the same. They may enhance the simulation but it's basically still the same game as the original.
Remember when SimCity 3000 was first announced? It was supposed to be a fully 3D game with a very detailed business simulation. They eventually scrapped it claiming it was too ambitious.
Okay, back them that might have taken a pretty high-end system, but why not now? I'll bet even my crummy system (P3 500, TNT2) would more than suffice. (It runs Black & White and I doubt SC4 would need to be that fancy.)
Computing power's evolved, the game hasn't. SimCity 4 may have a 3D engine but it's a long way from being fully 3D, and while the enhancements to the simulator sound good they still fall way short.
When they develop a SimCity that is what SimCity 3000 was supposed to be, I'll be the first in line to buy it. Until then, SimCity 2000 is still pretty damn fun!
Why don't the transportation departments go out and hire "starving artists" to paint their traffic signs? They could probably get them a lot cheaper than sign companies.
The department wins by saving money, the artists win by having work. The only losers might be the sign companies, but only slightly because artists won't be able to replace sign companies by any means.
Yeah this sounds an overly simplistic solution, but if it hasn't been tried then who's to say it won't work?
BTW I completely disapprove of what the guy did, but at its core it might be a good idea.
You can do refills pretty easily with some printers.
I've been refilling my Canon BJC-4000 for over 3 years now. It's not a process for the faint of heart (or those that hate to get dirty!), but it can be done.
I use the big BC-21 black ink tanks which have a plug in the top that you can get out fairly easily. Then I just inject the ink into the sponge inside with a syringe. A bit of cleanup, put the plug back in, and it's done. It takes less than 10 minutes.
Not only that, the ink from the supplier I found is, IMO, much better than Canon's. It's darker and seems to print a bit clearer.
I bought a big (500mL) bottle of ink for $99CDN and by the time I'm done with it I'll have got close to 50 refills out of it. A cartridge costs $40CDN. Do the math!
Well, actually I can only get about 3-5 refills out of a cartridge before the print head gets too clogged, at which point I still have to buy a new cartridge. But that's a lot better than buying a new one every single time!
I simply couldn't afford to own a printer without refills. It's something I intend to look into carefully when I buy my next printer. If a manufacturer goes out of the way to make refilling difficult, then I'll go out of my way to avoid buying their product.
Does anybody else remember the Tron games for Intellivision? They were some of the best ever games for that system.
Tron Deadly Discs was my favourite. It wasn't like the arcade game Discs of Tron, instead you and the enemies ran around a playfield throwing discs at each other. Eventually the Recognizer would come and you'd have to hit it in just the right spot to disable it. It was pretty easy but still lots of fun.
Tron Solar Sailer was the coolest Intellivoice game. It was a pretty weird concept that I can't really describe too well, but it actually had quite a bit to do with the movie.
There was another game, Tron Maze-A-Tron which I didn't think was very good. Basically you just ran around a maze doing stuff.
Of course the arcade games were a lot of fun too but for a youngster with very little money it was a lot nicer to have something to play at home.
If that's the accepted definition of a dead-end job, then I sure hope it's true. Those of us who have coding in our blood don't want to do anything else. I've been coding since I was 8 years old and it's still the only thing I really love to do.
Die-hard coders live for the crunch of a deadline; it's when we're at our best. If it means we have to go without sleep or food or hygiene then so be it, we couldn't be more happy.
When we have spare time, we code. Utilities, games, time-wasters, whatever strikes our fancy at the time. How many people go to work doing something all day and then come home and do the exact same thing for fun, and still enjoy it?
Speaking for myself, I can live comfortably off of a senior programmer's salary all my life. The extra figures don't mean enough to me. I love every aspect of coding and have no interest in a management position. Having just completed a software engineering course that felt more like a management course, I now know more than ever that this is true.
Some of us are just born to code. Those that aren't can probably tolerate it for a while, but then they'll want to move on. I think that's largely true of any profession, not just coding.
As for me, I hope I can code until I die.
Maybe I'm too old to understand (I'm 40, which probably makes me older than 95% of /. readers), but I consider /. to be a news site. I come here for IT/geek news. Normally my attitude is if its important in the world of computing, it will be /..
on
The thing I find ironic about all this is that so often people complain about Slashdot having old news and stuff they already knew about. Today (it's still April 1st for me) we got probably the freshest set of stories seen on Slashdot for a long time - none more than 24 hours old. Yet now people are complaining for a totally different reason.
I look at it this way:
Slashdot only played one April fools joke themselves today (the stuff about ad-stories). Aside from that, Slashdot did what it's supposed to do - it reported the news for nerds. Today because of this day's nerdy nature it just happens that the news consists of jokes.
The question is, then, do jokes == news? From the looks of it, most people say no. Actually I'd probably agree with them - I'm not an April Fools Day fan, and I don't believe in so-called "practical jokes". But I respect the importance of April 1st in the traditions of "nerd culture", so I don't bitch about it.
In fact, I admit I even had a few chuckles today. All in all I actually found the whole thing quite interesting. It was different, if nothing else!
Just so long as things gets back to "normal" now that it's over...
...on GameSpot. See I don't actually know anything about the Warcraft series - never played the games or seen them as that kind of game doesn't really interst me - so I didn't pay much attention to it when I visited GameSpot earlier today.
The kicker is that I was actually on heightened alert for April Fool's jokes. I knew GameSpot would have one. I even skimmed this story just to be sure, but the article made it sound like Orcs were a new race that were supposed to be added, and like I said I didn't know any better, so I moved on.
Only now that this story has shown up here have I realized it was a pile of crap. So congrats, GameSpot, ya got me!
I bet you could convince more kids to brush if, say, you had a toothbrush that played the Barney theme song while you were brushing.
:-)
This has been done, more-or-less. Not sure if it's an only-in-Canada thing, but Colgate makes a tube of toothpaste with Barney on it that chimes our a whiney electronic version of Yankee Doodle whenever the lid is opened. My mom runs a dayhome and one of the kids keeps one of these things here.
I do not expect this product to last long on the market. For one thing, you can't shut it off! If you open it by mistake or something you're forced to listen to 70 seconds of this thing. It drives you nuts fast.
Yes, the kids do like it, but they like it too much - all the other kids kept trying to fool with it. At least the music makes it easy to catch them.
Here's the worst part:
One morning I go into the bathroom to get ready for classes, and I become aware of this very high-pitched ringing. After determining it wasn't my ears, I started listening around for it.
I figured it might be air in the plumbing, so I bent down to listen to the sink. As I honed in on the sound, to my horror I realized it wasn't a sustained ring but in fact a series of very short, distinct beeps. Then I saw the Barney toothpaste, and sure enough, the thing was malfunctioning and emitting these beeps non-stop.
It took a very hard *WHACK* against the counter to get it to shut up. The thing is tucked away in a drawer now. It even started beeping once again but another whack seems to have shut it up for good - I hope.
Be careful what you wish for...
In fact, there are several stopping lights at intersections just blocks from my house!
In the case of Staroffice/OpenOffice, it seems to me that real reason behind the split is to 'force' people to use Solaris instead of Linux.
Bingo.
It seems to me (though I don't follow this too closely) that Solaris has been losing to Linux for quite some time now, and that Sun is very worried about that. So I suspect they are using StarOffice as bait to get people to switch. It's a real act of desperation. Fortunately, it won't work. StarOffice is nice but it's no killer app.
I would have been willing to pay a reasonable fee for 6.0. $40 or so for a quality program that's comparable to MS Office is quite a steal. That Sun realizes this is a good thing.
However, not charging for the Solaris version is just plain low. It's Microsoft low, to be blunt. It's an attempt (though futile) to manipulate people into switching to Solaris. I won't stand for it. So I guess I'll stick with 5.2 or maybe try OpenOffice, and hope that Sun comes to their senses soon.
Hell, when I was searching for flower delivery companies online with google during vday week, I wasn't sure who to go with -- but the advertising results gave me several great options and I wound up using two of them.
Um, two? Does that mean there were two different recipients? No wonder this was posted anonymously!
Actually, BC++ 2.0 for OS/2 was quite stable and worked very well for what I used it for. They seemed to have fixed all of the major problems, e.g. with compiling long functions. I used it for several DOS to OS/2 ports and also for some Presentation Manager applications.
The sad part was that shortly after it was released, Borland gave up on their OS/2 compiler. Had they given 2.0 a chance it might have cut into CSet and Watcom's share. (Though dropping it turned out to be a good move because OS/2 interest itself petered out soon after.)
Hopefully they will get it right for the Linux edition, both in terms of the product quality and the way they approach marketing it.
The Pro Pinball series is probably the best line of computer-specific pinball games you can get. While you need Windows to play the PC versions, the tables are generally quite well designed, the physics are very well-done, and they even have the diagnostics and statistics that real pinball machines have. There's also a web site with worldwide high scores for each game.
One of the major knocks against the Pro Pinball series was that you only got one table for the price of a normal computer game. I thought Timeshock was well worth the full price, but at any rate this is no longer a problem. Last summer I found a bundle with all four games (plus a bunch of casino and other games) for only $25 Canadian. This is a huge bargain since the games have hundreds of hours of replay value!
I see this as a sign that online shopping is starting to become less of a novelty and more of an everyday thing.
Lots of those online price breaks were to encourage people to try online shopping. As more and more people start to buy online, the need to offer incentives goes down and the need to actually profit from online business goes up. It's a classic ploy that even Homer Simpson recognized: "Get us addicted then jack up the price!"
As for the auction sites, it shows to me that sellers are starting to take them seriously. In the past people might have put up a bit of old junk to see how the auction site worked. If it sold for next to nothing, that was okay - chock it up to research. Now, sellers know there are people out there willing to pay for hard-to-find, high demand items, and they set their minimum bids accordingly.
Of course this quasi-recession we're in isn't helping matters, but I think that's only a small part of it. To me this is just the natural evolution of doing business online.
What we should do as a country is not recognize any offical religious holidays. Employeers should allow people who ask to take a personal day off for their chosen real/imaginary/weird holidays.
I totally agree with this. Being a "true" athiest I get annoyed at having religious holidays forced down my throat (so to speak).
I firmly respect people's right to believe in what they want to believe in, and to take whatever holidays are significant to them. But those of us who either want to work or simply just don't care should have the option.
Not sure about the US, but there are still some parts of Canada where it is prohibited by law to open on holidays, religious or otherwise. These anachronistic laws are gradually being overturned but it takes a long time of course.
However, even if all the laws get changed and companies are free to do as they please, it doesn't mean things are going to be any different. Logistically it'd a nightmare for many companies. If 80% of your workforce wants Dec. 25 off, it would probably be more feasible to not even bother to operate that day. So the other 20% would still have to take the day off anyhow.
As for myself, well, I don't have a job, and as a student I'm glad to get a few weeks off after a tough semester! However, I wouldn't mind being in class now if it meant I could finish my degree a few months sooner.
There's also an Intellivision version of the game mentioned here. Looks like Parker Brothers had big plans for their LOTR licence. Too bad it was just as the 80's video game market collapsed!