In college I knew several Computer Engineers that didn't really know what the hell their major was until it was almost too late
This is my experience to a T. It took 2 years of "can you hack it" classes to get into basic circuit theory at my SmartyPants U, another semester after that into the basics of comp. engineering. It was at this point where I discovered a terrible truth: I Didn't Enjoy Comp. Engineering. Of course, at that point there's nothing a college student can do. I had 89 hours by the end of that semester, and I desperately wanted out. Of course, SmaryPants U wanted me to stay put, seeing as I'd already invested so much time & energy in one major.
Once again, this is a generalization but luckily my friends didn't lose any hours switching to MIS and now make more money than I do with my silly CS degree. Lucky bastards... They wouldn't let me make the switch.
I think that another major problem looming is our own impression of the driving experience. Current cars are designed to brake and to accelerate when necessary. They are also designed to wait (say at a red light or an accident). Current airplanes are required to continue moving, you can't stop and wait at a floating red light for other traffic streams to cross your flight path. We could accomplish the going and stopping thing farily easily with helicopter-based cars. But then that violates the dreamy idea seeminly present in most every flying-car futurescape we see.
A bigger obstacle to future development of flying cars is not just the technology to get it to work safely, it's the building of the infrastructure. When cars were invented before the turn of the 20th century, there were no improved roads to speak of. Cars were driving around on horse and buggy trails and tearing them to pieces, so much so that toll roads started charging cars ridiculously high fees compared to buggies. It was individual car owners banding together into motor clubs that originally drove the production of new roads and the improvement of older trails. The federal government didn't get involved until shortly after WWI, and they had to clean up the mess of thousands of groups working with what they had. Today's public wouldn't allow a group of "flying car enthusiast clubs" to set up air roads and such. They would expect the government to establish regulations for how such a system would work, and we know that it could take years for the govt to figure it all out.
But if I take off my tinfoil hat I start to wonder: WHY do cellphones have cameras? Did YOU ask for your cellphone to have a camera? Did you WANT your cellphone to have a camera? Did you have a USE for your cellphone to have a camera?
A few years back, everyone was clamoring about "internet on your mobile" and how it would revolutionize your mobile experience. The telcos sunk billions of dollars into upgrading their networks for things like 3G, etc. They had a lot of money riding on the fact that people would love using the internet anywhere. When the services started rolling out, no one in America seemed really intersted. Most web pages weren't created with mobile phones in mind for viewing on a tiny 240x360 (at best) sized screen. Portal pages designed by the mobile telcos offered things such as news highlights, sports, and weather, but who wants to pay $10 a month to check the weather whenever you want? Just walk outside! The user experience was horrible, and no one wanted the new-fangled mobile internet. The telcos had all this extra bandwidth that they paid through the nose to set up, and they had no one to sell it to (end users). So, they invented services that would take advantage of the bandwidth, such as email and sending pictures back and forth between a user's mobile and computer. This is the main reason behind sticking cameras into phones, and the same logic (roughly) applies to SMS and to ringtones.
Regarding your perl sig: It was a very pleasurable experience to figure that bastard out =).
In looking at it, you can trim the,109 at the tail end if you change your input string and tack on an ì. Why didn't you? There was also a typo in there (ending the phrase with a , instead of a period). Also, I tried looking it up my three O'Reilly Perl books, but I didn't see the for @_ method you used. Where'd you dig that up from?
push @x,ord()-32 for split'','Z=!;g&7?oO&:;- aì';split'','phroggy'x4;print chr^shift @_ for @x
If this is your bag, you're better off going with last.fm, who recently combined with audioscrobbler. Using a tiny plugin to your computer's music player, it uploads what songs you listen to, then builds an index and finds neighbors to your listening habits in the database. Then, get this, you get to listen to music straight off of those neighbor's profiles, so you can find new music reeeeally easily. From what I understand, there's work being done in getting it to work with an iPod, so when you plug in it checks to see what songs you've played and sends those up to your profile. Rockin!
Unfortunately, even the person finding the cat can never sure he actually found it, no matter how much he claims so.
bullshit. According to your thinking: If something looks like a duck, feels like a duck, quacks like a duck, behaves like a duck, and even smells like a duck, then... we still can never be fully 100% sure it's truly a duck.
The industry loses nothing from my copying of their precious data, because I would not have purchased that data anyhow.
That is probably among the silliest arguments I have ever heard to justify a person's downloading illegal media. If you don't have the permission of the copyright owner, you don't get the privilege of listening to it. Period. End of story. This is the basic idea behind a copyright. In the case of this media, the copyright holder demands that you pay them a fee in exchange for the media's use. Saying that you wouldn't have bought it to begin with justifies nothing. You legally have no right or privilege to listen to the music or watch the videos that you have not paid the copyright holder for. The only exceptions to this rule are at the sole discretion of the copyright holder, whether you like it or not.
In short, you have no excuse for being a freeloader other than you don't feel like paying. Your words indicate that you are trying to justify your criminality in a way that won't irreperably harm your conscience. Admit it, you are a common criminal, and you are deserving of "petty justice" under your nation's laws.
Looks like the reporter copied the whole paragraph straight from Wikipedia. See for yourself and compare the two. Funny how I don't see any credit being given to the paragraph's origins in there, is that not a violation of the document's license? As I read it, the BBC's excerpt is considered a Modified Version (link to Wikipedia license). A quick google search turned up another site with nearly the exact same wording (Biodatabase.de), and you can see they have the credit for Wikipedia at the bottom. Why is the BBC any different?
Well let's take this a bit further: If everything is constructed out of a 3-d model, how would you do it? Take 5 examples of common tasks that normal people do every day with their computers (in no particular order):
1. Receiving and sending email 2. Writing documents (Word or other) 3. Listening to music, ripping CDs 4. Browsing the web 5. Watching movies/videos/anime/etc.
The way I see it, the brain is designed to absorb large amounts of information in a linear manner, although it is "processed" largely in parallel. Think of a book: it's a long string of letters, spaces, and punctuation from start to finish. Start at one location and read until you get what you need, whether that means starting at the beginning or somewhere in the middle. It (usually) has a table of contents that allows you to start wherever you want, but you're still going to read linearly. Even human language is designed in linear fashion. You can't stack three or four words on top of each other and expect to make any sense of any of it, neither can you read two chapters at the same time. I challenge you to try calling two different people at the same time, one in each ear, and successfully listening to both people.
All this is to say if we intend to bring about a paradigm change in the way we do computing, we'll have to invest some time and effort in learning how to use it, and that will scare most investors off. It is worth it, however, because I think it will greatly enhance productivity.
There shouldn't be a need for browser detection if the page is written with web standards. Browser detection is so 2003, we're into the age of XHTML+CSS now. Then you can pitch all that ugly javascript out the window (If need be use ECMAscript). Try checking out Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards to get a clearer view on the topic.
Re:The Media
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's the byproduct of news media for monetary gain, which is itself a product of capitalistic societies. The outlets want things that bring in views/readers/listeners, and inflammatory or sensational stories do it every time. Or, said another way, "if it bleeds, it leads." How unfortunate for the readers that we don't get the whole story. The funny thing is how much more reliable profit-seeking news outlets are than say state-run news outlets. Who here doesn't remember the side-by-side videos of the Iraqi minister claiming that there were no Americans in Iraq and US Marines toppling a statue of Sadaam at his own castle in Baghdad. Classic!
Re:My personal favorite
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 0
If you like that one, you'll love this calendar, a Bushism for every day of the year:
"Except that these days, what the studio is capable of is that much greater than before. Your artist with the right image can't sing in tune? No problem, just fix the pitch in the studio. etc. etc."
While this is true to some extent, it's not something that musicians should expect to lean on. All of the equipment in a studio is geared towards making you sound better and more together and have more $SOUND_EFFECT. However, these things are not replacements for lack of talent. You can't go into a studio sounding like crap and expect to come out with a song like Jimi's version of "All Along the Watchtower". Now Jimi was so good that *despite* poor recording methods and por engineering, he made it sound good, just like Bing.
When a person settles down to learn Greek, the class doesn't start with MODERN Greek. So when I started learning Greek, they started me at ANCIENT Greek, 600 BC as they put it. This Greek is significantly harder to learn because there's more grammar, more punctuation, and more special cases. When a Greek students wants to read something from a later time period, they have to figure out what changes were made to the language and then account for them. This is more easily done going from old to new. Greek through the years has been watered down and vastly simplified. What used to be a beautifully musical language is now more like others, simple, patternistic. My professor was showing us what kinds of things are no longer around. It makes the language appear quite different, but it is still readable because we started at an earlier period.
Slashdot Mirror
In college I knew several Computer Engineers that didn't really know what the hell their major was until it was almost too late
... They wouldn't let me make the switch.
This is my experience to a T. It took 2 years of "can you hack it" classes to get into basic circuit theory at my SmartyPants U, another semester after that into the basics of comp. engineering. It was at this point where I discovered a terrible truth: I Didn't Enjoy Comp. Engineering.
Of course, at that point there's nothing a college student can do. I had 89 hours by the end of that semester, and I desperately wanted out. Of course, SmaryPants U wanted me to stay put, seeing as I'd already invested so much time & energy in one major.
Once again, this is a generalization but luckily my friends didn't lose any hours switching to MIS and now make more money than I do with my silly CS degree.
Lucky bastards
I think that another major problem looming is our own impression of the driving experience. Current cars are designed to brake and to accelerate when necessary. They are also designed to wait (say at a red light or an accident). Current airplanes are required to continue moving, you can't stop and wait at a floating red light for other traffic streams to cross your flight path.
We could accomplish the going and stopping thing farily easily with helicopter-based cars. But then that violates the dreamy idea seeminly present in most every flying-car futurescape we see.
A bigger obstacle to future development of flying cars is not just the technology to get it to work safely, it's the building of the infrastructure. When cars were invented before the turn of the 20th century, there were no improved roads to speak of. Cars were driving around on horse and buggy trails and tearing them to pieces, so much so that toll roads started charging cars ridiculously high fees compared to buggies.
It was individual car owners banding together into motor clubs that originally drove the production of new roads and the improvement of older trails. The federal government didn't get involved until shortly after WWI, and they had to clean up the mess of thousands of groups working with what they had.
Today's public wouldn't allow a group of "flying car enthusiast clubs" to set up air roads and such. They would expect the government to establish regulations for how such a system would work, and we know that it could take years for the govt to figure it all out.
But if I take off my tinfoil hat I start to wonder: WHY do cellphones have cameras? Did YOU ask for your cellphone to have a camera? Did you WANT your cellphone to have a camera? Did you have a USE for your cellphone to have a camera?
A few years back, everyone was clamoring about "internet on your mobile" and how it would revolutionize your mobile experience. The telcos sunk billions of dollars into upgrading their networks for things like 3G, etc. They had a lot of money riding on the fact that people would love using the internet anywhere.
When the services started rolling out, no one in America seemed really intersted. Most web pages weren't created with mobile phones in mind for viewing on a tiny 240x360 (at best) sized screen. Portal pages designed by the mobile telcos offered things such as news highlights, sports, and weather, but who wants to pay $10 a month to check the weather whenever you want? Just walk outside! The user experience was horrible, and no one wanted the new-fangled mobile internet.
The telcos had all this extra bandwidth that they paid through the nose to set up, and they had no one to sell it to (end users). So, they invented services that would take advantage of the bandwidth, such as email and sending pictures back and forth between a user's mobile and computer.
This is the main reason behind sticking cameras into phones, and the same logic (roughly) applies to SMS and to ringtones.
Thanks for clarifications and link. Twas informative! I bow to your perl hacker prowess
Regarding your perl sig: It was a very pleasurable experience to figure that bastard out =).
,109 at the tail end if you change your input string and tack on an ì. Why didn't you? There was also a typo in there (ending the phrase with a , instead of a period).
In looking at it, you can trim the
Also, I tried looking it up my three O'Reilly Perl books, but I didn't see the for @_ method you used. Where'd you dig that up from?
push @x,ord()-32 for split'','Z=!;g&7?oO&:;- aì';split'','phroggy'x4;print chr^shift @_ for @x
If this is your bag, you're better off going with last.fm, who recently combined with audioscrobbler. Using a tiny plugin to your computer's music player, it uploads what songs you listen to, then builds an index and finds neighbors to your listening habits in the database. Then, get this, you get to listen to music straight off of those neighbor's profiles, so you can find new music reeeeally easily.
From what I understand, there's work being done in getting it to work with an iPod, so when you plug in it checks to see what songs you've played and sends those up to your profile. Rockin!
I imagine that Sun is acutally over every beach every single day, unless it's cloudy...
Unfortunately, even the person finding the cat can never sure he actually found it, no matter how much he claims so.
... we still can never be fully 100% sure it's truly a duck.
bullshit.
According to your thinking: If something looks like a duck, feels like a duck, quacks like a duck, behaves like a duck, and even smells like a duck, then
The industry loses nothing from my copying of their precious data, because I would not have purchased that data anyhow.
That is probably among the silliest arguments I have ever heard to justify a person's downloading illegal media. If you don't have the permission of the copyright owner, you don't get the privilege of listening to it. Period. End of story. This is the basic idea behind a copyright.
In the case of this media, the copyright holder demands that you pay them a fee in exchange for the media's use. Saying that you wouldn't have bought it to begin with justifies nothing. You legally have no right or privilege to listen to the music or watch the videos that you have not paid the copyright holder for. The only exceptions to this rule are at the sole discretion of the copyright holder, whether you like it or not.
In short, you have no excuse for being a freeloader other than you don't feel like paying. Your words indicate that you are trying to justify your criminality in a way that won't irreperably harm your conscience. Admit it, you are a common criminal, and you are deserving of "petty justice" under your nation's laws.
Looks like the reporter copied the whole paragraph straight from Wikipedia. See for yourself and compare the two. Funny how I don't see any credit being given to the paragraph's origins in there, is that not a violation of the document's license? As I read it, the BBC's excerpt is considered a Modified Version (link to Wikipedia license).
A quick google search turned up another site with nearly the exact same wording (Biodatabase.de), and you can see they have the credit for Wikipedia at the bottom. Why is the BBC any different?
C'mon, bud, a little cut and paste doesn't hurt anyone. I merely forgot to put in the And just so you know, you shouldn't be using straight up quotations in HTML as well, it doesn't validate as XHMTL. You should replace all of your "s with "
And you're correct, I would have chosen to use the anchor over the non-standard URL tag
I humbly suggest that you consider using the more semantic tags instead of .
n o12.htm
Information about it here:
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_
I'm going to guess that they should have used in place of the apostrophe
Well let's take this a bit further: If everything is constructed out of a 3-d model, how would you do it? Take 5 examples of common tasks that normal people do every day with their computers (in no particular order):
1. Receiving and sending email
2. Writing documents (Word or other)
3. Listening to music, ripping CDs
4. Browsing the web
5. Watching movies/videos/anime/etc.
The way I see it, the brain is designed to absorb large amounts of information in a linear manner, although it is "processed" largely in parallel. Think of a book: it's a long string of letters, spaces, and punctuation from start to finish. Start at one location and read until you get what you need, whether that means starting at the beginning or somewhere in the middle. It (usually) has a table of contents that allows you to start wherever you want, but you're still going to read linearly. Even human language is designed in linear fashion.
You can't stack three or four words on top of each other and expect to make any sense of any of it, neither can you read two chapters at the same time. I challenge you to try calling two different people at the same time, one in each ear, and successfully listening to both people.
All this is to say if we intend to bring about a paradigm change in the way we do computing, we'll have to invest some time and effort in learning how to use it, and that will scare most investors off. It is worth it, however, because I think it will greatly enhance productivity.
Mods, please moderate parent as troll!
There shouldn't be a need for browser detection if the page is written with web standards. Browser detection is so 2003, we're into the age of XHTML+CSS now. Then you can pitch all that ugly javascript out the window (If need be use ECMAscript).
Try checking out Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards to get a clearer view on the topic.
It's the byproduct of news media for monetary gain, which is itself a product of capitalistic societies. The outlets want things that bring in views/readers/listeners, and inflammatory or sensational stories do it every time. Or, said another way, "if it bleeds, it leads." How unfortunate for the readers that we don't get the whole story.
The funny thing is how much more reliable profit-seeking news outlets are than say state-run news outlets. Who here doesn't remember the side-by-side videos of the Iraqi minister claiming that there were no Americans in Iraq and US Marines toppling a statue of Sadaam at his own castle in Baghdad. Classic!
If you like that one, you'll love this calendar, a Bushism for every day of the year:
The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President 2005 Day-to-Day Calendar
Your sig is extremely offensive to us Christians, don't suppose you'd consider changing it would you? Thanks
That's the most ludircous thing I've ever heard! You must be joking, or an ass clown, I can't figure out which.
uhhh, brown?
...
Seems to be more like urine and clay
Mods must be Homestarrunner fans, no one else caught that one. =P
"And in this one, the player wouldn't control me, because YOU CAN'T CONTROL ME!"
"Except that these days, what the studio is capable of is that much greater than before. Your artist with the right image can't sing in tune? No problem, just fix the pitch in the studio. etc. etc."
While this is true to some extent, it's not something that musicians should expect to lean on. All of the equipment in a studio is geared towards making you sound better and more together and have more $SOUND_EFFECT. However, these things are not replacements for lack of talent. You can't go into a studio sounding like crap and expect to come out with a song like Jimi's version of "All Along the Watchtower".
Now Jimi was so good that *despite* poor recording methods and por engineering, he made it sound good, just like Bing.
There sure are a lot of God-haters here on /. We gots ourselves a regular ol' S & G right here.
When a person settles down to learn Greek, the class doesn't start with MODERN Greek. So when I started learning Greek, they started me at ANCIENT Greek, 600 BC as they put it. This Greek is significantly harder to learn because there's more grammar, more punctuation, and more special cases. When a Greek students wants to read something from a later time period, they have to figure out what changes were made to the language and then account for them. This is more easily done going from old to new.
Greek through the years has been watered down and vastly simplified. What used to be a beautifully musical language is now more like others, simple, patternistic. My professor was showing us what kinds of things are no longer around. It makes the language appear quite different, but it is still readable because we started at an earlier period.