Rich applications in the browser, with voice recognition done by the phone itself. I'm a genius, really I am. Proof^H^H^H^H^HTechnical details left to the underlings.
I'm going to stress two of those: Lack of funding and business risk.
Our "company face" website is browser-agnostic, but our major web apps are strictly B2B. We designed them years ago, in the first round of ASP, updated it slightly for ASP2.0, with lots of inter-connected controls, and we were never given time ("funding") to make it work across other browsers when some nice cross-browser JS frameworks came out. And you know what? All our customers enforce IE in-house, so we have no requirement to make it cross-browser, and in fact, a major change at this point would be a "business risk" (although God knows I wish we could scrap it and start over--we've had to add so many features that it's a nightmare now--but there's that "funding" issue again).
Although I must add, anything designed for the end-user (where the environment isn't mandated) should darned well better work in IE, FF, Opera and Safari!
Read. Think. The problem here is careless cops.
7:15am, two students are shot in a dorm. Cops decide it's simply "domestic" and don't issue a campus-wide lockdown. Over two hours later, on the other side of campus (maybe after perp went and got more guns & ammo?), presumably same perp takes out 30 students, faculty, and staff.
My wife is a prof. A junior high buddy of mine is a prof at VT. He's an engineer. I have no idea if he's alive, injured, or dead. When students get mad about grades, who are they mad at? Profs! Keep those deadly weapons out of campus buildings, for Pete's sake.
You also need to either quote the verbatim passages or properly paraphrase (it's the paraphrase thing that shows comprehension), and if it's 90% quoted passages strung together with a little bit of glue, even if it's well-written glue, that may show good search skills, but no synthesis (which is at least as important).
The essays my wife assigns are argumentative, anyway: make some claim (the "thesis"), and then support it with evidence from the text at issue. Research papers additionally require that the student engage the secondary material, citing scholars who agree with the claim, and showing how scholars who disagree could be wrong (and any interesting question has scholars on both sides). If it's not a research paper, there should be no secondary material, so there should be no citation beyond the main text, except perhaps the source of any facts of historical context, unless abolutely well known ("Shakespeare's home town of Stratford" would require no citation, for example, but the builder of the Globe theater might).
What if you name the folder "fordchevydodge"? Is it found by "chevy" and "hevy"? Let me check: Nope, neither. (It is found by "ford".) That does seem like an odd UI decision. But I'm trying to think of an occasion where I'd be searching for the middle part of a filename, unless maybe there's a date (which it does find: "200704" in the middle of "fordchevy200704dodge"), or if I had names in mixed case (which parent demonstrated does work) or separated with spaces or underscores (which I've just demonstrated works: "chevy" in "ford_chevy200704dodge"), so perhaps it's a useful odd UI decision. It certainly saves indexing time/space.
My wife is an English professor and has to deal with this all the time. "But I didn't mean to!" doesn't cut it: she takes class time to explain plagiarism, and then she quizzes them on it, and then keeps the quiz as evidence that the student understands what constitutes plagiarism.
There is always some ding-a-ling who thinks he (and it's usually, although not always, "he") can fool her by pulling pieces from random web sources and vaguely stitching them together. C'mon, she's a literature prof; part of her job is analyzing style in a work. She can spot style changes a mile away.
On the rare occasion she can't actually pull up the source on the web (or, for the enterprising cheater, in the library; and don't bother hiding the book, 'cause there's such a thing as inter-library loan), she can almost always simply fail the paper on grammar/usage errors or on simple factual errors.
We have entertained the notion that those paper mills sell papers with deliberate errors ( only slightly more subtle than "After Hamlet murders Ophelia,..."), probably written by other English professors for a laugh.
Sure, there are probably students good enough to take diverse sources and make a decent paper out of it with proper transitions, etc.; but if they've done that much work, they were probably better off writing their own paper!
Ooh! Will it automatically switch itself to black and white for those who didn't yet have a color set? It was a long time before my wife knew why "nameless assistant #1" who was the first killed by the monster was referred to as a "red-shirt" ("Did he delay his first year of acting to extend his eligibility?").
No, it doesn't "leave little hope". What it means is that GP isn't up to the job. What he's talking about is part of my job, too (turning pages of actuarial documentation into business calculations). GP needs to get erself some training so that what e thinks are "vaguely defined arguments" suddenly reveal themselves to be well-known, precisely defined shorthand for (occasionally) complicated actuarial entities.
Beg pardon. I said "Italian" where I meant "Italian pronunciation of Latin," in apposition to "Germanic" earlier in my post, and spelled it "ch" because most English-speakers pronounce "ch" as in "cherry". I was trying to distinguish between the three pronunciations of Latin with which I am familiar, Germanic, Italian (or "Church"), and Classical. They are most easily identified by how the "soft c" (preceding i or e) is pronounced: respectively, "ts", "ch", and "k".
Not quite. Germanic pronunciations of Latin use the "ts" sound for the soft "c" (i.e., followed by "i" or "e", or even "y" if it's a loan word from Greek), instead of the Italian "ch". Both use "k" for hard "c" (followed by any other vowel). Which pronunciation would have been used in the medieval British Isles I'm not sure; the Irish would certainly have used the Italian pronunciation, but the Anglo-Saxons would likely have started with the Germanic.
Hear, hear! In any case, no one is forced to buy an iPod (and I've heard other players are better for some people, great) and no one is forced to use iTunes (lots of people use eMusic, right?).
The only restriction is that (a) the only DRM-encumbered music that plays on the iPod is from iTMS and (b) iTMS DRM-encumbered music plays only on the iPod.
Don't like the iPod? Use a different music store. Don't like iTMS & FairPlay? Use a different player.
Does someone want to say it's Apple's fault the iPod is so successful? Guilty as charged! Should they somehow pay other vendors whose players are not as popular? Get real!
I think you meant to say "The War of Northern Agression".
:-)
Actually, I'm from Vuh-jen-yuh, and high school "U.S. & Virginia History" was starting to get away from "War Between the States" and just call it "Civil War". Something to do with helping us with the AP History exam, I think.:)
This "inkless printing" tech isn't valuable for making a printout you can doodle on, unless they can make a matching "inkless pen". Otherwise you erase the sheet for reuse and the "blank" paper still has your notes on it.
Now that I'd pay money for. I print out code to "hand-edit", step through test cases, and generally write all over. If I had a stylus that was erasable just like the printer ink, I would use the same four or five pieces of paper over and over!
Your comment reminds me of a saying: "In England, two hundred miles is a long way; in the U.S., two hundred years is a long time." Europe and the Mideast have a long, long history of political interference.
Shoot, here in the U.S., there are plenty of people who are still pissed about the Civil War a century and a half ago. The partitioning of the Ottoman Empire only eighty-five years ago was just another "last straw" in a long line of "last straws," and there have been more "straws" since. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior, merely to explain the deep feelings of oppression (correct or not) in the region.
A Constitutional amendment can be unconstitutional if it conflicts with a part of the Constitution that came before the amendment itself. Income taxes were found to be constitutional, but the question of income taxes did have to be looked at by the Supreme Court.
Thank you for playing. What part of "amendment" is giving you trouble? By definition, any amendment must supersede any previous text (original or earlier amendment), I suppose premised on the belief that the people really know what they want, this time.
Consider the amendment repealing Prohibition. Would you argue that, because it conflicts with the amendment enacting Prohibition, it is unconstitutional? Or suppose we passed an amendment restriciting the vote to white male property owners thirty years old and up; is that unconstitutional because it conflicts with the amendment granting women the vote, or the one granting the vote to eighteen-year-olds, or the one granting the vote to blacks? Of course not! If the people (i.e., the Congress) pass an amendment, and the required supermajority of states ratifies it, then, no matter how ridiculous, it is the law of the land.
Here in sunny Florida, we know all about ridiculous amendments. It is in fact possible to pass two contradictory amendments in the same election, mostly because a majority seem to believe that if it made it to the ballot, it must be good, so the sheep vote "Yes" (or is it just because "Yes" is always the first option?); now what?
And any vote that's not secret can be coerced. Heard any news lately about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pushing for legislation to make votes to form a union non-secret?
Admittedly, in this country, it's hard to believe there could be wide-spread voter tampering, but vote-buying could still occur. For example, a company president could offers election day as a paid holiday (or just a monetary bonus) if the employee brings in his or her ballot indicating a vote for X? Or something more sinister: offer a paid holiday to all who show their ballot, but record who voted for whom, and using that data for some nefarious purpose.
There are two compelling reasons for EVMs. The most important is that the blind can vote without assistance (preserving the secret ballot). The second is to simplify ballot format: no more will we have the creative "butterfly" ballot (an attempt to squeeze more candidates into a given page space by alternating names on either side of the central "punch" area), which on its own may have swung the 2000 election. Did you know that Pat Buchanan received more votes in Palm Beach County (well-known as a haven for Jewish retirees from New York City) than Al Gore lost by in the entire state of Florida?
Of course, we may need multiple screens for all the candidates; who wants to be on screen three? EVMs also ought to have methods of randomizing the order of candidates; I've read that there's a bias towards selecting the first candidate in a list. Of course, election supervisors also need to be *allowed* to randomize the order; I think Florida law says that the candidate of the incumbent's party is always listed first (naturally). I wonder if this bias is why almost all the constitutional ballot initiatives get passed in this state, since "Yes" is always first. Actually, while I was living in South Bend, IN, the county election supervisor said it was "too hard" to randomize names on ballots, and always listed them in alphabetical order. Boy, if that's too hard.... She was voted out in the very next election.
In order for me to "advance", my immediate boss would have to quit (or be fired, which is unlikely; she's pretty good at her job), since she's one of three VP's (small company; she's also still one of the developers). Me, I've been telecommuting full-time for eight and a half years now (same company). The only down side is I get paid in Indiana dollars although I live somewhere with a higher cost of living, but the flexibility is worth the discount.
Actually, there was a recent foofaraw here in sunny Florida (82 degrees F on January 6! Blech!) regarding vehicles over a certain weight requiring a class-E (or whatever) license, some sort of commercial license, requiring knowledge of towing limits, how to lay out your flares when you break down, etc.--and the weight limit was exceeded by a number of vehicles that an ordinary Joe could buy at any dealership (I think the F-350 was among them, some of the "crew cab" trucks, etc.). I believe the law has now been amended, but as I drive a four-cylinder sedan getting something north of 30mpg, I don't give a rat's ass.
Actually, from 1956 to 2000, exit polls were getting better and better. Since then, exit polls have been skewing more Dem than the actual vote count. Sorry, I don't have a study to refer you to, but Robt Kennedy Jr's recent pieces in Rolling Stone has them.
I've got a Diamond Rio500 that must be six years old at this point (I don't think it could be eight, but I know I got it a Christmas at my parents', not at my in-laws'). It works just fine with iTunes. Sure, it only holds 64M (32 internal + max 32 drop-in flash, which I have to load as separate playlists), but it worked for me for five years, and it's enough for my daughter (to whom I gave it after I got a Nano last Christmas). So don't tell me it's stupid to expect a five year old player ("Whippersnapper!") to still work.
Slashdot Mirror
Rich applications in the browser, with voice recognition done by the phone itself. I'm a genius, really I am. Proof^H^H^H^H^HTechnical details left to the underlings.
I'm going to stress two of those: Lack of funding and business risk.
Our "company face" website is browser-agnostic, but our major web apps are strictly B2B. We designed them years ago, in the first round of ASP, updated it slightly for ASP2.0, with lots of inter-connected controls, and we were never given time ("funding") to make it work across other browsers when some nice cross-browser JS frameworks came out. And you know what? All our customers enforce IE in-house, so we have no requirement to make it cross-browser, and in fact, a major change at this point would be a "business risk" (although God knows I wish we could scrap it and start over--we've had to add so many features that it's a nightmare now--but there's that "funding" issue again).
Although I must add, anything designed for the end-user (where the environment isn't mandated) should darned well better work in IE, FF, Opera and Safari!
Read. Think. The problem here is careless cops. 7:15am, two students are shot in a dorm. Cops decide it's simply "domestic" and don't issue a campus-wide lockdown. Over two hours later, on the other side of campus (maybe after perp went and got more guns & ammo?), presumably same perp takes out 30 students, faculty, and staff. My wife is a prof. A junior high buddy of mine is a prof at VT. He's an engineer. I have no idea if he's alive, injured, or dead. When students get mad about grades, who are they mad at? Profs! Keep those deadly weapons out of campus buildings, for Pete's sake.
You also need to either quote the verbatim passages or properly paraphrase (it's the paraphrase thing that shows comprehension), and if it's 90% quoted passages strung together with a little bit of glue, even if it's well-written glue, that may show good search skills, but no synthesis (which is at least as important).
The essays my wife assigns are argumentative, anyway: make some claim (the "thesis"), and then support it with evidence from the text at issue. Research papers additionally require that the student engage the secondary material, citing scholars who agree with the claim, and showing how scholars who disagree could be wrong (and any interesting question has scholars on both sides). If it's not a research paper, there should be no secondary material, so there should be no citation beyond the main text, except perhaps the source of any facts of historical context, unless abolutely well known ("Shakespeare's home town of Stratford" would require no citation, for example, but the builder of the Globe theater might).
What if you name the folder "fordchevydodge"? Is it found by "chevy" and "hevy"? Let me check: Nope, neither. (It is found by "ford".) That does seem like an odd UI decision. But I'm trying to think of an occasion where I'd be searching for the middle part of a filename, unless maybe there's a date (which it does find: "200704" in the middle of "fordchevy200704dodge"), or if I had names in mixed case (which parent demonstrated does work) or separated with spaces or underscores (which I've just demonstrated works: "chevy" in "ford_chevy200704dodge"), so perhaps it's a useful odd UI decision. It certainly saves indexing time/space.
Mod parent up!
My wife is an English professor and has to deal with this all the time. "But I didn't mean to!" doesn't cut it: she takes class time to explain plagiarism, and then she quizzes them on it, and then keeps the quiz as evidence that the student understands what constitutes plagiarism.
There is always some ding-a-ling who thinks he (and it's usually, although not always, "he") can fool her by pulling pieces from random web sources and vaguely stitching them together. C'mon, she's a literature prof; part of her job is analyzing style in a work. She can spot style changes a mile away.
On the rare occasion she can't actually pull up the source on the web (or, for the enterprising cheater, in the library; and don't bother hiding the book, 'cause there's such a thing as inter-library loan), she can almost always simply fail the paper on grammar/usage errors or on simple factual errors.
We have entertained the notion that those paper mills sell papers with deliberate errors ( only slightly more subtle than "After Hamlet murders Ophelia, ..."), probably written by other English professors for a laugh.
Sure, there are probably students good enough to take diverse sources and make a decent paper out of it with proper transitions, etc.; but if they've done that much work, they were probably better off writing their own paper!
Ooh! Will it automatically switch itself to black and white for those who didn't yet have a color set? It was a long time before my wife knew why "nameless assistant #1" who was the first killed by the monster was referred to as a "red-shirt" ("Did he delay his first year of acting to extend his eligibility?").
I can't agree more. I'd also recommend his free .NET Book Zero, which is specifically aimed at C/C++ programmers, and did I mention it's free?
No, it doesn't "leave little hope". What it means is that GP isn't up to the job. What he's talking about is part of my job, too (turning pages of actuarial documentation into business calculations). GP needs to get erself some training so that what e thinks are "vaguely defined arguments" suddenly reveal themselves to be well-known, precisely defined shorthand for (occasionally) complicated actuarial entities.
Beg pardon. I said "Italian" where I meant "Italian pronunciation of Latin," in apposition to "Germanic" earlier in my post, and spelled it "ch" because most English-speakers pronounce "ch" as in "cherry". I was trying to distinguish between the three pronunciations of Latin with which I am familiar, Germanic, Italian (or "Church"), and Classical. They are most easily identified by how the "soft c" (preceding i or e) is pronounced: respectively, "ts", "ch", and "k".
Not quite. Germanic pronunciations of Latin use the "ts" sound for the soft "c" (i.e., followed by "i" or "e", or even "y" if it's a loan word from Greek), instead of the Italian "ch". Both use "k" for hard "c" (followed by any other vowel). Which pronunciation would have been used in the medieval British Isles I'm not sure; the Irish would certainly have used the Italian pronunciation, but the Anglo-Saxons would likely have started with the Germanic.
Hear, hear! In any case, no one is forced to buy an iPod (and I've heard other players are better for some people, great) and no one is forced to use iTunes (lots of people use eMusic, right?).
The only restriction is that (a) the only DRM-encumbered music that plays on the iPod is from iTMS and (b) iTMS DRM-encumbered music plays only on the iPod.
Don't like the iPod? Use a different music store. Don't like iTMS & FairPlay? Use a different player.
Does someone want to say it's Apple's fault the iPod is so successful? Guilty as charged! Should they somehow pay other vendors whose players are not as popular? Get real!
I think you meant to say "The War of Northern Agression".
Actually, I'm from Vuh-jen-yuh, and high school "U.S. & Virginia History" was starting to get away from "War Between the States" and just call it "Civil War". Something to do with helping us with the AP History exam, I think. :)
Now that I'd pay money for. I print out code to "hand-edit", step through test cases, and generally write all over. If I had a stylus that was erasable just like the printer ink, I would use the same four or five pieces of paper over and over!
Your comment reminds me of a saying: "In England, two hundred miles is a long way; in the U.S., two hundred years is a long time." Europe and the Mideast have a long, long history of political interference. Shoot, here in the U.S., there are plenty of people who are still pissed about the Civil War a century and a half ago. The partitioning of the Ottoman Empire only eighty-five years ago was just another "last straw" in a long line of "last straws," and there have been more "straws" since. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior, merely to explain the deep feelings of oppression (correct or not) in the region.
So is that a standard du jour, or a de jure standard?
Thank you for playing. What part of "amendment" is giving you trouble? By definition, any amendment must supersede any previous text (original or earlier amendment), I suppose premised on the belief that the people really know what they want, this time.
Consider the amendment repealing Prohibition. Would you argue that, because it conflicts with the amendment enacting Prohibition, it is unconstitutional? Or suppose we passed an amendment restriciting the vote to white male property owners thirty years old and up; is that unconstitutional because it conflicts with the amendment granting women the vote, or the one granting the vote to eighteen-year-olds, or the one granting the vote to blacks? Of course not! If the people (i.e., the Congress) pass an amendment, and the required supermajority of states ratifies it, then, no matter how ridiculous, it is the law of the land.
Here in sunny Florida, we know all about ridiculous amendments. It is in fact possible to pass two contradictory amendments in the same election, mostly because a majority seem to believe that if it made it to the ballot, it must be good, so the sheep vote "Yes" (or is it just because "Yes" is always the first option?); now what?
And any vote that's not secret can be coerced. Heard any news lately about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pushing for legislation to make votes to form a union non-secret?
Admittedly, in this country, it's hard to believe there could be wide-spread voter tampering, but vote-buying could still occur. For example, a company president could offers election day as a paid holiday (or just a monetary bonus) if the employee brings in his or her ballot indicating a vote for X? Or something more sinister: offer a paid holiday to all who show their ballot, but record who voted for whom, and using that data for some nefarious purpose.
There are two compelling reasons for EVMs. The most important is that the blind can vote without assistance (preserving the secret ballot). The second is to simplify ballot format: no more will we have the creative "butterfly" ballot (an attempt to squeeze more candidates into a given page space by alternating names on either side of the central "punch" area), which on its own may have swung the 2000 election. Did you know that Pat Buchanan received more votes in Palm Beach County (well-known as a haven for Jewish retirees from New York City) than Al Gore lost by in the entire state of Florida?
Of course, we may need multiple screens for all the candidates; who wants to be on screen three? EVMs also ought to have methods of randomizing the order of candidates; I've read that there's a bias towards selecting the first candidate in a list. Of course, election supervisors also need to be *allowed* to randomize the order; I think Florida law says that the candidate of the incumbent's party is always listed first (naturally). I wonder if this bias is why almost all the constitutional ballot initiatives get passed in this state, since "Yes" is always first. Actually, while I was living in South Bend, IN, the county election supervisor said it was "too hard" to randomize names on ballots, and always listed them in alphabetical order. Boy, if that's too hard.... She was voted out in the very next election.
In order for me to "advance", my immediate boss would have to quit (or be fired, which is unlikely; she's pretty good at her job), since she's one of three VP's (small company; she's also still one of the developers). Me, I've been telecommuting full-time for eight and a half years now (same company). The only down side is I get paid in Indiana dollars although I live somewhere with a higher cost of living, but the flexibility is worth the discount.
I, for one, welcome our new European standardization overlords.
But the inch is now defined as exactly 2.54 centimeters. Ergo, the yard is defined in meters (36 in * 0.0254 m/in = 0.9144 m).
Actually, there was a recent foofaraw here in sunny Florida (82 degrees F on January 6! Blech!) regarding vehicles over a certain weight requiring a class-E (or whatever) license, some sort of commercial license, requiring knowledge of towing limits, how to lay out your flares when you break down, etc.--and the weight limit was exceeded by a number of vehicles that an ordinary Joe could buy at any dealership (I think the F-350 was among them, some of the "crew cab" trucks, etc.). I believe the law has now been amended, but as I drive a four-cylinder sedan getting something north of 30mpg, I don't give a rat's ass.
Actually, from 1956 to 2000, exit polls were getting better and better. Since then, exit polls have been skewing more Dem than the actual vote count. Sorry, I don't have a study to refer you to, but Robt Kennedy Jr's recent pieces in Rolling Stone has them.
I've got a Diamond Rio500 that must be six years old at this point (I don't think it could be eight, but I know I got it a Christmas at my parents', not at my in-laws'). It works just fine with iTunes. Sure, it only holds 64M (32 internal + max 32 drop-in flash, which I have to load as separate playlists), but it worked for me for five years, and it's enough for my daughter (to whom I gave it after I got a Nano last Christmas). So don't tell me it's stupid to expect a five year old player ("Whippersnapper!") to still work.