As a student just starting his third week of engineering at Smartypants U. I have to report that i'm not having similar issues. While I do have one or two TA's are aren't competent at what they're doing they've been honestly trying their best. As for the actual professors I have two department heads teaching respectivly the intro physics and chem courses. Those professors are great. That being said I know this isn't the case everywhere. Money certaintly helps get better professors, fair or not that is the current situation. (financial aid however is also at very high levels from what I can tell)
Now the person I think who has hit upon this topic best is Dean Kamen the creator of the controversial segway. Whether or not your support his commercial endevours he's started one of the best programs to ever touch students. FIRST robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/) is a program that introduces to high school students (and through the lego league program middle schoolers) to what it is like to be an engineer. In his openning address to the competition's participants last year, he talked about how kids in the United States just want to hang out and in essence be lazy. After taking a tour through India however he saw droves of kids trying their hardest to learn everything they could, desperate for jobs that americans have begun to it seems believe are a birth right. Its an issue that his program that while becoming international he is hoping will help with these issues in the United States.
After being on a team for four years I learned almost everything that is involved in an engineering project. Given a strict deadline of six weeks to produce and ship a competition ready(heheh...) robot is just like reality, stressful, long nights(after school till 8 or later) and full of rewards. I've learned more than how to use machine shop tools, design parts in professional cad software, troubleshoot or write code for a robot. The program forces teams to fundraise and seek funding just like any real company. I've had to hold fundraisers, contact sponsors, cultivate relationships with companies and hunt down wealthy alumni for funds. The main goal of the program is to as the acro-name states, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, to inspire and foster a love for science and engineering. So my team also transformed itself into a PR machine(a vital part of companies in todays world) producing everything from corporate giveaways to hosting robotics expos in places as big as the world financial center in downtown manhattan.
Now I realize I sound like some brainwashed zealot, but ask any person who has participated and you will get a similarly positive response. After four years of participating I managed to wrangle a summer internship at an engineering firm actually doing engineering. Also now here at collge, while many students here can easily rival my abilities in a classroom, when it comes to what matters, making something and getting it out there in the public I'll have a huge upperhand. I know my dad, an engineer at a small company now looks for FIRST robotics experience on the resumes of new workers.
The educational instutions of today still offer education in the same way that they always have. FIRST offers people a chance to understand what engineering actually is about, creating things! The number of people that my team converted to engineering was sizable. The program is now relativly large at close to 1500 teams and I'm sure that within ten years the effects of it will be felt throughout the engineering world. Former FIRST robotics members will spread throughout the industry filling it innovation and a new life that is sorely needed.
I'm president of my FIRST robotics team and i can't support this enough. Its an absolutely amazing program. I've learned far too much for a high schooler to know. With the skills i learned, this past summer, i created a device for a company that earned them a nasa research grant, by myself. Now they want me to come back as a part time engineer. I wouldn't have been able to do anything that i did without first robotics. Absolutely amazing experience. DO IT, you won't regret it a bit!
I'd say the most interesting result of this is that it appears microsoft made windows run on a mac. If their custom NT kernal is siimilar to what is on the X-box then it is quite a feat. The x-box ran a slightly modified directX which is the part of the windows OS that Wine is having a really hard time emulating. If microsoft could port that over to a G5 mac then i they could easily port a full Windows operating system over. Not that they would. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to do it economically, but its still interesting that they could.
~Ian
Outsourcing is just like Object Oriented Programming. You're not suppoesd to care how you get the result, just that you get it. So you give a problem to you workers(who now happen to be in India) and get a result back. Just like an object in your programming code. So yes, project managers would be considered higher level just as the code that uses the objects is higher level code than the object's code.
I'm not one to whine, but this article is from June 8th, 2001!
It mentions that some people want us to be using fuel cell batteries by the end of 2001. Now i don't own an iPod, but it sure doesn't run on a fuel cell battery. Infact still nothing runs on fuel cells. Any Slashdot readers know the progress of fuel cells in this area in recent times?
The problem is ease of use. It is so easy to go on kazaa and listen to music. Just type what you want and there you can listen to it. If i could do the same thing and have the song automatically charged i would be happy to use that. But the way it is now why go out of my way to pay.
At my school the basic programming course teaches 3 languages
The first is NetLogo because its really awesome and you can do great things with it very easily. Ever try to simulate the spread of diseases in a C program???
The second is Dr Scheme which is a newer form of LISP. Teaches kids how to use functions and recursion. And the tortures of syntax. I just love () now. Rather i love (((()))) now. That portion of the course is concluded by us making our own number system with simple arithmetic functions. I think we used A's to represent a unit.
Finally we conclude with Python. Basically it teaches us how to use a liner programming language.(none of the others really read top to bottom.) Overall a very good course. They also teach an introductory course that spends a whole term on python. Python has everything the more advanced languages have and its free in everyway. Plus it is much easier to read and teach with. I love it as does everyone who takes the course.
I love my "silent" computer. It isn't totally silent but the fans in the TV entertainment systems are louder than it.
The mainstay was getting a silent case(Antec Sonata-Highly recomended) and powersupply. The case has some sound reducing material in the front and a quiet power supply. Using a large heat sink on the processor and a low RPM fan i keep my CPU very cool. I put the Zalman VGA cooler on my 9500 pro and it not only runs great, but actually it also runs cooler.
The only case fan i have is a large low rpm fan out the back. It all runs like a charm and seems to always be lower than room temperature. (Damn AC is on the opposite side of the apartment.)
The question is will having slashdot link to this site get more converts than if they made a web banner or pop up ad? (or worse one of those on page pop ups?)
Now if they're so against it they just need to do what the US government was afraid of during the cold war. All the chinese people have to stand on it and jump at the same time... thats 1 billion people times about 150 pounds each. or 150 billion pounds of force. Thats how you get rid of a controversial dam... damn it:)
I think that quote gets modded up for every slashdot news post.
More bandwith, " wait 'til you see what this does for porn!"
New graphics card " wait 'til you see what this does for porn!"
New Virus named after girl " wait 'til you see what this does for porn!"
Chinese moon base in 2012 " wait 'til you see what this does for online porn!"
Build your own fuel injection computer " wait 'til you see what this does for online porn!":)
-Ian
Re:I've seen fuzzy robots! Woe unto man.
on
Power Tool Drag Races
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Fuzzy robots??? well i followed your link and had my retinas burned by humans without any fuzzyness. Infact they were nude. Power tool welding geeks in a nude calendar is not my idea of battle bots:D
Consider this for a moment. Your job is to study the stars, you search the skies for distant galatic bodies, many late nights you've spent studying the stars with you're giant telescopes, and even sent some telescopes into space and now suddenly you go down a mineshaft to find someting called WIMPS.
The FX 5200 was being compared to an old budget card. The 9000 pro has been replaced(for a while now) by the 9100 and 9200 cards which are faster! Not to mention that you can get a 128 meg version for 74$ just 5$ more than that card(at gameve.com).
How about this keyboard at:http://www.fingerworks.com/ It has all the functions you need without a single button. I don't know if it is actually better but i'm sure you could probably work faster if you don't have to switch between a mouse and a keyboard(its a giant touchpad). All those other functions like copy, cut, paste, etc are just little motions that probably take the same time as pressing ctrl-c or anyother similar combination but give you more flexibility.
hehe i met one of the creators of the computer that beat the top checkers player. For him it seemed like a minor achievement. He thought the real challenge would be in creating one of these chess computers. Well i guess here they are.
I still don't understand the allure of Blizzards two most recent RTS's. Both SC and WarIII balance play by limiting you. Why on earth should i only be allowed to select 12 units? It makes no sense and just makes my life painful. Why should i have to babysit my resource production to make it as effective as possible. Since when did somebody think it was a good idea to hurt new players by forcing you to place your resource gathering structures at a certain distance, no more no less. Aren't RTS's supposed to be about the combat?
Well the game that did that right was total annihilation. More than 6 months before Blizzard ever released starcraft(yet over 2 years past the day it was orginally supposed to be released) it came out. It had better graphics, better gameplay, real physics, even water combat. Best of all you actually got to fight instead of manage resources. It still is the best RTS out there in my opinion and its still getting better. It has a mod community that has created thousands of new units for the game many of them better than what the game designers made. Now you can play everything from space battles to fighting as the rebels against the empire in a starwars total conversion. Many completely new races have even been made.(races in Total Annihilation have more than 200 units) Even completely new game matching services have been made. These are in someways better than Battle.net. They offer meta games of galatic wars where you fight against other players for control of planets in a galaxy to help your side. And after you play those games you can replay them in full 3d using a program made by community members. Yet blizzard is still putting along and with the release of WCIII:FT it will probably sell to more unknowing customers millions of copys. So next time you're at your local software store and are going to pick up that expansion pack think for a second and take a look at TA. at 10$ for it and its two expansions(the commander pack) it is probably worth your while.
It would good for EA to grow as large as it can. The bigger it is the more code it has in its database for its programers to call upon. Also if it expands into music and movie industries those are more resources it has at its disposal. Eventually if it needs an ingame movie it can go to the movie department and get it made there. If it needs music, they can get it from their music department. It should also allow them to have people dedicated to writing stories for games and other specialized positions. Diseny is in their grasp. It would bring only more respect for the game industry. Interactivity is so much better than just sitting and watching!
By the way did anyone notice that they are creating their own version of a theme park. Its called RollerCoaster tycoon.;) They even are creating their own world dedicated to their profit. Thats right the sims online shipped today.
"Magellean circumsized the world using a a new brand new Clipper!"
I'm not much of a programmer so i can't comment on actual programming improvements but one common thread i saw was that large libraries of code has been a huge boon to development. Big Blue Box has developed a system of organizing its seperate projects. (They develop computer and console games) Each project or brandname product they have gets spawned as a small group or satelite company. The first example was that they have spawned off their Black & White studios to work on that game line.
How they use this is called the satelite system. Every month the seperate companies/groups meet and share their ideas and what they have done with each other. They can get the viewpoint of many different developers that way. They also can share code between them. One example was that one group developed some awesome water effects. (looks damn close to real water) They all now have access to the great water renderer. Sharing code like this allows less programers to create more together. Its the same idea as having large online libraries of code at your hands. (another advantage to this system is that it is easy to intergrate a new small team of developers and give them access to large amounts of code to get started.) I can see this as a method that will take off in the near future.
Now all i have to do is to train my sheep to sort through my spam...
Slashdot Mirror
As a student just starting his third week of engineering at Smartypants U. I have to report that i'm not having similar issues. While I do have one or two TA's are aren't competent at what they're doing they've been honestly trying their best. As for the actual professors I have two department heads teaching respectivly the intro physics and chem courses. Those professors are great. That being said I know this isn't the case everywhere. Money certaintly helps get better professors, fair or not that is the current situation. (financial aid however is also at very high levels from what I can tell)
Now the person I think who has hit upon this topic best is Dean Kamen the creator of the controversial segway. Whether or not your support his commercial endevours he's started one of the best programs to ever touch students. FIRST robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/) is a program that introduces to high school students (and through the lego league program middle schoolers) to what it is like to be an engineer. In his openning address to the competition's participants last year, he talked about how kids in the United States just want to hang out and in essence be lazy. After taking a tour through India however he saw droves of kids trying their hardest to learn everything they could, desperate for jobs that americans have begun to it seems believe are a birth right. Its an issue that his program that while becoming international he is hoping will help with these issues in the United States.
After being on a team for four years I learned almost everything that is involved in an engineering project. Given a strict deadline of six weeks to produce and ship a competition ready(heheh...) robot is just like reality, stressful, long nights(after school till 8 or later) and full of rewards. I've learned more than how to use machine shop tools, design parts in professional cad software, troubleshoot or write code for a robot. The program forces teams to fundraise and seek funding just like any real company. I've had to hold fundraisers, contact sponsors, cultivate relationships with companies and hunt down wealthy alumni for funds. The main goal of the program is to as the acro-name states, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, to inspire and foster a love for science and engineering. So my team also transformed itself into a PR machine(a vital part of companies in todays world) producing everything from corporate giveaways to hosting robotics expos in places as big as the world financial center in downtown manhattan.
Now I realize I sound like some brainwashed zealot, but ask any person who has participated and you will get a similarly positive response. After four years of participating I managed to wrangle a summer internship at an engineering firm actually doing engineering. Also now here at collge, while many students here can easily rival my abilities in a classroom, when it comes to what matters, making something and getting it out there in the public I'll have a huge upperhand. I know my dad, an engineer at a small company now looks for FIRST robotics experience on the resumes of new workers.
The educational instutions of today still offer education in the same way that they always have. FIRST offers people a chance to understand what engineering actually is about, creating things! The number of people that my team converted to engineering was sizable. The program is now relativly large at close to 1500 teams and I'm sure that within ten years the effects of it will be felt throughout the engineering world. Former FIRST robotics members will spread throughout the industry filling it innovation and a new life that is sorely needed.
~Ian
Proud Member of Team 694!
I'm president of my FIRST robotics team and i can't support this enough. Its an absolutely amazing program. I've learned far too much for a high schooler to know. With the skills i learned, this past summer, i created a device for a company that earned them a nasa research grant, by myself. Now they want me to come back as a part time engineer. I wouldn't have been able to do anything that i did without first robotics. Absolutely amazing experience. DO IT, you won't regret it a bit!
I'd say the most interesting result of this is that it appears microsoft made windows run on a mac. If their custom NT kernal is siimilar to what is on the X-box then it is quite a feat. The x-box ran a slightly modified directX which is the part of the windows OS that Wine is having a really hard time emulating. If microsoft could port that over to a G5 mac then i they could easily port a full Windows operating system over. Not that they would. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to do it economically, but its still interesting that they could. ~Ian
Outsourcing is just like Object Oriented Programming. You're not suppoesd to care how you get the result, just that you get it. So you give a problem to you workers(who now happen to be in India) and get a result back. Just like an object in your programming code. So yes, project managers would be considered higher level just as the code that uses the objects is higher level code than the object's code.
~Ian
I'm not one to whine, but this article is from June 8th, 2001!
It mentions that some people want us to be using fuel cell batteries by the end of 2001. Now i don't own an iPod, but it sure doesn't run on a fuel cell battery. Infact still nothing runs on fuel cells. Any Slashdot readers know the progress of fuel cells in this area in recent times?
~Ian
I don't use a mac or own a mac. Thus my troubles are not solved!
The problem is ease of use. It is so easy to go on kazaa and listen to music. Just type what you want and there you can listen to it. If i could do the same thing and have the song automatically charged i would be happy to use that. But the way it is now why go out of my way to pay.
The first is NetLogo because its really awesome and you can do great things with it very easily. Ever try to simulate the spread of diseases in a C program??? The second is Dr Scheme which is a newer form of LISP. Teaches kids how to use functions and recursion. And the tortures of syntax. I just love () now. Rather i love (((()))) now. That portion of the course is concluded by us making our own number system with simple arithmetic functions. I think we used A's to represent a unit. Finally we conclude with Python. Basically it teaches us how to use a liner programming language.(none of the others really read top to bottom.) Overall a very good course. They also teach an introductory course that spends a whole term on python. Python has everything the more advanced languages have and its free in everyway. Plus it is much easier to read and teach with. I love it as does everyone who takes the course.
The mainstay was getting a silent case(Antec Sonata-Highly recomended) and powersupply. The case has some sound reducing material in the front and a quiet power supply. Using a large heat sink on the processor and a low RPM fan i keep my CPU very cool. I put the Zalman VGA cooler on my 9500 pro and it not only runs great, but actually it also runs cooler.
The only case fan i have is a large low rpm fan out the back. It all runs like a charm and seems to always be lower than room temperature. (Damn AC is on the opposite side of the apartment.)
The question is will having slashdot link to this site get more converts than if they made a web banner or pop up ad? (or worse one of those on page pop ups?)
Now if they're so against it they just need to do what the US government was afraid of during the cold war. All the chinese people have to stand on it and jump at the same time... thats 1 billion people times about 150 pounds each. or 150 billion pounds of force. Thats how you get rid of a controversial dam... damn it :)
I think that quote gets modded up for every slashdot news post.
:)
More bandwith, " wait 'til you see what this does for porn!"
New graphics card " wait 'til you see what this does for porn!"
New Virus named after girl " wait 'til you see what this does for porn!"
Chinese moon base in 2012 " wait 'til you see what this does for online porn!"
Build your own fuel injection computer " wait 'til you see what this does for online porn!"
-Ian
Fuzzy robots??? well i followed your link and had my retinas burned by humans without any fuzzyness. Infact they were nude. Power tool welding geeks in a nude calendar is not my idea of battle bots :D
and you confuse your C's and S's... Physicists ;P
Consider this for a moment. Your job is to study the stars, you search the skies for distant galatic bodies, many late nights you've spent studying the stars with you're giant telescopes, and even sent some telescopes into space and now suddenly you go down a mineshaft to find someting called WIMPS.
GO ASTRONOMERS!
I didn't know barbie was into muscle cars :)
But we didn't make slashdot so i guess we're just not good enough. :D
ABC news, 7:45 (new york city atleast)
And the big secret is...
The FX 5200 was being compared to an old budget card. The 9000 pro has been replaced(for a while now) by the 9100 and 9200 cards which are faster! Not to mention that you can get a 128 meg version for 74$ just 5$ more than that card(at gameve.com).
Did anyone else think that the fight reeked of Luke fighting off Vader's attempt to convert him to the dark side?
How about this keyboard at :http://www.fingerworks.com/
It has all the functions you need without a single button. I don't know if it is actually better but i'm sure you could probably work faster if you don't have to switch between a mouse and a keyboard(its a giant touchpad). All those other functions like copy, cut, paste, etc are just little motions that probably take the same time as pressing ctrl-c or anyother similar combination but give you more flexibility.
hehe i met one of the creators of the computer that beat the top checkers player. For him it seemed like a minor achievement. He thought the real challenge would be in creating one of these chess computers. Well i guess here they are.
I still don't understand the allure of Blizzards two most recent RTS's. Both SC and WarIII balance play by limiting you. Why on earth should i only be allowed to select 12 units? It makes no sense and just makes my life painful. Why should i have to babysit my resource production to make it as effective as possible. Since when did somebody think it was a good idea to hurt new players by forcing you to place your resource gathering structures at a certain distance, no more no less. Aren't RTS's supposed to be about the combat?
Well the game that did that right was total annihilation. More than 6 months before Blizzard ever released starcraft(yet over 2 years past the day it was orginally supposed to be released) it came out. It had better graphics, better gameplay, real physics, even water combat. Best of all you actually got to fight instead of manage resources. It still is the best RTS out there in my opinion and its still getting better. It has a mod community that has created thousands of new units for the game many of them better than what the game designers made. Now you can play everything from space battles to fighting as the rebels against the empire in a starwars total conversion. Many completely new races have even been made.(races in Total Annihilation have more than 200 units) Even completely new game matching services have been made. These are in someways better than Battle.net. They offer meta games of galatic wars where you fight against other players for control of planets in a galaxy to help your side. And after you play those games you can replay them in full 3d using a program made by community members. Yet blizzard is still putting along and with the release of WCIII:FT it will probably sell to more unknowing customers millions of copys. So next time you're at your local software store and are going to pick up that expansion pack think for a second and take a look at TA. at 10$ for it and its two expansions(the commander pack) it is probably worth your while.
It would good for EA to grow as large as it can. The bigger it is the more code it has in its database for its programers to call upon. Also if it expands into music and movie industries those are more resources it has at its disposal. Eventually if it needs an ingame movie it can go to the movie department and get it made there. If it needs music, they can get it from their music department. It should also allow them to have people dedicated to writing stories for games and other specialized positions. Diseny is in their grasp. It would bring only more respect for the game industry. Interactivity is so much better than just sitting and watching!
;) They even are creating their own world dedicated to their profit. Thats right the sims online shipped today.
By the way did anyone notice that they are creating their own version of a theme park. Its called RollerCoaster tycoon.
"Magellean circumsized the world using a a new brand new Clipper!"
The question is though: Did it exist before we found out it existed?
I'm not much of a programmer so i can't comment on actual programming improvements but one common thread i saw was that large libraries of code has been a huge boon to development. Big Blue Box has developed a system of organizing its seperate projects. (They develop computer and console games) Each project or brandname product they have gets spawned as a small group or satelite company. The first example was that they have spawned off their Black & White studios to work on that game line.
How they use this is called the satelite system. Every month the seperate companies/groups meet and share their ideas and what they have done with each other. They can get the viewpoint of many different developers that way. They also can share code between them. One example was that one group developed some awesome water effects. (looks damn close to real water) They all now have access to the great water renderer. Sharing code like this allows less programers to create more together. Its the same idea as having large online libraries of code at your hands. (another advantage to this system is that it is easy to intergrate a new small team of developers and give them access to large amounts of code to get started.) I can see this as a method that will take off in the near future.
Now all i have to do is to train my sheep to sort through my spam...