For an interesting Lord of the Rings tie-in, see Ebert's 'movie answer man' article from a few weeks ago. That's where I first heard about the "uncanny valley" concept. Ebert talks about it in the process of analyzing Gollum's Oscar chances.
An even better grading system (in my opinion) is the one used at many Canadian institutes of higher learning, for example at the University of Waterloo (the other UW).
Students' final grades in a class are just a percentage (0-100). Of course, this is still subject to belling and inflation, but it provides a far finer granualarity.
Part of this is because I've met Mathematics PhDs who can't do their own taxes. If that's the case, can I trust a PhD in CS to network two boxes together? Probably not.
No, you shouldn't trust a PhD in CS to network two boxes together, for the same reason that you shouldn't get a PhD in English Literature to type your business letters for you.
In that case it definitely sounds like these 4 UW students aren't doing things the "Right Way", according to the core OpenBSD team's standards, anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking them - this is a big and very cool undertaking that the students are doing. It's just too bad that it seems like their work won't be accepted by the OpenBSD core team.
But UW Eng != UW in general, so you're completely correct, the stoooopid poster should just STFU.
Exactly. I tried to make this point in my other post in this thread.
But... I have an engineering co-op student who's working for me, and it's amusing to bash MS in front of him.
Except that all four students working on this project are 4th year CompEng students! According to their site, they "are four University of Waterloo students who are adding Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) support to the OpenBSD kernel as [their] 4th year Computer Engineering Design Project."
The University of Waterloo, eh? Well, knowing them...
Which apparently you don't.
the versions of OpenBSD with SMP support will require a Windows XP activation key...
Or maybe they figured out a way to port OpenBSd to Windows. Or something. Waterloo?
I assume you're referring to the stories from several months ago about a proposed deal where UW's Computer and Electrical Engineering department would, as part of a larger research sponsorship deal with MS, agree to make C# the language used in a first year class for CompEng students. There was a huge outcry against this by most CS and CompEng students and profs. Also, note that the School of Computer Science, in the Faculty of Mathematics, had nothing to do with this deal.
It is my impression that there are many UW students who use or contribute to Open Source projects. Profs are more than willing to make an occasional joke in class at Microsoft's expense. And most CS students (I can't speak for CompEngers) don't touch any MS products for programming projects past first year, by far preferring to use the provided unix labs.
Do I think the CompEng department's decision regarding C# bad? Very much so. But as I understand it, this decision was made by a few key people who stretched their authority, when really they should have consulted with more people. In fact, Engineering profs have called UW administration on this decision, leading to a decision that before the MS deal can be finalized, it must be approved by "the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Program Committee, Faculty of Engineering Admissions Committee, Faculty of Engineering Academic Committee, Faculty of Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee, Year 1 Implementation Committee, Senate Undergraduate Council, UW Registrar's Office and the senate as required by UW policy and practice." This, in my opinion, effectively has killed the deal. See this article for more about this. [Note that the article implies that the proposed MS C# deal would have affected all first year programming classes. This is untrue: only first year CompEng classes would have been affected; CS students would have been fine.]
The very reason that this decision was such as big deal at UW is that it goes so very much against the prevalent attitude there. And the very large amount of negative feedback they got from UW students and profs in the CompEng and CS departments should ensure that something like this doesn't happen again at UW.
Dear Moderators, My above comment in this thread is making fun of the guy who started this thread. "In Soviet Russia, dead horse is beating you." i.e. I was telling the guy "you are beating a dead horse".
Now, 'to beat a dead horse' is a figure of speech. In this case, it means he is telling an old, over-used joke that is no longer funny.
I didn't think I'd have to explain this on Slashdot, but apparently I do...
I wonder if this could cause U.S.-Canadian tensions?
I think you meant to say more tensions.
The US puts tarrifs on Canada's softwood lumber and talks about doing the same to its wheat. Sure they signed free trade agreements with Canada, but that doesn't mean they can't violate them whenever its convenient for them. And what can Canada do about this? Nothing, really. Especially since Bush is far more concerned about Mexico than he is with the USA's biggest trading partner, Canada.
Immediately after 9/11 Canadian firefighters, resue workers, ambulance crews, etc went to Manhatten to help. And Canada sent troops to help in Afghanistan, four of whom were killed because of the criminal negligence of two US pilots (according to the findings of both Canadian and US inquiries). Was any of this reported in the US? Not really, except for an American governor's fund raisers to help out the poor scape-goated American pilots. I wouldn't be complaining about this lack of recognition in the US for this good, neighbourly help provided by Canada, expect for the way that American officials and their media are more than willing to pounce on the smallest (or even non-existant) negative things. For example, after 9/11 a lot was made by top US officials about how lax Canadian security was and how this allowed the terrorists to enter the US via Canada, in spite of the fact that there was no evidence that any of the terrorists in fact entered from Canada. I fear to think what the reaction would be if some terrorists do enter the US via Canada and do complete a horrible attack - the Americans will have their proof of Canada's irresponsibly lax security, even though terrorists are clearly just as able to enter the US directly.
Also, consider the recent case of a non-elected Canadian government person, just a PR person for the Prime Minister, who in a private conversation with a reporter called President Bush "a moron". This comment got published, and within a few days CNN was talking about it with the caption "Canada: A threat?" on the screen while making much of the remark of a "senior official in the Canadian government".
I guess my point in all this is that, yes, if the US government doesn't like this patent decision to a sufficent degree, than you can expect to hear a lot in the US media about Canada's 'policy of flagrently disregarding US patent law'. Most likely you just won't hear anything about this in the US media, since most people won't care about this patent law/biology type of news.
You consider these reviewers biased. The theonering.net reviewer in particular is writing for a specific audience: not just those who've read the books, but those who have read and are big fans of the book and know a lot of details about them. A review for that audience is going to understandably focus on how the movie differs from the book and whether these difference work well or not.
Now, I agree that the theonering.net reviewer is probably quite biased, but not necessarily in the "I will praise this movie no matter what" kind of way. In fact, I would say that except for people who hate all fantasy and try to trash it as 'childish' or for wackos who think the books are satanic, that hard-core fans of the book are at least as likely to rip the movie apart as 'normal' reviewers are. Fans are suspicous about any change from the books, and they will loudly complain about any changes that end up not working in the movies. However, fans are likely biased in that they'll end up liking and disliking different things about the movie than the normal reviewers will.
I wasn't able to find this in the press release. Does anyone know if the encryption algorithm would be public key based, or would it be DEC or something like that?
The stuff on South Park isn't real Canada bashing. Often it is in fact making fun of Americans' Canada bashing. In the case of the South Park Movie and its song "Blame Canada", it is mocking the tendency of parents to blame the bad behaviour of their children on anything and everything but themselves - even on something as obviously harmless (from an American's point of view) as Canada.
Re:Sounds like a pretty crappy university
on
Realtime OS Jaluna
·
· Score: 1
According to some of my profs, MIT also uses Scheme as the introductory language. The idea is that not only has almost nobody used it beforehand, but that it is so different from other mainstream languages. They use this to instill some humility in any students who show up a little too cocky.
Sounds like a pretty crappy university
on
Realtime OS Jaluna
·
· Score: 1
I sounds like you're right, that you should have chosen a different university. Different people look to get different things out of an education.
I have trouble imagining a university offering courses called "Java" or "XML". But if these are the types of courses you'd be interested in, then it sounds like a good community college would have been the way to go.
If, on the other hand, you like the stuff you're learning in the theory courses but just want a chance to try some of it out in programming assignments, then it sounds like you've got screwed over pretty good by your university. In my experience a good portion of courses at reputable universities also include programming assignments for hands-on experience. For examples, a course in algorithm design and analysis or in operating systems would include assignments where you implement those algorithms or implement process control.
So it sounds like whichever of these things you're looking for, you're at the wrong university.
Of course, it is possible that when you say "theory courses" you do in fact mean real hard-core abstract theory, and that this university is trying to produce all theoretical computer scientists. In that case the university would not be crappy, as I claimed, but would just be different and unique. Although it would definitely not be offering what you sound like you're looking for in that case, either. However, I sincerely doubt that a university with such a daring program would offer electives called "Java" and "XML", so I don't think we have to consider this case.
Re:Sounds fascinating...
on
Realtime OS Jaluna
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm a student at the University of Waterloo. I recently took their real-time course. You would apparently be dismayed to learn that even after taking that course, and spending an average of about 35 hours a week outside of class working on it, I don't know a thing specifically about Jaluna or any other real-life real-time OS.
Instead of teaching us how to code for Jaluna they taught us enough about the inner workings of RTOS's that we could write a limited one on our own. In fact, we did - hence the incredibly large (yet rewarding) workload.
Although I agree with pretty much everything else that's been said, I really like watching the trailers. I'd be happy with twenty-five minutes of them.
However, I can't stand other types of advertisements at the movies!
The biggest thing that a movie theatre has over watching a DVD hasn't really been mentioned so far. It has nothing to do with screen/sound quality, etc. It is the fact that DVDs come out at least five months after the movie is in theatre. For me, this is a big deal, since 90% of the time when I go to a big movie theatre, it is for a movie that I've been eagerly anticipating for months (at least) ahead of time. So waiting many months more just isn't an option.
>Give her what every shy, young, sweet, innocent, >18-year-old female college freshman needs: >a webcam! > >At least, that's what I think they all need...
I fine idea, but not very original. That is, if the half dozen different icq messages I get everyday are true, then there must be tens of thousands of naked co-ed college girls with webcams, all eager to please me!
About Adams and Dion - let me appologize on behalf of all Canadians and ensure you that nobody listens to them up here. Or at least, only the same type of people who listen to them in the US listen to them here too.
They are not at all representative of Canadian music. We tend to keep most of our good musicians to ourselves. Sorry for being to selfish.
And don't forget Korea. When North Korea invaded the South and UN troops from the US, Canada, etc, went in and turned the tide, Chinese troops became involved and fought (and killed) American, Canadian, etc troops for the sake of spreading communism.
Yes, but I'm sure no one was thinking of those applications when Copernicus was around. Which is probably the point - just because you don't see any applications for a new theory doesn't mean it won't prove extremely useful.
>> I'm pretty sure a quantum singularity of any >> size will have a mass a little bit heavier >> than that of any mountain.
No, you're wrong. True, singularities formed from the collapse of stars would have masses greater than that of our sun, but singularities formed by other means, such as shortly after the big bang, can have far less mass.
I'm sure that when the author mentioned "singularities the size of a mountain" he meant this to indicate they were rather small. The particles that black holes radiate (called Hawking radiation) are produced faster for smaller black holes. Hence a black hole formed from a star would radiate very little, a mountain sized one would radiate much more, and a very tiny black hole would disapear very quickly in a burst of Hawking radiation.
Slashdot Mirror
For an interesting Lord of the Rings tie-in, see Ebert's 'movie answer man' article from a few weeks ago. That's where I first heard about the "uncanny valley" concept. Ebert talks about it in the process of analyzing Gollum's Oscar chances.
Its nice to see some MS researchers going against the perceived stereotype and being open in their suggestions like this.
And I think they have a good point about massive memory being a very important part of computing advancement right now.
An even better grading system (in my opinion) is the one used at many Canadian institutes of higher learning, for example at the University of Waterloo (the other UW). Students' final grades in a class are just a percentage (0-100). Of course, this is still subject to belling and inflation, but it provides a far finer granualarity.
No, you shouldn't trust a PhD in CS to network two boxes together, for the same reason that you shouldn't get a PhD in English Literature to type your business letters for you.
In that case it definitely sounds like these 4 UW students aren't doing things the "Right Way", according to the core OpenBSD team's standards, anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking them - this is a big and very cool undertaking that the students are doing. It's just too bad that it seems like their work won't be accepted by the OpenBSD core team.
Exactly. I tried to make this point in my other post in this thread.
But... I have an engineering co-op student who's working for me, and it's amusing to bash MS in front of him.
Except that all four students working on this project are 4th year CompEng students! According to their site, they "are four University of Waterloo students who are adding Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) support to the OpenBSD kernel as [their] 4th year Computer Engineering Design Project."
Which apparently you don't.
the versions of OpenBSD with SMP support will require a Windows XP activation key...
Or maybe they figured out a way to port OpenBSd to Windows. Or something. Waterloo?
I assume you're referring to the stories from several months ago about a proposed deal where UW's Computer and Electrical Engineering department would, as part of a larger research sponsorship deal with MS, agree to make C# the language used in a first year class for CompEng students. There was a huge outcry against this by most CS and CompEng students and profs. Also, note that the School of Computer Science, in the Faculty of Mathematics, had nothing to do with this deal.
It is my impression that there are many UW students who use or contribute to Open Source projects. Profs are more than willing to make an occasional joke in class at Microsoft's expense. And most CS students (I can't speak for CompEngers) don't touch any MS products for programming projects past first year, by far preferring to use the provided unix labs.
Do I think the CompEng department's decision regarding C# bad? Very much so. But as I understand it, this decision was made by a few key people who stretched their authority, when really they should have consulted with more people. In fact, Engineering profs have called UW administration on this decision, leading to a decision that before the MS deal can be finalized, it must be approved by "the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Program Committee, Faculty of Engineering Admissions Committee, Faculty of Engineering Academic Committee, Faculty of Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee, Year 1 Implementation Committee, Senate Undergraduate Council, UW Registrar's Office and the senate as required by UW policy and practice." This, in my opinion, effectively has killed the deal. See this article for more about this. [Note that the article implies that the proposed MS C# deal would have affected all first year programming classes. This is untrue: only first year CompEng classes would have been affected; CS students would have been fine.]
The very reason that this decision was such as big deal at UW is that it goes so very much against the prevalent attitude there. And the very large amount of negative feedback they got from UW students and profs in the CompEng and CS departments should ensure that something like this doesn't happen again at UW.
Dear Moderators,
My above comment in this thread is making fun of the guy who started this thread. "In Soviet Russia, dead horse is beating you." i.e. I was telling the guy "you are beating a dead horse".
Now, 'to beat a dead horse' is a figure of speech. In this case, it means he is telling an old, over-used joke that is no longer funny.
I didn't think I'd have to explain this on Slashdot, but apparently I do...
In Soviet Russia, dead horse is beating you!
I think you meant to say more tensions.
The US puts tarrifs on Canada's softwood lumber and talks about doing the same to its wheat. Sure they signed free trade agreements with Canada, but that doesn't mean they can't violate them whenever its convenient for them. And what can Canada do about this? Nothing, really. Especially since Bush is far more concerned about Mexico than he is with the USA's biggest trading partner, Canada.
Immediately after 9/11 Canadian firefighters, resue workers, ambulance crews, etc went to Manhatten to help. And Canada sent troops to help in Afghanistan, four of whom were killed because of the criminal negligence of two US pilots (according to the findings of both Canadian and US inquiries). Was any of this reported in the US? Not really, except for an American governor's fund raisers to help out the poor scape-goated American pilots. I wouldn't be complaining about this lack of recognition in the US for this good, neighbourly help provided by Canada, expect for the way that American officials and their media are more than willing to pounce on the smallest (or even non-existant) negative things. For example, after 9/11 a lot was made by top US officials about how lax Canadian security was and how this allowed the terrorists to enter the US via Canada, in spite of the fact that there was no evidence that any of the terrorists in fact entered from Canada. I fear to think what the reaction would be if some terrorists do enter the US via Canada and do complete a horrible attack - the Americans will have their proof of Canada's irresponsibly lax security, even though terrorists are clearly just as able to enter the US directly.
Also, consider the recent case of a non-elected Canadian government person, just a PR person for the Prime Minister, who in a private conversation with a reporter called President Bush "a moron". This comment got published, and within a few days CNN was talking about it with the caption "Canada: A threat?" on the screen while making much of the remark of a "senior official in the Canadian government".
I guess my point in all this is that, yes, if the US government doesn't like this patent decision to a sufficent degree, than you can expect to hear a lot in the US media about Canada's 'policy of flagrently disregarding US patent law'. Most likely you just won't hear anything about this in the US media, since most people won't care about this patent law/biology type of news.
You consider these reviewers biased. The theonering.net reviewer in particular is writing for a specific audience: not just those who've read the books, but those who have read and are big fans of the book and know a lot of details about them. A review for that audience is going to understandably focus on how the movie differs from the book and whether these difference work well or not.
Now, I agree that the theonering.net reviewer is probably quite biased, but not necessarily in the "I will praise this movie no matter what" kind of way. In fact, I would say that except for people who hate all fantasy and try to trash it as 'childish' or for wackos who think the books are satanic, that hard-core fans of the book are at least as likely to rip the movie apart as 'normal' reviewers are. Fans are suspicous about any change from the books, and they will loudly complain about any changes that end up not working in the movies. However, fans are likely biased in that they'll end up liking and disliking different things about the movie than the normal reviewers will.
If you mean DES, not DEC Hmm, yes, particularly unfortunate typo on my part.
I wasn't able to find this in the press release. Does anyone know if the encryption algorithm would be public key based, or would it be DEC or something like that?
The stuff on South Park isn't real Canada bashing. Often it is in fact making fun of Americans' Canada bashing. In the case of the South Park Movie and its song "Blame Canada", it is mocking the tendency of parents to blame the bad behaviour of their children on anything and everything but themselves - even on something as obviously harmless (from an American's point of view) as Canada.
According to some of my profs, MIT also uses Scheme as the introductory language. The idea is that not only has almost nobody used it beforehand, but that it is so different from other mainstream languages. They use this to instill some humility in any students who show up a little too cocky.
I sounds like you're right, that you should have chosen a different university. Different people look to get different things out of an education.
I have trouble imagining a university offering courses called "Java" or "XML". But if these are the types of courses you'd be interested in, then it sounds like a good community college would have been the way to go.
If, on the other hand, you like the stuff you're learning in the theory courses but just want a chance to try some of it out in programming assignments, then it sounds like you've got screwed over pretty good by your university. In my experience a good portion of courses at reputable universities also include programming assignments for hands-on experience. For examples, a course in algorithm design and analysis or in operating systems would include assignments where you implement those algorithms or implement process control.
So it sounds like whichever of these things you're looking for, you're at the wrong university.
Of course, it is possible that when you say "theory courses" you do in fact mean real hard-core abstract theory, and that this university is trying to produce all theoretical computer scientists. In that case the university would not be crappy, as I claimed, but would just be different and unique. Although it would definitely not be offering what you sound like you're looking for in that case, either. However, I sincerely doubt that a university with such a daring program would offer electives called "Java" and "XML", so I don't think we have to consider this case.
I'm a student at the University of Waterloo. I recently took their real-time course. You would apparently be dismayed to learn that even after taking that course, and spending an average of about 35 hours a week outside of class working on it, I don't know a thing specifically about Jaluna or any other real-life real-time OS.
Instead of teaching us how to code for Jaluna they taught us enough about the inner workings of RTOS's that we could write a limited one on our own. In fact, we did - hence the incredibly large (yet rewarding) workload.
Mod this guy up! I'm just not sure whether this is more funny or more insightful...
Although I agree with pretty much everything else that's been said, I really like watching the trailers. I'd be happy with twenty-five minutes of them.
However, I can't stand other types of advertisements at the movies!
The biggest thing that a movie theatre has over watching a DVD hasn't really been mentioned so far. It has nothing to do with screen/sound quality, etc. It is the fact that DVDs come out at least five months after the movie is in theatre. For me, this is a big deal, since 90% of the time when I go to a big movie theatre, it is for a movie that I've been eagerly anticipating for months (at least) ahead of time. So waiting many months more just isn't an option.
>Give her what every shy, young, sweet, innocent,
>18-year-old female college freshman needs:
>a webcam!
>
>At least, that's what I think they all need...
I fine idea, but not very original. That is, if the half dozen different icq messages I get everyday are true, then there must be tens of thousands of naked co-ed college girls with webcams, all eager to please me!
About Adams and Dion - let me appologize on behalf of all Canadians and ensure you that nobody listens to them up here. Or at least, only the same type of people who listen to them in the US listen to them here too.
They are not at all representative of Canadian music. We tend to keep most of our good musicians to ourselves. Sorry for being to selfish.
And don't forget Korea. When North Korea invaded the South and UN troops from the US, Canada, etc, went in and turned the tide, Chinese troops became involved and fought (and killed) American, Canadian, etc troops for the sake of spreading communism.
Yes, but I'm sure no one was thinking of those applications when Copernicus was around. Which is probably the point - just because you don't see any applications for a new theory doesn't mean it won't prove extremely useful.
>> I'm pretty sure a quantum singularity of any
>> size will have a mass a little bit heavier
>> than that of any mountain.
No, you're wrong. True, singularities formed from the collapse of stars would have masses greater than that of our sun, but singularities formed by other means, such as shortly after the big bang, can have far less mass.
I'm sure that when the author mentioned "singularities the size of a mountain" he meant this to indicate they were rather small. The particles that black holes radiate (called Hawking radiation) are produced faster for smaller black holes. Hence a black hole formed from a star would radiate very little, a mountain sized one would radiate much more, and a very tiny black hole would disapear very quickly in a burst of Hawking radiation.