What was utterly mad about the whole situation was that I was quite legally listening to Radio 4 which is funded by the TV License without paying a penny.
The TV License fee is worth it for Radio 4 alone. The law is an ass.
I tell you what, lets have 10 minutes in an hour and ten seconds in a minute, 10 hours in a day, 10 days in a week, 10 weeks in a month and 10 months in a year.
Kilo, Mega, Giga. I do not think you get what those mean.
Yes I do. I even studied physics at university. Computers are binary. They should be measured in appropriate units. A megabyte is a megabyte because it takes up exactly 20 bits of an address bus.
It's quite simple. A kilobyte is 2 to the power of 10 bytes, i.e. 1024 bytes.
A megabyte is 2 to the power of 20 bytes.
A gigabyte is 2 to the power of 30 bytes.
It's very easy to understand and to remember. The "nice round 10s" are in the indices.
Whatever next? Ten bits in a byte? Or 8-bit bytes only allowed to hold 100? Mind you, with a 10-bit byte they could enforce a range of 0-999 or -500 to +499. *sigh*
Their main newspaper in the UK is the Sun. It's selling points are bare breasts on page 3, porn stories thinly disguised as "problems" (Dear Deardrie) and football news.
The rest of the paper is taken up with intolerant right-wing propaganda and celebrity gossip.
Most worryingly, though, it is the newspaper whose political leanings decide the result of the UK's General Elections. This time around the Sun has switched back to supporting the Conservatives.
This is the rag the proles get their politics from.
I've never paid for a copy of the Sun, but if I ever look at it (note you can't actually read it) I confine my interest to the bare breasts and the porn stories. I get my news from BBC Radio 4, BBC Mewsnight, Channel 4 News and the Guardian.
The Times is just the Sun but without the breasts and porn stories, i.e. for people who think they are better than that somehow.
Ho hum: an anti-Health and Safety story from the Daily Mail. I suppose immigrants, asylum seekers, gays, liberals ans women were also involved in this?
Have you tried to live without a TV in the UK? I did for 6 years. The TV Licensing people refused to believe that I didn't have one and kept pestering me to get a license. One year I had to sign two copies of the "I promise I don't have a TV set" form within a fortnight, speak to them on the phone and to deal with a TV License Inspector who turned up on my doorstep at 6pm one day.
The funny thing is, I became a great BBC Radio 4 fan during that time. It's paid for by the TV License fee, but you don't need such a license to listen to the radio...
Yes, I read your post. IBM was the new Standard Oil. Microsoft was the new IBM. Google is the new Microsoft.
People were saying similarly positive and negative things about Microsoft 15+ years ago in a similar context: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Microsoft was seen as the Great Liberating Force against IBM.
I'm not particularly desperate for mod points today, I just think people need to bear this historical lesson in mind, which is the reason for my post. My £0.02.
I see you are a fan of mine, and I hope my pointing this out won't change that, but - there are good reasons swapping batteries, while great for your phone, doesn't scale to your car.
I was trying to think of something witty to say regarding having a disagreement with someone you know or learning stuff and all that. Should I take umbridge now?
Maybe because the battery packs on electric vehicles weigh in excess of 500 lbs?
Which is why they'd be replaced by a machine! A machine can wash my car, so a machine should be able to find the battery compartment, unlock it, open it, remove the old battery pack, insert the new one, close the door and lock it again.
I can buy Duracell, Energiser, Panasonic, Phillips, el cheapo AA, AAA etc. batteries and they'll all work in my camera or TV remote. I have Energiser and Sony rechargeables. You can buy replacement laptop batteries. Why the heck would it be difficult to do the same for electric vehicles?
When power to wight ratio and reliability are crucial, why on earth are they using a plain old piston engine when they could be using a Wankel? Are they stuck in the 1940s?
Would you like a tour of my workhouse here in Whitechapel? No able-bodied man over the age of 3 gets gruel rations until he has broken his daily quota of rocks. It's good for their souls! When they have worked off their debt by the age of 21, most thank me for my seemingly unending generosity and are reluctant to leave. Most send their sons and daughters to be brought up in the industrious and humble fashion in which they themselves were moulded.
I come from a very similar background to yours and am largely self-taught as well.
As far as Computer Science goes, the important things in addition to what you have already studied are Algorithms (Knuth, Sedgewick) and Functional Programming (scheme is nice and simple and mature). I wish I'd known about Functional Programming 20 years ago...
In the world of work, if you understand and can implement basic algorithms in C and C++ you will be miles ahead of 90% of people.
What's really important for work is good engineering practice. You should learn about design and testing. Test Driven Development is a really powerful technique and quite easy to pick up if you are a hands-on learner. Your code will be so much better as a result. Again. you'll be miles ahead of most other people.
Learn about Combinatorial Testing. See the NIST website.
Do code reviews. Review code written by people better and more experienced than yourself. That's a very powerful way to learn what works and good style.
Befriend some grey-beards and heed their words.
Continuous integration, refactoring,... it's a lifetime's challenge but it's great fun and very rewarding.
Finally, knowing Bourne shell (or bash) scripting is as very useful skill to have. It opens many doors and can make you a very valuable team member since many people only know GUI tools (Visual Studio).
Don't over-emphasise the PHP. It leads to dead-end jobs that are way beneath you.
Slashdot Mirror
Catch a falling Starfighter, put it in your pocket...
NASCAR? Do they still have at least one fatality per race?
What are these? Is this something that afflicts Windows people still?
First, including a link doesn't make you a programmer.
Whoooooosh!
I got the "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" letters too.
What was utterly mad about the whole situation was that I was quite legally listening to Radio 4 which is funded by the TV License without paying a penny.
The TV License fee is worth it for Radio 4 alone. The law is an ass.
I tell you what, lets have 10 minutes in an hour and ten seconds in a minute, 10 hours in a day, 10 days in a week, 10 weeks in a month and 10 months in a year.
Kilo, Mega, Giga. I do not think you get what those mean.
Yes I do. I even studied physics at university. Computers are binary. They should be measured in appropriate units. A megabyte is a megabyte because it takes up exactly 20 bits of an address bus.
This is preposterous.
It's quite simple. A kilobyte is 2 to the power of 10 bytes, i.e. 1024 bytes.
A megabyte is 2 to the power of 20 bytes.
A gigabyte is 2 to the power of 30 bytes.
It's very easy to understand and to remember. The "nice round 10s" are in the indices.
Whatever next? Ten bits in a byte? Or 8-bit bytes only allowed to hold 100? Mind you, with a 10-bit byte they could enforce a range of 0-999 or -500 to +499. *sigh*
Their main newspaper in the UK is the Sun. It's selling points are bare breasts on page 3, porn stories thinly disguised as "problems" (Dear Deardrie) and football news.
The rest of the paper is taken up with intolerant right-wing propaganda and celebrity gossip.
Most worryingly, though, it is the newspaper whose political leanings decide the result of the UK's General Elections. This time around the Sun has switched back to supporting the Conservatives.
This is the rag the proles get their politics from.
I've never paid for a copy of the Sun, but if I ever look at it (note you can't actually read it) I confine my interest to the bare breasts and the porn stories. I get my news from BBC Radio 4, BBC Mewsnight, Channel 4 News and the Guardian.
The Times is just the Sun but without the breasts and porn stories, i.e. for people who think they are better than that somehow.
Ho hum: an anti-Health and Safety story from the Daily Mail. I suppose immigrants, asylum seekers, gays, liberals ans women were also involved in this?
Have you tried to live without a TV in the UK? I did for 6 years. The TV Licensing people refused to believe that I didn't have one and kept pestering me to get a license. One year I had to sign two copies of the "I promise I don't have a TV set" form within a fortnight, speak to them on the phone and to deal with a TV License Inspector who turned up on my doorstep at 6pm one day.
The funny thing is, I became a great BBC Radio 4 fan during that time. It's paid for by the TV License fee, but you don't need such a license to listen to the radio...
It's a funny old world.
I'll see your coup and raise you a Turra Coo
Yes, I read your post. IBM was the new Standard Oil. Microsoft was the new IBM. Google is the new Microsoft.
People were saying similarly positive and negative things about Microsoft 15+ years ago in a similar context: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Microsoft was seen as the Great Liberating Force against IBM.
I'm not particularly desperate for mod points today, I just think people need to bear this historical lesson in mind, which is the reason for my post. My £0.02.
Sounds just like what people were saying about Microsoft in the early 1990s.
Microsoft is dead. Google is the new Microsoft.
I see you are a fan of mine, and I hope my pointing this out won't change that, but - there are good reasons swapping batteries, while great for your phone, doesn't scale to your car.
I was trying to think of something witty to say regarding having a disagreement with someone you know or learning stuff and all that. Should I take umbridge now?
Maybe because the battery packs on electric vehicles weigh in excess of 500 lbs?
Which is why they'd be replaced by a machine! A machine can wash my car, so a machine should be able to find the battery compartment, unlock it, open it, remove the old battery pack, insert the new one, close the door and lock it again.
I can buy Duracell, Energiser, Panasonic, Phillips, el cheapo AA, AAA etc. batteries and they'll all work in my camera or TV remote. I have Energiser and Sony rechargeables. You can buy replacement laptop batteries. Why the heck would it be difficult to do the same for electric vehicles?
Why wait around for the batteries to charge when you could have standard interchangeable battery packs?
You could drive up to a machine that swaps out your spent battery with a recharged one in a matter of seconds.
Well, why aren't helicopters using Wankels? Huh? Huh?
Most use gas turbines.
For one thing, you can't buy a Wankel engine of the appropriate size
Yes you can.
don't they have awful fuel economy which mitigates power to wait when you've got to carry more fuel
No, not at the speeds and loadings required for aero use.
When power to wight ratio and reliability are crucial, why on earth are they using a plain old piston engine when they could be using a Wankel? Are they stuck in the 1940s?
We should go down the pub some time and put the world to rights.
They probably thought that if they spent the $250 they'd get "support" for the software.
Allah vs. Jesus.
Do I win the interweb?
A man after my own heart!
Would you like a tour of my workhouse here in Whitechapel? No able-bodied man over the age of 3 gets gruel rations until he has broken his daily quota of rocks. It's good for their souls! When they have worked off their debt by the age of 21, most thank me for my seemingly unending generosity and are reluctant to leave. Most send their sons and daughters to be brought up in the industrious and humble fashion in which they themselves were moulded.
Next year I am to receive a knighthood.
And Boney M could send them on a Nightflight to Venus... segue to Rasputin.
I come from a very similar background to yours and am largely self-taught as well.
As far as Computer Science goes, the important things in addition to what you have already studied are Algorithms (Knuth, Sedgewick) and Functional Programming (scheme is nice and simple and mature). I wish I'd known about Functional Programming 20 years ago...
In the world of work, if you understand and can implement basic algorithms in C and C++ you will be miles ahead of 90% of people.
What's really important for work is good engineering practice. You should learn about design and testing. Test Driven Development is a really powerful technique and quite easy to pick up if you are a hands-on learner. Your code will be so much better as a result. Again. you'll be miles ahead of most other people.
Learn about Combinatorial Testing. See the NIST website.
Do code reviews. Review code written by people better and more experienced than yourself. That's a very powerful way to learn what works and good style.
Befriend some grey-beards and heed their words.
Continuous integration, refactoring, ... it's a lifetime's challenge but it's great fun and very rewarding.
Finally, knowing Bourne shell (or bash) scripting is as very useful skill to have. It opens many doors and can make you a very valuable team member since many people only know GUI tools (Visual Studio).
Don't over-emphasise the PHP. It leads to dead-end jobs that are way beneath you.