I have a machine learning problem that I hope to solve as a part of a commercial service and that project will almost certainly benefit from the requirement that the solutions to this contest be explained to the world.
I would be astonished if an open source OLAP project didn't benefit or couldn't be started as a result of the code that will be published and refined through the course of this contest.
Society doesn't only benefit from big, flashy goals (not that you were saying that).
You misspelled "deliberate and significant misrepresentation intended to deceive a gullible electorate" as "typo". No need to thank me, I'm just here to help.
You honestly think some cabal at FNC thought putting a "D" there would fool millions of people into thinking otherwise? I mean, come on, THINK it through.
We're talking about the same millions of people who largely believed Bush's campaign statements in 2004. Their ability to distinguish fact from the exact opposite of fact is no longer in question, it's a given.
The facts have a huge and obvious liberal bias. The strage part is how that liberal-favoring bias seems to be growing with every passing day... You'd think someone would want to do something about that, and look! There's Fox "News" to the rescue! They're working over time to bring historican revisionism right up to today's news!
That being young, politically liberal minded people.
Have you ever actually watched the show? Cause the Dems get lambasted as the unelectable (and worse than that) on a regular basis.
How many times do we really need to hear that Bush is a dumbfuck,
I'll take "at least once a day" until McCain gets elected, please (I'm a nonreligious conservative who thinks Bush has harmed this country in almost every way that matters and who doesn't feel well represented by most of our "religious-right" Republicans).
or see Stewart shilling for the latest Democratic candidate?
You can't possibly regularly watch the show. The only explanation for your statement is that you accidentally ended up there instead of watching Fox News for one episode where he was playing nice with a Dem and haven't been back since.
It's not an exact duplicate, but I have discussed meeting my wife on match.com recently here on Slashdot. I'm not a subscriber so I can't go back that far and see my old messages to post a URL...
I loudly objected to the Ruby Ridge showdown, educating everyone around me to what happened (and noting carefully that I didn't agree with the white separatist's views, but that I didn't think his son and wife deserved to be killed for his failure to play ball with the FBI). You're correct that people on the left had a harder time of agreeing, but most came to the conclusion that something went badly wrong up there and that the FBI agents got away with multiple murder.
And you're also right that today, my friends who vote Republican no matter what are having a tough time understanding that they are standing idly by while their civil liberties are quickly and methodically stripped away for no purpose that benefits them.
But then again, I've always been somewhat of a free-thinker in politics. I tend to call myself a "l"ibertarian, though I don't put as much faith in the free market to cure society's ills as most libertarians seem to. My right wing friends are often suprised to discover that I'm a gun-nut who enjoys competitive shooting, for smaller government (though I have mixed feelings about the regulation of various industries), for fewer taxes and fewer entitlement programs, etc. My left wing friends don't really expect me to be a Bush critic who's pro-choice (even though I personally am willing to call a fetus "alive" at the moment of conception), anti-death-penalty (too many false positives in the system), etc.
The double standard is completely ridiculous. Either you're passionate about civil rights or you're not, you don't change your mind about losing your first amendment rights (or all the others) based on who is leading the attack.
Purely out of interest, why did you choose Match.Com (paid, not very "smart") over, say, OKCupid.com (free, sort of "smart").
I made a similar choice (though I've never heard of OKCupid.com), and I had two very deliberate reasons: match.com has more people (== more women), and a pay site keeps the riff-raff out.
Because of the fee, you can be fairly certain that the people you're talking to on match.com are actively looking to meet someone. I tried craigslist for a while, but there were too many "casual" women there to find anyone who wanted to be serious. I would expect any free site to have a similar issue. Not sure what your "smart" remark might imply about match.com (smart people, smart filtering process, etc.) I had some trouble finding a really smart girl on match.com, but I didn't have any better luck with finding intelligent women on the free sites, and being persistent eventually paid off (a very smart girl on match.com found me).
I just married one of the woman I met on match.com in 2003, though the path to getting here was exhausting. I had 13 first dates where either I was interested but she wasn't or she was interested but I wasn't. By the time my wife searched for me and sent me an email, I was very tired of the whole thing and about ready to throw in the towel. But it looked like I would have an interesting conversation with this one last woman, so I went to the coffee shop and had an amazing night.
Too many women (and probably men) are putting up unrealistically flattering photos, which means an unpleasant suprise in person. My wife unintentionally put up fairly unflattering photos and when I saw her in person, I had to check the room again, as I was so pleasantly suprised. I told her that her photos didn't do her justice and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Just remember that dating websites only kinda solve one part of the problem. They get you introductions to people you would never otherwise meet. If they're honest on their profile, you also get some early answers to important questions, but there are no guarantees there. You're still going to have to go through all of the work of really seeing if the relationship makes sense and then putting in the work to build that relationship into something significant, with all of the joys and difficulties that will bring.
As for the income thing, match equates "don't want to answer" with "less than $25k/year". My wife didn't want to date the unemployed and put "at least $25k/year" as a filter and only saw me because I had recently made my income visible. So my wife wasn't being a gold-digger, but wouldn't have seen me if I hadn't put my income out there. Match.com's decision-making on this question is particularly questionable.
We are EXTREMELY productive and very organized but don't really on charts and powerpoint presentations.
Right, but that doesn't mean your team doesn't have a process. You do have some ability to communicate reliable estimates to other people, you do have some ability to agree on the underlying hardware/OS that your system runs on, you do have some ability to make certain that before new code gets used by paying customers that it's of some acceptable quality.
You just don't rely on a document called a "project plan" or all-hands meetings as the visible parts of your process.
Those sorts of implicit-yet-effective processes tend to happen when there is a strong personality on the team who has some idea of how to get things done and everyone else goes along for the ride. That person is the one who announced one day that there's a team wiki, who is a bit of a nazi on code documentation, who's the one people think of when someone says "mentor". S/he may be an asshole, and s/he may not be the fastest developer on the team, but because they are strong-willed, and their methods work, the team actually has a process that works.
I've seen and heard about it happening enough that I would be suprised if you don't have a similar situation with the team you're describing. The worst thing that can happen to that sort of a team is an externally imposed process that just adds red tape and interferes with getting things done without any perceivable benefit. People who've worked in better processes tend to get really annoyed with the clueless PHB's who need more process simply because they can't see any.
you'd be amazed what you can get done when your employees can take ownership.
The best processes leave ownership and responsibility right where they belong: with the producers. Don't disparage the word "process", as you have a process (or several processes) whether you know it or not. What matters is how effective your process(es) really are.
(An aside: IMHO, efficiency is ultimately the enemy of effectiveness, and effectiveness is what's really needed in any significant endeavor).
Now I remember from my math class that if you could not show how you arrived at your answer it was treated as a guess and thrown out.
That's because you're being graded on providing the correct answer and demonstrating the process you used to reach that answer. Perelman (and other mathemeticians, including Yau) are instead judged solely on the correctness of their work.
I am not saying Perelman did not solve the conjecture but his approach to publishing his work in a piecemeal and incomplete manner was a poor choice [...]
Actually, Perelman did not reveal an incomplete proof. According to those who can follow the processes in his messages, it seems to be complete without further elaboration . Further, he didn't "publish" in the academic meaning of the word, he announced, and if his announcement came in three pieces, well, nobody paid him to work on it, so the complaints about his means of delivery seem a little embittered.
Yau does appear to be filling in gaps [...]
Ah, but that's the question at the center of the controversy: Are there gaps to be filled? Outside of Yau's group, the consensus appears to be, "No. Perelman's proof is complete as originally described."
If there were pieces missing which Yau could provide, then Yau and his students would be justified in their claim. Instead, it appears that Yau and his students were merely restating the exact same proof in their own words and claiming to have filled in blanks.
The maturing that goes on at college isn't really part of the design; it's just a fortunate side effect some people experience.
Sure. At most decent universities, the chance for personal growth is there. Whether you actually do grow is up to the individual.
My comment was only meant to point out that this individual almost certainly didn't take that opportunity. Based on the amount of time he spent there, along with his remarks about what he wants to do with his newfound degrees.
Part of the point of an undergraduate education is to be exposed to new ideas and concepts while you're establishing yourself in an environment separate from your parents and the babysitting culture of most secondary schools.
Somehow, I don't think he got very much exposure to new ideas and concepts. He sounds like someone who's decided that whatever makes the most money is the best thing to do with your life.
I notice the Japanese aren't buying Sony MP3 players either, but then you wouldn't want to be bothered by the actual argument, now would you?
Didn't think so. But thanks for playing.
Oh, and by the way, you just made my day (or night, as it were:) It's a little sad that there are people like you in the world but fantastically wonderful that I don't know anyone like you. I'm not normally one to laugh at another person's misfortune, but ha! ha! about your personality!
Truth is Japan has some of the most brand-loyal customers in the world.
Correct.
They will buy a Japanese console over an American one even if it is far inferior.
Incorrect.
Sure, the Japanese are just about as xenophobic as a red-state voter, but they'll buy an Apple iPod over a Samsung MP3 player any day of the week and twice on Sunday. You had it right the first time: the Japanese are brand-loyal consumers.
Point taken. For someone to grok Lisp, they're going to have to get beyond what's possible in Java.
However, as someone who does mostly Java (more and more Ruby, however), I do know what closures and continuations are, and can get the point (and some basic explanations as to why they're useful) across to another Java programmer without too much angst. That I come from Lisp and Smalltalk (back in the day) probably has something to do with that.
I do sincerely wish that a more generally useful continuation implementation existed in Java. No real reason why not, but at the moment, a third party implementation would have to interact with VM internals, which is sure to cause portability and maintenance problems.
** try explaining closures or continuations to a Java-only programmer.
Closures: A closure is a function that can access the variables of the surrounding context where it's executed. You know anonymous inner classes? When you declare and call an anonymous inner class in a function, you're using one kind of closure, though it has some limitations on accessing local variables compared to what you can do with true closures in List, Smalltalk, Ruby, etc.
Continuation: Have you ever wanted to write a web-based wizard that could receive a user response to step 3 and didn't have to go back recheck that the previous steps were complete before acting on the new data? What you want are continuations, the ability to set aside the complete state of the context (not just some values from the context ala Session variables) and go back to that state later.
Luckily, with Java's thread model, continuations have been available since Java 1.1, though only RIFE currently supports them as a part of it's web flow. Unluckily, Threads are not perfect continuations, because they cannot be duplicated and can not be made re-entrant. Further unluckily, EJBs are actively hostile to Thread-based continuations, because they deliberately use Thread context in ways which make it almost impossible to use a Thread as a continuation container (think transaction boundaries). Luckily, since EJB's suck in so many other ways, you're probably not using them and may be able to take a look at RIFE for your next project.
Why is it that the "book thinking" is the only good type of thinking that should be developed and the "game thinking" (which is more exploratory and problem solving) is a bad type of thinking?
Great point. There certainly are other redeeming qualities to games. Just not so much in the "cultural communication" arena. I was incorrect to only list social interaction as a beneficial aspects of games. In many ways, decent games are practice for real world contests against nature, against each other, against... That's valuable and shouldn't be minimized.
However, in complete agreement with your later statement, I don't think that games are an effective replacement for books, which was my originally intended (if badly worded) point. So neglecting reading to spend all of your time playing games is "bad". Neglecting interacting with people to spend all of your time reading is similarly "bad". All under the umbrella of "unbalanced == bad".
As for Steve Johnson's observations, people bring their own imaginations when reading books, too. The better books let the reader fill in their own images, provide their own details, and with guidance, their own backstory and storyline context. After reading a sci-fi book growing up, I would often think of my own stories in the same universe or continuations of the author's story (without copyright approval, of course). It's player control over the storyline that's one theoretically really interesting thing about games. I don't know about you, but I've been frequently disappointed in the amount of control I have over the storyline in most games. Even the much-hyped "Black & White" was sorely limited here. I agree that the potential is there, but in practice, it seems to be very difficult to let people experience their own story in a game. A few choice points is the best we can currently do, it seems.
It seems like there's a bias for reading and against video gaming. I don't understand why.
For single-player games, that bias has something to do with the quantity and significance (quality) of the content. Books can communicate more worlds more quickly and in more detail than any screen-based media (movies, television, video games, etc.). Books provide a deeper level of insight into the minds of characters than movies or television, and even really bad books provide more character development than 99% of the games on the market.
Don't get me wrong, I love games, including video games (I own two DS Lite's). But IMHO, most of what's redeeming about games (video, board, card, etc.) are the social aspects, not the cultural aspects (if the creative author even tried on this front). Books are mostly asocial, but are an enormously valuable means of learning about other people and the world around us. At the moment, there's just no substitute for how quickly and effectively cultural information can be conveyed by a written story.
The strongest two correlations for the amount of time children spend reading is number of reading materials in the house and amount of time parents spend reading (Freakonomics). If your walls are covered with bookshelves filled with books and magazines that you read, chances are that your kids will read a lot too.
Provide the example and opportunity from an early age and the lesson is learned indelibly. But pushing children to read without actually doing it yourself accomplishes little.
I loved visiting my grandmother's house. You couldn't see any wallpaper behind the bookshelves on almost every wall and I was informed at a very early age that these books were to be taken down and enjoyed. I read just about everything on her shelves through the years, which set me up well for High School book reports where I had to say what I thought about Watership Down (read at age 8, 12, and 16), Tale of Two Cities (read at 10, 15, and 17), etc. As you can imagine, I got the "escapist" label as well.
Most people who learn assembly do so to program embedded systems. As in, firmware writers for something like 90%+ of the computers in existence (statistic pulled from my ass). There are many, many people who do this, and they're hiring new people fresh from EE and CS programs all the time.
It shouldn't take any decent C programmer more than two weeks to begin producing passable microcontroller assembly for an embedded project, a few more weeks before he starts using macros effectively, and a few months before he can produce maintainable assembly code with macros.
It's just not that tough to use most modern assemblers. It's the memory and register limitations that make the problem of embedded microcontroller programming interesting. Trying to wedge the solution to a sophisticated information management problem into 2048 bytes of program ROM and 512 bytes of RAM can call for quite a bit of creativity.
I just married the woman I met on match.com three years ago. She was my 13th first date from match.com, which made it an exhausting but ultimately worthwhile experience. For the first two months I was on match.com, I didn't put up my salary because I didn't want to meet gold-diggers. Didn't quite work as I'd hoped, since match.com used to equate "don't want to say" as "less than $25,000/year". My wife didn't want to date the jobless and specified "at least $25,000/year", so she only found me when I finally went ahead and put my income on my profile.
Some hints. If all you're finding are married men, posers and losers: you're using the wrong dating site and/or you're searching for the wrong criteria.
Hint #1: Craigslist is the wrong site if you are looking for an actual relationship. One-night stand? Line forms to the left. Random sex in parking lots? Right over here, ma'am. Meaningful relationship? I'm sorry, but we're all out at the moment.
Those women who perpetually date players (who then cheat on them) don't seem to be able to distinguish between arrogance and confidence, and seem to put more value on the car than the person (for the overly sensitive: this is an unfair generalization with a large dose of truth). Hint #2: Be different from those women in how you select partners, and you'll be different from them in the relationships you have.
Hint #3: The trick with the photographs is to not put so much value on a photo and instead, value someone who can write a decent profile, respond well in email (articulate, decent spelling and grammar, possibly funny) and meet the guy quickly (but with a low investment). After two or three emails, meet at a coffee shop after work "for a quick cup" and make up your mind in person in 5-20 minutes.
Fundamentally, don't pretend that dating sites are a replacement for the first date. They're a replacement for the club, activity, or job where you might otherwise see someone interesting, but not a whole lot more. All of the other work in meeting someone great is still up to you.
I read it as direct communication with devices on the RS485 bus is currently supported, but P-Net (an application layer network protocol for RS485 and similar transport layers) is not.
As for bluetooth, I don't want to rely on it too much. Someone starts making lunch with a microwave or using a mobile phone nearby and everything starts crapping out...
Mindstorms are cool, but I was disappointed by the new version because it's still limited to a fixed, relatively small number of sensors and actuators per control module.
Actually, as described in the NXT HDK documentation (this link is a download), all sensor ports can act as I2C controllers and sensor port #4 also provides an RS485 bus. The I2C capability is currently utilized by the ultrasonic sensor as well as aftermarket sensors by HiTechnic and MindSensors. The RS485 capability is not currently used by any Lego or aftermarket products, but with Lego being so encouraging about third party extensions, I doubt that will last for long.
On the three motor/servo limit, If you take a look at the MindSensors products, you may notice a four motor/servo driver module. I'm curious if that module lets you use the extra actuators in the same way you use the three native ports...
Unfortunately, he's gone dark side. He's flip-flopped on tax cuts for the rich, and supports the war in Iraq.
Two points:
I don't mind candidates who change their minds. Candidates that refuse to learn new things, refuse to understand complex issues, refuse to compromise to achieve larger goals, refuse to deviate from narrow rules, etc. can't possibly be my representative in office. Kerry got cut to pieces on this topic because he went on the defensive when he should have used it as an opportunity to destroy Bush's credentials as a statesman.
I haven't heard McCain provide support for the decision to go to war in Iraq (aside from the one vote supporting the original decision, which is significant, but IMHO, an act of political necessity). What his goal appears to be with his recent statements, is to do the least amount of additional damage to the US on the subject of Iraq. He thinks that more troops are the best way to do that. Though I may disagree with his opinion, I appreciate his grasp of the problem that Bush has gotten us into: Iraq is six months into a civil war which is a direct result of the instability that we caused. There are no longer easy answers in Iraq.
Personally, I see the collapse of Iraq into full-fledged civil war as inevitable, and by pulling out now that war will start (and end) that much faster. We'll get blamed either way. Eventually, Iraq will need to become three countries, a wealthy Kurdish north, a wealthy Shia south, and an impoverished Sunni middle. What the US military presence does is slow down this process, killing more of our people, while the underlying economic reality simmers. The occasional forest fire is essential to a healthy forest (I know, I'm heartless).
Hilary would win the Democratic nomination in a walk and would get thoroughly trounced in the general election. As long as McCain wins the Republican primary, I've got no problem with that. But if DeLay or someone equally nauseating ends up on the Republical ticket, I'll be packing my things and moving to Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a machine learning problem that I hope to solve as a part of a commercial service and that project will almost certainly benefit from the requirement that the solutions to this contest be explained to the world.
I would be astonished if an open source OLAP project didn't benefit or couldn't be started as a result of the code that will be published and refined through the course of this contest.
Society doesn't only benefit from big, flashy goals (not that you were saying that).
Regards,
Ross
We're talking about the same millions of people who largely believed Bush's campaign statements in 2004. Their ability to distinguish fact from the exact opposite of fact is no longer in question, it's a given.
The facts have a huge and obvious liberal bias. The strage part is how that liberal-favoring bias seems to be growing with every passing day... You'd think someone would want to do something about that, and look! There's Fox "News" to the rescue! They're working over time to bring historican revisionism right up to today's news!
Regards,
Ross
I'll take "at least once a day" until McCain gets elected, please (I'm a nonreligious conservative who thinks Bush has harmed this country in almost every way that matters and who doesn't feel well represented by most of our "religious-right" Republicans).
You can't possibly regularly watch the show. The only explanation for your statement is that you accidentally ended up there instead of watching Fox News for one episode where he was playing nice with a Dem and haven't been back since.
Regards,
Ross
It's not an exact duplicate, but I have discussed meeting my wife on match.com recently here on Slashdot. I'm not a subscriber so I can't go back that far and see my old messages to post a URL...
Regards,
Ross
I loudly objected to the Ruby Ridge showdown, educating everyone around me to what happened (and noting carefully that I didn't agree with the white separatist's views, but that I didn't think his son and wife deserved to be killed for his failure to play ball with the FBI). You're correct that people on the left had a harder time of agreeing, but most came to the conclusion that something went badly wrong up there and that the FBI agents got away with multiple murder.
And you're also right that today, my friends who vote Republican no matter what are having a tough time understanding that they are standing idly by while their civil liberties are quickly and methodically stripped away for no purpose that benefits them.
But then again, I've always been somewhat of a free-thinker in politics. I tend to call myself a "l"ibertarian, though I don't put as much faith in the free market to cure society's ills as most libertarians seem to. My right wing friends are often suprised to discover that I'm a gun-nut who enjoys competitive shooting, for smaller government (though I have mixed feelings about the regulation of various industries), for fewer taxes and fewer entitlement programs, etc. My left wing friends don't really expect me to be a Bush critic who's pro-choice (even though I personally am willing to call a fetus "alive" at the moment of conception), anti-death-penalty (too many false positives in the system), etc.
The double standard is completely ridiculous. Either you're passionate about civil rights or you're not, you don't change your mind about losing your first amendment rights (or all the others) based on who is leading the attack.
Regards,
Ross
Because of the fee, you can be fairly certain that the people you're talking to on match.com are actively looking to meet someone. I tried craigslist for a while, but there were too many "casual" women there to find anyone who wanted to be serious. I would expect any free site to have a similar issue. Not sure what your "smart" remark might imply about match.com (smart people, smart filtering process, etc.) I had some trouble finding a really smart girl on match.com, but I didn't have any better luck with finding intelligent women on the free sites, and being persistent eventually paid off (a very smart girl on match.com found me).
Regards,
Ross
I just married one of the woman I met on match.com in 2003, though the path to getting here was exhausting. I had 13 first dates where either I was interested but she wasn't or she was interested but I wasn't. By the time my wife searched for me and sent me an email, I was very tired of the whole thing and about ready to throw in the towel. But it looked like I would have an interesting conversation with this one last woman, so I went to the coffee shop and had an amazing night.
Too many women (and probably men) are putting up unrealistically flattering photos, which means an unpleasant suprise in person. My wife unintentionally put up fairly unflattering photos and when I saw her in person, I had to check the room again, as I was so pleasantly suprised. I told her that her photos didn't do her justice and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Just remember that dating websites only kinda solve one part of the problem. They get you introductions to people you would never otherwise meet. If they're honest on their profile, you also get some early answers to important questions, but there are no guarantees there. You're still going to have to go through all of the work of really seeing if the relationship makes sense and then putting in the work to build that relationship into something significant, with all of the joys and difficulties that will bring.
As for the income thing, match equates "don't want to answer" with "less than $25k/year". My wife didn't want to date the unemployed and put "at least $25k/year" as a filter and only saw me because I had recently made my income visible. So my wife wasn't being a gold-digger, but wouldn't have seen me if I hadn't put my income out there. Match.com's decision-making on this question is particularly questionable.
Regards,
Ross
You just don't rely on a document called a "project plan" or all-hands meetings as the visible parts of your process.
Those sorts of implicit-yet-effective processes tend to happen when there is a strong personality on the team who has some idea of how to get things done and everyone else goes along for the ride. That person is the one who announced one day that there's a team wiki, who is a bit of a nazi on code documentation, who's the one people think of when someone says "mentor". S/he may be an asshole, and s/he may not be the fastest developer on the team, but because they are strong-willed, and their methods work, the team actually has a process that works.
I've seen and heard about it happening enough that I would be suprised if you don't have a similar situation with the team you're describing. The worst thing that can happen to that sort of a team is an externally imposed process that just adds red tape and interferes with getting things done without any perceivable benefit. People who've worked in better processes tend to get really annoyed with the clueless PHB's who need more process simply because they can't see any.
The best processes leave ownership and responsibility right where they belong: with the producers. Don't disparage the word "process", as you have a process (or several processes) whether you know it or not. What matters is how effective your process(es) really are.
(An aside: IMHO, efficiency is ultimately the enemy of effectiveness, and effectiveness is what's really needed in any significant endeavor).
Regards,
Ross
Actually, Perelman did not reveal an incomplete proof. According to those who can follow the processes in his messages, it seems to be complete without further elaboration . Further, he didn't "publish" in the academic meaning of the word, he announced, and if his announcement came in three pieces, well, nobody paid him to work on it, so the complaints about his means of delivery seem a little embittered.
Ah, but that's the question at the center of the controversy: Are there gaps to be filled? Outside of Yau's group, the consensus appears to be, "No. Perelman's proof is complete as originally described."
If there were pieces missing which Yau could provide, then Yau and his students would be justified in their claim. Instead, it appears that Yau and his students were merely restating the exact same proof in their own words and claiming to have filled in blanks.
Regards,
Ross
My comment was only meant to point out that this individual almost certainly didn't take that opportunity. Based on the amount of time he spent there, along with his remarks about what he wants to do with his newfound degrees.
Regards,
Ross
Part of the point of an undergraduate education is to be exposed to new ideas and concepts while you're establishing yourself in an environment separate from your parents and the babysitting culture of most secondary schools.
Somehow, I don't think he got very much exposure to new ideas and concepts. He sounds like someone who's decided that whatever makes the most money is the best thing to do with your life.
Regards,
Ross
I notice the Japanese aren't buying Sony MP3 players either, but then you wouldn't want to be bothered by the actual argument, now would you?
:) It's a little sad that there are people like you in the world but fantastically wonderful that I don't know anyone like you. I'm not normally one to laugh at another person's misfortune, but ha! ha! about your personality!
Didn't think so. But thanks for playing.
Oh, and by the way, you just made my day (or night, as it were
Most sincere and warm regards,
Ross
Incorrect.
Sure, the Japanese are just about as xenophobic as a red-state voter, but they'll buy an Apple iPod over a Samsung MP3 player any day of the week and twice on Sunday. You had it right the first time: the Japanese are brand-loyal consumers.
Regards,
Ross
Point taken. For someone to grok Lisp, they're going to have to get beyond what's possible in Java.
However, as someone who does mostly Java (more and more Ruby, however), I do know what closures and continuations are, and can get the point (and some basic explanations as to why they're useful) across to another Java programmer without too much angst. That I come from Lisp and Smalltalk (back in the day) probably has something to do with that.
I do sincerely wish that a more generally useful continuation implementation existed in Java. No real reason why not, but at the moment, a third party implementation would have to interact with VM internals, which is sure to cause portability and maintenance problems.
Regards,
Ross
Continuation: Have you ever wanted to write a web-based wizard that could receive a user response to step 3 and didn't have to go back recheck that the previous steps were complete before acting on the new data? What you want are continuations, the ability to set aside the complete state of the context (not just some values from the context ala Session variables) and go back to that state later.
Luckily, with Java's thread model, continuations have been available since Java 1.1, though only RIFE currently supports them as a part of it's web flow. Unluckily, Threads are not perfect continuations, because they cannot be duplicated and can not be made re-entrant. Further unluckily, EJBs are actively hostile to Thread-based continuations, because they deliberately use Thread context in ways which make it almost impossible to use a Thread as a continuation container (think transaction boundaries). Luckily, since EJB's suck in so many other ways, you're probably not using them and may be able to take a look at RIFE for your next project.
Regards,
Ross
However, in complete agreement with your later statement, I don't think that games are an effective replacement for books, which was my originally intended (if badly worded) point. So neglecting reading to spend all of your time playing games is "bad". Neglecting interacting with people to spend all of your time reading is similarly "bad". All under the umbrella of "unbalanced == bad".
As for Steve Johnson's observations, people bring their own imaginations when reading books, too. The better books let the reader fill in their own images, provide their own details, and with guidance, their own backstory and storyline context. After reading a sci-fi book growing up, I would often think of my own stories in the same universe or continuations of the author's story (without copyright approval, of course). It's player control over the storyline that's one theoretically really interesting thing about games. I don't know about you, but I've been frequently disappointed in the amount of control I have over the storyline in most games. Even the much-hyped "Black & White" was sorely limited here. I agree that the potential is there, but in practice, it seems to be very difficult to let people experience their own story in a game. A few choice points is the best we can currently do, it seems.
Regards,
Ross
Don't get me wrong, I love games, including video games (I own two DS Lite's). But IMHO, most of what's redeeming about games (video, board, card, etc.) are the social aspects, not the cultural aspects (if the creative author even tried on this front). Books are mostly asocial, but are an enormously valuable means of learning about other people and the world around us. At the moment, there's just no substitute for how quickly and effectively cultural information can be conveyed by a written story.
Regards,
Ross
"Fewer", I'll agree with. "None" is what I was objecting to.
Regards,
Ross
The strongest two correlations for the amount of time children spend reading is number of reading materials in the house and amount of time parents spend reading (Freakonomics). If your walls are covered with bookshelves filled with books and magazines that you read, chances are that your kids will read a lot too.
Provide the example and opportunity from an early age and the lesson is learned indelibly. But pushing children to read without actually doing it yourself accomplishes little.
I loved visiting my grandmother's house. You couldn't see any wallpaper behind the bookshelves on almost every wall and I was informed at a very early age that these books were to be taken down and enjoyed. I read just about everything on her shelves through the years, which set me up well for High School book reports where I had to say what I thought about Watership Down (read at age 8, 12, and 16), Tale of Two Cities (read at 10, 15, and 17), etc. As you can imagine, I got the "escapist" label as well.
Regards,
Ross
Most people who learn assembly do so to program embedded systems. As in, firmware writers for something like 90%+ of the computers in existence (statistic pulled from my ass). There are many, many people who do this, and they're hiring new people fresh from EE and CS programs all the time.
It shouldn't take any decent C programmer more than two weeks to begin producing passable microcontroller assembly for an embedded project, a few more weeks before he starts using macros effectively, and a few months before he can produce maintainable assembly code with macros.
It's just not that tough to use most modern assemblers. It's the memory and register limitations that make the problem of embedded microcontroller programming interesting. Trying to wedge the solution to a sophisticated information management problem into 2048 bytes of program ROM and 512 bytes of RAM can call for quite a bit of creativity.
Regards,
Ross
I just married the woman I met on match.com three years ago. She was my 13th first date from match.com, which made it an exhausting but ultimately worthwhile experience. For the first two months I was on match.com, I didn't put up my salary because I didn't want to meet gold-diggers. Didn't quite work as I'd hoped, since match.com used to equate "don't want to say" as "less than $25,000/year". My wife didn't want to date the jobless and specified "at least $25,000/year", so she only found me when I finally went ahead and put my income on my profile.
Some hints. If all you're finding are married men, posers and losers: you're using the wrong dating site and/or you're searching for the wrong criteria.
Hint #1: Craigslist is the wrong site if you are looking for an actual relationship. One-night stand? Line forms to the left. Random sex in parking lots? Right over here, ma'am. Meaningful relationship? I'm sorry, but we're all out at the moment.
Those women who perpetually date players (who then cheat on them) don't seem to be able to distinguish between arrogance and confidence, and seem to put more value on the car than the person (for the overly sensitive: this is an unfair generalization with a large dose of truth). Hint #2: Be different from those women in how you select partners, and you'll be different from them in the relationships you have.
Hint #3: The trick with the photographs is to not put so much value on a photo and instead, value someone who can write a decent profile, respond well in email (articulate, decent spelling and grammar, possibly funny) and meet the guy quickly (but with a low investment). After two or three emails, meet at a coffee shop after work "for a quick cup" and make up your mind in person in 5-20 minutes.
Fundamentally, don't pretend that dating sites are a replacement for the first date. They're a replacement for the club, activity, or job where you might otherwise see someone interesting, but not a whole lot more. All of the other work in meeting someone great is still up to you.
Regards,
Ross
I read it as direct communication with devices on the RS485 bus is currently supported, but P-Net (an application layer network protocol for RS485 and similar transport layers) is not.
As for bluetooth, I don't want to rely on it too much. Someone starts making lunch with a microwave or using a mobile phone nearby and everything starts crapping out...
Regards,
Ross
On the three motor/servo limit, If you take a look at the MindSensors products, you may notice a four motor/servo driver module. I'm curious if that module lets you use the extra actuators in the same way you use the three native ports...
Regards,
Ross
I don't mind candidates who change their minds. Candidates that refuse to learn new things, refuse to understand complex issues, refuse to compromise to achieve larger goals, refuse to deviate from narrow rules, etc. can't possibly be my representative in office. Kerry got cut to pieces on this topic because he went on the defensive when he should have used it as an opportunity to destroy Bush's credentials as a statesman.
I haven't heard McCain provide support for the decision to go to war in Iraq (aside from the one vote supporting the original decision, which is significant, but IMHO, an act of political necessity). What his goal appears to be with his recent statements, is to do the least amount of additional damage to the US on the subject of Iraq. He thinks that more troops are the best way to do that. Though I may disagree with his opinion, I appreciate his grasp of the problem that Bush has gotten us into: Iraq is six months into a civil war which is a direct result of the instability that we caused. There are no longer easy answers in Iraq.
Personally, I see the collapse of Iraq into full-fledged civil war as inevitable, and by pulling out now that war will start (and end) that much faster. We'll get blamed either way. Eventually, Iraq will need to become three countries, a wealthy Kurdish north, a wealthy Shia south, and an impoverished Sunni middle. What the US military presence does is slow down this process, killing more of our people, while the underlying economic reality simmers. The occasional forest fire is essential to a healthy forest (I know, I'm heartless).
Regards,
Ross
Hilary would win the Democratic nomination in a walk and would get thoroughly trounced in the general election. As long as McCain wins the Republican primary, I've got no problem with that. But if DeLay or someone equally nauseating ends up on the Republical ticket, I'll be packing my things and moving to Europe.
Regards,
Ross