ha ha...no kidding...my last semester of school we had a huge project where we were working in a lab we could only use at night. Classes, of course, were still during the day, so sleep was something like 9:00-11:00 MWF and 10:30-1:30 TTH. Not a great schedule, but what can you do. Well, about 4 weeks into this (just before exams) I left the lab one morning feeling quite ill. Woke up 4 hours later on the floor of my bathroom. Don't even remember getting home, but from what my friends tell me I was talking about a chipmunk and kept swerving the car. From that point on we decided that it might be good to get a little sleep. Sure enough, 8 hours of solid sleep later I felt like a million. At that point, I think I would have taken something like this gladly, but really...if you're getting that broken, suppressing the symptoms CAN'T be a good idea.
Re:blood will short your circuits, too
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10 Computer Mishaps
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· Score: 2, Funny
No kidding on the shock thing...a little while ago I was fixing an old computer. I had the open computer sitting on the floor of my room and I was getting pretty bored trying to fix the thing so I kicked up my feet on top of the case and plugged in my amp to play a little guitar. I kept feeling this weird tingling in my feet, and at first I thought it was just my foot falling asleep, so I got up and shook it around for a bit and went back to playing. Well, the feeling was back again, only stronger. Repeat a few more times and now I'm starting to get a little weirded out - feels like there's electricity coming from the computer. So I get up and fiddle around a bit, but I can't feel anything. Put the feet up, and there it is again. At this point I'm totally confused, so I sit down, pick up the guitar and kick my foot onto the top of the case. Thing zapped my foot so hard that I fell off my chair and cracked my back/head into the desk behind me.
Well, I had the computer and the amp plugged into the same outlet. Turns out there was some type of a short and I was completing the circuit between the guitar and the case, which is why I couldn't feel anything when I wasn't using the guitar. The more I moved around, the more the cable pulled on the outlet and the worse it got until it zapped me.
Lesson learned, I guess...feel the tingle and stay clear.
I think it really depends on why you became a vegetarian in the first place. When I stopped eating meat, it was less because I was concerned about animals than it was because i found it rather disturbing that meat was something that was DEAD that we were EATING. I just found it rather unapetizing and creepy - I'd look at a burger and think "ground up cow middles". yech.
Even if the meat was artificaially grown outside an actual animal, I'm not sure that this would be an association I could break. Seeing, smelling and tasting meat kinda disgusts me. It's just not something I'm comfortable with. I don't think it being artificial would change that. That's just me though - I'm sure there are other people out there who would and do feel quite differently, and more power to them for it.
I wholehartedly agree. I took computer engineering in university, but I did some of my interships in completely different fields. I spent 8 months on a biodiesel reserach project and 4 months working at the sudbury neutrino observatory.
The biodiesel one was great - I was basically in change of the research program, and I got to research, design and perform all the tests. Although it wasn't in my field, I made some major contacts at the university and the labs and it really helped when I applied to grad school.
The neutrino observatory would have been a great experience even if I did nothing at all in my field. I spent 3 months working in a physics lab at the bottom of a mine and playing with probably the world's most expensive water (heavy water)- it was worth it just for the cool factor of the mine. But despite the fact that I wasn't hired to do computer stuff, I ended up spending the last month writing a computer simulation for the salt removal system. At the interview for my current job, I spent a good half hour talking about that work term. My boss just thought it was the neatest thing ever and I think it kind of showed that I was up for a challenge, flexible etc.
Honestly, if you find something you think might be interesting, TAKE IT. Just having some experience, no matter what it is, will get your foot in the door. A little variety never hurt anyone, no need to specialize before you even graduate. Leave the door open - you're still in school - why limit yourself?
When I first started, the first language we started with was turing. To be honest, I don't have much experience with some of the languages being described here, so maybe the other suggestions have the same features, but turing has some really good features for new programmers.
Firstly, there aren't a lot of include libraries, you can start writing the code without having to worry about things like missing things that should be linked. Starting out, I think students should be more worried about learning how to structure programs than where to find the functions they are looking for. Giving students a bunch of code they don't understand to put at the top of their program just makes it seem harder than it really is. Secondly, it's a very english based language. Instead of brackets you get actual words that say things like "end if". When you're just starting, I think this is a bonus because it's more intuitive.
Also, although the graphics are REALLY rudimentary, you only have to put in ONE line to access the ability to draw graphics on the screen. None of the craziness of some of the other programs where you have to set up windows and drawing areas etc etc to just put a line on the screen. They're not beautiful for sure, but it really lets advanced students do a little bit more, and pictures are always more exciting than console program that just spit out text.
Additionally, turing does have OO support, so if you're looking to teach OO concepts, you have access to them.
I don't know much about python, haven't done much with it, although it seems like it might be a fairly good place to start as well. I'd stay away from VB and PHP (and I guess Perl too for that matter). VB can make you a wicked looking program, but it's very unstructured. It might be easy to learn, but you probably want students to learn a languge that is a bit more structured, or they might have trouble later. VB doesn't require things like variable declarations and doens't really require you to stick to strict types and might be confusing when you try to move to a stricter language. I'd stay away from stuff like PHP because it's real use and power is with web stuff. To use PHP for web based stuff, you need some knowledge of HTML. Using PHP to write HTML can be a real pain in the a$$. It's a nightmare of brackets and quote marks and it requires you to have a knowledge of 2 sets of languages/tags and to actually keep the difference clear in your mind. Differentiating between these can be very difficult for beginning students.
Ok, done my rant...look into turing though. Although it's not as powerful as some of the other languages, I think for teaching what you're looking for is a language that makes it easy to get started, with simple syntax, but common code structures.
Re:Stallman was right up to this point ...
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Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, it's not QUITE what you're describing, but MIT started a program a little while ago called "open courseware". Basically, they open sourced their course material and published it on the internet. A lot of the stuff really is quite fantastic. I've used it a few times for reference and just for general reading and the stuff in there is really quite good. The best part is there's a really wide range of courses covered, but the comp/elec eng section is really quite expansive.
really? because a lot of the software I use is, in fact, free. Going by your analogy most of the open source stuff out there is worthless, and microsoft is a far superior OS to linux or bsd because it costs more.
I'm not trying to dump on expensive software/computers here...sometimes the good stuff does cost more. But price isn't an indication of quality or worth, IMHO.
I think it rather depends on where you are applying - different schools look for different things. I live in Canada, and when I applied to grad school, I couldn't find one school here who even mentioned the GRE, let alone looked at it. They asked for transcripts, but the most important things were your references.
Personally, I lucked out though - my grad school application was quite late because I wasn't sure I wanted to go, and it basically consisted of me going up to the advisor for my final year undergrad project, and being like "hey, Dr. D...doing anything interesting next year?". Which is the other thing you might want to look at - tests and grades are important for getting your foot in the door, but in reality, profs need grad students that they know will put in the work and churn out some good stuff for them. It's your degree, but how well you do also reflects on your advisor. Email them, express your interest, see if you can go down and check out their reserach. Convince them that you're really interested, and are willing to put in the work. A lot of the time you can get what amounts to a job interview for grad school just by asking if they can spare some time to talk to you.
The problem is that usually part of the contract is that the terms of service are subject to change without notice. ISP's do this all the time with other stuff - ex. right now I'm paying for "unlimited" cable that actually has a download cap. Called it a "change in the terms of service". If Telus had something like that in the contract (and they usually do), it might be a bit hard to win a case on the basis of breach of contract.
Agreed. The photoshop batch tool is actually quite good. The best part about doing that, is that they have a recorder, so all you have to do it perform the actions you want and it records them into a little macro that you can then choose to run on selected photos, or even on whole directories.. Just make sure you get the opening and saving right, and you can do most of the photo processing right in photoshop itself. It's so easy to set them up, that you could probably show the client how to do it himself, and he could record a macro to actually do the processing he wants to do. This would be a bonus if you're not in graphics yourself and you're not quite sure what type of processing a photo would need.
We set up a little system similar to this to processing and PDF some document images - the images had to be cropped, colour adjusted, resized and flipped, and it was a terribly tedious job. Then we had to PDF them and pop them on to our server. We just used a PDF tool with a command prompt and wrote a little script to create a PDF document with all the docs from one folder, ordered by time created (they were scanned in order). Then, it just opened an FTP and dumped them onto the server. Because it was a one-time thing, I think we had the script open photoshop, but we actually started the batch job by hand, although there must be some way to get get that automated too - we just didn't care that much.
Photoshop is actually a fairly well designed program, and it has the tools to deal with mass processing fairly easily, because it's something that is pretty common. Good luck.
Oh yeah, turing was great. I should put a disclaimer - I'm still pretty young (mid twenties), so I'm not talking about a terribly long time ago, but the first time I came across the idea of programming was turing, and it was like a whole new world. Suddenly every time I looked at a program I was thinking how it was made and if I could possibly do it myself. Very eye opening experience.
I still think that it was one of the best intros to programming - fairly simple language to learn, everything is written out in fairly plain language, and a pretty easy set-up so you didn't need to worry about a whole lot of things like includes etc. to get the program working - you could focus on how to actally make your code work. For a newbie, this is GOLD. The best thing (and worst thing) about turing though, was the graphics. I don't even know if I loved them or hated them. During my first computer course (grade 7 I think), we were asked to write this little program, but given a long time to do it. I think me and my partner finished something like a month before it was supposed to be done. We cleaned her up a bit, threw in some crazy bits (I guess you'd call them easter eggs now), but still had some time left over. So we did what every respectible game did - splash screen dialogue. Man...I remember spending at least 3 full weeks drawing and filling these crazy paint drawings in turing using coordinate specs. Talk about crazy. It took FOREVER. But by the end I could whip out a full screen coloured turing drawing in like 10 minutes. Even though I've moved on from that though, every once in a while I long for that quick set up cheezy drawing ability, especailly when I'm looing for something really, really simple, but still have to go through setting up all the crap you need for stuff like C.
Well said. And although the poster was likely looking for infomation for something professional, there are also a lot of ask slashdots that come from people working on hobbies or side projects who won't necessarily have the knowledge required to start, or even necessarily know where to look to find it. I came to this post specifically BECAUSE I know practically nothing about this topic, and so far it has been quite informative.
Right after that image in the slideshow, there is another image that uses a similar layout, but uses boxes instead of small circles, and relates elements that are not right together with arrows. It's a bit more clear - less graphical, more chart-like. Still looks a bit hard to use though.
Why would schools teach VB instead of c/c++ etc when one of the really good things about.net is that it supports different languages? (I don't know about java...never tried or looked into it, but I know for sure it supports c/c++). Now, I'm not a.net programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but during my final year of university, our group got the school to give us a copy of.net from some microsoft academic deal they had specifically so we DIDN'T have to use VB for our program.
We only had ~12 weeks to finish off a pretty hefty project (motion capture system essentially), and between the code planning, interfacing with the hardware and writing the image processing backend, we didn't really have the time to program a GUI from scratch, particularily since we didn't have a whole lot of experience with it, and because there were tools out there that would let us write a better, more flexible interface more quickly. Originally, we were going to go with VB, but there were concerns about interfacing a VB front-end with a C++ backend, particularily in light of the time constraints. Enter.NET.
Now don't get me wrong - using.net for the first time with absolutely no training is no picnic. We jumped in with both feet and really felt the sting of early, ignorant decisions about how to use the program. The words that came out of my mouth during that project would have made a sailor blush, and I still harbour a hateful resentment towards the still elusive concept of managed projects and just why it is that our code libraries always seemed to require patches or tweaks to work in a manged.net project but not in any other compiler. [rant off]. But at the same time, we didn't have to resort to cobbling together VB and C++ for no real reason, and we were able to put together a decent GUI using the windows forms features, all written right in C.
I still don't really trust.net - I'm way more comfortable in gcc, compling my own code, and "managing" my own projects - but I don't think this is something that will limit students - it supports a good number of standard high-level languages, and provides some good tools and features that can be quite useful.
Actually - I think the robot DOES have more degrees of freedom than a human...
I might be wrong, but I was pretty sure that when we talk about degrees of freedom in terms of movement, that 6 was pretty much the limit - 3 degrees in position and rotation (x,y,z,pitch,yaw,roll). With 6 degrees, you can describe the position and rotation of any point in space - I'm not sure what the other degrees would be. Maybe up to 6 DOF for more than one point on the robot? Like the arm can position themselves with x degrees of freedom plus the other arm, plus the legs etc? Or am I totally missing something here?
I think that really depends on what department you're in and what you're doing with the computers. There are some classes that require some real heavy-duty machines. Back at my university, we were running some fairly heavy modelling and FEA software. My year was the first to use this, but the computers couldn't handle the load from these things - you'd leave the thing solving for hours, or even overnight and when you came back there was a good chance it had crashed and you had to do it again anyway. There was some real competition to get a computer in the new lab because it was way faster and they tended not to crash as often.
The next year they upgraded everything and fixed some of the network problems and the problems were significantly reduced. Even still, my friend was using the program for his research, and he ended up buying his own REALLY heavy-duty computer - this thing was a monster and he designed it specifically to do the type of graphics and modelling he needed. Instead of using the school computers, he'd bring this monster (full tower, incredibly heavy) with him everywhere because it solved faster.
ok...I'm going to stray into another fuel for a second, but bear with me, I do have a real point...
I did some research with biodiesel for a fuel company a while back. Biodiesel comes up against very similar arguments as ethanol does as an alternative fuel - it's not really saving energy because it takes so much energy to generate it in the first place. While scientists might not like to hear this type of thing, it's a valid and important argument, and something that really needs to be looked at before we move on to new fuels. There's a catch though - while the studies didn't necessarily agree, they all looked at the current methods of producing biodiesel. Meanwhile, in the past few years, another researcher had devised a new way of producing the stuff. Normal production methods (in a nutshell), use temperature and pressure to split a triglyceride into biodiesel and glycerine. The newer method used chemicals, which were then recycled. Also, you could produce the stuff from yellow grease, which normally has to be cleaned and disposed of anyway. This was a HUGE breakthrough in both cost and energy useage, which is why our company was now looking at providing premium biodiesel farm blends (mostly because of the cost thing though =). As an added bonus, a lot of farmers loved the idea of running their equipment on an agricultural based fuel.
Meanwhile, back to the ethanol thing.... We tend to think of ethanol as one of those fuels that has sort of established itself. It's already produced on a large scale, it's as good as it's going to get. I'm not sure I buy that. I think there's plenty of research to be done on improving the production techniques for ethanol. We're still a fair way off from having viable hydrogen based cars - we don't have the infrastructure or cars to support it, and we don't have viable and affordable technology to produce and store enoug of it to be useful. But research continues and we assume that we will eventually overcome these problems. Why then, can research not continue on ethanol and different, better, ways to produce it? As it stands right now, I can see a large number of reasons why it would be prudent to continue to develop ethanol as a fuel:
1. We have the infrastructure to handle the delivery of the fuel
2. High ethanol blends can be put into current car designs with some fairly minor adjustments - mostly seals and filters.
3. With higher fuel costs, the relative price is going down
4. it's a high octane fuel
5. In lower blends, people are able to use it right in their current cars.
While hydrogen might be the goal, ethanol could be the transition. Hydrogen still seems to be a fair way off IMHO, and ethanol is something we can work with today, with our current cars and our current infrastructure. We do need to keep looking at hydrogren, but in the mean while, we can't really keep using petroleum, so we need something, be it electric cars, or better ethanol, or both together. It just seems like a more realistic, attainable goal for the near future.
I haven't owned a VCR in many years, but when I was younger, the biggest problem I found wasn't the tape thing, but the weird way VCR's dealt with channels (just as a side note, this VCR was OLD...I'm sure they're way better now, but I've moved on). Anyway, we had cable (pretty normal), and different cable companies had different numbers for their channels. Just to make things a bit more fun, the VCR for some reason, operated on different channel numbers than the TV. Just to make it a little bit MORE fun, you could program the VCR channels to be different TV numbers, BUT they reset themselves what seemed to be rather randomly, and programming the channels was hardly intuitive since you basically had to guess what channel you were setting and then check it after. Since we didn't usually tape a bunch of shows, when we DID want to tape something, the routine basically consisted of trying to set the channels on the VCR, and then running a test tape though for 1 minute to make sure the channel was correct. Even then, every once in a while, you'd get home and realize you had a half hour of some show you'd never seen before in your life. Stupid VCR...I hated that thing.
I doubt that she was talking about implementing different hiring practices. The thing I've noticed about about younger kids is that for the most part, is that even the ones with more exposure to "real-world" type politics, tend to hold a much more idealistic view of the world than us older, more disenchanted folk. Her "should" was more likely just a comment on a perceived discrepancy between the way she thought the place would be, and how it actually is. And good on her for it...sometimes it takes fresh eyes pointing out things like that to show us how far we really still have to go in this sector before we have a representitive work force.
Just as a side note, you're right - there are some really strange hiring practices out there, and I don't think we should be hiring people who aren't the best candidate based solely on the fact that they are a minority. I think it hurts both sides (people assume you're only there because you're a minority). But at the same time, I think it's hard for guys to realize just how much discrimination there still is out there.
Yeah, because everyone knows that due to the fact that you have a penis, you must be able to out-program all the girls out there. I mean, silly me, I thought it was about brain power, but no...it must be about whether or not you have the jiggly-bits.
You're right - there is no consensus right now, but there are new production techniques that are starting to come into play as well. U of Toronto has been doing quite a bit of research into this type of thing. The problem with the old way of making biodiesel is that it requires high temperatures and pressures to separate the useful fuel from the glycerine. Essentially (in a very simplified nutshell), you're using temp and pressure to crack a triglyceride into 3 molecules of useable fuel, and a molecule of glycerine. That takes lots of energy to do. The OTHER possibility is to do it chemically, which is what some of the newer techniques are looking into. I don't know what the energy balance is like today, granted, but personally, I do think there is a way to generate this stuff efficiently, and I've seen a pilot plant up and running that uses a chemical separation process and recycles the chemicals. Their electrical equipment basically consisted of a few pumps and some testing equipment on the back end. They're not ready for a full-scale plant yet, but they're close.
Now, I know I'm just arguing for one side here, and I freely admit that I don't know how well the process is caried out today, but the other advantage, as I see it, is that stuff like yellow grease also counts as biomass. So regardless of whether or not you're using more energy in the processing, you're still overall doing something good, since at least you're not going through the process of cleaning the stuff, just so it can be disposed of.
It is a very good point though. For a fuel to really be considered environmentally friendly, this type of lifecycle analysis will have to be completed, regardless of the type of fuel.
I worked with a fuel company for a while, researching the possibility of introducing a bio-diesel blended fuel for trucks and heating. I'm fairly convinced that this will be one of those big milestones on the road to more environmentally friendly fuel. It's safer to handle, has a higher lubricity and cetane rating and reduces almost all the major emissions (except SO2). Not only that, but some of the newer manufacturing techniques really lower the impact of the manufacturing - using chemicals that can be reclaimed, room temp and pressure production etc. Plus, in low blends (~10%), you can stick it right into a diesel engine (at higher blends, usually the manufacturers get worried about warrently, and there may be some effect on certain types of rubber seals with really high blends). Not only that, but you can make it out of TONNES of stuff - we were working with soy based fuel, but we also had a bin of fuel from rendered animal fat. Not the greatest smelling stuff, and it wasn't as good as the soy, but they company we were working with was doing major reserach with a rendering plant - killing 2 birds with one stone - enviro-fuel and a way to recycle rendered fats. In fact, the most major problem to the introduction of these fuels is cost, and the gap between the bio (soy) diesel and the regular fuel is closing fairly rapidly. We managed to get to market for farm fuel with 2, 5 and 10% blends, and I think they're expanding those soon.
As the parent points out, hydrogen isn't the only alternate fuel out there, and it's a fairly long way off from being a viable source. Using stuff like ethanol and biodiesel would be an excellent first step, and would be way easier than transitioning to hydrogen, since the infrastructure is already in place. The current fuel prices are making this more viable than ever before.
"overdone" is really more of an opinion. It is possible that a page that uses these fancy controls is overdone, just in the same way that a page that uses any fancy new web design can be said to be overdone. In university, I worked with a prof who wrote all of his web pages in plain text with the same grey background because anything else would have been too fancy for him. It's all a matter of opinion.
While it does pay to give consideration to useability, I don't think you can automatically point to any site that happens to use fancy controls and say that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design or that it is overdone. If the controls are sitting where a control would normally be, there are a bunch of them there with options beside them and one of them is looking a little different, chances are good that user will recognize them as controls.
Look, I do understand your point - it makes sense to use controls that people recognize. But there's nothing to say that people would ONLY recognize the traditional style boxes as things that are clickable. It seems like you're saying that the GP should prove to you that these things are needed. I don't think it would be possible to do so - you're right. But at the same time, you can say the same things about most web page design ideas out there. Prove to me that you really do need to change your font family to have your page look great. Or that rollover buttons are really required. Or that a multitude of other things are "necessary" and don't make the page "overdone". These small things, on their own, are not "necessary". But fitting the small details to the overall style helps gives the page its character, and if styling your buttons helps, I personally can't see the harm. After all, it's their risk to take, right?
Actually, during high school I took senior level classes in latin and law, and there was one offered in philosophy. They were just basic pre-university level classes - not specialized, just a general overview, but they were SO interesting. As a student with interests severely in the math camp, I somehow ended up walking away from that year with the highest grade in my OAC law class. Granted, it was a private school, so they could offer some more interesting academic classes - latin, law, philosophy and a couple others (no shop though - man, I would have killed for a shop class).
At any rate, after some experience taking these classes, I agree 100% with your comment. They're interesting, and they round the types of courses currently offered, but more than that, they can provide teachers a different way to assess the student's skills. For example - I hated English class. I love reading, but I HATE everything to do with analysis of book themese and symbolism etc. I'm terrible at it. For the longest time I thought I was just a terrible writer in general, but the law class showed me that I am just better at a different style of writing. I write formal essays like your average math student - very factual, not a whole lot of fluff. This doesn't work very well in English classes, but works fine in some other disciplines. And it translates well into the types of technical writing that was required in university.
The other thing that really helped to shape my writing skills was that my grade 7 teacher spent at least a month of one term talking about how to properly construct an essay outline. We thought it was utterly stupid at the time, but we had to learn it because all of our assignment and exams required that we hand in an outline. I look back now and realize exactly how much I owe to her for those classes. Although the strict structure lapsed somewhat, her basic lessons about the way to construct and organize papers and arguments lasted me all the way through high school and university, and I still use her basic style every time I need to put together a paper for work. If there was ONE thing I would suggest for the curriculum for every school, that would be it.
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ha ha...no kidding...my last semester of school we had a huge project where we were working in a lab we could only use at night. Classes, of course, were still during the day, so sleep was something like 9:00-11:00 MWF and 10:30-1:30 TTH. Not a great schedule, but what can you do. Well, about 4 weeks into this (just before exams) I left the lab one morning feeling quite ill. Woke up 4 hours later on the floor of my bathroom. Don't even remember getting home, but from what my friends tell me I was talking about a chipmunk and kept swerving the car. From that point on we decided that it might be good to get a little sleep. Sure enough, 8 hours of solid sleep later I felt like a million. At that point, I think I would have taken something like this gladly, but really...if you're getting that broken, suppressing the symptoms CAN'T be a good idea.
No kidding on the shock thing...a little while ago I was fixing an old computer. I had the open computer sitting on the floor of my room and I was getting pretty bored trying to fix the thing so I kicked up my feet on top of the case and plugged in my amp to play a little guitar. I kept feeling this weird tingling in my feet, and at first I thought it was just my foot falling asleep, so I got up and shook it around for a bit and went back to playing. Well, the feeling was back again, only stronger. Repeat a few more times and now I'm starting to get a little weirded out - feels like there's electricity coming from the computer. So I get up and fiddle around a bit, but I can't feel anything. Put the feet up, and there it is again. At this point I'm totally confused, so I sit down, pick up the guitar and kick my foot onto the top of the case. Thing zapped my foot so hard that I fell off my chair and cracked my back/head into the desk behind me.
Well, I had the computer and the amp plugged into the same outlet. Turns out there was some type of a short and I was completing the circuit between the guitar and the case, which is why I couldn't feel anything when I wasn't using the guitar. The more I moved around, the more the cable pulled on the outlet and the worse it got until it zapped me.
Lesson learned, I guess...feel the tingle and stay clear.
I think it really depends on why you became a vegetarian in the first place. When I stopped eating meat, it was less because I was concerned about animals than it was because i found it rather disturbing that meat was something that was DEAD that we were EATING. I just found it rather unapetizing and creepy - I'd look at a burger and think "ground up cow middles". yech.
Even if the meat was artificaially grown outside an actual animal, I'm not sure that this would be an association I could break. Seeing, smelling and tasting meat kinda disgusts me. It's just not something I'm comfortable with. I don't think it being artificial would change that. That's just me though - I'm sure there are other people out there who would and do feel quite differently, and more power to them for it.
I wholehartedly agree. I took computer engineering in university, but I did some of my interships in completely different fields. I spent 8 months on a biodiesel reserach project and 4 months working at the sudbury neutrino observatory.
The biodiesel one was great - I was basically in change of the research program, and I got to research, design and perform all the tests. Although it wasn't in my field, I made some major contacts at the university and the labs and it really helped when I applied to grad school.
The neutrino observatory would have been a great experience even if I did nothing at all in my field. I spent 3 months working in a physics lab at the bottom of a mine and playing with probably the world's most expensive water (heavy water)- it was worth it just for the cool factor of the mine. But despite the fact that I wasn't hired to do computer stuff, I ended up spending the last month writing a computer simulation for the salt removal system. At the interview for my current job, I spent a good half hour talking about that work term. My boss just thought it was the neatest thing ever and I think it kind of showed that I was up for a challenge, flexible etc.
Honestly, if you find something you think might be interesting, TAKE IT. Just having some experience, no matter what it is, will get your foot in the door. A little variety never hurt anyone, no need to specialize before you even graduate. Leave the door open - you're still in school - why limit yourself?
When I first started, the first language we started with was turing. To be honest, I don't have much experience with some of the languages being described here, so maybe the other suggestions have the same features, but turing has some really good features for new programmers.
Firstly, there aren't a lot of include libraries, you can start writing the code without having to worry about things like missing things that should be linked. Starting out, I think students should be more worried about learning how to structure programs than where to find the functions they are looking for. Giving students a bunch of code they don't understand to put at the top of their program just makes it seem harder than it really is. Secondly, it's a very english based language. Instead of brackets you get actual words that say things like "end if". When you're just starting, I think this is a bonus because it's more intuitive.
Also, although the graphics are REALLY rudimentary, you only have to put in ONE line to access the ability to draw graphics on the screen. None of the craziness of some of the other programs where you have to set up windows and drawing areas etc etc to just put a line on the screen. They're not beautiful for sure, but it really lets advanced students do a little bit more, and pictures are always more exciting than console program that just spit out text.
Additionally, turing does have OO support, so if you're looking to teach OO concepts, you have access to them.
I don't know much about python, haven't done much with it, although it seems like it might be a fairly good place to start as well. I'd stay away from VB and PHP (and I guess Perl too for that matter). VB can make you a wicked looking program, but it's very unstructured. It might be easy to learn, but you probably want students to learn a languge that is a bit more structured, or they might have trouble later. VB doesn't require things like variable declarations and doens't really require you to stick to strict types and might be confusing when you try to move to a stricter language. I'd stay away from stuff like PHP because it's real use and power is with web stuff. To use PHP for web based stuff, you need some knowledge of HTML. Using PHP to write HTML can be a real pain in the a$$. It's a nightmare of brackets and quote marks and it requires you to have a knowledge of 2 sets of languages/tags and to actually keep the difference clear in your mind. Differentiating between these can be very difficult for beginning students.
Ok, done my rant...look into turing though. Although it's not as powerful as some of the other languages, I think for teaching what you're looking for is a language that makes it easy to get started, with simple syntax, but common code structures.
Well, it's not QUITE what you're describing, but MIT started a program a little while ago called "open courseware". Basically, they open sourced their course material and published it on the internet. A lot of the stuff really is quite fantastic. I've used it a few times for reference and just for general reading and the stuff in there is really quite good. The best part is there's a really wide range of courses covered, but the comp/elec eng section is really quite expansive.
MIT open courseware site: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
really? because a lot of the software I use is, in fact, free. Going by your analogy most of the open source stuff out there is worthless, and microsoft is a far superior OS to linux or bsd because it costs more.
I'm not trying to dump on expensive software/computers here...sometimes the good stuff does cost more. But price isn't an indication of quality or worth, IMHO.
I think it rather depends on where you are applying - different schools look for different things. I live in Canada, and when I applied to grad school, I couldn't find one school here who even mentioned the GRE, let alone looked at it. They asked for transcripts, but the most important things were your references.
Personally, I lucked out though - my grad school application was quite late because I wasn't sure I wanted to go, and it basically consisted of me going up to the advisor for my final year undergrad project, and being like "hey, Dr. D...doing anything interesting next year?". Which is the other thing you might want to look at - tests and grades are important for getting your foot in the door, but in reality, profs need grad students that they know will put in the work and churn out some good stuff for them. It's your degree, but how well you do also reflects on your advisor. Email them, express your interest, see if you can go down and check out their reserach. Convince them that you're really interested, and are willing to put in the work. A lot of the time you can get what amounts to a job interview for grad school just by asking if they can spare some time to talk to you.
The problem is that usually part of the contract is that the terms of service are subject to change without notice. ISP's do this all the time with other stuff - ex. right now I'm paying for "unlimited" cable that actually has a download cap. Called it a "change in the terms of service". If Telus had something like that in the contract (and they usually do), it might be a bit hard to win a case on the basis of breach of contract.
Agreed. The photoshop batch tool is actually quite good. The best part about doing that, is that they have a recorder, so all you have to do it perform the actions you want and it records them into a little macro that you can then choose to run on selected photos, or even on whole directories.. Just make sure you get the opening and saving right, and you can do most of the photo processing right in photoshop itself. It's so easy to set them up, that you could probably show the client how to do it himself, and he could record a macro to actually do the processing he wants to do. This would be a bonus if you're not in graphics yourself and you're not quite sure what type of processing a photo would need.
We set up a little system similar to this to processing and PDF some document images - the images had to be cropped, colour adjusted, resized and flipped, and it was a terribly tedious job. Then we had to PDF them and pop them on to our server. We just used a PDF tool with a command prompt and wrote a little script to create a PDF document with all the docs from one folder, ordered by time created (they were scanned in order). Then, it just opened an FTP and dumped them onto the server. Because it was a one-time thing, I think we had the script open photoshop, but we actually started the batch job by hand, although there must be some way to get get that automated too - we just didn't care that much.
Photoshop is actually a fairly well designed program, and it has the tools to deal with mass processing fairly easily, because it's something that is pretty common. Good luck.
Oh yeah, turing was great. I should put a disclaimer - I'm still pretty young (mid twenties), so I'm not talking about a terribly long time ago, but the first time I came across the idea of programming was turing, and it was like a whole new world. Suddenly every time I looked at a program I was thinking how it was made and if I could possibly do it myself. Very eye opening experience.
I still think that it was one of the best intros to programming - fairly simple language to learn, everything is written out in fairly plain language, and a pretty easy set-up so you didn't need to worry about a whole lot of things like includes etc. to get the program working - you could focus on how to actally make your code work. For a newbie, this is GOLD. The best thing (and worst thing) about turing though, was the graphics. I don't even know if I loved them or hated them. During my first computer course (grade 7 I think), we were asked to write this little program, but given a long time to do it. I think me and my partner finished something like a month before it was supposed to be done. We cleaned her up a bit, threw in some crazy bits (I guess you'd call them easter eggs now), but still had some time left over. So we did what every respectible game did - splash screen dialogue. Man...I remember spending at least 3 full weeks drawing and filling these crazy paint drawings in turing using coordinate specs. Talk about crazy. It took FOREVER. But by the end I could whip out a full screen coloured turing drawing in like 10 minutes. Even though I've moved on from that though, every once in a while I long for that quick set up cheezy drawing ability, especailly when I'm looing for something really, really simple, but still have to go through setting up all the crap you need for stuff like C.
Well said. And although the poster was likely looking for infomation for something professional, there are also a lot of ask slashdots that come from people working on hobbies or side projects who won't necessarily have the knowledge required to start, or even necessarily know where to look to find it. I came to this post specifically BECAUSE I know practically nothing about this topic, and so far it has been quite informative.
There is a post on his website - http://www.wilwheaton.net/
Right after that image in the slideshow, there is another image that uses a similar layout, but uses boxes instead of small circles, and relates elements that are not right together with arrows. It's a bit more clear - less graphical, more chart-like. Still looks a bit hard to use though.
Why would schools teach VB instead of c/c++ etc when one of the really good things about .net is that it supports different languages? (I don't know about java...never tried or looked into it, but I know for sure it supports c/c++). Now, I'm not a .net programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but during my final year of university, our group got the school to give us a copy of .net from some microsoft academic deal they had specifically so we DIDN'T have to use VB for our program.
.NET.
.net for the first time with absolutely no training is no picnic. We jumped in with both feet and really felt the sting of early, ignorant decisions about how to use the program. The words that came out of my mouth during that project would have made a sailor blush, and I still harbour a hateful resentment towards the still elusive concept of managed projects and just why it is that our code libraries always seemed to require patches or tweaks to work in a manged .net project but not in any other compiler. [rant off]. But at the same time, we didn't have to resort to cobbling together VB and C++ for no real reason, and we were able to put together a decent GUI using the windows forms features, all written right in C.
.net - I'm way more comfortable in gcc, compling my own code, and "managing" my own projects - but I don't think this is something that will limit students - it supports a good number of standard high-level languages, and provides some good tools and features that can be quite useful.
We only had ~12 weeks to finish off a pretty hefty project (motion capture system essentially), and between the code planning, interfacing with the hardware and writing the image processing backend, we didn't really have the time to program a GUI from scratch, particularily since we didn't have a whole lot of experience with it, and because there were tools out there that would let us write a better, more flexible interface more quickly. Originally, we were going to go with VB, but there were concerns about interfacing a VB front-end with a C++ backend, particularily in light of the time constraints. Enter
Now don't get me wrong - using
I still don't really trust
Actually - I think the robot DOES have more degrees of freedom than a human...
I might be wrong, but I was pretty sure that when we talk about degrees of freedom in terms of movement, that 6 was pretty much the limit - 3 degrees in position and rotation (x,y,z,pitch,yaw,roll). With 6 degrees, you can describe the position and rotation of any point in space - I'm not sure what the other degrees would be. Maybe up to 6 DOF for more than one point on the robot? Like the arm can position themselves with x degrees of freedom plus the other arm, plus the legs etc? Or am I totally missing something here?
I think that really depends on what department you're in and what you're doing with the computers. There are some classes that require some real heavy-duty machines. Back at my university, we were running some fairly heavy modelling and FEA software. My year was the first to use this, but the computers couldn't handle the load from these things - you'd leave the thing solving for hours, or even overnight and when you came back there was a good chance it had crashed and you had to do it again anyway. There was some real competition to get a computer in the new lab because it was way faster and they tended not to crash as often.
The next year they upgraded everything and fixed some of the network problems and the problems were significantly reduced. Even still, my friend was using the program for his research, and he ended up buying his own REALLY heavy-duty computer - this thing was a monster and he designed it specifically to do the type of graphics and modelling he needed. Instead of using the school computers, he'd bring this monster (full tower, incredibly heavy) with him everywhere because it solved faster.
ok...I'm going to stray into another fuel for a second, but bear with me, I do have a real point...
I did some research with biodiesel for a fuel company a while back. Biodiesel comes up against very similar arguments as ethanol does as an alternative fuel - it's not really saving energy because it takes so much energy to generate it in the first place. While scientists might not like to hear this type of thing, it's a valid and important argument, and something that really needs to be looked at before we move on to new fuels. There's a catch though - while the studies didn't necessarily agree, they all looked at the current methods of producing biodiesel. Meanwhile, in the past few years, another researcher had devised a new way of producing the stuff. Normal production methods (in a nutshell), use temperature and pressure to split a triglyceride into biodiesel and glycerine. The newer method used chemicals, which were then recycled. Also, you could produce the stuff from yellow grease, which normally has to be cleaned and disposed of anyway. This was a HUGE breakthrough in both cost and energy useage, which is why our company was now looking at providing premium biodiesel farm blends (mostly because of the cost thing though =). As an added bonus, a lot of farmers loved the idea of running their equipment on an agricultural based fuel.
Meanwhile, back to the ethanol thing.... We tend to think of ethanol as one of those fuels that has sort of established itself. It's already produced on a large scale, it's as good as it's going to get. I'm not sure I buy that. I think there's plenty of research to be done on improving the production techniques for ethanol. We're still a fair way off from having viable hydrogen based cars - we don't have the infrastructure or cars to support it, and we don't have viable and affordable technology to produce and store enoug of it to be useful. But research continues and we assume that we will eventually overcome these problems. Why then, can research not continue on ethanol and different, better, ways to produce it? As it stands right now, I can see a large number of reasons why it would be prudent to continue to develop ethanol as a fuel:
1. We have the infrastructure to handle the delivery of the fuel
2. High ethanol blends can be put into current car designs with some fairly minor adjustments - mostly seals and filters.
3. With higher fuel costs, the relative price is going down
4. it's a high octane fuel
5. In lower blends, people are able to use it right in their current cars.
While hydrogen might be the goal, ethanol could be the transition. Hydrogen still seems to be a fair way off IMHO, and ethanol is something we can work with today, with our current cars and our current infrastructure. We do need to keep looking at hydrogren, but in the mean while, we can't really keep using petroleum, so we need something, be it electric cars, or better ethanol, or both together. It just seems like a more realistic, attainable goal for the near future.
I haven't owned a VCR in many years, but when I was younger, the biggest problem I found wasn't the tape thing, but the weird way VCR's dealt with channels (just as a side note, this VCR was OLD...I'm sure they're way better now, but I've moved on). Anyway, we had cable (pretty normal), and different cable companies had different numbers for their channels. Just to make things a bit more fun, the VCR for some reason, operated on different channel numbers than the TV. Just to make it a little bit MORE fun, you could program the VCR channels to be different TV numbers, BUT they reset themselves what seemed to be rather randomly, and programming the channels was hardly intuitive since you basically had to guess what channel you were setting and then check it after. Since we didn't usually tape a bunch of shows, when we DID want to tape something, the routine basically consisted of trying to set the channels on the VCR, and then running a test tape though for 1 minute to make sure the channel was correct. Even then, every once in a while, you'd get home and realize you had a half hour of some show you'd never seen before in your life. Stupid VCR...I hated that thing.
I doubt that she was talking about implementing different hiring practices. The thing I've noticed about about younger kids is that for the most part, is that even the ones with more exposure to "real-world" type politics, tend to hold a much more idealistic view of the world than us older, more disenchanted folk. Her "should" was more likely just a comment on a perceived discrepancy between the way she thought the place would be, and how it actually is. And good on her for it...sometimes it takes fresh eyes pointing out things like that to show us how far we really still have to go in this sector before we have a representitive work force.
Just as a side note, you're right - there are some really strange hiring practices out there, and I don't think we should be hiring people who aren't the best candidate based solely on the fact that they are a minority. I think it hurts both sides (people assume you're only there because you're a minority). But at the same time, I think it's hard for guys to realize just how much discrimination there still is out there.
- and she's a girl :(
Yeah, because everyone knows that due to the fact that you have a penis, you must be able to out-program all the girls out there. I mean, silly me, I thought it was about brain power, but no...it must be about whether or not you have the jiggly-bits.
You're right - there is no consensus right now, but there are new production techniques that are starting to come into play as well. U of Toronto has been doing quite a bit of research into this type of thing. The problem with the old way of making biodiesel is that it requires high temperatures and pressures to separate the useful fuel from the glycerine. Essentially (in a very simplified nutshell), you're using temp and pressure to crack a triglyceride into 3 molecules of useable fuel, and a molecule of glycerine. That takes lots of energy to do. The OTHER possibility is to do it chemically, which is what some of the newer techniques are looking into. I don't know what the energy balance is like today, granted, but personally, I do think there is a way to generate this stuff efficiently, and I've seen a pilot plant up and running that uses a chemical separation process and recycles the chemicals. Their electrical equipment basically consisted of a few pumps and some testing equipment on the back end. They're not ready for a full-scale plant yet, but they're close.
Now, I know I'm just arguing for one side here, and I freely admit that I don't know how well the process is caried out today, but the other advantage, as I see it, is that stuff like yellow grease also counts as biomass. So regardless of whether or not you're using more energy in the processing, you're still overall doing something good, since at least you're not going through the process of cleaning the stuff, just so it can be disposed of.
It is a very good point though. For a fuel to really be considered environmentally friendly, this type of lifecycle analysis will have to be completed, regardless of the type of fuel.
As another alternate fuel - what about biodiesel?
I worked with a fuel company for a while, researching the possibility of introducing a bio-diesel blended fuel for trucks and heating. I'm fairly convinced that this will be one of those big milestones on the road to more environmentally friendly fuel. It's safer to handle, has a higher lubricity and cetane rating and reduces almost all the major emissions (except SO2). Not only that, but some of the newer manufacturing techniques really lower the impact of the manufacturing - using chemicals that can be reclaimed, room temp and pressure production etc. Plus, in low blends (~10%), you can stick it right into a diesel engine (at higher blends, usually the manufacturers get worried about warrently, and there may be some effect on certain types of rubber seals with really high blends). Not only that, but you can make it out of TONNES of stuff - we were working with soy based fuel, but we also had a bin of fuel from rendered animal fat. Not the greatest smelling stuff, and it wasn't as good as the soy, but they company we were working with was doing major reserach with a rendering plant - killing 2 birds with one stone - enviro-fuel and a way to recycle rendered fats. In fact, the most major problem to the introduction of these fuels is cost, and the gap between the bio (soy) diesel and the regular fuel is closing fairly rapidly. We managed to get to market for farm fuel with 2, 5 and 10% blends, and I think they're expanding those soon.
As the parent points out, hydrogen isn't the only alternate fuel out there, and it's a fairly long way off from being a viable source. Using stuff like ethanol and biodiesel would be an excellent first step, and would be way easier than transitioning to hydrogen, since the infrastructure is already in place. The current fuel prices are making this more viable than ever before.
"overdone" is really more of an opinion. It is possible that a page that uses these fancy controls is overdone, just in the same way that a page that uses any fancy new web design can be said to be overdone. In university, I worked with a prof who wrote all of his web pages in plain text with the same grey background because anything else would have been too fancy for him. It's all a matter of opinion.
While it does pay to give consideration to useability, I don't think you can automatically point to any site that happens to use fancy controls and say that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design or that it is overdone. If the controls are sitting where a control would normally be, there are a bunch of them there with options beside them and one of them is looking a little different, chances are good that user will recognize them as controls.
Look, I do understand your point - it makes sense to use controls that people recognize. But there's nothing to say that people would ONLY recognize the traditional style boxes as things that are clickable. It seems like you're saying that the GP should prove to you that these things are needed. I don't think it would be possible to do so - you're right. But at the same time, you can say the same things about most web page design ideas out there. Prove to me that you really do need to change your font family to have your page look great. Or that rollover buttons are really required. Or that a multitude of other things are "necessary" and don't make the page "overdone". These small things, on their own, are not "necessary". But fitting the small details to the overall style helps gives the page its character, and if styling your buttons helps, I personally can't see the harm. After all, it's their risk to take, right?
Actually, during high school I took senior level classes in latin and law, and there was one offered in philosophy. They were just basic pre-university level classes - not specialized, just a general overview, but they were SO interesting. As a student with interests severely in the math camp, I somehow ended up walking away from that year with the highest grade in my OAC law class. Granted, it was a private school, so they could offer some more interesting academic classes - latin, law, philosophy and a couple others (no shop though - man, I would have killed for a shop class).
At any rate, after some experience taking these classes, I agree 100% with your comment. They're interesting, and they round the types of courses currently offered, but more than that, they can provide teachers a different way to assess the student's skills. For example - I hated English class. I love reading, but I HATE everything to do with analysis of book themese and symbolism etc. I'm terrible at it. For the longest time I thought I was just a terrible writer in general, but the law class showed me that I am just better at a different style of writing. I write formal essays like your average math student - very factual, not a whole lot of fluff. This doesn't work very well in English classes, but works fine in some other disciplines. And it translates well into the types of technical writing that was required in university.
The other thing that really helped to shape my writing skills was that my grade 7 teacher spent at least a month of one term talking about how to properly construct an essay outline. We thought it was utterly stupid at the time, but we had to learn it because all of our assignment and exams required that we hand in an outline. I look back now and realize exactly how much I owe to her for those classes. Although the strict structure lapsed somewhat, her basic lessons about the way to construct and organize papers and arguments lasted me all the way through high school and university, and I still use her basic style every time I need to put together a paper for work. If there was ONE thing I would suggest for the curriculum for every school, that would be it.