Ah, interesting. It threw me off because it had more of a color tint to it than I remember being able to see. It's visible sometimes out where I live (the pseudo-rural areas of Ohio) but I guess fainter and more just white.
Note to astronomy guys - some pictures of what the milky way looks like with the naked eye would be very appreciated on that wikipedia page.
The panoramic shots are cool, as are the color-enhanced ones. But for all that people talk about the milky way so often, and the fact that I have seen it several times (if faintly) in person, I've always been very vague on whether I was actually seeing it because so few of the common pictures show what it'll actually look like:)
Agreed. People seem to be missing out on the core part of what makes the app store so successful: it makes it very easy to connect your little indie application to a very large audience.
It was also a very new platform with a large install base - ie, a market where being the first or the best product was more important than being established.
If they have a nice mix of free and paid software on there, I could see it being useful... but still not so much, since not every PC shipping would have it. If there's no significant user base, why bother putting your apps on there instead of just tossing it on download.com?
Love of free software only takes you so far - greed and/or financial survival is a much stronger motivator.
And honestly, is there any reason to replace most school textbooks if they haven't been ripped to shreds?
History - at least in my school, we almost never covered anything more current than world war II. I don't think what happened in the American Revolution has changed significantly in five years. And really current events should be using current journalism rather than a textbook anyway.
Math - Primary and secondary school math was pretty completely defined hundreds of years ago. All new textbooks add is different methods of teaching it, none of which have been proven to actually be better in a long-term sense.
Literature - Again, in school you're reading classics, not keeping up with the New York Times bestsellers. Heck, most literature books are just for convenience anyway - the vast majority of it is all public domain and available on Project Gutenberg or something similar. Similarly, most classes read the same novels every year or allow the students to go find a book on their own to read.
Science - There have been no scientific advances in the last twenty years that will actually be covered in secondary school. The old scientific literature, combined with a few periodicals for some of the "wow" factor of modern science, should be fine.
The only field where I can see an advantage to updating textbooks is in the computer science classes - and all computer science classes by definition already have a computer in them to access the vast quantity of web-available information.
I know this idea is anathema to the textbook industry, but seriously, what have they changed in the actual core textbooks aside from graphics and layout styles?
I'm all for adding new online worksheets or test generators or that sort of thing to make teachers lives easier, but that should have nothing to do with having to spend $100 on a new book.
If he's that smart, just get him on a track working somewhere where he doesn't feel like it's a waste, that has some sort of path from low-end to decent job (lower-middle management, at least). Sales might be good, depending.
Once he's worked a few years and figured himself out, he can get into a community or online college, get his degree (because now he realizes it might mean something) and go on with his life and be perfectly successful, assuming he actually *does* have some sort of work ethic for things that aren't school.
I have several friends who dropped out of school because they considered it pointless who are getting along fairly well this way. As long as he gets skills in something that will eventually translate to a living job (ie, doesn't spend all his time working at a coffee shop whining about not getting his liberal arts degree, or worse yet, paying off his half of a liberal arts degree) he can be fine. There are paths other than immediately going to college - someone with actual smarts who can take something seriously, even if it isn't school, can still do well.
There are a large number of people who are pro-legalization who do not smoke pot.
It's like saying the only people who support gay marriage like to have sex with other dudes. It distracts from the point of the argument - sound, fair policy.
But I think the fact that this issue keeps coming up shows that marijuana legalization isn't as much of a fringe, oddball, shouldn't-even-talk-about-it issue as some people seem to think. Polls are showing around half of the people in the US could go for completely legalization, and more than 70% are in favor of medicinal legalization. It's kind of ridiculous that despite the support for this issue it is still considered such a non-issue.
Hell, the numbers in favor of legalization are *much* larger than the numbers in favor of gun control, and they still talk about trying to push that through!
And even though we'd like to think differently about their abilities, Congress is not very different than Joe Sixpack.
I may be stating the obvious, but it was that realization when I was in high school that turned me into a (small 'l') libertarian.
I was on a job shadowing trip to visit with our local state representative. We got to follow her around all day, talk a bit about current policy issues, and see how the different committee and general assembly sessions worked.
And that was the strongest impression that I walked away with... they were all so average.
I had somehow grown up with the idea that whether politicians were lying crooks or paragons of virtue, they were something slightly above the average idiot in my classes. I imagined Machiavellian schemes to reward the fats cats that got them into power or grab more power for themselves, opposed by those few good men who had somehow managed to survive the grindings of the political machines.
What I saw was just a bunch of middle aged men and women who seemed in general to be less intelligent (or at least no more) than the people I met at random social events whom I knew I could already argue and problem-solve circles around.
I guess I expected them to be smart the same way people generally expect doctors or scientists to be smart. Maybe not all brilliance, but at least hitting that "I went to the gifted classes" level of intelligence.
My friend got into a policy argument with our representative over some local environmental issue - it was a big deal at the time, and in her district. The rep stated her "for or against" position, then handed it off to her intern, a college guy who was barely older than us, and seemed to be overall worse-informed than my friend on the arguments for and against the issue, and why the rep was against it (aside from the real answer, which was "my majority leader told me to be").
The realization that our all-powerful government was being run by people whom I wouldn't trust to run my school or do my taxes made a big impression. I used to think that the problem was just overcoming the negative influences on government - the bribes, the lobbyists, etc. Now I just hope they don't drive the bus into a ditch.
It was the first week of school. That means no one has what bus and kids go together memorized yet (students or teachers). I got on the wrong bus a few times myself as a kid - once I realized it I told the bus driver and he took me back to school and they called my parents. The only possible danger here is if the kid makes a separate mistake and gets off at the wrong stop.
Of course, in my schools for the first week or so all of the bus drivers checked the kids off of their notebook when they got off, so an extra kid would still be caught. I'm surprised that it got far enough to be more than an annoyance.
It's an easy stereotype because it sells. Most overweight, bumbling-but-lovable sitcom dads were successful stand-up comedians doing a very similar act long before they got into television.
I've noticed that it's often a problem of the "long tail" so often described in online companies.
There are millions of people who do not share interests with most of the people around them. Some of them are able to find some common interests and just ignore the rest of what they want to do, some aren't. I know where I grew up, I was the only person in my class who was really into video games and computers. I found some other people I could be friends with anyway, but it was a part of my personality that would have gone completely unexpressed without online gaming.
There are enough people online, heck, enough people just playing wow that you will be able to find not just a few people who share your interest but hundreds of them. I fail to see how it is inherently worse to be forming friendships with those people than with the people who happen to be geographically close to you.
Yes, there are a few things online friends can't do for you - getting you laid being the most important. But assuming you have managed to find a companion somewhere, what is inherently worse about meeting your friends online for a raid compared to meeting them in a bar for a pint? Why are people who hang out with their friends in a bar considered social and normal and those who have equally many friends disturbed losers? In my experience, the level of closeness and friendship in those sorts of groups is no different.
Being poorly socialized will follow you online as well - it is a separate problem from where you are trying to be social.
You might add the feeling of continuity, of building something.
Your character gets stronger and better the longer you play. Your guild gets farther along in instances, and becomes closer friends. Even your personal skills and knowledge increase the longer you play.
As long as there is an opportunity to continue to build you have a strong reason to come back. You're invested in your character, in your guild, in your skills.
Both times I quit WoW it was because the accomplishments available to my character had dried up, and my guild had collapsed. I no longer had anything to work for, or anything holding me to the game. And even then it was still hard - I honestly really miss my character sometimes.
People like to build something - the longer you let what they build last (and continue to be interesting to build) the longer they will want to stay.
It's possible to debug without a debugger, and it's possible to over-use a debugger when some simple code checks, reviews, or log statements would be better.
That said, I've developed for situations (like pixel shaders, or OpenGL in general) where I worked for months without a debugger, then we finally bought GDebugger. And my bugfinding time was nearly cut in half. There are still bugs that you have just dig into the code on, or areas where the drivers/applications are buggy and you can't get useful debug information. But there is such a vast gap in the amount of information you have to start trying to fix a problem between using and not using a debugger. Just the basic level of "here's where we notice the problem develops, and this is the state of your program" can drop the time to find simple bugs by such a huge amount compare to "something broken, I have no idea where, I'll turn on my billion logging statements and then go add a bunch of new ones until I find a lead."
"Crutches" are still tools, and they were made for a reason. I can live without a debugger, but I'd never choose to.
Most of my Code::Blocks stumbling blocks were performance and stability related. I've never had an IDE crash and freeze on me so much. The debugger felt very primitive as well, at least in terms of usability of its interface. Maybe they've fixed it by now, or maybe we were just doing some things it wasn't expecting us to.
Not saying that vi doesn't support some of the editing features (or that you can't get all of them through some arcane set of macros and plugins in emacs) just arguing that some of the features are, in fact, useful:)
"Idiot gimmicks like incremental search" You mean so I can type ctrl-i, three characters and be *instantly* where I want to be instead of having to bring up a full search and hit enter, then backspace because I mispelled the word, then enter again?
Or code completion, so if you can't remember exactly what the syntax was on some obscure object you only need to use for two lines you have to go navigate to the source file, open it up, and find the interface, instead of just hitting one keyboard shortcut to bring up the entire interface immediately?
You don't see any benefit in having an IDE tell you immediately, at a glance, that your program will not compile? Instead of sitting around and waiting for the whole make to run to give you a list of errors?
Do you realize that there is no reason not to combine an ide in one window and a shell in another? That this is a very standard way of working? IDE's also contain keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything - I almost never take my fingers off of the home row.
I agree that setting up a new project in an IDE is cumbersome. You need to do that once per project - you will be working on that project for months.
As for not using debuggers... even if you're on a command line, you use a debugger. Or you can wade through 1000 lines of source code trying to figure out exactly what died, when a debugger would show you in 5 seconds that you forgot that you initialized a variable to the wrong number.
I'll agree 100% that people shouldn't be taught how to program on an IDE - it's important to know what is actually going on under hood. I learned on vi and cc. But that doesn't mean you can't improve on it.
I'm getting the impression from people I talk to that until very recently, Netbeans really sucked. Since version 6.0 it has sucked significantly less. Not sure if that is enough less suck to be better than eclipse or not - my limited experience with both has indicated that they both are very usable, but have their issues.
If you still consider Code::Blocks to be "rather nice" you haven't worked with it long enough:) But that is my general opinion on most IDE's - the longer you've used a given one the more you hate it.
Except for apparently about the only way the steel is worth more than the cost of disassembly is when you send it to India. And then you get stuff like this:
Where they pay a bunch of workers the bare minimum to wade through the asbestos and other chemicals, risking fire and falling, and leave the leftovers on the beach. I'm not sure the environmental and human cost of these operations makes the energy savings for the steel really pay off.
Of course, I'm all for finding better ways to scrap ships, but the cost of steel right now is low enough there isn't a ton of a market.
In the US livestock fences are nearly always some form of barbed wire. And much old farmland has rows and rows of the stuff has collapsed, rusted out, or been left there when the fence broke.
Just sort of curious since barbed wire and/or glass fences on a property were apparently considered "booby trapped" enough, but there is not significant difference between a barbed wire fence made to keep out humans and one to keep out animals - or especially one that once kept out animals and is now a curled up mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, interesting. It threw me off because it had more of a color tint to it than I remember being able to see. It's visible sometimes out where I live (the pseudo-rural areas of Ohio) but I guess fainter and more just white.
Note to astronomy guys - some pictures of what the milky way looks like with the naked eye would be very appreciated on that wikipedia page.
The panoramic shots are cool, as are the color-enhanced ones. But for all that people talk about the milky way so often, and the fact that I have seen it several times (if faintly) in person, I've always been very vague on whether I was actually seeing it because so few of the common pictures show what it'll actually look like :)
Agreed. People seem to be missing out on the core part of what makes the app store so successful: it makes it very easy to connect your little indie application to a very large audience.
It was also a very new platform with a large install base - ie, a market where being the first or the best product was more important than being established.
If they have a nice mix of free and paid software on there, I could see it being useful... but still not so much, since not every PC shipping would have it. If there's no significant user base, why bother putting your apps on there instead of just tossing it on download.com?
Love of free software only takes you so far - greed and/or financial survival is a much stronger motivator.
And honestly, is there any reason to replace most school textbooks if they haven't been ripped to shreds?
History - at least in my school, we almost never covered anything more current than world war II. I don't think what happened in the American Revolution has changed significantly in five years. And really current events should be using current journalism rather than a textbook anyway.
Math - Primary and secondary school math was pretty completely defined hundreds of years ago. All new textbooks add is different methods of teaching it, none of which have been proven to actually be better in a long-term sense.
Literature - Again, in school you're reading classics, not keeping up with the New York Times bestsellers. Heck, most literature books are just for convenience anyway - the vast majority of it is all public domain and available on Project Gutenberg or something similar. Similarly, most classes read the same novels every year or allow the students to go find a book on their own to read.
Science - There have been no scientific advances in the last twenty years that will actually be covered in secondary school. The old scientific literature, combined with a few periodicals for some of the "wow" factor of modern science, should be fine.
The only field where I can see an advantage to updating textbooks is in the computer science classes - and all computer science classes by definition already have a computer in them to access the vast quantity of web-available information.
I know this idea is anathema to the textbook industry, but seriously, what have they changed in the actual core textbooks aside from graphics and layout styles?
I'm all for adding new online worksheets or test generators or that sort of thing to make teachers lives easier, but that should have nothing to do with having to spend $100 on a new book.
If he's that smart, just get him on a track working somewhere where he doesn't feel like it's a waste, that has some sort of path from low-end to decent job (lower-middle management, at least). Sales might be good, depending.
Once he's worked a few years and figured himself out, he can get into a community or online college, get his degree (because now he realizes it might mean something) and go on with his life and be perfectly successful, assuming he actually *does* have some sort of work ethic for things that aren't school.
I have several friends who dropped out of school because they considered it pointless who are getting along fairly well this way. As long as he gets skills in something that will eventually translate to a living job (ie, doesn't spend all his time working at a coffee shop whining about not getting his liberal arts degree, or worse yet, paying off his half of a liberal arts degree) he can be fine. There are paths other than immediately going to college - someone with actual smarts who can take something seriously, even if it isn't school, can still do well.
You assume that getting useful ideas out of this site was actually a goal.
There are a large number of people who are pro-legalization who do not smoke pot.
It's like saying the only people who support gay marriage like to have sex with other dudes. It distracts from the point of the argument - sound, fair policy.
Actually, there's a fairly strong argument that pot was banned because industrial hemp was a competition to wood pulp as a source for paper.
http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html
Here are a few:
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may062009/mj_zogby_5-6-09.php
And here's an older poll showing the support for medical marijuana:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/410/gallup.shtml
Interestingly, support seems to be trending up for legalization in general.
But I think the fact that this issue keeps coming up shows that marijuana legalization isn't as much of a fringe, oddball, shouldn't-even-talk-about-it issue as some people seem to think. Polls are showing around half of the people in the US could go for completely legalization, and more than 70% are in favor of medicinal legalization. It's kind of ridiculous that despite the support for this issue it is still considered such a non-issue.
Hell, the numbers in favor of legalization are *much* larger than the numbers in favor of gun control, and they still talk about trying to push that through!
If that was their plan, it backfired a bit, since it convinced me to never vote for any of them again ;-)
And even though we'd like to think differently about their abilities, Congress is not very different than Joe Sixpack.
I may be stating the obvious, but it was that realization when I was in high school that turned me into a (small 'l') libertarian.
I was on a job shadowing trip to visit with our local state representative. We got to follow her around all day, talk a bit about current policy issues, and see how the different committee and general assembly sessions worked.
And that was the strongest impression that I walked away with... they were all so average.
I had somehow grown up with the idea that whether politicians were lying crooks or paragons of virtue, they were something slightly above the average idiot in my classes. I imagined Machiavellian schemes to reward the fats cats that got them into power or grab more power for themselves, opposed by those few good men who had somehow managed to survive the grindings of the political machines.
What I saw was just a bunch of middle aged men and women who seemed in general to be less intelligent (or at least no more) than the people I met at random social events whom I knew I could already argue and problem-solve circles around.
I guess I expected them to be smart the same way people generally expect doctors or scientists to be smart. Maybe not all brilliance, but at least hitting that "I went to the gifted classes" level of intelligence.
My friend got into a policy argument with our representative over some local environmental issue - it was a big deal at the time, and in her district. The rep stated her "for or against" position, then handed it off to her intern, a college guy who was barely older than us, and seemed to be overall worse-informed than my friend on the arguments for and against the issue, and why the rep was against it (aside from the real answer, which was "my majority leader told me to be").
The realization that our all-powerful government was being run by people whom I wouldn't trust to run my school or do my taxes made a big impression. I used to think that the problem was just overcoming the negative influences on government - the bribes, the lobbyists, etc. Now I just hope they don't drive the bus into a ditch.
It was the first week of school. That means no one has what bus and kids go together memorized yet (students or teachers). I got on the wrong bus a few times myself as a kid - once I realized it I told the bus driver and he took me back to school and they called my parents. The only possible danger here is if the kid makes a separate mistake and gets off at the wrong stop.
Of course, in my schools for the first week or so all of the bus drivers checked the kids off of their notebook when they got off, so an extra kid would still be caught. I'm surprised that it got far enough to be more than an annoyance.
I think the submitter meant that they had an actual human do the translation, as opposed to babelfish. Wasn't what I jumped to first, either.
It's an easy stereotype because it sells. Most overweight, bumbling-but-lovable sitcom dads were successful stand-up comedians doing a very similar act long before they got into television.
Define successful in real life.
I've noticed that it's often a problem of the "long tail" so often described in online companies.
There are millions of people who do not share interests with most of the people around them. Some of them are able to find some common interests and just ignore the rest of what they want to do, some aren't. I know where I grew up, I was the only person in my class who was really into video games and computers. I found some other people I could be friends with anyway, but it was a part of my personality that would have gone completely unexpressed without online gaming.
There are enough people online, heck, enough people just playing wow that you will be able to find not just a few people who share your interest but hundreds of them. I fail to see how it is inherently worse to be forming friendships with those people than with the people who happen to be geographically close to you.
Yes, there are a few things online friends can't do for you - getting you laid being the most important. But assuming you have managed to find a companion somewhere, what is inherently worse about meeting your friends online for a raid compared to meeting them in a bar for a pint? Why are people who hang out with their friends in a bar considered social and normal and those who have equally many friends disturbed losers? In my experience, the level of closeness and friendship in those sorts of groups is no different.
Being poorly socialized will follow you online as well - it is a separate problem from where you are trying to be social.
You might add the feeling of continuity, of building something.
Your character gets stronger and better the longer you play. Your guild gets farther along in instances, and becomes closer friends. Even your personal skills and knowledge increase the longer you play.
As long as there is an opportunity to continue to build you have a strong reason to come back. You're invested in your character, in your guild, in your skills.
Both times I quit WoW it was because the accomplishments available to my character had dried up, and my guild had collapsed. I no longer had anything to work for, or anything holding me to the game. And even then it was still hard - I honestly really miss my character sometimes.
People like to build something - the longer you let what they build last (and continue to be interesting to build) the longer they will want to stay.
It's possible to debug without a debugger, and it's possible to over-use a debugger when some simple code checks, reviews, or log statements would be better.
That said, I've developed for situations (like pixel shaders, or OpenGL in general) where I worked for months without a debugger, then we finally bought GDebugger. And my bugfinding time was nearly cut in half. There are still bugs that you have just dig into the code on, or areas where the drivers/applications are buggy and you can't get useful debug information. But there is such a vast gap in the amount of information you have to start trying to fix a problem between using and not using a debugger. Just the basic level of "here's where we notice the problem develops, and this is the state of your program" can drop the time to find simple bugs by such a huge amount compare to "something broken, I have no idea where, I'll turn on my billion logging statements and then go add a bunch of new ones until I find a lead."
"Crutches" are still tools, and they were made for a reason. I can live without a debugger, but I'd never choose to.
Most of my Code::Blocks stumbling blocks were performance and stability related. I've never had an IDE crash and freeze on me so much. The debugger felt very primitive as well, at least in terms of usability of its interface. Maybe they've fixed it by now, or maybe we were just doing some things it wasn't expecting us to.
Not saying that vi doesn't support some of the editing features (or that you can't get all of them through some arcane set of macros and plugins in emacs) just arguing that some of the features are, in fact, useful :)
"Idiot gimmicks like incremental search" You mean so I can type ctrl-i, three characters and be *instantly* where I want to be instead of having to bring up a full search and hit enter, then backspace because I mispelled the word, then enter again?
Or code completion, so if you can't remember exactly what the syntax was on some obscure object you only need to use for two lines you have to go navigate to the source file, open it up, and find the interface, instead of just hitting one keyboard shortcut to bring up the entire interface immediately?
You don't see any benefit in having an IDE tell you immediately, at a glance, that your program will not compile? Instead of sitting around and waiting for the whole make to run to give you a list of errors?
Do you realize that there is no reason not to combine an ide in one window and a shell in another? That this is a very standard way of working? IDE's also contain keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything - I almost never take my fingers off of the home row.
I agree that setting up a new project in an IDE is cumbersome. You need to do that once per project - you will be working on that project for months.
As for not using debuggers... even if you're on a command line, you use a debugger. Or you can wade through 1000 lines of source code trying to figure out exactly what died, when a debugger would show you in 5 seconds that you forgot that you initialized a variable to the wrong number.
I'll agree 100% that people shouldn't be taught how to program on an IDE - it's important to know what is actually going on under hood. I learned on vi and cc. But that doesn't mean you can't improve on it.
I'm getting the impression from people I talk to that until very recently, Netbeans really sucked. Since version 6.0 it has sucked significantly less. Not sure if that is enough less suck to be better than eclipse or not - my limited experience with both has indicated that they both are very usable, but have their issues.
If you still consider Code::Blocks to be "rather nice" you haven't worked with it long enough :) But that is my general opinion on most IDE's - the longer you've used a given one the more you hate it.
Except for apparently about the only way the steel is worth more than the cost of disassembly is when you send it to India. And then you get stuff like this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13443629/
Where they pay a bunch of workers the bare minimum to wade through the asbestos and other chemicals, risking fire and falling, and leave the leftovers on the beach. I'm not sure the environmental and human cost of these operations makes the energy savings for the steel really pay off.
Of course, I'm all for finding better ways to scrap ships, but the cost of steel right now is low enough there isn't a ton of a market.
In the US livestock fences are nearly always some form of barbed wire. And much old farmland has rows and rows of the stuff has collapsed, rusted out, or been left there when the fence broke.
Just sort of curious since barbed wire and/or glass fences on a property were apparently considered "booby trapped" enough, but there is not significant difference between a barbed wire fence made to keep out humans and one to keep out animals - or especially one that once kept out animals and is now a curled up mess.