I don't need to mention that those of us who subscribe to Slashdot saw this thing about a half hour early but I can say honestly that I don't feel like I gained terribly much in this case. The server was still happily yielding files at the time I connected and I downloaded part 13 of 13 to determine if it would be worthwhile to check parts 1-12 once the inevitable Slashdotting finished, shortly after I downloaded that one piece.
Now, I'm a critical sort, but the graphics on this video were about the quality of the cut scenes on the N64 with similar levels of subtelty in the expressions. The characters had faces textured on that simply did not move. So when one of the characters yelled "No!" when the apparent villain did some evil thing, he looked just as passive and stoic as ever, and it seemed dramatically out of place. He could have at least temporarily had his texture switched to one of a slightly shocked look -- something akin to the sudden face changes you saw from the female villain in Reboot.
The effects animation weren't terrible, but, let's face it, a glowing white fountain of energy shooting into the sky is (1) relatively easy to produce and (2) somewhat cliche.
This is all terribly critical, and I realize that these people don't have the resource of a studio like Mainframe let alone Pixar, but I would recommend those of you currently saturating this link:
Don't waste your bandwith. It's not all that good.
Don't waste their bandwidth. They need the money to hire artists.
Almost forgot, just for a second, that Microsoft is a marketing behemoth first and a software developer second.
Pardon my lack of increduelty, but aren't low power portable devices exactly the sort of thing that the.Net paradigm is a good idea for? Supposedly,.Net encourages modularization so that one can easily distribute processing over a wide area. So you've got a small portable wirless device which, necessarily, has to have low power consumption, which means it has to have a relatively weak processor. So if you utilized faster computers on the other end of that wireless connection, you might be able to have that wireless device perform operations you wouldn't otherwise expect it to be able to do.
Granted, this device does not do anything remotely requiring such a thing (or even requiring WinCE), but I have to be the devil's advocate every now and then. The price of being a cynic.
I realize that you were pointing out how ridiculous it was to vary the color on the playing cards, but I ask you this: How do you prevent your dealer from cheating in such a game? Obviously, anyone dealing from the bottom of the deck is probably cheating...but how do you tell if you're blind? For that matter, even if you're sighted, he's still going to have a decent idea what cards you don't have since he knows what cards were in the middle whenever the deck was cut (and, therefore, not near the top).
Massive lawsuits against students are ridiculous and will damage public perception.
Bah huh? Since when did college students have a positive appearance in the public eye? Seems to me that college students are largely regarded as generally lazy, cheap, and annoying.
Once more, since college students vote in rather low numbers and are on the whole relatively poor, stepping on them has relatively little effect. They can't fight back. Don't believe me? Most state budgets are in the red lately. One of the key manners in which this is being corrected is by shafting higher education.
They don't have to win a lawsuit anyhow. Fear of expensive lawsuits let alone potential prosecution is much more effective.
As you can see, the second reason is useless with a dynamically-typed language. In addition, it can lead to all sort of problems in C++ and Java and should be avoided. Example: what if your program now has to deal with another type - say "BigInt" arbitray-precision integers, in addition to ints and doubles? You cannot subclass "int" since it is a primitive non-object, so you will have to modify all your code that uses "int a" and make "BigInt a" versions of the functions. If you can foresee the problem, you can use a wrapper object (Java's "Integer") while initially writing your function "foo" but you cannot fix existing code: if you have a library that uses "int" you need to re-write portions of it when your program grows past 32-bit integers.
You'll excuse my meandering off the subject, but in C++ isn't this exactly the case for templates? [Ignoring the fact that templates can dramatically increase compile times and debug symbols.]
? I wouldn't it's not like an airplane where there's a chance of escape or like a train that pretty much stays on its track. What if the stick malfunctioned? You would get thrown off the road, very unpleasing.
Call me strange, but I think it doesn't take terrribly long to pull a 747 into a tail spin. Once there, I'm pretty sure it's hard to pull it out of it, there's no manual fix, and there's slim odds of escape. That said, I've absolutely never heard of a plane going into a tail spin due to its electronics malfunctioning. Something about precision design and redundancy maybe?
The last time there was a major instruction set update was the Pentium Pro
Come again? I don't see where this statement is justified. IIRC, the Pentium Pro's significant additions were merely conditional moves, floating points compares whose result was put in the CPU flags, and fast system call instructions. Useful to a degree, but nothing revolutionary. Meanwhile, MMX and SSE2 both introduced about the same number of instructions which could potentially cause much larger increase in processor performance. Near as I can tell, this addition is no more or less big than any of the other recent additions (MMX, SSE, SSE2).
And, as a matter of fact, the last large instruction set update would then have to be 286->386 when we gained 32-bit, protected mode, many new instructions, and several new forms of old instructions -- and even then, the protected mode features in the 386 already existed in the 286 for the most part.
I agree with the OP that the x86 architecture is probably limited by it's high degree of backward compatibility. I don't have technical facts to back this up, but I think common-sense would agree with me here.
Well, yes and no. How about I quote an article that vaguely touches on the matter? Here's a random article that came up when I searched for "microinstructions x86". It somewhat explains the issues (though the author doesn't seem to understand that floating point registers, MMX registers, and SSE registers are all general purpose registers for most purposes).
Ah, but my point. The x86 is natively CISC (Complex Instruciton Set Computer) which means instructions have variable length and variable arguments. (Of course, SSE and MMX are both SIMD and have instructions varrying from 2 to 5 bytes long, so they're working against the whole RISC idea, but they've got their own special units.) Meanwhile, the SPARC is RISC based. In short, it's easier to make a RISC processor run faster. But that might not matter so much.
x86 implementation of the present day is essentially a RISC processor on the back end. The native CISC instructions are transformed into micro-instructions. This transformation is done in a decoder. So long as that transformation can be done quickly and the micro-instructions well pipelined, the decoder unit shouldn't be too much of a killer.
Having said that, it's worth mentioning some of the strange things that the decoder has to dedicate silicon to. Some trouble instructions are problematic in more than one way, as noted previously with plex86, PUSHF which pushes the current CPU flags (e.g. interrupt flag (enabled/disabled), zero flag (last comparison equal/last sub result in a zero)) onto the stack is problematic. Then there are others which are just a bad idea. PUSHA is an old instruction which pushes all of the 386 general purpose registers on to the stack (including (E)SP, even though it's ignored when POPA is called). These instructions are those sort of useless instructions which came from the philosophy that computers should, on the lower level, start to emulate the higher level languages they're normally programmed in. That idea didn't pan out, especially as RISC became clearly superior. Another similar strangeness is found in XLATB which I haven't seen used in my natural life by a human nor a compiler, but is still supported in modern CPUs. That's not even to get into BCD instructions...
As it stands, though, last I checked what most hurt computer performance in real situations are cache misses and branch mispredictions. I have seen HP make a processor that was completely backwards incompatible that solved this problem. That is, it forced you to recompile all of your old code. It packed instructions around every branch which indicated the full length of both paths. Then both paths could be evaluated at a low cost, and the results of the untaken path thrown away. Other similar things were done to increase the success of cache prefetch and whatnot. Server only, of course -- no one wants a non-backwards compatible processor on their desktop.
But, back to the article which is about new instructions which will improve some processing intensive applications. However, the article notes, problems with branch misprediction are not solved in the new Intel chip. The processor will be clocked faster (and hence, so will the cache) so the problem may be a bit less noticable.
Most comments I've seen so far relate to those making relatively large amounts of money, at least enough so that they can measure their taxes in 5 figures. So if most of Slashdot has enough income that a 1040EZ is out of the question, I may as well be disregarded.
However, as noted by other people, it's free to file a 1040EZ online. There are multiple sites that offer the service and all of the one's I've seen utilize SSL. Once more, as already noted, the return is processed faster than a paper return and you can elect to have your return direct deposited. [And if you're, say, a college student living off of financial aid and college jobs, you're pretty certainly getting most of your taxes back.]
I've filed electronically using my1040ez.com two years running now, have not had any difficulty and have had the money in my bank account relatively quickly.
I hate cancelling moderations like this. Someone less lazy than myself should make a patch to fulfill that feature request about cancelling one's moderations.
News for nerds and we don't even have geometry skills. Ok, quick recap.
That's start in 2D. What we have is a single point (our baseball) which hears a noise. We use this noise to determine a distance at which the source of the noise is likely located. Since all we know is where the ball is (hopefully) and the strength of the noise, we can now a draw a circle around the ball somewhere along which our target lies. Dropping another ball results in a another circle with a different center. Provided our balls dropped in different places, these two circles overlap at either one or two places. As such, we still need a THIRD ball in 2D to find out person. And this is assuming we can make a definite translation from signal level to distance as well as pinpoint the location of the baseballs.
Now 3D. Instead of circles we have spheres. The intersection of two spheres is a circle or a point if we're really lucky. The intersection of a circle and a sphere is two points or a single point. This means we need four baseballs (each creating its own spehere) to find someone in the rubble heap.
Scare tactis here much? And that's directly from the article, quoted in context by the submitter.
corrosive hydrogen fluoride
Yeah, that's nice, but you're almost guaranteed that you need to use a strong base (sodium hydroxide) or a strong acid (hydrogen fluoride, hydrocloric acid, etc.) in any manufacturing process, if for nothing else than cleaning. Arsine gas is frquently produced in the process of creating flux, a cleaning agent, which is necessary for soldering. Pretty much any device with a circuit board (TV, microwave, remote control) is going to require solder and therefore involve the same agents.
For further perspective, look at the ingredients of your shampoo or conditioner some time, and you're likely to see HCL, NaOH, as one of the last few ingredients. If not, you're almost certain to see sodium chloride, the result of titrating with one or the other. Doesn't make them much more dangerous.
you would at very least be violating copyright on the 9700 firmware
Right track, wrong side of the road. Unless that firmware has a license allowing such things (and it probably doesn't), copying that firmware was against copyright laws long before the DMCA.
Unless there was some circumvention of an anti-copying mechanism or a VCR without automatic gain control involved, I don't think the DMCA has dick to do with this, as parent stated.
Your Microsoft-trained brain is looking for complexity where there is none.
Woah, who put this thing into troll mode. And who ever modded you up enough to get you a +2? Must be like capitalism: You live long enough, and you just gather wealth.
It really is an XML file.
It really is an executable that just happens to read XML files. Those XML files really do have any number of potential values for their various tags and attributes. They really may not have a publicly available schema that defines what every possible value or tag is. It is really very likely that the behavior of individual tags and attributes may not be rigorously defined in any fashion, especially because lack of a hard standard my really facilitate future improvement of the product. It really is true that it may be faster to run 'strings' to discover all of the likely tags, attributes, and values that this thing might recognize, especially if such things have a liklihood of changing between versions.
You really missed the point. And I really hope you learn to stop trolling and actually contribute real information at some point.
Doing a quick look on the web, I incidentally came upon quite a few astronomy sites about projecting stereo images, but the results always came out about the same: The cost of a "low cost" VR system runs around $20 grand. Cheap glasses that use a shutter effect seem to run at about $200. But, well, use your own judgement. This is just about a half hour of research:
This has been done several times before. For instance, there is this SNES/Sega/PC/whatever else you want bike which is basically a fancy looking controller and then there's this SNES specific bike, the Life Cycle which I recall being issues in some back issue of Nintendo Power. I think there was even a Pacman-esque game that was supposed to go with it.
Granted, I don't think I made any generalizations to provoke a defensive response. I try to word such things carefully exactly because of my tendancy to get such responses. I'm quite familiar with intelligent ladies who have plenty of capabilities in computer science, as I'm dating one, and she's a fair bit smarter than myself.
As per childbirth, though I'm sure it can be a real problem in some areas, pregnancy seems extraordinarily rare on campus, probably due in good part to readily available birth control at the student health center.
BTW - Does Opera provide a way to change the default zoom level?
Although it doesn't resolve the issue with non-zoomed images, one can definitely zoom their text by default by setting a user-style sheet something like:
* { font-size: 36pt !important }
I believe you can also simply set the default as well, but it could fall prey to some evil web designer who thinks that tiny fonts look better.
As pointed out by some already, statistics tend to show that men do better in mathematics.
In addition, I've also seen some state one reason for this gender disparity is that fields such as law and medicine have much more human involvement. Computer science, however, is frequently detached, sometimes to the point of seeming human hostile. And, you'll pardon the stereotypical thinking, but it seems that women tend to gravitate towards jobs which involve significant human involvement. An emphasis on human factors engineering and interface design might make computer science programs more attractive to those looking for a more human-centered job, male or female.
I suggest you actually do those searches. The results are somewhat interesting, especially considering the first link for "slashdot preferences" goes to a page that isn't even indexed (and produces an error unless you have a cookie). You just proved my point: If your term appears in the URL of a page, that page jumps up the Google ranking for that search.
Though I realize there's still a bit of work involved, once you decompress an executable (many intelligent people still do to their EXEs what PKLite did in the DOS days -- not sure about Apple), I imagine one could probably find a lot of the key information about an XML file format by simply running the strings on it.
Having had to reverse engineer a couple of bits of data formats by reading the disassembly of the executable, I can easily see how this would be of benefit. But, as someone already stated, this would still be the act of the most dedicated individual. Although idiosyncrasies about how individual settings interact is still certainly the realm of trial and error.
If you don't want to be disturbed at nigth, pull out the phone. How hard is that ? Employer doesn't accept it ? In that case he should be *paying* you for being "always accessible".
Actually, he may not have the right to request those hours off nor extra pay except when he is actively helping out. In my state, CO, the Colorado Minimum Wage Law reads as follows:
b)
Sleep Time: where an employee's tour of duty is 24 hours or longer, up to 8 hours of sleeping time can be excluded from overtime compensation, if: (1) an express agreement excluding sleeping time exists; and (2) adequate sleeping facilities for an uninterrupted night's sleep are provided; and (3) at least five hours of sleep are possible during the scheduled sleeping periods; and (4) interruptions to perform duties are considered time worked. When said employee's tour of duty is less than 24 hours, periods during which the employee is permitted to sleep are compensable work time, as long as the employee is on duty and must work when required. Only actual sleep time may be excluded up to a maximum of eight (8) hours per work day. When work related interruptions prevent five (5) hours of sleep, the employee shall be compensated for the entire work day.
Where did Google admit to downraking searchking specifically? They very well could have downranked ANY linkfarm as a part of their pagerank formula change which is what is implied in the law meme article.
Quite right, as many have seen fit to point out, and as I mentioned above myself, I don't know for sure whether Google singled out SearchKing. What I have read up to this point seems to point to that, however, considering the relativley large drop that the site and related sites saw, however. See my link to the Search Engine Watch article which highlights this oddity. There was a more pertinent article I had read previously, but it unfortunately slips my memory.
It is true that I am working from hyperbole, second-hand stories, and circumstantial evidence. Just like SpamKing's lawyers. Although I'm not sure five or so people needed to separately point the fact out, I probably should be modded a bit more Overrated and a bit less Informative on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't need to mention that those of us who subscribe to Slashdot saw this thing about a half hour early but I can say honestly that I don't feel like I gained terribly much in this case. The server was still happily yielding files at the time I connected and I downloaded part 13 of 13 to determine if it would be worthwhile to check parts 1-12 once the inevitable Slashdotting finished, shortly after I downloaded that one piece.
Now, I'm a critical sort, but the graphics on this video were about the quality of the cut scenes on the N64 with similar levels of subtelty in the expressions. The characters had faces textured on that simply did not move. So when one of the characters yelled "No!" when the apparent villain did some evil thing, he looked just as passive and stoic as ever, and it seemed dramatically out of place. He could have at least temporarily had his texture switched to one of a slightly shocked look -- something akin to the sudden face changes you saw from the female villain in Reboot.
The effects animation weren't terrible, but, let's face it, a glowing white fountain of energy shooting into the sky is (1) relatively easy to produce and (2) somewhat cliche.
This is all terribly critical, and I realize that these people don't have the resource of a studio like Mainframe let alone Pixar, but I would recommend those of you currently saturating this link:
Pardon my lack of increduelty, but aren't low power portable devices exactly the sort of thing that the .Net paradigm is a good idea for? Supposedly, .Net encourages modularization so that one can easily distribute processing over a wide area. So you've got a small portable wirless device which, necessarily, has to have low power consumption, which means it has to have a relatively weak processor. So if you utilized faster computers on the other end of that wireless connection, you might be able to have that wireless device perform operations you wouldn't otherwise expect it to be able to do.
Granted, this device does not do anything remotely requiring such a thing (or even requiring WinCE), but I have to be the devil's advocate every now and then. The price of being a cynic.
I realize that you were pointing out how ridiculous it was to vary the color on the playing cards, but I ask you this: How do you prevent your dealer from cheating in such a game? Obviously, anyone dealing from the bottom of the deck is probably cheating...but how do you tell if you're blind? For that matter, even if you're sighted, he's still going to have a decent idea what cards you don't have since he knows what cards were in the middle whenever the deck was cut (and, therefore, not near the top).
Bah huh? Since when did college students have a positive appearance in the public eye? Seems to me that college students are largely regarded as generally lazy, cheap, and annoying.
Once more, since college students vote in rather low numbers and are on the whole relatively poor, stepping on them has relatively little effect. They can't fight back. Don't believe me? Most state budgets are in the red lately. One of the key manners in which this is being corrected is by shafting higher education.
They don't have to win a lawsuit anyhow. Fear of expensive lawsuits let alone potential prosecution is much more effective.
You'll excuse my meandering off the subject, but in C++ isn't this exactly the case for templates? [Ignoring the fact that templates can dramatically increase compile times and debug symbols.]
Call me strange, but I think it doesn't take terrribly long to pull a 747 into a tail spin. Once there, I'm pretty sure it's hard to pull it out of it, there's no manual fix, and there's slim odds of escape. That said, I've absolutely never heard of a plane going into a tail spin due to its electronics malfunctioning. Something about precision design and redundancy maybe?
Come again? I don't see where this statement is justified. IIRC, the Pentium Pro's significant additions were merely conditional moves, floating points compares whose result was put in the CPU flags, and fast system call instructions. Useful to a degree, but nothing revolutionary. Meanwhile, MMX and SSE2 both introduced about the same number of instructions which could potentially cause much larger increase in processor performance. Near as I can tell, this addition is no more or less big than any of the other recent additions (MMX, SSE, SSE2).
And, as a matter of fact, the last large instruction set update would then have to be 286->386 when we gained 32-bit, protected mode, many new instructions, and several new forms of old instructions -- and even then, the protected mode features in the 386 already existed in the 286 for the most part.
Well, yes and no. How about I quote an article that vaguely touches on the matter? Here's a random article that came up when I searched for "microinstructions x86". It somewhat explains the issues (though the author doesn't seem to understand that floating point registers, MMX registers, and SSE registers are all general purpose registers for most purposes).
Ah, but my point. The x86 is natively CISC (Complex Instruciton Set Computer) which means instructions have variable length and variable arguments. (Of course, SSE and MMX are both SIMD and have instructions varrying from 2 to 5 bytes long, so they're working against the whole RISC idea, but they've got their own special units.) Meanwhile, the SPARC is RISC based. In short, it's easier to make a RISC processor run faster. But that might not matter so much.
x86 implementation of the present day is essentially a RISC processor on the back end. The native CISC instructions are transformed into micro-instructions. This transformation is done in a decoder. So long as that transformation can be done quickly and the micro-instructions well pipelined, the decoder unit shouldn't be too much of a killer.
Having said that, it's worth mentioning some of the strange things that the decoder has to dedicate silicon to. Some trouble instructions are problematic in more than one way, as noted previously with plex86, PUSHF which pushes the current CPU flags (e.g. interrupt flag (enabled/disabled), zero flag (last comparison equal/last sub result in a zero)) onto the stack is problematic. Then there are others which are just a bad idea. PUSHA is an old instruction which pushes all of the 386 general purpose registers on to the stack (including (E)SP, even though it's ignored when POPA is called). These instructions are those sort of useless instructions which came from the philosophy that computers should, on the lower level, start to emulate the higher level languages they're normally programmed in. That idea didn't pan out, especially as RISC became clearly superior. Another similar strangeness is found in XLATB which I haven't seen used in my natural life by a human nor a compiler, but is still supported in modern CPUs. That's not even to get into BCD instructions...
As it stands, though, last I checked what most hurt computer performance in real situations are cache misses and branch mispredictions. I have seen HP make a processor that was completely backwards incompatible that solved this problem. That is, it forced you to recompile all of your old code. It packed instructions around every branch which indicated the full length of both paths. Then both paths could be evaluated at a low cost, and the results of the untaken path thrown away. Other similar things were done to increase the success of cache prefetch and whatnot. Server only, of course -- no one wants a non-backwards compatible processor on their desktop.
But, back to the article which is about new instructions which will improve some processing intensive applications. However, the article notes, problems with branch misprediction are not solved in the new Intel chip. The processor will be clocked faster (and hence, so will the cache) so the problem may be a bit less noticable.
But therein is the
Most comments I've seen so far relate to those making relatively large amounts of money, at least enough so that they can measure their taxes in 5 figures. So if most of Slashdot has enough income that a 1040EZ is out of the question, I may as well be disregarded.
However, as noted by other people, it's free to file a 1040EZ online. There are multiple sites that offer the service and all of the one's I've seen utilize SSL. Once more, as already noted, the return is processed faster than a paper return and you can elect to have your return direct deposited. [And if you're, say, a college student living off of financial aid and college jobs, you're pretty certainly getting most of your taxes back.]
I've filed electronically using my1040ez.com two years running now, have not had any difficulty and have had the money in my bank account relatively quickly.
I hate cancelling moderations like this. Someone less lazy than myself should make a patch to fulfill that feature request about cancelling one's moderations.
News for nerds and we don't even have geometry skills. Ok, quick recap.
That's start in 2D. What we have is a single point (our baseball) which hears a noise. We use this noise to determine a distance at which the source of the noise is likely located. Since all we know is where the ball is (hopefully) and the strength of the noise, we can now a draw a circle around the ball somewhere along which our target lies. Dropping another ball results in a another circle with a different center. Provided our balls dropped in different places, these two circles overlap at either one or two places. As such, we still need a THIRD ball in 2D to find out person. And this is assuming we can make a definite translation from signal level to distance as well as pinpoint the location of the baseballs.
Now 3D. Instead of circles we have spheres. The intersection of two spheres is a circle or a point if we're really lucky. The intersection of a circle and a sphere is two points or a single point. This means we need four baseballs (each creating its own spehere) to find someone in the rubble heap.
High school flashbacks. Scary.
Scare tactis here much? And that's directly from the article, quoted in context by the submitter.
corrosive hydrogen fluoride
Yeah, that's nice, but you're almost guaranteed that you need to use a strong base (sodium hydroxide) or a strong acid (hydrogen fluoride, hydrocloric acid, etc.) in any manufacturing process, if for nothing else than cleaning. Arsine gas is frquently produced in the process of creating flux, a cleaning agent, which is necessary for soldering. Pretty much any device with a circuit board (TV, microwave, remote control) is going to require solder and therefore involve the same agents.
For further perspective, look at the ingredients of your shampoo or conditioner some time, and you're likely to see HCL, NaOH, as one of the last few ingredients. If not, you're almost certain to see sodium chloride, the result of titrating with one or the other. Doesn't make them much more dangerous.
Right track, wrong side of the road. Unless that firmware has a license allowing such things (and it probably doesn't), copying that firmware was against copyright laws long before the DMCA.
Unless there was some circumvention of an anti-copying mechanism or a VCR without automatic gain control involved, I don't think the DMCA has dick to do with this, as parent stated.
GPS is a passive system. It can't be overloaded.
Woah, who put this thing into troll mode. And who ever modded you up enough to get you a +2? Must be like capitalism: You live long enough, and you just gather wealth.
It really is an executable that just happens to read XML files. Those XML files really do have any number of potential values for their various tags and attributes. They really may not have a publicly available schema that defines what every possible value or tag is. It is really very likely that the behavior of individual tags and attributes may not be rigorously defined in any fashion, especially because lack of a hard standard my really facilitate future improvement of the product. It really is true that it may be faster to run 'strings' to discover all of the likely tags, attributes, and values that this thing might recognize, especially if such things have a liklihood of changing between versions.
You really missed the point. And I really hope you learn to stop trolling and actually contribute real information at some point.
Have a nice day. Really.
Doing a quick look on the web, I incidentally came upon quite a few astronomy sites about projecting stereo images, but the results always came out about the same: The cost of a "low cost" VR system runs around $20 grand. Cheap glasses that use a shutter effect seem to run at about $200. But, well, use your own judgement. This is just about a half hour of research:
Two games: 'Dance Dance Revolution' and 'Sambe De Amigo'.
This has been done several times before. For instance, there is this SNES/Sega/PC/whatever else you want bike which is basically a fancy looking controller and then there's this SNES specific bike, the Life Cycle which I recall being issues in some back issue of Nintendo Power. I think there was even a Pacman-esque game that was supposed to go with it.
Pardon my talking about statistics generically referring to women, but I was not pointing at any particular woman or trying to advocate any bias. A good number of articles at this site, though some dated, cover this issue quite well.
Granted, I don't think I made any generalizations to provoke a defensive response. I try to word such things carefully exactly because of my tendancy to get such responses. I'm quite familiar with intelligent ladies who have plenty of capabilities in computer science, as I'm dating one, and she's a fair bit smarter than myself.
As per childbirth, though I'm sure it can be a real problem in some areas, pregnancy seems extraordinarily rare on campus, probably due in good part to readily available birth control at the student health center.
Although it doesn't resolve the issue with non-zoomed images, one can definitely zoom their text by default by setting a user-style sheet something like: * { font-size: 36pt !important } I believe you can also simply set the default as well, but it could fall prey to some evil web designer who thinks that tiny fonts look better.
As pointed out by some already, statistics tend to show that men do better in mathematics.
In addition, I've also seen some state one reason for this gender disparity is that fields such as law and medicine have much more human involvement. Computer science, however, is frequently detached, sometimes to the point of seeming human hostile. And, you'll pardon the stereotypical thinking, but it seems that women tend to gravitate towards jobs which involve significant human involvement. An emphasis on human factors engineering and interface design might make computer science programs more attractive to those looking for a more human-centered job, male or female.
I suggest you actually do those searches. The results are somewhat interesting, especially considering the first link for "slashdot preferences" goes to a page that isn't even indexed (and produces an error unless you have a cookie). You just proved my point: If your term appears in the URL of a page, that page jumps up the Google ranking for that search.
Though I realize there's still a bit of work involved, once you decompress an executable (many intelligent people still do to their EXEs what PKLite did in the DOS days -- not sure about Apple), I imagine one could probably find a lot of the key information about an XML file format by simply running the strings on it.
Having had to reverse engineer a couple of bits of data formats by reading the disassembly of the executable, I can easily see how this would be of benefit. But, as someone already stated, this would still be the act of the most dedicated individual. Although idiosyncrasies about how individual settings interact is still certainly the realm of trial and error.
If you don't want to be disturbed at nigth, pull out the phone. How hard is that ? Employer doesn't accept it ? In that case he should be *paying* you for being "always accessible".
Actually, he may not have the right to request those hours off nor extra pay except when he is actively helping out. In my state, CO, the Colorado Minimum Wage Law reads as follows:
Quite right, as many have seen fit to point out, and as I mentioned above myself, I don't know for sure whether Google singled out SearchKing. What I have read up to this point seems to point to that, however, considering the relativley large drop that the site and related sites saw, however. See my link to the Search Engine Watch article which highlights this oddity. There was a more pertinent article I had read previously, but it unfortunately slips my memory.
It is true that I am working from hyperbole, second-hand stories, and circumstantial evidence. Just like SpamKing's lawyers. Although I'm not sure five or so people needed to separately point the fact out, I probably should be modded a bit more Overrated and a bit less Informative on this one.