Actually, sexual activity is a really good way to burn energy/calories/etc. People with a really cranked sex drive can get in shape from their bedroom activities.
I suppose it's a trend. Sex=possible weight-loss,muscle gain=better looking partner=more sex
So people with a lot of sexual output probably will be happily surprised when next stepping on the ol' bathroom scale.
Next time you want to pick somebody up, just tell them: Do you know that strong sexual activity is a great way to get in shape? How about you and I do some workouts together - phorm
Your sig is cool. I'm thinking of collecting/. sigs as "geeky quote of the day" for my websites. Can I add yours to the site (or did it come from somebody else).
Chances are if you like linux you were also picked on in school... - phorm
I've worked out a surprisingly functional socket class system in VB. I'm working to make a similar one in VC++ to replace it (instead of using hacky VB code to get back certain functionality issues). After that I was hoping to code something for my linux machine so that I can make apps that do basically what you just described: communicate with the linux machine from the windows machine through custom socket interfaces.
What do you use as a reference for this? I haven't coded any C-type stuff for linux (just Perl scripts) yet but I would be most interested in getting started. I so any good reference-material would be good, particularly in reference to sockets. I suppose I could also code something like this in Perl as well?
I've been told that sockets on linux behave in a similar way to those in windows, so perhaps it won't be too large a gap to bridge in my case, just need some samples to get me started.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who do, and those laugh at those who do - phorm
In terms of a floating-in-space standpoint, what is the difference between "geostationary" orbit, and "geosynchronous" orbit.
Does stationary mean it sits in relatively the same position while the earth rotates below.
Synchronous I believe means it moves with the earth's rotation to be fixed over the same point?
Maybe they mean the same thing. Any space-heads out there that can clarify this. Thanks.
I seem to remember M.U.D. as standing for "Multi-User-Door"? Games on BBS's were called door games. Were there two meanings, or is this the same as the unknown origin of BNC?
Wouldn't it save a lot of cost to take a sample of your blood and have it frozen? Does that contain all of your DNA, or is it just part. Taking various samples and having them put on ice would probably preserve a lot more than having then on CD anyways.
What would they use this for? To make a clone-copy of you 100 years from now? That would be weird...
In the men's room:
Hey dude, you're like, missing something
I know, damn kids scratched the CD before I had it put in safety deposit
I'm going to donate some DNA in the old-fashioned way, it's much more fun - phorm
Usually I'd tend to agree with this, anything onboard tends to leech its resources, taking up RAM or CPU when a seperate card might have handled this on its own. At least most newer board (not all) have the option of disabling the onboard devices from the bios so that you can install others without conflicts.
For power computer users, most onboard sucks. For an office-type PC, it's nice if you have your NIC, Video, and Sound all on the mainboard. This tends to make configuring the thing a little easier (with the exemption of some board which don't duely identify the onboard chips causing driver nightmares when installing a newer OS).
Onboard sound is a lot less messy than video though, also depending on the chipset. My board came with a SB PCI128 clone. Nothing super by most standards, and yet performance-wise I notice very little difference between it and peripheral soundcards. The "surround" feature is ok, it lets me use the line-in as a line-out for a 4 speaker effect, which works in a lot of games supporting 4 speaker directsound-surround.
I'm looking to build a new system now. I'll probably piece it together over a month or to, so built-in is nice in this case. After paying for the motherboard+cpu+HD+drive+case+CD-ROM (have a GeForce4 for it already, thank goodness), I think that I can allow for a cheap onboard soundcard and/or NIC. As long as I can disable them through the BIOS, then I won't have to start without sound, but I can always pop in a decent soundcard later.
On a related note, does anyone know which SoundCards are decent but not hugely expensive for somebody who is very into gaming, etc but not really sound development (although an input I could jack my guitar into would be way cool).
Of course. I actually thought of this, but figured that as long as the machine has a good fan and heatsink running, then raising the room temperate by 10-15 degrees probably wouldn't affect it so much as a human (humidity is another story though).
It's a notable point though, but in this case I was more pointing out standard environmental distractions, removing the fan/heatsink from the computer would be more along the lines of human error in the case of the design team.
That about clinches it. A lot of people really look down upon those who use any coding language that in any way simplifies the coding. The way I've always seen it is thus:
Visual Basic is a very nice language for coding GUI-based applications. Newer versions have increased speed and performance such that there's not really a difference (exempting the included DLL's) between a standard office-type app made in VB and one in C++. If you want to get complicated and rip into the windows API, then you're probably doing something that may require C++, but VB often even handles this nicely. It interfaces much more nicely with the C-based DLL's than it used to in the past.
My biggest peeve is the syntactical differences in compative operators and math. There was a time when I love VB, but now I truly hate having to do a "myvar = myvar+1", or the fact that you can't do something like "var1=var2+var3" (in VB that would give a boolean).
In arguement for VC++, the wizards can handle a lot of the windowing/GUI stuff for you. I think that if if gave you some nice understandable error messages when you screwed up things might be a lot nicer. (it sucks when you get an ambiguous error message on line 2023 caused by a mistake on line 101).
Since I've learned C++, I prefer it when possible. I have no huge qualms about writing a GUI in VB, or even a hybrid project with C++ DLL's linked to my VB GUI's. Every coder has their place. Just because one can program C and Fortran doesn't make them any better than a VB programmer. In a timed-trial for a small GUI app, the VB programmer would likely stomp the C progammer.
If only MS could program better error messages... Error on line 342: unknown thingamabobber executing blingconfangler - phorm
I don't know about American law, but in Canada if a law is ruled as too ambiguous of difficult to interpret, it can be "struck down." In some cases, it helps get rid of bad "catch-all" laws that get thrown into place to deal with one problem, and misinterpreted to be used in other cases for which it is not intended.
The flip-side to this is that some laws which are good get tossed because of the same reason. In particular this often seems to be in old laws which don't fully apply to new situations. For awhile we had the child-pornography laws knocked down on a similar basis about interpreting them to material on the internet. I think this case is still going through the wheels, in fact.
Does America have a similar process? Could the DCMA be struck down on the basis of ambiguity or does this just mean that the judge has to sort through what it means himself?
Was there a time-limit on moves in this game? I would be interested in seeing how the two opponents worked under the stress of time-limitations. Stats that showed not only the moves but also the delay between decisions would be also be cool.
One thing about the computer, it won't get distracted. Humans are affected by their environment as well, so things such as changes in temperature etc could affect the outcome
Of course, this is an honest match of brain against brain. But maybe if the chess pieces were drawn to the shape of playboy models Fritz would get the advantage next time:-)
Computers are still limited to the logic of their creators. Humans are illogical, so therein lies the advantage. - phorm
In the PC world, anyways.
Many computers that took up whole offices/floors/buildings are beaten by a $90 graphing calculator nowadays.
One of the local business has a really year old computer that manages some critical software. They can't take it offline because the processes it handle are extremely important, and there is no software to attend to them nowadays (though I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to attend). The thing takes up half a room, has virtually no circuit pathways (all wires inside), and all of it's displays are etched with a nasty case of several years' burn-in.
10 years from now, Kramnik may be expending all of his brainpower beating Chess 2012 on a game-boy equivilent...
This guy must be fairly decent with his servers. It's one of the few personal-served type websites I've seen that haven't gone under with the slashdot barrage.
He's also got a page crapload of images on the page, which puts more load than a standard 1-2 image HTML page.
I must ask though, who is his employer? Surely these aren't his own machines (at the quoted x-million each?) unless he's also one rich SOB. The employer must be really trusting in this guy to let him mess with expensive machines like this. I wonder how they'll take the energy bill associated with all those fancy lights
Nah. The black people are in the higher-security prisons, or on death row, because the aren't able to afford pricey lawyers and live on mommy and daddy's budget like some moronic slashdot posters I could mention.
think that if they add new features at a cost, it's not going to affect anybody who doesn't decide to use those features. Remember, it takes them time and money to implement these features, so making people pay for them makes sense as long as the fee isn't huge.
Most companies charge for new features, though many implement them as free in the beginning to get clients hooked. Look at all the new stuff that's become more readily available on cellphones in the past few years. A lot of people doesn't bother subscribing to extra feautures, but I'm sure somebody pays it or they wouldn't be offered
If KDE league was never actually tied to KDE, what exactly do their share in common besides the name, or is it just the name?
I've not heard of the league before. From the article it seems they were something like a KDE publicity group that never did a lot of what they said they would?
Please don't flame me, I have nothing against the league or KDE, this is just my interpretation of what I read in the article
Actually, at one time I had a semi-working 3d modeller, based on Visual Basic and DirectX 5. One could create simple objects or design faces by vertex, and then create objects from the faces. I seem to remember in the end I had gotten a working gl modeller, although I think the texturing had issues.
Direct3d is not incredibly difficult to work with. Although I swear that it was easier back in the days when one would import library functions from custom TLB's and there were a crapload of samples online, since the current Microsoft SDK examples suck.
I don't know if openGL is any more difficult, I imaging skilled C++ programmer could probably come up with something quite a lot better that I did in about 3 months.
My last recommendation, check for similar projects, and release your project as open source. It might net you more assistance, and it would probably make a lot of slashdotters happy as well.
I'd give you code for the old VB modeller, but looking back at it, it's so bad that even I can barely figure out what I was doing. I figure that by the time you're 90% done you'll look back and say "wow, that first month of code is absolute shit, maybe I should rewrite it.":-)
Many European countries, such as France, Denmark and Belgium, displayed a penchant for off-beat surreal humour, while Americans and Canadians preferred jokes where there was a strong sense of superiority -- either because a character looks stupid or is made to look stupid by someone else.
Americans: Laugh at everyone else
Canadians: Laugh at ourselves
Everyone but Americans: Laugh at Americans when they fail to upstage somebody else, ending up looking like asses
No, this is not a troll. If you consider how many various Anti-American regard an American trying to upstage somebody else and ending up looking rather foolish...
Did you hear the one about the slashdot post, the somewhat anti-American comment, and the flames that followed? - phorm
Going after the users through a different route would probably be a more-or-less median solution. What that route may be is up to debate, but if Verizon (hopefully) wins then it's quite likely the RIAA will simply move on to a plan B (or C, or D).
Despite what many cynics will say, Kazaa is useful for legitimate purposes as well as piracy. Just because the postal service can be used to send illegal material doesn't mean that it in itself is illegal. The same stanza applies to Kazaa. Way back when it was less easy to trade such things online, postal was probably used quite a bit for such purposes, in addition to legal mailings. I seem to remember local BBS's and later internet sites advertising CD's full of warez etc that could be ordered and mailed.
By the same token, Verizon is supplying the medium for perfectly legal communication, which is also being used for piracy.
And in the end, perhaps they'll net a few 15yr-olds with a few hundred MP3's. Will the bad publicity be worth it? - phorm
Amidst the trolls, goatse, and a million other crap posts, there is every so often a voice of dry wit what gives me faith that some of you actually understand what humour is. Thanks for the laugh, much appreciated!
How many people here have visited warez sites that pop up banners advertising "sexy lolitas", "nude swedish girls", etc. Some of these pics seem to aim at the below 18 mark, which I've always found disgusting. Now, though, it seems that if I were to have been caught with these in my browser cache I could have been (in US law anyways) charged with possession of kiddy porn?
We need to stick a judge and jury on a computer for a day with low-key words that, while not indicative of this type of illegal smut, seem to for some reason end up with a million pop-up banners. Then let's see what's in that PC's cache.
Internet porn laws, saving hundreds of children from innocent users everyday - phorm
Just out of curiousity. Does anyone know how to pronounce this? Is it Sa ki la, or Sa Kee la, or something else entirely? I doubt I'll ever actually be verbalizing the name of the dolphin, but sometimes it helps to know these things should an arguement arise.
Teacher? Good choice (Re:Good Riddance...)
on
Careers After Tech?
·
· Score: 2
This was going to be my secondary choice of occupation. After dealing with the same-'ol' same-'ol IT job for a decade or so, I've noticed some IT people moving towards more of a teaching than application role.
And the thing is, they're good at it. In college we had a prof who used to be a programmer for one of the local large corps. He turned out to be one of the best teachers in the program.
While I won't say that all IT people have an ability to teach, it can also be said that a lot of them are better than somebody who dabbler who also has a teaching degree. We had some of these guys too, and they SUCKED. There's nothing worse than having some weiner with a B. English who just learned how to code last year trying to teach a class of people who have a geniune interest in learning IT.
I think that some people are. A system with newer P4 chips and a fairly high-end graphics card will also do that job nicely, no space heater needed:-)
As for the capacity, I think you could feed it from passive power (something with a trickle feed before the computer comes on) so that it's partly charged before the computer comes on, that way it will be charged and ready before the drives rev up.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, sexual activity is a really good way to burn energy/calories/etc. People with a really cranked sex drive can get in shape from their bedroom activities.
I suppose it's a trend. Sex=possible weight-loss,muscle gain=better looking partner=more sex
So people with a lot of sexual output probably will be happily surprised when next stepping on the ol' bathroom scale.
Next time you want to pick somebody up, just tell them:
Do you know that strong sexual activity is a great way to get in shape? How about you and I do some workouts together - phorm
Multi-User Door
/. sigs as "geeky quote of the day" for my websites. Can I add yours to the site (or did it come from somebody else).
Your sig is cool. I'm thinking of collecting
Chances are if you like linux you were also picked on in school... - phorm
I've worked out a surprisingly functional socket class system in VB. I'm working to make a similar one in VC++ to replace it (instead of using hacky VB code to get back certain functionality issues). After that I was hoping to code something for my linux machine so that I can make apps that do basically what you just described: communicate with the linux machine from the windows machine through custom socket interfaces.
What do you use as a reference for this? I haven't coded any C-type stuff for linux (just Perl scripts) yet but I would be most interested in getting started. I so any good reference-material would be good, particularly in reference to sockets. I suppose I could also code something like this in Perl as well?
I've been told that sockets on linux behave in a similar way to those in windows, so perhaps it won't be too large a gap to bridge in my case, just need some samples to get me started.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who do, and those laugh at those who do - phorm
In terms of a floating-in-space standpoint, what is the difference between "geostationary" orbit, and "geosynchronous" orbit.
Does stationary mean it sits in relatively the same position while the earth rotates below.
Synchronous I believe means it moves with the earth's rotation to be fixed over the same point?
Maybe they mean the same thing. Any space-heads out there that can clarify this. Thanks.
All your satellites are belong to us? - phorm
I seem to remember M.U.D. as standing for "Multi-User-Door"? Games on BBS's were called door games. Were there two meanings, or is this the same as the unknown origin of BNC?
Wouldn't it save a lot of cost to take a sample of your blood and have it frozen? Does that contain all of your DNA, or is it just part. Taking various samples and having them put on ice would probably preserve a lot more than having then on CD anyways.
What would they use this for? To make a clone-copy of you 100 years from now? That would be weird...
In the men's room:
Hey dude, you're like, missing something
I know, damn kids scratched the CD before I had it put in safety deposit
I'm going to donate some DNA in the old-fashioned way, it's much more fun - phorm
Usually I'd tend to agree with this, anything onboard tends to leech its resources, taking up RAM or CPU when a seperate card might have handled this on its own. At least most newer board (not all) have the option of disabling the onboard devices from the bios so that you can install others without conflicts.
For power computer users, most onboard sucks. For an office-type PC, it's nice if you have your NIC, Video, and Sound all on the mainboard. This tends to make configuring the thing a little easier (with the exemption of some board which don't duely identify the onboard chips causing driver nightmares when installing a newer OS).
Onboard sound is a lot less messy than video though, also depending on the chipset. My board came with a SB PCI128 clone. Nothing super by most standards, and yet performance-wise I notice very little difference between it and peripheral soundcards. The "surround" feature is ok, it lets me use the line-in as a line-out for a 4 speaker effect, which works in a lot of games supporting 4 speaker directsound-surround.
I'm looking to build a new system now. I'll probably piece it together over a month or to, so built-in is nice in this case. After paying for the motherboard+cpu+HD+drive+case+CD-ROM (have a GeForce4 for it already, thank goodness), I think that I can allow for a cheap onboard soundcard and/or NIC. As long as I can disable them through the BIOS, then I won't have to start without sound, but I can always pop in a decent soundcard later.
On a related note, does anyone know which SoundCards are decent but not hugely expensive for somebody who is very into gaming, etc but not really sound development (although an input I could jack my guitar into would be way cool).
When can I get a dual-AGP board? - phorm
Of course. I actually thought of this, but figured that as long as the machine has a good fan and heatsink running, then raising the room temperate by 10-15 degrees probably wouldn't affect it so much as a human (humidity is another story though).
It's a notable point though, but in this case I was more pointing out standard environmental distractions, removing the fan/heatsink from the computer would be more along the lines of human error in the case of the design team.
Computers don't need to take pee breaks - phorm
That about clinches it. A lot of people really look down upon those who use any coding language that in any way simplifies the coding. The way I've always seen it is thus:
Visual Basic is a very nice language for coding GUI-based applications. Newer versions have increased speed and performance such that there's not really a difference (exempting the included DLL's) between a standard office-type app made in VB and one in C++. If you want to get complicated and rip into the windows API, then you're probably doing something that may require C++, but VB often even handles this nicely. It interfaces much more nicely with the C-based DLL's than it used to in the past.
My biggest peeve is the syntactical differences in compative operators and math. There was a time when I love VB, but now I truly hate having to do a "myvar = myvar+1", or the fact that you can't do something like "var1=var2+var3" (in VB that would give a boolean).
In arguement for VC++, the wizards can handle a lot of the windowing/GUI stuff for you. I think that if if gave you some nice understandable error messages when you screwed up things might be a lot nicer. (it sucks when you get an ambiguous error message on line 2023 caused by a mistake on line 101).
Since I've learned C++, I prefer it when possible. I have no huge qualms about writing a GUI in VB, or even a hybrid project with C++ DLL's linked to my VB GUI's. Every coder has their place. Just because one can program C and Fortran doesn't make them any better than a VB programmer. In a timed-trial for a small GUI app, the VB programmer would likely stomp the C progammer.
If only MS could program better error messages... Error on line 342: unknown thingamabobber executing blingconfangler - phorm
I don't know about American law, but in Canada if a law is ruled as too ambiguous of difficult to interpret, it can be "struck down." In some cases, it helps get rid of bad "catch-all" laws that get thrown into place to deal with one problem, and misinterpreted to be used in other cases for which it is not intended.
The flip-side to this is that some laws which are good get tossed because of the same reason. In particular this often seems to be in old laws which don't fully apply to new situations. For awhile we had the child-pornography laws knocked down on a similar basis about interpreting them to material on the internet. I think this case is still going through the wheels, in fact.
Does America have a similar process? Could the DCMA be struck down on the basis of ambiguity or does this just mean that the judge has to sort through what it means himself?
Was there a time-limit on moves in this game? I would be interested in seeing how the two opponents worked under the stress of time-limitations. Stats that showed not only the moves but also the delay between decisions would be also be cool.
:-)
One thing about the computer, it won't get distracted. Humans are affected by their environment as well, so things such as changes in temperature etc could affect the outcome
Of course, this is an honest match of brain against brain. But maybe if the chess pieces were drawn to the shape of playboy models Fritz would get the advantage next time
Computers are still limited to the logic of their creators. Humans are illogical, so therein lies the advantage. - phorm
In the PC world, anyways.
Many computers that took up whole offices/floors/buildings are beaten by a $90 graphing calculator nowadays.
One of the local business has a really year old computer that manages some critical software. They can't take it offline because the processes it handle are extremely important, and there is no software to attend to them nowadays (though I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to attend). The thing takes up half a room, has virtually no circuit pathways (all wires inside), and all of it's displays are etched with a nasty case of several years' burn-in.
10 years from now, Kramnik may be expending all of his brainpower beating Chess 2012 on a game-boy equivilent...
We'd hear a lot of clapping about now...
This guy must be fairly decent with his servers. It's one of the few personal-served type websites I've seen that haven't gone under with the slashdot barrage.
He's also got a page crapload of images on the page, which puts more load than a standard 1-2 image HTML page.
I must ask though, who is his employer? Surely these aren't his own machines (at the quoted x-million each?) unless he's also one rich SOB. The employer must be really trusting in this guy to let him mess with expensive machines like this. I wonder how they'll take the energy bill associated with all those fancy lights
Nah. The black people are in the higher-security prisons, or on death row, because the aren't able to afford pricey lawyers and live on mommy and daddy's budget like some moronic slashdot posters I could mention.
think that if they add new features at a cost, it's not going to affect anybody who doesn't decide to use those features. Remember, it takes them time and money to implement these features, so making people pay for them makes sense as long as the fee isn't huge.
Most companies charge for new features, though many implement them as free in the beginning to get clients hooked. Look at all the new stuff that's become more readily available on cellphones in the past few years. A lot of people doesn't bother subscribing to extra feautures, but I'm sure somebody pays it or they wouldn't be offered
If KDE league was never actually tied to KDE, what exactly do their share in common besides the name, or is it just the name?
I've not heard of the league before. From the article it seems they were something like a KDE publicity group that never did a lot of what they said they would?
Please don't flame me, I have nothing against the league or KDE, this is just my interpretation of what I read in the article
Actually, at one time I had a semi-working 3d modeller, based on Visual Basic and DirectX 5. One could create simple objects or design faces by vertex, and then create objects from the faces. I seem to remember in the end I had gotten a working gl modeller, although I think the texturing had issues.
:-)
Direct3d is not incredibly difficult to work with. Although I swear that it was easier back in the days when one would import library functions from custom TLB's and there were a crapload of samples online, since the current Microsoft SDK examples suck.
I don't know if openGL is any more difficult, I imaging skilled C++ programmer could probably come up with something quite a lot better that I did in about 3 months.
My last recommendation, check for similar projects, and release your project as open source. It might net you more assistance, and it would probably make a lot of slashdotters happy as well.
I'd give you code for the old VB modeller, but looking back at it, it's so bad that even I can barely figure out what I was doing. I figure that by the time you're 90% done you'll look back and say "wow, that first month of code is absolute shit, maybe I should rewrite it."
Many European countries, such as France, Denmark and Belgium, displayed a penchant for off-beat surreal humour, while Americans and Canadians preferred jokes where there was a strong sense of superiority -- either because a character looks stupid or is made to look stupid by someone else.
Americans: Laugh at everyone else
Canadians: Laugh at ourselves
Everyone but Americans: Laugh at Americans when they fail to upstage somebody else, ending up looking like asses
No, this is not a troll. If you consider how many various Anti-American regard an American trying to upstage somebody else and ending up looking rather foolish...
Did you hear the one about the slashdot post, the somewhat anti-American comment, and the flames that followed? - phorm
Going after the users through a different route would probably be a more-or-less median solution. What that route may be is up to debate, but if Verizon (hopefully) wins then it's quite likely the RIAA will simply move on to a plan B (or C, or D).
Despite what many cynics will say, Kazaa is useful for legitimate purposes as well as piracy. Just because the postal service can be used to send illegal material doesn't mean that it in itself is illegal. The same stanza applies to Kazaa. Way back when it was less easy to trade such things online, postal was probably used quite a bit for such purposes, in addition to legal mailings. I seem to remember local BBS's and later internet sites advertising CD's full of warez etc that could be ordered and mailed.
By the same token, Verizon is supplying the medium for perfectly legal communication, which is also being used for piracy.
And in the end, perhaps they'll net a few 15yr-olds with a few hundred MP3's. Will the bad publicity be worth it? - phorm
Amidst the trolls, goatse, and a million other crap posts, there is every so often a voice of dry wit what gives me faith that some of you actually understand what humour is. Thanks for the laugh, much appreciated!
How many people here have visited warez sites that pop up banners advertising "sexy lolitas", "nude swedish girls", etc. Some of these pics seem to aim at the below 18 mark, which I've always found disgusting. Now, though, it seems that if I were to have been caught with these in my browser cache I could have been (in US law anyways) charged with possession of kiddy porn?
We need to stick a judge and jury on a computer for a day with low-key words that, while not indicative of this type of illegal smut, seem to for some reason end up with a million pop-up banners. Then let's see what's in that PC's cache.
Internet porn laws, saving hundreds of children from innocent users everyday - phorm
Just out of curiousity. Does anyone know how to pronounce this? Is it Sa ki la, or Sa Kee la, or something else entirely? I doubt I'll ever actually be verbalizing the name of the dolphin, but sometimes it helps to know these things should an arguement arise.
This was going to be my secondary choice of occupation. After dealing with the same-'ol' same-'ol IT job for a decade or so, I've noticed some IT people moving towards more of a teaching than application role.
And the thing is, they're good at it. In college we had a prof who used to be a programmer for one of the local large corps. He turned out to be one of the best teachers in the program.
While I won't say that all IT people have an ability to teach, it can also be said that a lot of them are better than somebody who dabbler who also has a teaching degree. We had some of these guys too, and they SUCKED. There's nothing worse than having some weiner with a B. English who just learned how to code last year trying to teach a class of people who have a geniune interest in learning IT.
I think that some people are. A system with newer P4 chips and a fairly high-end graphics card will also do that job nicely, no space heater needed :-)
As for the capacity, I think you could feed it from passive power (something with a trickle feed before the computer comes on) so that it's partly charged before the computer comes on, that way it will be charged and ready before the drives rev up.