Turn everything in the house upside down. Put it exactly like it would have been before but inverted. Note that you may need some cinder blocks or something to invert desks with computers on them. For added effect, you could stick the keyboards and such to the desk with some form of tape. The hardest part of this would involve appliances. After all, you don't want the stove kicking on while the burners are on the floor.
Another suggestion would involve creating a web of twine in the house. Start at one corner and work backwards. Plug a webcam near the front door to watch how he handles it. Leave a cheap pair of child-safe scissors wrapped around the doorknob by a small piece of string.
Something we actually did once was collect a heaping load of those mail-in inserts from magazines and put them randomly in a person's office. Inside a book here. Inside a file there. Taped to the monitor. Cut into pieces and stuck to the keys so it looked like an insert. I've heard from guys who still work there that he still finds them two years later. (No, the employment change was not due to the gag.)
I would agree completely. Blackjack was the first game I ever wrote. I did it on the TI-82 graphing calculator during my HS Chemistry class. It sucked, but I was learned the basics about programming and how difficult it really can be. Especially putting in the cheat codes so my lab partner would always be at a statistical disadvantage.:)
1) It is not part of CS curriculum so students never hear of it.
Exactly. We suggest the students in the computer architecture lab at Purdue use CVS, but no one knows how. We're in the process of changing that by creating little mini-lectures that describe how to setup and use CVS effectively.
3) Many individual developers are lazy. They only use it because they are forced to do it.
...which is why I have been coming up with lots of examples that the students encounter and how to solve them using CVS. "It worked yesterday? Check out the version from yesterday. Here's the command to do it." They have to do performance benchmarks for their final report. Inevitably something has been changed so they can't remove their caches. Show them how to tag each submission so they can simply checkout the version they turned in six weeks ago.
In general, I believe that giving people practical examples demonstrating that CVS can really save their butts help a lot. If they don't see any purpose, why would most people bother? (We know why, but they don't.)
This is Australia, so maybe things are different in the US.
Oh, and also as my (male) supervisor once warned me, some of the older guys are just biased against women.
From my experience, it's very similar here in the US. My wife and I are working on Ph.Ds in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, respectively. She has faced a considerable amount of resistance from people who keep overworking her in an effort to "prove herself." From my perspective, this is equivalent to attempting to "break her" from getting a Ph.D. In contrast, no one has ever asked me to prove myself, whereas her previous advisor kept beating her work with insults, usually at a public coffeehouse. Actually, he never praised her.
In another event, she met with a member of the faculty that said she should just get a Masters because "you might get pregnant or married." (In that order)
Sometimes the discrimination is much more subtle than getting fired or an application rejected. Until we got married, I had a really hard time seeing it, but now, I can understand why many women would be upset about these statements. I am quick to agree that academic debate is healthy and conflicting opinions feed the research process. However, using the "daddy truck" and "baby truck" argument just doesn't cut it for a lot of people.
Disclaimer: I have a 4.0 cumulative undergrad into 2nd year Ph.D.
4.0 = uptight asshole or passionless droid
I can easily recall 5 superperformers at my company (4.0 doctorates from top schools with 3-5 years experience at work), and they all share the same traits: stubborn, egocentric, verbose, scared of precision error greater than 1e-10, and always in the goddamn way of deadlines!
I'm sorry that you feel that way. Please tell me what company you work for, so I can avoid you guys. I will gladly agree that you will encounter a lot of 4.0 droids. One of my best friends from undergrad is one of them. However, I know several people in each of your GPA ranges that exhibit the same behavior. Our resident Comic Book Guy is a consistent middle-of-the-road performer. On the other side of the coin, I can't walk anywhere in the EE building without someone stopping me to say hello and talk about something non-academic (football, video games, location of Friday's party, etc.). My supervisor on my last internship was a former 4.0 student and as good ol' boy as you can get.
Beware the dangers of judging someone by a single measure. Replace each of your ranges with an ethnicity and you can see how ridiculous you appear. I can see why "stubborn" people may be reluctant to see your point of view. People are different. Get over it.
Slashdot has seen these guys before. Basically, Dawson Engler (professor at Stanford who founded Coverity) has made a career out of detecting software bugs by checking for redundant or dead code. While his work is very impressive, he isn't really detecting every bug anyway. It gives a good idea about the frequency of bugs to estimate the number of errors.
That said, I agree with your statement about Windows. It would have been better to have left rephrased that one.
I agree completely. Actually, this is one of the problems I have with games in Linux. Damn near every game comes with some scoring system, many of which you can't turn off. I'm glad to know that I take my time off from meeting deadlines to play solitaire against the clock. At least in Windows, you can turn it off or hide it if you want.
At one point in time, I would have said "hell yeah!" but now that I'm living in the real world, I just want to have peaceful fun.
When I was interning at a sensor company, we had a similar situation. Basically, the new product development lab was asked to build an updated version of one of our production machines, which would sound simple enough. The original was designed in 1979 and completed in 1984, and the original staff was no longer working there for various reasons (mostly due to retirement and a neurotic obsession with all things Macintosh -- no trolling, just wait until later).
We had a drawer full of old schematics in no particular order, a printout of some Pascal code, and a good intuition about how the machine worked because it had been in constant use since 1984. However, careful examination showed that the inside of the machine (an 8-foot tall rack) consisted of wire-wrapped boards of TTL logic with ribbon cables soldered into the motherboard of an old Mac SE. We couldn't tell if the schematics were accurate at all because of the rat's nest of wires inside. The source code was nowhere to be found on the Mac, so we didn't know if the printout of code had been modified. So many optical and mechanical parts on the machine were obsolete that we couldn't find datasheets without some research from the manufacturers. It didn't help that the guy who built it was eventually fired because he was artifically providing job security by making convoluted designs without adequate documentation.
What did we do? We spent the first month reading the schematics and drawing our own block diagrams down as low as we could go. Then, we tried correlating those features with the source code to determine how much of the code made sense. However, the most important thing that we did was keep immaculate notes of the process as we went through it about why the original machine was designed the way it was.
We took the "why" and as much existing hardware/software as we could. When we couldn't take their work directly or it had been obsoleted by significantly advanced technology, we replaced it with something similar. By the time I left, we had managed to sort through the mess enough to send a board out for layout, which I think is pretty good since they only put one engineer on it full time and an intern.
I guess what I'm saying is that we couldn't do it quickly, so it's likely you won't either. Get the lastest version into CVS and start reading. Take good notes and draw lots of diagrams. I'd probably start with the hardware first because otherwise the source is likely to make zero sense. Hire a good intern to import all the electronic documentation because they're cheaper anyway and will probably surprise you with some of the things they find. Good luck!
When in doubt, find an old priest and a young priest...
"Most of the time," Somin notes," only bare majorities know which party has control of the Senate, some 70 percent cannot name either of their state's senators and the vast majority cannot name any congressional candidate in their district at the height of a campaign."
You know... I couldn't have told you my candidates as of yesterday morning, but my wife and I sat down and read up on each of the candidates and proposals on the ballot last night. We spent about three hours looking them all over and made our respective choices. We didn't get flustered with all the handwaving, shouting, badmouthing, etc. that goes along with pre-election advertisements. We just looked at their web sites, read their stances on the issues, discussed them, and made our choices based upon our impressions of them. No real emotional attachment, just looking at how they feel about what we feel is important.
...and it only took us a minute a piece to fill out the ballot. The reason why we had such a long line at my voting precinct was not the number of people but that they were all spending 3-5 minutes a piece dealing with Diebold's latest creation. And yes, the one next to me deadlocked during a guy's vote. The elections officials simply rebooted the machine, gave the guy a new flash card, and destroyed the old one.
This isn't actually the first time something like this has happened. They actually started looking for a downed plane at the University of Arkansas's Razorback Stadium in 2000 when they fired up their new scoreboard. Talk about powerful... before they finished the enclosing the stadium, you could see it clearly from the interstate coming into town -- about five miles away.
It was really funny to watch them play DVDs to test out the screen because they would always have the "this video not meant for public viewing" warning before broadcasting it out to the entire south side of Fayetteville.:)
The problem is that you came in at Season 3. The series starts out pretty slow and dull. Around Episode 3 or 4, the rookies (Caboose and Donut) start showing up, and things get really funny. It's one of those shows that you have to watch a few episodes for it to make sense. I've yet to meet anyone that has watched three consecutive episodes and not been in hysterics at the end.
If you're looking for a single episode to give you a good idea of their brand of humor, check out their public service announcements (PSAs). Unfortunately, they don't have any online right now due to their rolling release schedule.
Re:I interned at Wal-Mart's IT department...
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 3, Informative
the pay was below industry standards, but it's in Bentonville, AR, so the cost of living was pretty low, too.
If you were wondering how much cheaper it is than the rest of the country, you could look up the US Census data for Bentonville, AR. A quick glance at the economic data shows that median housing is $27,000 less than the national median. Having lived in NW Arkansas for five years, I can honestly say that is one of the nicest places I've ever lived and is very affordable. (I almost fainted when I saw that the price of fast food in California is more expensive than a nice restaurant in Fayetteville.)
...of course, I wasn't working for Wal-Mart at the time, so I couldn't really give you the opinion on that.
I don't own a car, I make a point of not owning one but how do you convince Mr Tinyknob in his suv-sports-environment killer to drive something fuel efficient?
My wife has lupus, so getting in and out of my Saturn SL (29/40 mpg) is painful. My father-in-law has rheumatoid arthritis and couldn't get into my car if he tried. They both drive trucks because they couldn't get a fuel-efficient car if they wanted to.
My mom commutes 40 miles to work every day in a Mazda 2200 truck on a crowded interstate. She got rear-ended once by a Cadillac and drove home while the other went to the junkyard. She's happy to sacrifice the mileage for idiot protection. I don't want to imagine what that Caddy would have done to a hybrid.
What about if you're married with four kids? Your options start getting slimmer because six people just don't fit in a car. Not many other choices outside of a minivan, which doesn't exactly get great mileage either.
Suppose you don't live in an urban hell. Good luck getting out into the woods in a low-riding economy car. Every time my wife and I would go visit her grandmother in southeast Arkansas, I'd bottom out my car in a gravel road pothole.
If there weren't reasonable uses for trucks and SUVs, they wouldn't be selling. People have decided that they like them for one reason or another. I've listed at least four up above. All are applications where an economy car is less favorable than a "V8 5L penis extension."
And if you missed it in the examples above, yes, I drive an economy car (2001 Saturn SL). It serves my needs of driving 4 miles to and from work every day. My wife also commutes 4 miles but has needs that my Saturn can't provide. Just because you don't need one, don't assume that others don't need one. Such behavior is as mindless as those you attempt to describe.
Granted, the monetary costs will probably exceed Camille, simply because south Florida is more densely populated than south Mississippi. However, when one considers the pure destructive force, it's hard to compare to Camille. Just ask anyone from Mississippi or Alabama who was of reasonable age to remember August 17-18, 1969.
I also teach at a large public institution, and I don't think the cheating is that bad either. It is much worse at the more prestigious research universities.
I understand completely. I am at Purdue for my Ph.D. after getting my undergrad from the University of Arkansas. Cheating is very commonplace in the undergraduate courses here. No one knows why, but I have a few suggestions (YMMV):
Students are trying to meet parental expectations. Many students who get into "prestigious" universities at the undergraduate level are given unrealistic expectations.
Grading by "the curve" promotes competition between students. Sometimes, that extra equation scribbled on the desktop can make the difference of a letter grade.
Because so many people are cheating, many others simply believe that it is necessary to compete.
The fact is that we didn't have a cheating problem in the EE department at Arkansas. Sure, there were a few people that everyone knew cheated. However, the overwhelming majority of people followed the rules. From talking to seniors here, it's unbelievable some lengths people will go to get ahead.
Same thing for my academic advisor. Every time we fly to a conference, we have to show up an extra 45 minutes early to compensate for the additional hassle. At Indianapolis, they were actually nice enough to tell him why he wasn't allowed to get his boarding pass from the e-ticket machine, so at least he knows what's going on. Just like Mr. Kennedy, someone on the no-fly watch list has a similar name, which is really funny because his name is quite uncommon.
Dark environment, legitimate paths for both good and evil, SPECIAL system, and turn-based combat... the most important of which is the darkness. The bomb should have crushed the human spirit. Everything else comes from this. Good and evil can easily exist in such a world because the "good" raise the people while the "evil" can continue to dominate/exploit them. The SPECIAL system is excellent, but I could handle something different. The turn-based combat is preferred, but I'd handle real-time, as long as it wasn't a twitch FPS.
However, I'm not going to be quick to buy a Bethesda Fallout 3. I remember the hollow expansiveness of TES: Arena. Nothing like a huge world with "fetch the item" quests! I'm going to wait until some user reviews come out before jumping on the Fallout 3 bandwagon.
The extension of Hubble closes the gap between current and future platforms. Interestingly Webb has a mission life of 5 - 10 years. In contrast Hubble was launched in 1990 and will be in use for at least another 3-4 years. Let's hope NASA is being conservative in their estimate of the duration of the Webb...
The Hubble has long since passed its design limits. My former employer was responsible for making the servo systems. I can't remember exactly, but the spec was for something like 2-3 years. It's surprising that the damn thing has worked as long as it has. Before trying to compare the mission life of the two telescopes, consider that the Hubble wasn't supposed to last this long, either.
Accelerator for narrowband connections. Predict which pages the user is more likely to visit next, and start loading them as the user still reads the previous page.
Chen, Xiu and Zhang, Ziaodong. "A Popularity-Based Prediction Model for Web Prefetching." IEEE Computer, 2003.
They state that most web accesses start at very popular pages (slashdot.org) and rapidly descend to less popular pages (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11482&op= Reply&threshold=3&commentsort=0&tid=126&tid=154&ti d=95&mode=thread&pid=9673971). The problem here is that you encounter a very low hit rate when trying to pick the unpopular page of your choice. They put together a Markov tree for prefetching offline and use this information for the next session. Of course, this only helps you on your next session.
I read alot, particularly content on the web, so I'm not really concerned with our culture becoming "post-literate" because of the decline in novel consumption.
The decline in novel consumption doesn't really concern me either. However, I believe in the importance behind reading something that has been through an editorial process. As an ECE graduate student with a teaching position, I can reasonably say that the communication skills of college graduates are lacking. My guess is that they have spent too much time reading blogs, Slashdot posts, and l33t sp34k e-mails and not enough time reading properly structured English.
Then, there are those people who insist upon using uncommon words and structuring painfully complex sentences in an attempt to impress people when a simple sentence would be much more effective. I had a student like that in my senior design lab. He would write really long sentences describing his design that would cause me to reread everything two or three times. Then, another student had an inferior design but explained it very well. Anyone care to guess who got the higher grade (on the written portion)?
[contrived example]
Student #1: "The quadrature radial encoder transmits a series of unsigned binary positions and a checksum through a radio frequency (RF) channel to the monitoring terminal, where the results will be dissiminated to the proper interfaces."
Student #2: "The sensor communicates with the computer through RF."
I never understood the point of making speed runs through games... When you're trying to run through as fast as you can, aren't you kind of missing the point of actually playing the game
Why would anyone make a speed run through a game? Why would anyone try to make it through Metal Gear Solid without killing anyone? Why would anyone spend months collecting 99 of every non-unique item in Final Fantasy? Why would anyone set up a parking lot of stolen cars in the middle of the street in GTA3? Why would anyone try to beat Chrono Trigger without saving or dying? Why would anyone irradicate every criminal in every city of Fallout 2?
The fact is that I know people who have tried every one of these because they thought it would be fun. I think that some of the ideas are stupid, but my opinion means diddley squat because I'm not the one trying to be entertained. I think that these people have played the games to the point that they are ninja masters and want to take their game to the next level: fast, obsessive, ridiculous, or "other."
Just watch the Super Metroid replay. I downloaded the 0:38 game because it was all one clip and was completely floored by the guy's insane skills. I have never seen anyone wall jump like that before!
The negative reviewer is likely not a dumbass, he/she may just not be familiar enough with the literature. This becomes a problem when they send back a negative review w/o a clear understanding of the technical issues presented.
In the words of my advisor, "Each paper should be a stand-alone work." The purpose of introduction and related work sections is to present these technical issues. The reader should know (a) why your work is important, (b) what has already been done, and (c) why your work is an improvement upon existing work. Part of explaining what has been done is defining key terms and concepts such that a capable researcher who does not share your in-depth knowledge of the problem can cobble together enough information to understand your paper. (Be sure to define all your acronyms before using them.)
surely you do not suggest that scientific literature be toned down to the lowest common denominator?
No, but it should be at the level of a researcher with fundamental understanding of your field. Writing about a specialized computer architecture for streaming media? Assume that your reader understands basic computer architecture. If the reviewer still complains about not understanding basic computer architecture, bring it up with the conference chair.
But how do you explain that one reviewer gives a glowing review, while another thinks its a steaming pile of dogshit? the assumption is that everyone comprehends at the same level, which is certainly not true.
Having had this happen recently, I can say that after being informed of the problem, it really wasn't clear enough for a casual reader. Maybe you just didn't explain a critical assumption well enough to get it noticed by a reviewer.
Honestly, I don't think there will be too big of a fight. Coming into this discussion as a Ph.D. student that also pays way too much for textbooks every semester, I believe that the quality of textbooks you get for your $70-$120 is generally worth the money.
While I'm just as much of an OSS fan as everyone else, I think that textbooks are a totally different arena. We have all had textbooks that totally sucked and were completely useless. If a book were free (as in beer) and I couldn't learn anything from it, I would start sifting through Amazon for an overpriced professional version. For example, looking at the OpenTextBook book, the target audience of the book is totally unclear to me. Basic algebra in the same textbook as fractals and calculus? While I admire their effort, this book is going to be woefully inadequate for any real class unless the organizers (a) decide a single subject (mathematics is not good enough) or (b) make the book 2,000 pages.
Free textbooks can be done (and done well -- I took linear algebra with a great textbook written by the professor and distributed for reproduction charges). However, I think that you would still have to stick with the experts and prey upon their generosity to get anything worth using for a course for the overwhelming majority of topics. Good luck to anyone trying to write an algorithms text that competes with CLR, an analog electronics book with Sedra and Smith, or a computer architecture book with Hennessy and Patterson. (If you recognize these authors, you know what I mean).
If cost is your only issue to use free textbooks, make friends with someone from Asia. You can get English print textbooks in paperback for about $5-$15 that normally only come in hardback here for the outrageous prices that people always talk about.
The real thing you need to do is get over yourself. You're not special. There's lots of people in this world that are just as smart as you.
I'm normally a very encouraging person, but I have to agree with the parent here. This leads into something my mother would always say, "There's a difference between being smart and wise." I know a guy who was a supposed genius. He entered college on a full scholarship despite getting a 2.0 GPA in high school. He was way to smart for his electrical engineering classes, so he never went and stayed up late doing stupid things like riding the glass elevator at the Hilton and strolling around Wal-Mart looking for blue lamps. In the end, he lost his scholarship after a single semester (failing to keep a 2.0) and joined the Air Force, where I have heard he became a real screw-up.
The first question everyone asked was, "He was so smart, so why didn't he succeed?" The answer is so obvious that few people were willing to see it. He wasn't wise enough to know that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. The second reason is that very few people give a damn about how smart you are. You will be judged based upon what you complete, and if your attention span is limited only to what you find interesting, you are destined for failure. Your boss will ask you to do something that is not interesting to you because it needs to be done. If you make a habit of (a) saying "no" or (b) not doing it with the effort required for successful completion, you can complain to the people standing next to you at the unemployment office.
Reiterating what many others have said, stop whining and prove your worth. I'd recommend college because I know very few employers who will even consider hiring people without college degrees for anything less than factory assembly or janitorial staff. Why? College doesn't prove that you're smart because lots of stupid people graduate each year. College shows that you can dedicate yourself to a long-term goal of accumulating a functional knowledge of a discipline and succeed at an acceptable level. If you aren't willing to do that, be prepared for heartbreak, as most companies are not willing to take a chance with you, however promising you claim to be.
Just to back up your argument, according to Benini et al. in "Policy Optimization for Dynamic Power Management," the breakdown of power consumption by subsystem is:
36% display
21% digital circuitry (CPU, RAM, etc.)
18% Hard disks
18% Networking
7% Non-critical components
It definitely takes more than replacing the CPU to really save power. Amdahl's Law in action...
For those exceptionally motivated with IEEE membership, search IEEE Xplore for "predictive shutdown," "dynamic voltage scaling," or "dynamic power management."
Slashdot Mirror
Another suggestion would involve creating a web of twine in the house. Start at one corner and work backwards. Plug a webcam near the front door to watch how he handles it. Leave a cheap pair of child-safe scissors wrapped around the doorknob by a small piece of string.
Something we actually did once was collect a heaping load of those mail-in inserts from magazines and put them randomly in a person's office. Inside a book here. Inside a file there. Taped to the monitor. Cut into pieces and stuck to the keys so it looked like an insert. I've heard from guys who still work there that he still finds them two years later. (No, the employment change was not due to the gag.)
I would agree completely. Blackjack was the first game I ever wrote. I did it on the TI-82 graphing calculator during my HS Chemistry class. It sucked, but I was learned the basics about programming and how difficult it really can be. Especially putting in the cheat codes so my lab partner would always be at a statistical disadvantage. :)
In general, I believe that giving people practical examples demonstrating that CVS can really save their butts help a lot. If they don't see any purpose, why would most people bother? (We know why, but they don't.)
In another event, she met with a member of the faculty that said she should just get a Masters because "you might get pregnant or married." (In that order)
Sometimes the discrimination is much more subtle than getting fired or an application rejected. Until we got married, I had a really hard time seeing it, but now, I can understand why many women would be upset about these statements. I am quick to agree that academic debate is healthy and conflicting opinions feed the research process. However, using the "daddy truck" and "baby truck" argument just doesn't cut it for a lot of people.
Good luck on your Ph.D.
Beware the dangers of judging someone by a single measure. Replace each of your ranges with an ethnicity and you can see how ridiculous you appear. I can see why "stubborn" people may be reluctant to see your point of view. People are different. Get over it.
Let the flaming begin.
That said, I agree with your statement about Windows. It would have been better to have left rephrased that one.
At one point in time, I would have said "hell yeah!" but now that I'm living in the real world, I just want to have peaceful fun.
We had a drawer full of old schematics in no particular order, a printout of some Pascal code, and a good intuition about how the machine worked because it had been in constant use since 1984. However, careful examination showed that the inside of the machine (an 8-foot tall rack) consisted of wire-wrapped boards of TTL logic with ribbon cables soldered into the motherboard of an old Mac SE. We couldn't tell if the schematics were accurate at all because of the rat's nest of wires inside. The source code was nowhere to be found on the Mac, so we didn't know if the printout of code had been modified. So many optical and mechanical parts on the machine were obsolete that we couldn't find datasheets without some research from the manufacturers. It didn't help that the guy who built it was eventually fired because he was artifically providing job security by making convoluted designs without adequate documentation.
What did we do? We spent the first month reading the schematics and drawing our own block diagrams down as low as we could go. Then, we tried correlating those features with the source code to determine how much of the code made sense. However, the most important thing that we did was keep immaculate notes of the process as we went through it about why the original machine was designed the way it was.
We took the "why" and as much existing hardware/software as we could. When we couldn't take their work directly or it had been obsoleted by significantly advanced technology, we replaced it with something similar. By the time I left, we had managed to sort through the mess enough to send a board out for layout, which I think is pretty good since they only put one engineer on it full time and an intern.
I guess what I'm saying is that we couldn't do it quickly, so it's likely you won't either. Get the lastest version into CVS and start reading. Take good notes and draw lots of diagrams. I'd probably start with the hardware first because otherwise the source is likely to make zero sense. Hire a good intern to import all the electronic documentation because they're cheaper anyway and will probably surprise you with some of the things they find. Good luck!
When in doubt, find an old priest and a young priest...
Google cache link
It was really funny to watch them play DVDs to test out the screen because they would always have the "this video not meant for public viewing" warning before broadcasting it out to the entire south side of Fayetteville. :)
If you're looking for a single episode to give you a good idea of their brand of humor, check out their public service announcements (PSAs). Unfortunately, they don't have any online right now due to their rolling release schedule.
- My wife has lupus, so getting in and out of my Saturn SL (29/40 mpg) is painful. My father-in-law has rheumatoid arthritis and couldn't get into my car if he tried. They both drive trucks because they couldn't get a fuel-efficient car if they wanted to.
- My mom commutes 40 miles to work every day in a Mazda 2200 truck on a crowded interstate. She got rear-ended once by a Cadillac and drove home while the other went to the junkyard. She's happy to sacrifice the mileage for idiot protection. I don't want to imagine what that Caddy would have done to a hybrid.
- What about if you're married with four kids? Your options start getting slimmer because six people just don't fit in a car. Not many other choices outside of a minivan, which doesn't exactly get great mileage either.
- Suppose you don't live in an urban hell. Good luck getting out into the woods in a low-riding economy car. Every time my wife and I would go visit her grandmother in southeast Arkansas, I'd bottom out my car in a gravel road pothole.
If there weren't reasonable uses for trucks and SUVs, they wouldn't be selling. People have decided that they like them for one reason or another. I've listed at least four up above. All are applications where an economy car is less favorable than a "V8 5L penis extension."And if you missed it in the examples above, yes, I drive an economy car (2001 Saturn SL). It serves my needs of driving 4 miles to and from work every day. My wife also commutes 4 miles but has needs that my Saturn can't provide. Just because you don't need one, don't assume that others don't need one. Such behavior is as mindless as those you attempt to describe.
Granted, the monetary costs will probably exceed Camille, simply because south Florida is more densely populated than south Mississippi. However, when one considers the pure destructive force, it's hard to compare to Camille. Just ask anyone from Mississippi or Alabama who was of reasonable age to remember August 17-18, 1969.
- Students are trying to meet parental expectations. Many students who get into "prestigious" universities at the undergraduate level are given unrealistic expectations.
- Grading by "the curve" promotes competition between students. Sometimes, that extra equation scribbled on the desktop can make the difference of a letter grade.
- Because so many people are cheating, many others simply believe that it is necessary to compete.
The fact is that we didn't have a cheating problem in the EE department at Arkansas. Sure, there were a few people that everyone knew cheated. However, the overwhelming majority of people followed the rules. From talking to seniors here, it's unbelievable some lengths people will go to get ahead.Same thing for my academic advisor. Every time we fly to a conference, we have to show up an extra 45 minutes early to compensate for the additional hassle. At Indianapolis, they were actually nice enough to tell him why he wasn't allowed to get his boarding pass from the e-ticket machine, so at least he knows what's going on. Just like Mr. Kennedy, someone on the no-fly watch list has a similar name, which is really funny because his name is quite uncommon.
However, I'm not going to be quick to buy a Bethesda Fallout 3. I remember the hollow expansiveness of TES: Arena. Nothing like a huge world with "fetch the item" quests! I'm going to wait until some user reviews come out before jumping on the Fallout 3 bandwagon.
They state that most web accesses start at very popular pages (slashdot.org) and rapidly descend to less popular pages (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11482&op= Reply&threshold=3&commentsort=0&tid=126&tid=154&ti d=95&mode=thread&pid=9673971). The problem here is that you encounter a very low hit rate when trying to pick the unpopular page of your choice. They put together a Markov tree for prefetching offline and use this information for the next session. Of course, this only helps you on your next session.
Then, there are those people who insist upon using uncommon words and structuring painfully complex sentences in an attempt to impress people when a simple sentence would be much more effective. I had a student like that in my senior design lab. He would write really long sentences describing his design that would cause me to reread everything two or three times. Then, another student had an inferior design but explained it very well. Anyone care to guess who got the higher grade (on the written portion)?
[contrived example]
Student #1: "The quadrature radial encoder transmits a series of unsigned binary positions and a checksum through a radio frequency (RF) channel to the monitoring terminal, where the results will be dissiminated to the proper interfaces."
Student #2: "The sensor communicates with the computer through RF."
[/contrived example]
The fact is that I know people who have tried every one of these because they thought it would be fun. I think that some of the ideas are stupid, but my opinion means diddley squat because I'm not the one trying to be entertained. I think that these people have played the games to the point that they are ninja masters and want to take their game to the next level: fast, obsessive, ridiculous, or "other."
Just watch the Super Metroid replay. I downloaded the 0:38 game because it was all one clip and was completely floored by the guy's insane skills. I have never seen anyone wall jump like that before!
While I'm just as much of an OSS fan as everyone else, I think that textbooks are a totally different arena. We have all had textbooks that totally sucked and were completely useless. If a book were free (as in beer) and I couldn't learn anything from it, I would start sifting through Amazon for an overpriced professional version. For example, looking at the OpenTextBook book, the target audience of the book is totally unclear to me. Basic algebra in the same textbook as fractals and calculus? While I admire their effort, this book is going to be woefully inadequate for any real class unless the organizers (a) decide a single subject (mathematics is not good enough) or (b) make the book 2,000 pages.
Free textbooks can be done (and done well -- I took linear algebra with a great textbook written by the professor and distributed for reproduction charges). However, I think that you would still have to stick with the experts and prey upon their generosity to get anything worth using for a course for the overwhelming majority of topics. Good luck to anyone trying to write an algorithms text that competes with CLR, an analog electronics book with Sedra and Smith, or a computer architecture book with Hennessy and Patterson. (If you recognize these authors, you know what I mean).
If cost is your only issue to use free textbooks, make friends with someone from Asia. You can get English print textbooks in paperback for about $5-$15 that normally only come in hardback here for the outrageous prices that people always talk about.
The first question everyone asked was, "He was so smart, so why didn't he succeed?" The answer is so obvious that few people were willing to see it. He wasn't wise enough to know that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. The second reason is that very few people give a damn about how smart you are. You will be judged based upon what you complete, and if your attention span is limited only to what you find interesting, you are destined for failure. Your boss will ask you to do something that is not interesting to you because it needs to be done. If you make a habit of (a) saying "no" or (b) not doing it with the effort required for successful completion, you can complain to the people standing next to you at the unemployment office.
Reiterating what many others have said, stop whining and prove your worth. I'd recommend college because I know very few employers who will even consider hiring people without college degrees for anything less than factory assembly or janitorial staff. Why? College doesn't prove that you're smart because lots of stupid people graduate each year. College shows that you can dedicate yourself to a long-term goal of accumulating a functional knowledge of a discipline and succeed at an acceptable level. If you aren't willing to do that, be prepared for heartbreak, as most companies are not willing to take a chance with you, however promising you claim to be.
- 36% display
- 21% digital circuitry (CPU, RAM, etc.)
- 18% Hard disks
- 18% Networking
- 7% Non-critical components
It definitely takes more than replacing the CPU to really save power. Amdahl's Law in action...For those exceptionally motivated with IEEE membership, search IEEE Xplore for "predictive shutdown," "dynamic voltage scaling," or "dynamic power management."