One thing I'd like to point out about this whole situation is that all parties chose Evil actions. Some groups of kids in that school chose to taunt, hurt, ridicule, and give as much pain to the two shooters as they could. Many of us here can understand that from experience; I know I can. The whole situation got out of hand when the shooters decided to escalate the hurt and pain by building bombs and shooting everyone they could for revenge.
Both groups chose to do evil and nobody won.
I'd also like to reinforce what others have said about high school and later life in general: high school social structures are not permanent. When you graduate and go to college or work, you get to start over. People are more mature after high school and appreciate intelligence and ability rather than social standing (except for politics). If things aren't going well for you in high school, just tough it out and get through it. Life does get much better.
Gun control arguments are invalid
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
it was an unfortunate situation caused by a number of circumstances. One of those circumstances was the easy availability of guns. It plays a role, and a significant role at that.. two kids are not going to be able to kill 15 people in a school with a butter knife - at least, it would be a lot harder.
This type of school shooting by kids didn't happen 50 years ago in this country and there was very little regulation of guns back then. Something has changed in America's culture so that kids see shooting everyone in school is now an option. I think the efforts to remove God and morality from public life and replace it with moral relativism and Darwin has caused everyone to become more selfish and disrespectful of others lives and property.
It is much easier today to get fuel for antisocial feelings/behavior in movies, music, and yes, the Internet. When God has been removed from public society, people then consider themselves as gods. People determine their own behavior and right/wrong based on their feelings and ideas and desires. I think these kids decided to get some revenge and fame and had no thought for other peoples lives. Other people were expendable.
For whatever reason, and influenced by our culture (but not guaranteed by it) they chose to do evil. Lots of people choose to do evil no matter their upbringing, bank account, family life, or favorite music.
This talk about impulses and exciting all frequencies reminds me of a very similar common technique in mechanical engineering where you can easily test to find the natural frequencies of a structure.
In school, we did a simple experiment to find the natural frequencies of a cantilever beam (beam attached at one end like a diving board). To start with, what you want to do is excite all the frequencies of the beam. As other people have stated, an impulse in the time domain excites all frequencies in the frequency domain. For example, if you tap a beam with a hammer, it will excite all the frequencies of the beam. For verification, look up the Laplace transform of an impulse.
So the experiment goes like this: attach an accelerometer to the beam, plug it up to a computer acquisition system, tap the beam with a hammer, record the accelerometer output, then do a FFT on the data and you will see the natural frequencies of the beam.
The similar situation is the tapping of the hammer exciting all frequencies in the beam. These guys are generating a radio "tap" with electronics.
It is good to see that ZD Net is starting to get their sources from/. instead of repeating Micros~1 press releases as "news". If they are not careful, some actually informative and accurate reporting might slip through despite their Berst^H^H^Hst efforts to the contrary.
This isn't just a case of we-are-bigger-than-you-so-do-what-we-say. There are several factors that have resulted in this war and how it is being run.
Normal emotional reaction to seeing people killed and run out of the country for reasons we don't agree with. We don't like it, and we don't want to feel helpless and stand by and watch it happen without "doing something".
Political consequences. Clinton would be attacked for not "doing something right now" and it would damage his political standing. He would also be attacked for getting American soldiers killed, therefore he ordered only air strikes which we have a high confidence in their ability to not get killed.
Small country; we are bigger. (We don't normally pick on large countries like Russia or China this way.
Clinton makes most decisions based on his emotions and for political reasons/ambitions; therefore he had to act quickly to save his political ass and because he felt bad. (Same thing can be said for most politicans)
What they didn't consider to be important are issues like:
Should we attack an independent country because of internal troubles? Where do you draw the line between internal troubles and this-is-so-serious-we-can't-watch-anymore? (Note vast potential for spin-control and media exaggeration/lies to make people think we are right. You hear "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" but how many people have actually been killed by the Serbs? The terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sound really bad, but are they appropriate for the reality of the situation?)
He should know that air power alone cannot prevent a guy on the ground from going door to door with a pistol and kicking people out of their homes or killing them. If he didn't know this, he should have been advised of it, but he ignored it and up front and publically declared we will not do all that is necessary to stop this; but we will do a little bit. We will sprinkle a few bombs here and hope everything gets magically better.
A corollary is what will we do when we finally realize that air power is not enough?
What will the effect of our actions there have on the region? Russia is getting pissed off, but Clinton assumes they are bluffing.
The main point is that this war is being fought for political reasons. Our country is not being threatened, so military reasons are not the motivation.
The politicians are covering their collective asses so they can get re-elected and look good on TV. They are walking a tightrope between "doing something" and not paying any political price for it. If they were concerned for the safety of the ethnic-Albanians above all, they would have gone in with everything and been convinced that American (and NATO) lives were worth losing on their behalf.
The real problem is not a technological one. It is a case of the politicians using the wrong tool for the job. The refugees are being run out of the country by ground troops using small arms and face-to-face confrontations. Using a multi-million dollar fighter/bomber flying at 20,000 ft and at hundreds of miles an hour is not the appropriate way to stop the guy on the ground with a pistol in his hand; only sending in ground troops will do that.
The politicians want to "do something" and not get hurt. It is much easier to blow up empty buildings with jets and expect no casualties than sending in ground troops to die. Air power should only be used to prepare the way for ground troops, not as an end unto itself.
I don't think this situation can be halted unless the country is occupied by foreign forces on a permanent basis and police state is created. Since I don't support that, I don't think we should be doing a half-ass job by bombing them because the politicians wanted to "do something".
I think it is too early to tell if all these licenses are bad. I can imagine a situation with too many conflicting licenses, but I can also imagine a situation where all but a few wither away and you have a small set of standard licenses that people use.
I thought it was interesting how he made some design decisions that were intended to make it easier for him to work with the other developers out there and it also ended up being a good decision on technical merits.
I wonder if the free software community's dynamics help create better design decisions as opposed to a corporate environment. I'm not talking about the often-cited advantages like having lots of people pounding on the code and such; I'm talking about the need to have many developers working in parallel affects technical decisions in a way that are benificial.
It is an interesting thought to ponder, and one I'm not qualified to answer from lack of experience.
In the end, that's my complaint about perl. It's far to easy to write ugly, nasty, unmaintainable code. A programming language should enforce some minimum standard of style in the name of communal good, and the standard in perl seems to be: "well, I sort of understand what it's supposed to do..." Not good enough.
You are blaming the language for the programmers misuse of it. I don't agree that is appropriate. Perl does enforce some "minimum standard of style", but it appears to be different than your preferred minimum.
You will never please everybody, but I do like the language.
I think the thumb sucking Gnu icon is appropriate. RMS can act like a real crybaby when he wants to.
I propose a 1 step recovery program for his ego:
Step 1: Get over it.
The name Linux as opposed to GNU/Linux is not a way of pushing RMS into the background. Don't put so much into a name.
The publicity around Linus and RMS is different because marketing (intentional or unintentional) does not follow logical rules. A normal looking guy with a wife and two little kids living in California is a more comfortable image for many people to focus on rather than a long haired/bearded eccentric.
If you are running for office RMS, get a political consultant. If you are writing code, quit whining and get on with it.
its "Project Nomad" players will use
proprietary technology to make next-generation, compact, affordable players.
I thought someone would have caught this by now.
and:
But the firm said it will not just make a player. It also intends to use its audio marketing muscle to make an impact on the entire fledgling industry. In an announcement, Creative declared, "Creative intends on driving the technology, direction, and strategy associated with the creation, playback, and distribution of digital audio content via the Internet."
It seems that CL wants to get a monopoly on the industry.
How about this:
The market has been waiting for Creative to make its move, said Sim Wong Hoo, chairman and chief executive officer at Creative.
Since when has "the market" been waiting for Creative to make its move? They seem to have a very high opinion of themselves. It seems the market is doing just fine without them so far.
It doesn't look to me like they want to play any MP3, but use some sort of proprietary encoding/encryption/whatever wrapped around an MP3 (I suppose to stop all those "pirates" out there)
If they want to give it a try, I say go for it. However, for all of you who have the "give me free stuff or give me death" attitude, this may not be what you want.
I got my Palm III from http://www.buycomp.com/ and saved myself some money compared to Office Depot or similar stores. For example, they currently have the Palm III for $217.95. I don't see the Palm IIIx or Palm V listed yet, but they will be cheaper than the local electronics store when they get 'em.
I suspect the "obsession" with platters is because it works, the technology is understood very well, they have manufacturing plants already set up to make them in high volume, and the limits haven't been reached yet.
I'm no super coder, but I am a Mechanical Engineer with a Master's degree who does a little programming for fun now and then.
In my experience, college opens doors and creates opportunities. There are many fields you wouldn't even know about unless you had went to college. Anybody can drop out of school to do html, cgi scripting, or database UI development. There is a need for these things, but you may get stuck doing them with little opportunity for advancement.
I don't think Joe Hacker is going to be able to come out of high school and create an industrial strength finite element analysis program and be able to keep it up to the state of the art. To do FEA well you really need to have an engineering degree to understand the engineering and advanced mathmatics that you are using to try and simulate the real world behavior of some material under various loading conditions. This is just one example of a type of program that requires a college education (unless you are a genius and there are not many of those).
Not all types of programming are easily picked up on your own. Not everyone can learn well on their own without the basics being presented formally.
Undergraduate studies will not be the most up to date with technology, and they are not intended to be. Undergraduate education teaches well established and stable techniques and concepts. It also intends to provide a foundation from which you can learn the latest tools and technology. Technology is moving especially fast in the computer industry, so undergraduate education will seem even further behind until the industry stabilizes.
Graduate school is the place to learn the latest and greatest; getting a Master's degree will do a good job here. A PhD is intended to go beyond the current knowlege and technology of the industry to create new things. A PhD also focuses on skills needed to explore into the unknown and verify your results. Graduate school is where you get to play with the latest toys and learn how to do research and present it in an understandable way to your peers.
I'm sure many students considering mechanical engineering in the Industrial Revolution could have had the same feelings as computer hackers of today. The technology is so new and the need is so great, that you can easily get into the market and find work and advance with technology on your own. However, there is no way a high school student could enter the mechanical engineering world today and be able to work on the latest and greatest technology and analysis techniques on his own and be able to keep up without a formal education. The field has stabilized well enough that the barriers for entry require a college education.
Potential surgeons during the Civil War working on the battle fields could have had the same attitudes as the hackers of today. The technology had not advanced far enough to prevent someone from learning all the necessary techniques from peers or on his own. With the state of the art in medicine today, would you want a self taught "learning by experience" surgeon working on you?
Someday the computer industry will stabilize just like the mechanical engineering industry, aerospace industry, or medical profession did after awhile. When it does, it will be much more apparent how a college education is an advantage then.
As software systems become larger and more complex, it will be much harder to keep up with the latest technology without a college degree. A college degree gives you a head start and teaches well thought out techniques without having to learn it by trial-and-error/experience.
I consider my mechanical engineering education to be worth every penny, and I think it can apply well to computer technology.
Grad school was MUCH more fun and interesting than undergrad classes. I also got a research assistantship which paid for my tuition and enough money to live on. I also participated in the co-op program where I got a year of experience in industry before graduating with my B.S. degree. My employer was going to credit me with 3 years of experience (1 year co-op + 2 years grad school) when raises came around so the time was not wasted in my case.
The decision to go to college or not is not trivial. Be sure you think it through and talk to those with lots of experience in the industry you are interested in to get advice.
Finally an informed opinion! It is good to see that occasionally a good comment will sneak in amongst the k33l mOus3 jockeys.
I got a Master's degree and I know the game. Research money funded by the government or industry groups buy the needed equipment and help fund grad students to work on the projects. My funding was from the department and the modest equipment purchases since this was a new area of research for the department and no external funding was available. However, they will use my work to help show competency in the subject matter and hopefully get funded more easily than if they went into an application with no previous work or experience.
I remember one professor who got a project doing some analysis of extensive weather buoy (sp?) data and he used some of the money to buy a kick a** PC to run the analysis on. (simple example of the use of the money)
I don't know what the money is used for in computer science projects, but I assume help for funding grad students and maybe hardware.
These are just examples from an academic environment, they may not apply to your situation.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I'd like to point out about this whole situation is that all parties chose Evil actions. Some groups of kids in that school chose to taunt, hurt, ridicule, and give as much pain to the two shooters as they could. Many of us here can understand that from experience; I know I can. The whole situation got out of hand when the shooters decided to escalate the hurt and pain by building bombs and shooting everyone they could for revenge.
Both groups chose to do evil and nobody won.
I'd also like to reinforce what others have said about high school and later life in general: high school social structures are not permanent. When you graduate and go to college or work, you get to start over. People are more mature after high school and appreciate intelligence and ability rather than social standing (except for politics). If things aren't going well for you in high school, just tough it out and get through it. Life does get much better.
This type of school shooting by kids didn't happen 50 years ago in this country and there was very little regulation of guns back then. Something has changed in America's culture so that kids see shooting everyone in school is now an option. I think the efforts to remove God and morality from public life and replace it with moral relativism and Darwin has caused everyone to become more selfish and disrespectful of others lives and property.
It is much easier today to get fuel for antisocial feelings/behavior in movies, music, and yes, the Internet. When God has been removed from public society, people then consider themselves as gods. People determine their own behavior and right/wrong based on their feelings and ideas and desires. I think these kids decided to get some revenge and fame and had no thought for other peoples lives. Other people were expendable.
For whatever reason, and influenced by our culture (but not guaranteed by it) they chose to do evil. Lots of people choose to do evil no matter their upbringing, bank account, family life, or favorite music.
If the IP address above is correct, I checked it too and got something different:
telnet 24.1.112.72 80
Trying 24.1.112.72...
Connected to 24.1.112.72.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP / 1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 Document Follows
Content-Length: 4378
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 03:28:16 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 03:26:28 GMT
Server: OmniHTTPd/2.02
Connection closed by foreign host.
This talk about impulses and exciting all frequencies reminds me of a very similar common technique in mechanical engineering where you can easily test to find the natural frequencies of a structure.
In school, we did a simple experiment to find the natural frequencies of a cantilever beam (beam attached at one end like a diving board). To start with, what you want to do is excite all the frequencies of the beam. As other people have stated, an impulse in the time domain excites all frequencies in the frequency domain. For example, if you tap a beam with a hammer, it will excite all the frequencies of the beam. For verification, look up the Laplace transform of an impulse.
So the experiment goes like this: attach an accelerometer to the beam, plug it up to a computer acquisition system, tap the beam with a hammer, record the accelerometer output, then do a FFT on the data and you will see the natural frequencies of the beam.
The similar situation is the tapping of the hammer exciting all frequencies in the beam. These guys are generating a radio "tap" with electronics.
It is good to see that ZD Net is starting to get their sources from /. instead of repeating Micros~1 press releases as "news". If they are not careful, some actually informative and accurate reporting might slip through despite their Berst^H^H^Hst efforts to the contrary.
What they didn't consider to be important are issues like:
A corollary is what will we do when we finally realize that air power is not enough?
The main point is that this war is being fought for political reasons. Our country is not being threatened, so military reasons are not the motivation.
The politicians are covering their collective asses so they can get re-elected and look good on TV. They are walking a tightrope between "doing something" and not paying any political price for it. If they were concerned for the safety of the ethnic-Albanians above all, they would have gone in with everything and been convinced that American (and NATO) lives were worth losing on their behalf.
I believe this is a much better analysis and quality of writing than the above attempt by Katz:
War's own peculiar logic
The real problem is not a technological one. It is a case of the politicians using the wrong tool for the job. The refugees are being run out of the country by ground troops using small arms and face-to-face confrontations. Using a multi-million dollar fighter/bomber flying at 20,000 ft and at hundreds of miles an hour is not the appropriate way to stop the guy on the ground with a pistol in his hand; only sending in ground troops will do that.
The politicians want to "do something" and not get hurt. It is much easier to blow up empty buildings with jets and expect no casualties than sending in ground troops to die. Air power should only be used to prepare the way for ground troops, not as an end unto itself.
I don't think this situation can be halted unless the country is occupied by foreign forces on a permanent basis and police state is created. Since I don't support that, I don't think we should be doing a half-ass job by bombing them because the politicians wanted to "do something".
I think it is too early to tell if all these licenses are bad. I can imagine a situation with too many conflicting licenses, but I can also imagine a situation where all but a few wither away and you have a small set of standard licenses that people use.
I thought it was interesting how he made some design decisions that were intended to make it easier for him to work with the other developers out there and it also ended up being a good decision on technical merits.
I wonder if the free software community's dynamics help create better design decisions as opposed to a corporate environment. I'm not talking about the often-cited advantages like having lots of people pounding on the code and such; I'm talking about the need to have many developers working in parallel affects technical decisions in a way that are benificial.
It is an interesting thought to ponder, and one I'm not qualified to answer from lack of experience.
You will never please everybody, but I do like the language.
I think the thumb sucking Gnu icon is appropriate. RMS can act like a real crybaby when he wants to.
I propose a 1 step recovery program for his ego:
Step 1: Get over it.
The name Linux as opposed to GNU/Linux is not a way of pushing RMS into the background. Don't put so much into a name.
The publicity around Linus and RMS is different because marketing (intentional or unintentional) does not follow logical rules. A normal looking guy with a wife and two little kids living in California is a more comfortable image for many people to focus on rather than a long haired/bearded eccentric.
If you are running for office RMS, get a political consultant. If you are writing code, quit whining and get on with it.
I thought someone would have caught this by now.
and:
It seems that CL wants to get a monopoly on the industry.
How about this:
Since when has "the market" been waiting for Creative to make its move? They seem to have a very high opinion of themselves. It seems the market is doing just fine without them so far.
It doesn't look to me like they want to play any MP3, but use some sort of proprietary encoding/encryption/whatever wrapped around an MP3 (I suppose to stop all those "pirates" out there)
If they want to give it a try, I say go for it. However, for all of you who have the "give me free stuff or give me death" attitude, this may not be what you want.
Film at 11.
I got my Palm III from http://www.buycomp.com/ and saved myself some money compared to Office Depot or similar stores. For example, they currently have the Palm III for $217.95. I don't see the Palm IIIx or Palm V listed yet, but they will be cheaper than the local electronics store when they get 'em.
Hey Rob! Is that a Dust Puppy on your chin?
The got milk picture has got to be one of the funniest pictures I've ever seen.
I suspect the "obsession" with platters is because it works, the technology is understood very well, they have manufacturing plants already set up to make them in high volume, and the limits haven't been reached yet.
I'm no super coder, but I am a Mechanical Engineer with a Master's degree who does a little programming for fun now and then.
In my experience, college opens doors and creates opportunities. There are many fields you wouldn't even know about unless you had went to college. Anybody can drop out of school to do html, cgi scripting, or database UI development. There is a need for these things, but you may get stuck doing them with little opportunity for advancement.
I don't think Joe Hacker is going to be able to come out of high school and create an industrial strength finite element analysis program and be able to keep it up to the state of the art. To do FEA well you really need to have an engineering degree to understand the engineering and advanced mathmatics that you are using to try and simulate the real world behavior of some material under various loading conditions. This is just one example of a type of program that requires a college education (unless you are a genius and there are not many of those).
Not all types of programming are easily picked up on your own. Not everyone can learn well on their own without the basics being presented formally.
Undergraduate studies will not be the most up to date with technology, and they are not intended to be. Undergraduate education teaches well established and stable techniques and concepts. It also intends to provide a foundation from which you can learn the latest tools and technology. Technology is moving especially fast in the computer industry, so undergraduate education will seem even further behind until the industry stabilizes.
Graduate school is the place to learn the latest and greatest; getting a Master's degree will do a good job here. A PhD is intended to go beyond the current knowlege and technology of the industry to create new things. A PhD also focuses on skills needed to explore into the unknown and verify your results. Graduate school is where you get to play with the latest toys and learn how to do research and present it in an understandable way to your peers.
I'm sure many students considering mechanical engineering in the Industrial Revolution could have had the same feelings as computer hackers of today. The technology is so new and the need is so great, that you can easily get into the market and find work and advance with technology on your own. However, there is no way a high school student could enter the mechanical engineering world today and be able to work on the latest and greatest technology and analysis techniques on his own and be able to keep up without a formal education. The field has stabilized well enough that the barriers for entry require a college education.
Potential surgeons during the Civil War working on the battle fields could have had the same attitudes as the hackers of today. The technology had not advanced far enough to prevent someone from learning all the necessary techniques from peers or on his own. With the state of the art in medicine today, would you want a self taught "learning by experience" surgeon working on you?
Someday the computer industry will stabilize just like the mechanical engineering industry, aerospace industry, or medical profession did after awhile. When it does, it will be much more apparent how a college education is an advantage then.
As software systems become larger and more complex, it will be much harder to keep up with the latest technology without a college degree. A college degree gives you a head start and teaches well thought out techniques without having to learn it by trial-and-error/experience.
I consider my mechanical engineering education to be worth every penny, and I think it can apply well to computer technology.
Grad school was MUCH more fun and interesting than undergrad classes. I also got a research assistantship which paid for my tuition and enough money to live on. I also participated in the co-op program where I got a year of experience in industry before graduating with my B.S. degree. My employer was going to credit me with 3 years of experience (1 year co-op + 2 years grad school) when raises came around so the time was not wasted in my case.
The decision to go to college or not is not trivial. Be sure you think it through and talk to those with lots of experience in the industry you are interested in to get advice.
Finally an informed opinion! It is good to see that occasionally a good comment will sneak in amongst the k33l mOus3 jockeys.
I got a Master's degree and I know the game. Research money funded by the government or industry groups buy the needed equipment and help fund grad students to work on the projects. My funding was from the department and the modest equipment purchases since this was a new area of research for the department and no external funding was available. However, they will use my work to help show competency in the subject matter and hopefully get funded more easily than if they went into an application with no previous work or experience.
I remember one professor who got a project doing some analysis of extensive weather buoy (sp?) data and he used some of the money to buy a kick a** PC to run the analysis on. (simple example of the use of the money)
I don't know what the money is used for in computer science projects, but I assume help for funding grad students and maybe hardware.
These are just examples from an academic environment, they may not apply to your situation.