Yes, but the glide ratio of a fireworks shell is << 1. If you completely shut down power to an RPV, it's going to travel horizontally several feet for every one foot it loses in altitude. That's assuming you are fortunate enough to lose thrust at the same time you lose your control link.
There's another name for a malfunctioning RPV: ballistic missile. It's entirely possible they might have been slightly concerned with the safety of people other than the flight crew.
Several of the states have constitutional provisions against it, but not the federal government. A regular law won't work because Congress would just change the law and go about business as usual. There are certain points in the process where only germane amendments can be accepted, but they are mostly to move things along and are easily circumvented at other stages.
The degree to which the practice is "frowned upon" is inversely proportional to the degree to which one agrees with the provision trying to be piggybacked. One side does it because the other side got away with it last time, and members of Congress have to resort to more and more tricks to get their ideas considered fairly.
The rules originated in a much more genteel time. Reading about the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, sure there was plenty of disagreement, wheeling, and dealing, but there were also times when delegates would completely change their mind based on another's argument, saying they hadn't thought of it that way before. While they pressed for their own interests, they also gave due consideration to the interests of others. Even though no one got exactly what they wanted, each state, southern or northern, large or small, had their most important concerns addressed to their satisfaction in the Constitution. The politics were heated, but ultimately cooperative.
The best word to describe the current state of Congress is "obstructionist." If you asked our current representatives to draft a constitution from scratch that could get successfully ratified, I doubt they could accomplish it. They rely on blocking each other, shutting down dissenting viewpoints, and cheap parliamentary maneuvers to sneak or ram their ideas in, depending on whether they are in the minority or majority, rather than persuasion and compromise.
Have you ever watched a modern Congressional "debate?" They aren't debates at all, but merely two sides taking turns giving speeches to the camera without any notice of each other, having already firmly made their decision before even entering the building.
I know everyone's trying for a funny mod with this joke but seriously, that's a pretty low representation of teens. They mostly want to be allowed the independence to exercise their own judgment and creativity, and recognized when they do it well. Of course, the easiest way to be certain you aren't merely mimicing your parents is to do something you know they do not approve of, but that isn't the primary goal. Assuming that your kids do everything to either please or displease you is a very ego-centric view.
If you want to encourage teens to do something, it needs to be their idea, then it doesn't matter if you approve or not. You can guide that decision as much as you want, providing information they are not aware of, helping them to see the longer term ramifications of their decision, but the final "click" of the idea has to come from them.
For example, the stereotypical "teen wants to wear weird clothes" scenario. You can say, "Well, that's certainly not a style I'd choose for myself, but it's an interesting choice. What attracted you to it?" That emphasizes their independent thought, and shows you are interested in their point of view before you pass judgment.
You might follow that up with, "Like it or not, people make assumptions about others based on the clothes they wear. What assumptions do you think people will make about you if you wear that kind of clothing?" Again, focusing more on their ideas than your own.
"When I was in high school, most people I knew who dressed like that didn't do drugs, but enough did that a lot of people still assumed they were into drugs. How do you plan to handle that if it comes up?" You are giving them information they may not have thought of, not accusing them, but showing you think they are capable of coming up with a solution. If they really aren't prepared, you'll find out at this point.
In the end, they still might decide to go a different way than you would prefer, but your concerns are addressed and they are prepared to handle the consequences of their own decision. If you do decide to "lay down the line" (which is stupid for something as trivial as clothing in my opinion) at least they will fully understand your reasoning behind it, and hopefully at least feel you don't outright hate them, but merely are utterly incapable of ever understanding them.
From the perspective of cultivating an interest in programming, the OP's teen has obviously already shown that interest. All the parent has to do is find out what the teen wants to accomplish with it, make sure he understands that sometimes you have to slough through some boring stuff in order to have enough skills to do the fun stuff, and make sure he has all the tools, resources, and guidance to succeed.
I was beginning to wonder if anyone would suggest a solution that involved—I don't know—listening to your child. Kids don't just decide they want to program without having a reason in mind.
I'd ask him what his goal is, and go from there. If he thinks it would be cool to make a widget for a social networking site, you know where to start. If he wants to make a java game for his cell phone, that's a completely different approach, but you still know where to start. Don't be afraid to make stubs and let him fill in only the interesting bits at first. Things teens might want to do with a computer are a lot more complex than when we got our start.
You know, I think troubleshooting on Windows has always gone that way. It was during yet another reinstall back in the 98 heyday that I finally repurposed my windows partition permanently.
Your step one reboot really hit home to me how far I have come from that mentality, like the grandparent poster. My printer inexplicably stopped working recently. I spent hours troubleshooting and finally had reached the limits of my knowledge and rebooted the computer in desperation. Turns out my hard drive had crashed, but everything that had been running kept on running, as long as it didn't need to write to disk like the print spool directory. If I had been running windows, I would have known right away when my hard drive crashed, hence making troubleshooting easier.
A few weeks later I'm thinking to myself that my swap performance seems kind of sluggish, so I go to tweak it and discover I don't have any. My new root drive had important data on it, so I did that part of the linux installation manually to avoid restoring backups, and had forgotten to set up swap. A couple quick commands (no reboot required), and everything is running the way I want it. If I had been running windows under those circumstances, I likely would have blue screened much earlier, prompting a reinstall to fix it, hence making troubleshooting easier.
By the way, does anyone know the windows xp equivalent to the sysctl swappiness parameter? I usually have a dozen or so applications open at work, and that swap delay every single time I switch between applications is starting to get annoying.
Re:C++ without solid understanding of OOP?
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Head First C#
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I disagree. C++ is perfectly capable of being used in a non-object-oriented manner, as are Java and C#. In fact, many people think they are doing OOP just because they use C++, and many people think a project can't be object-oriented if it is written in C. They are both often wrong.
I think I may be the only programmer in the world who first learned OOP from the perl camel book. The way Larry Wall explained it just clicked with me in a way nothing else had. He basically said here are all these concepts you've already been using and find handy, but if you add this little bless function there are some extremely useful things you can do.
Before that, I considered OOP to be unnecessary complexity of purely academic interest, and always skipped over those chapters. Interestingly enough, it didn't hinder me much, as I fit right in with the majority of programmers today who understand OOP in theory but not in practice.
Maybe I've been using linux so long that I'm out of touch with the "majority of users," but my guess is either you have never used a well-implemented package manager or you honestly think the majority of users are blathering idiots, or both.
My wife, who no one would describe as a blathering idiot, but whose talents lie elsewhere than computers, calls the update manager "the spiky orange icon thingy with the arrow." I don't care what she calls it because all the software on her laptop is up to date, without me ever having to touch it, and she started using it on her own before I even got a chance to teach her about it. I could set it up so it doesn't require her intervention at all, but she prefers having control.
So while you IE users are stressing out because updating "the system" with a "package manager" is too esoteric, us linux/firefox users are rolling merrily along with the latest security and bug fix updates, for all our software, brought to us by the friendly neighborhood spiky orange icon thingy. That's what I call good UI.
Not sure why you were modded funny. I spent three months last year looking for work, and found it necessary to maintain text-only, word, and pdf versions of my resume.
Interestingly, the best interviews and the job I eventually took all came from the pdf version. Those were primarily sent through my networking contacts directly to hiring managers. In my line of work, if my potential manager isn't comfortable with a pdf, I don't want the job.
I maintain a flash device driver for an embedded system as part of my job, and I have to say you have an interesting mix of misconceptions and valid points.
First of all, I'm wondering what you think your phone's built in memory is. If it's not flash, I feel sorry for you if your battery dies. Second, the nature of flash memory makes it highly desirable to implement some form of journaling. To change one byte of a file, you have to erase a sector, then write it back with the one byte changed. It is much easier to just write it to a new location then invalidate the first copy. I don't make memory cards or SSDs, but it is my understanding that most memory cards do this behind the scenes, as the world's most popular OS is too dumb to handle flash memory correctly. The OS thinks it is writing to the same physical location, but behind the scenes it's changing on every write.
You made a good point about the millions of writes, though. I'd love an SSD for my root partition that hardly ever gets written to, but I think it would wear out too quickly for/home unless it was severely oversized, and I'd probably want to get a lot of RAM to use for/tmp instead. A lot of applications with autosave and disk caching would need to be reworked I think in order for ubiquitous flash drives to be feasible.
Being good at coding is a lot different from knowing enough to pass a class.
The last time I was looking for work, I was invited through some networking contacts to interview for a job title I had never heard of before: an operations research analyst. They didn't care whether you processed the data in excel, matlab, or assembly language, as long as your results were good. It's not the typical thing one does with a computer science degree, but it sounds like it would be right up your alley. For myself, I thought the job was a great fit, but botched the interview by showing up sick as a dog because I had flown 1600 miles and didn't want to reschedule.
By the way, that BLS web site is great if you want to find out salary information, qualifications, and job outlook information for different areas of the country.
I think in Netflix's case, it was a matter of the profiles feature being tacked on as an afterthought, instead of being designed into the database in the first place. It's not hard to see how something that should have been easy if designed properly would be a nightmare after a few years of code decay. Unfortunately, most developers under management pressure use a "greedy" algorithm and implement what is least disruptive at the time to the detriment of long-term maintenance.
This is common, but from a kid's perspective, most would rather be sitting quietly or reading a book than doing more *work* than everyone else has to do. ... In fact, we worry that the smart kids are rushing to get done just so they can get to the free time or reading time that much earlier.
Who says it has to be more work? It just has to be different work.
I won my school spelling bee in 8th grade, and came in second or third for a few years before that against older competitors. In eighth grade, I nearly flunked spelling class until my parents intervened. Did my teacher say that since I can spell better than her, I could do something more interesting, like reading and writing, which obviously employs and strengthens the spelling skill? No, that wouldn't be fair to the other kids, but she let me make up an entire semester's worth of rote work in an afternoon at a slight penalty.
K-12 was a joke for me. I almost never had homework because I would finish it during class or the class after. I remember once a teacher waking me up by calling my name, me asking him to repeat the question, then answering it correctly before falling asleep again, leaving him no recourse to encourage me not to do so (in my defense, it was after lunch, his voice droned, and he always had the lights out for overheads).
You obviously haven't tried to share a queue with someone. It's harder than it appears. My wife and I were essentially "founding customers" of Netflix; we joined within a few months of them starting up. We have some movies we both enjoy watching together, and some we only watch together if one of us is completely bored. We would alternate spots in the queue, but then one of us would get busy and not watch ours for a week or so, then when the other person returned their movie, another movie would ship for the busy person, and all our movies at home would be for the person too busy to watch for a while.
If the non-busy person moved their movie to the top of the queue, that would mess up the alternation, because wherever they moved it from would now have two of the other person's movies in a row, which believe me is not easy to fix in a long queue if you have a particular order you want to watch them in. Plus the busy person would complain about the other one getting two or more in a row. Also, Netflix would sometimes ship the second movie in your queue to help speed up service, and that would mess everything up.
There were also problems when one person's queue was longer than the other's, and the recommendations were all messed up when you went to look for more movies to add. There are also a lot of movies that one of us would enjoy watching, but would never pick for ourselves, so it was often unclear exactly whose turn it was to have their pick on top of the queue.
Essentially, we spent way too much time maintaining our queue. I was the one who suggested separate queues to Netflix in the first place (okay, a few other people may have suggested the same idea). A while after making that suggestion, with nothing being done, we suspended our account, citing that as one of our primary reasons.
A couple years later, we found out that Netflix had finally implemented profiles, and that their turnaround time was rumored to be much better (our other reason for canceling), so we gave them another shot. Now, I hardly ever have to think about my queue. I can return my movies in the mailbox in the morning on my way out the door, when I don't have time to log on and maintain my queue, and only bother with my queue every week or so when their new releases rss feed has a major update.
Depending on what they replace it with, I may end up staying with Netflix, but this is definitely going to prompt me to explore other options. Heck, I'd probably be okay just going with pay-per-view.
I've used a recliner at my home computer for a long time now, and highly recommend it. I generally use my shirt or pants as a mouse pad. That's where my hand rests naturally anyway. Not ideal for heavy mouse users, but I set the acceleration fairly high so I don't need a lot of space and it is very comfortable for me.
I'm not idealistic about open standards. I use them because they are convenient and free, not to protest capitalism or something, and I fully realize some people feel a compulsion to use closed formats. More power to them. I'd just like the blame for lack of interoperability to go where the blame is due.
Having done it successfully through two engineering degrees and 10 years in industry, I can tell you that getting around the compatibility barrier is easier than most people think. 99.9% of the time the following magic words work: "I don't have visio, can you export it to a png or something and resend it?" When you send a file to them, do the same thing. Formats specific to a certain software application are meant for the author or a small group of authors to use, who are likely going to be in the same office and therefore can easily use the same software. Export formats are generally much better suited for "publishing" the work to other people who will not need to edit it.
I find it interesting and a little aggravating that people always imply it is the open source software that isn't interoperable, i.e. "Kivio and Dia can't do that." Visio and the.vsd file format are the ones actively trying not to be interoperable, i.e. "the.vsd file format can't do that."
The problem goes away if the people you work with also use open standards. Even if they don't, usually all it takes is for someone to send you an exported image file instead of a.vsd file, as I rarely have to edit a file someone else controls.
The problem is, you're trying to buy something (third-party vendor driver support) that isn't for sale, and you're trying to buy it from the wrong company. There are plenty of resources for estimating Linux market share, and Linux has been around long enough that vendors who ignore it have made a conscious decision to do so, for one reason or another. More often than not, the reason is that the community provides good enough support without their help.
My home computers have all been exclusively Linux for about 8 years, with my windows partitions hardly used for about 2 years before that, but the last two computers I bought were Dell laptops with XP preloaded and immediately wiped. Why?
First and foremost, price. I dilligently looked around, and couldn't find a better deal in my price range. Even in desktops, it seems everyone either offers a high-end server, or a bargain basement piece of junk. Laptops are even harder to find blank or with Linux in my price range.
I researched diligently to make sure the hardware would work, and it turned out the default hardware was just fine.
Companies keep making Linux offerings, then restrict them or withdraw them altogether before I have a chance to buy my next computer, due to "lack of interest." Now, my computers tend to last a long time. My current desktop came preloaded with Windows ME (any guesses why I switched to Linux?). It's been through two hard disk failures, but still does what I need it to do. There are a few nice-to-haves missing, but even those could be fixed with a RAM and video card upgrade.
So, you can make a meaningless point if you want. I'll save my money and enjoy my well-built hardware that meets my needs for a decent price.
I was taken in the exact opposite way. I subscribe to The Onion in my RSS reader, but thought at first from the headline two days ago that it was a serious slashdot article.
As a foster parent, I've had some really badly behaved kids come to stay with us. Do I blame their birth parents for teaching/allowing such behavior? Yes. Do I use that as an excuse to allow them to continue behaving badly under my care? No. This increasingly popular notion that we should wait for other people to fix our problems annoys me to no end.
If it's a problem for the teacher, the teacher should deal with it. I don't buy the idea that there's nothing the teacher can do because it is constitutionally protected speech. That may limit the options, but it doesn't eliminate all of them.
My personal child discipline method consists of two steps: find the underlying cause of the behavior, and find the right incentive to match. In this type of case, the underlying cause is probably covering for their own poor academic performance, or trying to boost their popularity among other poor performers.
In the first case, I would offer a way to help them catch up, such as a redo of a dismal homework assignment. In the second case, I would threaten to embarrass them in class. That embarrassment would probably take the form of informing the class that people tease those they love, so I'm hanging this printout of a myspace page with a heart around it, because the student must really love me to tease me this much. I say the best way to fight bad free speech is with some more free speech.
I'd feel compelled to inform the parents in any case, but I would offer to make that easier if they were cooperative, and would give the kid a chance to fix it first.
I watch a lot of G4TV, Gameplay HD, Sci-Fi Channel, Discovery, and the like. I also regularly visit several geek-oriented and video gamer-oriented websites. Why do I never see advertisements for D&D and other tabletop RPGs targeted to "outsiders?" This ask slashdot was the only thing I've ever seen that would even reach outsiders, and even this is geared towards insiders and isn't really an advertisement.
If you had slipped a little flyer into my KotOR case that said something like, "Continue the story with your friends using the Star Wars tabletop RPG," I would have at least been intrigued enough to check it out, and would probably have gotten into it 4 years sooner. I happened to get invited when I moved to a new city, but I'm actually kind of upset you didn't reach out to me earlier. Before I moved here I thought D&D was something ex-hippies used to do back in the 80's.
I'd like to hear some slashdotter advertising ideas. I'll start:
Have the characters themselves explain how they've changed to appeal to people who have never played D&D before. Sort of "Tiefling and the Gnome" style, but live action.
Show some serious battle scenes that suddenly stop due to RPG idiosyncracies, capital one style. For example, show a rogue picking a lock, an elf listening at the door, a dwarf silently hefting his axe, and a sorceror building up a spell in his hand. Slow, suspenseful music suddenly becomes frantic as they burst in to find a group of orcs, get ready to attack, then hear a voice out of nowhere say, "roll initiative." They all look up and grumble a little bit, pull out their d20's, compare the results, then get back to the fight like nothing happened.
Another one would be following an arrow in flight in slow motion. As it draws closer to the target, it becomes clear that it's going to miss. Cut back to the archer, who yells in slow motion, "Action Point!" Cut back to the arrow, which swerves to make a clean kill. The villagers cheer.
You're one of the most creative companies on the planet with one of the most creative customer bases ever. You can think of something!
Who would you pay more, the writer for an emmy-winning show, or the writer for a complete flop? If the answer isn't obvious, you might want to ask your local Politburo for help. How do you know which writers are working on new emmy-winning shows and which are working on complete flops? If you can tell in advance, why would you pay anyone to work on a flop? If you can't tell in advance, how do you know how much to pay them? One hit show is no guarantee of another. One of my favorite writers, David Shore, won an emmy for "House," but completely flopped on his next project. You would have seriously overpaid him for the flop and seriously underpaid him for "House."
I have an idea, we can wait to see how successful the show is, then pay the writers more for more successful shows. But how can we measure how successful a show is? I know, by the profits. We can pay writers more for shows that make more profit. I bet that would encourage them to write better. If only there were some mathematical formula we could use to codify that in a contract...
Slashdotters who judge writers but don't care enough about writing to learn "there" homophones get a big fat FAIL!
Oh, please. I hate Clinton as much as anyone, but making it to a vote is an exception rather than the rule when one is running for president. Missing a vote could be for any number of reasons, and you shouldn't read anything into it, especially on a vote that wasn't even close.
I happen to think federally funded arts and science is unconstitutional. We have states, charities, and private enterprise for that. You're making a really bad assumption that those things would never have happened without federal funding. In fact, none of the projects you mentioned were particularly useful until private enterprise took them over from government and academia.
On a side note, I had to laugh at the use of the term "prognosticators." I'm pretty sure if the Senate majority leader states how Congress is going to behave this year, we can call it more than prognostication, although his reasoning behind his chosen course of action surely qualifies.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the glide ratio of a fireworks shell is << 1. If you completely shut down power to an RPV, it's going to travel horizontally several feet for every one foot it loses in altitude. That's assuming you are fortunate enough to lose thrust at the same time you lose your control link.
There's another name for a malfunctioning RPV: ballistic missile. It's entirely possible they might have been slightly concerned with the safety of people other than the flight crew.
You're a little behind on your news cycle. They missed the analyst estimate, but not by much.
An interesting statistic caught my eye while looking over their financials:
Now who's #1 in the "record profits" field? Can you say "conflict of interest?"
Several of the states have constitutional provisions against it, but not the federal government. A regular law won't work because Congress would just change the law and go about business as usual. There are certain points in the process where only germane amendments can be accepted, but they are mostly to move things along and are easily circumvented at other stages.
The degree to which the practice is "frowned upon" is inversely proportional to the degree to which one agrees with the provision trying to be piggybacked. One side does it because the other side got away with it last time, and members of Congress have to resort to more and more tricks to get their ideas considered fairly.
The rules originated in a much more genteel time. Reading about the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, sure there was plenty of disagreement, wheeling, and dealing, but there were also times when delegates would completely change their mind based on another's argument, saying they hadn't thought of it that way before. While they pressed for their own interests, they also gave due consideration to the interests of others. Even though no one got exactly what they wanted, each state, southern or northern, large or small, had their most important concerns addressed to their satisfaction in the Constitution. The politics were heated, but ultimately cooperative.
The best word to describe the current state of Congress is "obstructionist." If you asked our current representatives to draft a constitution from scratch that could get successfully ratified, I doubt they could accomplish it. They rely on blocking each other, shutting down dissenting viewpoints, and cheap parliamentary maneuvers to sneak or ram their ideas in, depending on whether they are in the minority or majority, rather than persuasion and compromise.
Have you ever watched a modern Congressional "debate?" They aren't debates at all, but merely two sides taking turns giving speeches to the camera without any notice of each other, having already firmly made their decision before even entering the building.
I know everyone's trying for a funny mod with this joke but seriously, that's a pretty low representation of teens. They mostly want to be allowed the independence to exercise their own judgment and creativity, and recognized when they do it well. Of course, the easiest way to be certain you aren't merely mimicing your parents is to do something you know they do not approve of, but that isn't the primary goal. Assuming that your kids do everything to either please or displease you is a very ego-centric view.
If you want to encourage teens to do something, it needs to be their idea, then it doesn't matter if you approve or not. You can guide that decision as much as you want, providing information they are not aware of, helping them to see the longer term ramifications of their decision, but the final "click" of the idea has to come from them.
For example, the stereotypical "teen wants to wear weird clothes" scenario. You can say, "Well, that's certainly not a style I'd choose for myself, but it's an interesting choice. What attracted you to it?" That emphasizes their independent thought, and shows you are interested in their point of view before you pass judgment.
You might follow that up with, "Like it or not, people make assumptions about others based on the clothes they wear. What assumptions do you think people will make about you if you wear that kind of clothing?" Again, focusing more on their ideas than your own.
"When I was in high school, most people I knew who dressed like that didn't do drugs, but enough did that a lot of people still assumed they were into drugs. How do you plan to handle that if it comes up?" You are giving them information they may not have thought of, not accusing them, but showing you think they are capable of coming up with a solution. If they really aren't prepared, you'll find out at this point.
In the end, they still might decide to go a different way than you would prefer, but your concerns are addressed and they are prepared to handle the consequences of their own decision. If you do decide to "lay down the line" (which is stupid for something as trivial as clothing in my opinion) at least they will fully understand your reasoning behind it, and hopefully at least feel you don't outright hate them, but merely are utterly incapable of ever understanding them.
From the perspective of cultivating an interest in programming, the OP's teen has obviously already shown that interest. All the parent has to do is find out what the teen wants to accomplish with it, make sure he understands that sometimes you have to slough through some boring stuff in order to have enough skills to do the fun stuff, and make sure he has all the tools, resources, and guidance to succeed.
I was beginning to wonder if anyone would suggest a solution that involved—I don't know—listening to your child. Kids don't just decide they want to program without having a reason in mind.
I'd ask him what his goal is, and go from there. If he thinks it would be cool to make a widget for a social networking site, you know where to start. If he wants to make a java game for his cell phone, that's a completely different approach, but you still know where to start. Don't be afraid to make stubs and let him fill in only the interesting bits at first. Things teens might want to do with a computer are a lot more complex than when we got our start.
You know, I think troubleshooting on Windows has always gone that way. It was during yet another reinstall back in the 98 heyday that I finally repurposed my windows partition permanently.
Your step one reboot really hit home to me how far I have come from that mentality, like the grandparent poster. My printer inexplicably stopped working recently. I spent hours troubleshooting and finally had reached the limits of my knowledge and rebooted the computer in desperation. Turns out my hard drive had crashed, but everything that had been running kept on running, as long as it didn't need to write to disk like the print spool directory. If I had been running windows, I would have known right away when my hard drive crashed, hence making troubleshooting easier.
A few weeks later I'm thinking to myself that my swap performance seems kind of sluggish, so I go to tweak it and discover I don't have any. My new root drive had important data on it, so I did that part of the linux installation manually to avoid restoring backups, and had forgotten to set up swap. A couple quick commands (no reboot required), and everything is running the way I want it. If I had been running windows under those circumstances, I likely would have blue screened much earlier, prompting a reinstall to fix it, hence making troubleshooting easier.
By the way, does anyone know the windows xp equivalent to the sysctl swappiness parameter? I usually have a dozen or so applications open at work, and that swap delay every single time I switch between applications is starting to get annoying.
I disagree. C++ is perfectly capable of being used in a non-object-oriented manner, as are Java and C#. In fact, many people think they are doing OOP just because they use C++, and many people think a project can't be object-oriented if it is written in C. They are both often wrong.
I think I may be the only programmer in the world who first learned OOP from the perl camel book. The way Larry Wall explained it just clicked with me in a way nothing else had. He basically said here are all these concepts you've already been using and find handy, but if you add this little bless function there are some extremely useful things you can do.
Before that, I considered OOP to be unnecessary complexity of purely academic interest, and always skipped over those chapters. Interestingly enough, it didn't hinder me much, as I fit right in with the majority of programmers today who understand OOP in theory but not in practice.
Maybe I've been using linux so long that I'm out of touch with the "majority of users," but my guess is either you have never used a well-implemented package manager or you honestly think the majority of users are blathering idiots, or both.
My wife, who no one would describe as a blathering idiot, but whose talents lie elsewhere than computers, calls the update manager "the spiky orange icon thingy with the arrow." I don't care what she calls it because all the software on her laptop is up to date, without me ever having to touch it, and she started using it on her own before I even got a chance to teach her about it. I could set it up so it doesn't require her intervention at all, but she prefers having control.
So while you IE users are stressing out because updating "the system" with a "package manager" is too esoteric, us linux/firefox users are rolling merrily along with the latest security and bug fix updates, for all our software, brought to us by the friendly neighborhood spiky orange icon thingy. That's what I call good UI.
Not sure why you were modded funny. I spent three months last year looking for work, and found it necessary to maintain text-only, word, and pdf versions of my resume.
Interestingly, the best interviews and the job I eventually took all came from the pdf version. Those were primarily sent through my networking contacts directly to hiring managers. In my line of work, if my potential manager isn't comfortable with a pdf, I don't want the job.
I maintain a flash device driver for an embedded system as part of my job, and I have to say you have an interesting mix of misconceptions and valid points.
First of all, I'm wondering what you think your phone's built in memory is. If it's not flash, I feel sorry for you if your battery dies. Second, the nature of flash memory makes it highly desirable to implement some form of journaling. To change one byte of a file, you have to erase a sector, then write it back with the one byte changed. It is much easier to just write it to a new location then invalidate the first copy. I don't make memory cards or SSDs, but it is my understanding that most memory cards do this behind the scenes, as the world's most popular OS is too dumb to handle flash memory correctly. The OS thinks it is writing to the same physical location, but behind the scenes it's changing on every write.
You made a good point about the millions of writes, though. I'd love an SSD for my root partition that hardly ever gets written to, but I think it would wear out too quickly for /home unless it was severely oversized, and I'd probably want to get a lot of RAM to use for /tmp instead. A lot of applications with autosave and disk caching would need to be reworked I think in order for ubiquitous flash drives to be feasible.
Being good at coding is a lot different from knowing enough to pass a class.
The last time I was looking for work, I was invited through some networking contacts to interview for a job title I had never heard of before: an operations research analyst. They didn't care whether you processed the data in excel, matlab, or assembly language, as long as your results were good. It's not the typical thing one does with a computer science degree, but it sounds like it would be right up your alley. For myself, I thought the job was a great fit, but botched the interview by showing up sick as a dog because I had flown 1600 miles and didn't want to reschedule.
By the way, that BLS web site is great if you want to find out salary information, qualifications, and job outlook information for different areas of the country.
I think in Netflix's case, it was a matter of the profiles feature being tacked on as an afterthought, instead of being designed into the database in the first place. It's not hard to see how something that should have been easy if designed properly would be a nightmare after a few years of code decay. Unfortunately, most developers under management pressure use a "greedy" algorithm and implement what is least disruptive at the time to the detriment of long-term maintenance.
Who says it has to be more work? It just has to be different work.
I won my school spelling bee in 8th grade, and came in second or third for a few years before that against older competitors. In eighth grade, I nearly flunked spelling class until my parents intervened. Did my teacher say that since I can spell better than her, I could do something more interesting, like reading and writing, which obviously employs and strengthens the spelling skill? No, that wouldn't be fair to the other kids, but she let me make up an entire semester's worth of rote work in an afternoon at a slight penalty.
K-12 was a joke for me. I almost never had homework because I would finish it during class or the class after. I remember once a teacher waking me up by calling my name, me asking him to repeat the question, then answering it correctly before falling asleep again, leaving him no recourse to encourage me not to do so (in my defense, it was after lunch, his voice droned, and he always had the lights out for overheads).
You obviously haven't tried to share a queue with someone. It's harder than it appears. My wife and I were essentially "founding customers" of Netflix; we joined within a few months of them starting up. We have some movies we both enjoy watching together, and some we only watch together if one of us is completely bored. We would alternate spots in the queue, but then one of us would get busy and not watch ours for a week or so, then when the other person returned their movie, another movie would ship for the busy person, and all our movies at home would be for the person too busy to watch for a while.
If the non-busy person moved their movie to the top of the queue, that would mess up the alternation, because wherever they moved it from would now have two of the other person's movies in a row, which believe me is not easy to fix in a long queue if you have a particular order you want to watch them in. Plus the busy person would complain about the other one getting two or more in a row. Also, Netflix would sometimes ship the second movie in your queue to help speed up service, and that would mess everything up.
There were also problems when one person's queue was longer than the other's, and the recommendations were all messed up when you went to look for more movies to add. There are also a lot of movies that one of us would enjoy watching, but would never pick for ourselves, so it was often unclear exactly whose turn it was to have their pick on top of the queue.
Essentially, we spent way too much time maintaining our queue. I was the one who suggested separate queues to Netflix in the first place (okay, a few other people may have suggested the same idea). A while after making that suggestion, with nothing being done, we suspended our account, citing that as one of our primary reasons.
A couple years later, we found out that Netflix had finally implemented profiles, and that their turnaround time was rumored to be much better (our other reason for canceling), so we gave them another shot. Now, I hardly ever have to think about my queue. I can return my movies in the mailbox in the morning on my way out the door, when I don't have time to log on and maintain my queue, and only bother with my queue every week or so when their new releases rss feed has a major update.
Depending on what they replace it with, I may end up staying with Netflix, but this is definitely going to prompt me to explore other options. Heck, I'd probably be okay just going with pay-per-view.
I've used a recliner at my home computer for a long time now, and highly recommend it. I generally use my shirt or pants as a mouse pad. That's where my hand rests naturally anyway. Not ideal for heavy mouse users, but I set the acceleration fairly high so I don't need a lot of space and it is very comfortable for me.
I'm not idealistic about open standards. I use them because they are convenient and free, not to protest capitalism or something, and I fully realize some people feel a compulsion to use closed formats. More power to them. I'd just like the blame for lack of interoperability to go where the blame is due.
Having done it successfully through two engineering degrees and 10 years in industry, I can tell you that getting around the compatibility barrier is easier than most people think. 99.9% of the time the following magic words work: "I don't have visio, can you export it to a png or something and resend it?" When you send a file to them, do the same thing. Formats specific to a certain software application are meant for the author or a small group of authors to use, who are likely going to be in the same office and therefore can easily use the same software. Export formats are generally much better suited for "publishing" the work to other people who will not need to edit it.
I find it interesting and a little aggravating that people always imply it is the open source software that isn't interoperable, i.e. "Kivio and Dia can't do that." Visio and the .vsd file format are the ones actively trying not to be interoperable, i.e. "the .vsd file format can't do that."
The problem goes away if the people you work with also use open standards. Even if they don't, usually all it takes is for someone to send you an exported image file instead of a .vsd file, as I rarely have to edit a file someone else controls.
The problem is, you're trying to buy something (third-party vendor driver support) that isn't for sale, and you're trying to buy it from the wrong company. There are plenty of resources for estimating Linux market share, and Linux has been around long enough that vendors who ignore it have made a conscious decision to do so, for one reason or another. More often than not, the reason is that the community provides good enough support without their help.
My home computers have all been exclusively Linux for about 8 years, with my windows partitions hardly used for about 2 years before that, but the last two computers I bought were Dell laptops with XP preloaded and immediately wiped. Why?
First and foremost, price. I dilligently looked around, and couldn't find a better deal in my price range. Even in desktops, it seems everyone either offers a high-end server, or a bargain basement piece of junk. Laptops are even harder to find blank or with Linux in my price range.
I researched diligently to make sure the hardware would work, and it turned out the default hardware was just fine.
Companies keep making Linux offerings, then restrict them or withdraw them altogether before I have a chance to buy my next computer, due to "lack of interest." Now, my computers tend to last a long time. My current desktop came preloaded with Windows ME (any guesses why I switched to Linux?). It's been through two hard disk failures, but still does what I need it to do. There are a few nice-to-haves missing, but even those could be fixed with a RAM and video card upgrade.
So, you can make a meaningless point if you want. I'll save my money and enjoy my well-built hardware that meets my needs for a decent price.
I was taken in the exact opposite way. I subscribe to The Onion in my RSS reader, but thought at first from the headline two days ago that it was a serious slashdot article.
As a foster parent, I've had some really badly behaved kids come to stay with us. Do I blame their birth parents for teaching/allowing such behavior? Yes. Do I use that as an excuse to allow them to continue behaving badly under my care? No. This increasingly popular notion that we should wait for other people to fix our problems annoys me to no end.
If it's a problem for the teacher, the teacher should deal with it. I don't buy the idea that there's nothing the teacher can do because it is constitutionally protected speech. That may limit the options, but it doesn't eliminate all of them.
My personal child discipline method consists of two steps: find the underlying cause of the behavior, and find the right incentive to match. In this type of case, the underlying cause is probably covering for their own poor academic performance, or trying to boost their popularity among other poor performers.
In the first case, I would offer a way to help them catch up, such as a redo of a dismal homework assignment. In the second case, I would threaten to embarrass them in class. That embarrassment would probably take the form of informing the class that people tease those they love, so I'm hanging this printout of a myspace page with a heart around it, because the student must really love me to tease me this much. I say the best way to fight bad free speech is with some more free speech.
I'd feel compelled to inform the parents in any case, but I would offer to make that easier if they were cooperative, and would give the kid a chance to fix it first.
I watch a lot of G4TV, Gameplay HD, Sci-Fi Channel, Discovery, and the like. I also regularly visit several geek-oriented and video gamer-oriented websites. Why do I never see advertisements for D&D and other tabletop RPGs targeted to "outsiders?" This ask slashdot was the only thing I've ever seen that would even reach outsiders, and even this is geared towards insiders and isn't really an advertisement.
If you had slipped a little flyer into my KotOR case that said something like, "Continue the story with your friends using the Star Wars tabletop RPG," I would have at least been intrigued enough to check it out, and would probably have gotten into it 4 years sooner. I happened to get invited when I moved to a new city, but I'm actually kind of upset you didn't reach out to me earlier. Before I moved here I thought D&D was something ex-hippies used to do back in the 80's.
I'd like to hear some slashdotter advertising ideas. I'll start:
You're one of the most creative companies on the planet with one of the most creative customer bases ever. You can think of something!
Who would you pay more, the writer for an emmy-winning show, or the writer for a complete flop? If the answer isn't obvious, you might want to ask your local Politburo for help. How do you know which writers are working on new emmy-winning shows and which are working on complete flops? If you can tell in advance, why would you pay anyone to work on a flop? If you can't tell in advance, how do you know how much to pay them? One hit show is no guarantee of another. One of my favorite writers, David Shore, won an emmy for "House," but completely flopped on his next project. You would have seriously overpaid him for the flop and seriously underpaid him for "House."
I have an idea, we can wait to see how successful the show is, then pay the writers more for more successful shows. But how can we measure how successful a show is? I know, by the profits. We can pay writers more for shows that make more profit. I bet that would encourage them to write better. If only there were some mathematical formula we could use to codify that in a contract...
Slashdotters who judge writers but don't care enough about writing to learn "there" homophones get a big fat FAIL!
Oh, please. I hate Clinton as much as anyone, but making it to a vote is an exception rather than the rule when one is running for president. Missing a vote could be for any number of reasons, and you shouldn't read anything into it, especially on a vote that wasn't even close.
I happen to think federally funded arts and science is unconstitutional. We have states, charities, and private enterprise for that. You're making a really bad assumption that those things would never have happened without federal funding. In fact, none of the projects you mentioned were particularly useful until private enterprise took them over from government and academia.
On a side note, I had to laugh at the use of the term "prognosticators." I'm pretty sure if the Senate majority leader states how Congress is going to behave this year, we can call it more than prognostication, although his reasoning behind his chosen course of action surely qualifies.