Play Horde for a bit, and see if the same thign doesn't happen. I've played both, and both sides camp each other's lowbie towns. They ought to set up some freaking alliance vendors at the Crossroads, and at Taren Mill.
I'm in an unusual position in that I have a lvl 60 shammy, and a lvl 60 pally, so I know both classes pretty damn well. Sure pallys have advantages in PvE...At lvl 60, if you're specced anything except holy or protection, they treat you like crap. Your forced to pure support. Buffs and heals, buffs and heals. And don't spout bubble crap at me, because the bubble is fricking worthless. It's good for one full heal, la de da, and the other bubble is laughable, pally drops that on his warrior friend, you toss a frost shock at him, and by the time the shock wears off, no more bubble.
Shammys aren't suited to pure support. They have a whole talent tree dedicated to spell DPS! And while they have some abilities that pallies can beat, they have some abilities that pallies can't touch. Tremor Totem, which is godlike, all the weapon enchant totems, poison and disease purge totems, grace of air, strength of earth, etc. Sure they're not as strong, but there are a hell of a lot more of them. Raiding on the Alliance side, you're forced to worship the dwarf priest for the fear ward...Horde don't even notice fear.
And pvp? Shammys dominate pvp, group and solo. Warlock/Priest comes running into your group and fears. What happens? Alliance scatter all over the place, get crushed. Horde? Scatter for about a second, then tremor kicks in and they crush the priest/lock. Purge is huge...shammy only. Grounding totem? Earth shock?
So pallys have a lot of raid utility. Shammys have a definite place in raids, and they are excellent in pvp...They're much better offtanks than pallies, even without plate. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and, assuming you don't let people force you to spec to something annoying, they're both fun to play, and putting them together is going to be collossal. Think a Pally and a Warrior running at you is something to worry about? Think Pally + Shammy, and that'll teach you real fear. This is going to make for some interesting matchups, and a real shift in dynamics.
But people always bitch and moan. Waaaaaaaaaa, it's going to be different. Deal with it.
You can say the same about a lot of MMOs. I used to really like playing Planetside (now there is a use for the Unreal 3 engine), but I ended up quitting because of all the jackasses. Trying to level your command rank was like trying to herd cracked out cats with ADD.
Anyone else read "A new complete version of SWG" as "A completely new version of SWG"? I actually thought for a moment, "Well, at this point, starting over from scratch is probably not the worst idea..."
I'll be surprised if they can beat CoH/CoV with a superhero themed game though. There are things I think could be done better in CoH/V, but I don't think Sony can do 'em.
Ticketmaster is a more interesting case, because they have access to a resource that is a seriously tough nut to crack. You can record, mix, and burn your own CD, but if you want to play a venue bigger than your local bar, you're going to have to play their game (or find a nice field somewhere, build your own stage, etc).
Record companies, on the other hand, only have that sort of stranglehold on the retail outlets, and retail outlets have been slumping for years. I think the indies are in a really good position right now, and I think that's only going to get better.
One, we get "good" drm, which is to say, DRM that is both hard to break, and mostly transparent to the user (good quality, not good ethically). Right now DRM is really obvious, it's like a leash, and every time you try to exercise your rights, that leash jerks you up short, causes anger and irritation. It's also easy to break, so the benefits of breaking the DRM and getting full use of the content are way ahead of the actual hassle of breaking the DRM. In my opinion, the best way to get "good" DRM would be to stream everything from central servers, and make it available through a range of wireless integrated devices. This is obviously serious future tech, but the potential exists already, so it's not farfetched.
The other possibility is that the current distribution model will break down as artists opt-out of the restrictive RIAA practices, and some more organic system grows up in its place, where content is not so rabidly protected, and artists are more directly compensated by their fans.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a little of both, in the next 10 years. All these subscription sites are technically crappy implementations of the first concept...Pay a subscription fee and access the music all you want, in any number of crappy non-portable formats. But if you could browse it in your car, or anywhere else through a range of compatible devices interconnected wirelessly? Who gives a damn if you can't copy it, if you can access it any time, from any where? It'd be the death of the physical media sales, so they won't support it for a while to come, but it's the best approach for them. They keep control, they get your money.
As far as the second goes, there have been independant artists and independant labels for years, but they're exploding now, with all the production costs going down. They have so much less to lose, and so much less access to physical media stores, they're trying all kinds of new methods of distribution, and it's not unlikely that some of them will be popular enough to pull in some of the mainstream.
I'm even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one, because those bargain bins are an artifact of the whole "Shipping things from place to place" model of distribution...Eventually they have to clear out a warehouse, so stuff ends up in your grocery store at a loss.
This whole "Selling digital content for the same price as a hardcopy" crap is starting to piss me off. They're not the same! Hardcopy costs should ALWAYS be higher. If they aren't, we're getting screwed...There is no second option!
If I have to spend hours of my life, plus money for the goddamn media, plus download, plus cpu time while the DRM mangles the download into somethign I can't reburn, the damn thing should cost 5 bucks at most. I am sick and tired of being treated like a moron.
Cost compared to buying it from the store: Same Rights compared to buying it from the store: Less (Assuming DRM still works 5 minutes after they release it)
So, let me get this straight...I'm going to waste hours and dollars downloading a movie that (I assume) can only be ripped to DVD, which will be less functional than same dvd bought from the store, though just as pricey.
Tempting...If they include a free beating or tax audit, it'll be impossible to resist.
Well, it's not funny haha as much as funny sad. "You set a parameter for a style element, and that setting falls to the next element unless you provide it with a different element definition."
No...Really? You're saying that, if you set something to something, then it stays that way unless you tell it to be something else? And that that's a problem?
Come on! Don't push your own lack of skill off on the tool. If you want to do each page seperately, by all means, go right ahead. Otherwise, learn a little about CSS before you dimiss the whole thing as crap. I'm not a designer, but the "problems" he describes are are both familiar to me, and user error. Fixing inheretance is not that difficult.
I find CSS to be vaguely annoying because I'm not a visual guy, and my formatting never looks quite how I want it to, but there is no denying its simple and effective.
You should never pass an unescaped string to anything. End of story. Even php has addslashes() and stripslashes(), and even though they're a kludge, they still work.
With a more strongly typed language, there is no excuse for passing unescaped strings.
Normalization is still desirable, just because of its efficiency. No wasted space.
Just looking at the tree representation of the class structure, I don't know what they're thinking...Tier 1, the "Supertype" level, has two nodes (not counting the units-of-measure bits). Okay... Tier 2 has more than a hundred! More than all the Tier 3s combined! That's not moving from simple to complex, which is what the goal of structured data should be! It's just throwing stuff in a pile, and telling people what the pile looks like.
People at government agencies all over the country are going to be writing parsers to pull data out of this train wreck of a format, and it's not going to be easy, because there is no easy way to traverse to the data that you need. You can say this is just an interchange format, but the reality of it is, some joker is out there right now putting together the code to read an "XML database" with this structure. If your goal is to create yet still more bloated systems with yet still more arcane data constructs, this is a good start. Otherwise, it's a joke.
Just glancing at it, I can see problems. XML is too often used for databases when it shouldn't be, but there are similarities, and just looking at it I can see that it violates one of the most basic database design principles: normalization
Just as an example, there are three different namespaces dedicated to the various FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards)...To three different STANDARDS.
I'm no expert on government info, and I just looked at this thing for the first time, so maybe it's brilliant and I'm ust not seeing it, but it sure looks a lot like they've fallen victim to a database noob mistake, and created a monster tree with disproportionate crazy branches everywhere, and that is bound to cause relational problems, redundant data, and warped design challenges.
Okay...I can see the need for u:SuperType->u:ActivityType->c:ActivityType->im:Al ienEncounterType...I mean, we're bound to encounter aliens at some point, right?
But im:AlienStudentDisciplinaryActionType? Planning for Alien encounters is one thing, but planning for dealing with them in our school systems seems like bureaucratic bloat to me. I don't think the Red Staters will be down with their taxes going to teach godless little green people.
(end humor tags)
Re:What about other forms of external data?
on
Virus Jumps to RFID
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· Score: 1
Speaking from experience...Financial code is usually secure only because it is usually too stupid to be fooled. The financial databases where I work wouldn't even notice a sql injection attack; they're not smart enough to process one, even if someone was clever enough to put it through the "validation" process used to homogenize the data.
Making something too stupid to be hacked is an excellent line of defense where this kind of hacking is concerned...You can't trick it into doing something it can't do.
Come on, if they had some shame, they'd couldn't live with themselves. Their whole business model is basically to leech as much cash as they can off the works of people who are more creative than they could dream of being, and if this involves exploiting those same people and removing their rights to their own creations, they have no problems with that. They'd screw their grandmothers for an extra nickle.
As far as they're concerned this is one of the most important things in the world...someone is impinging on their leeching! Their blind, rapacious greed is the overriding impulse in their miserable lives.
Nothing would suprise me, coming from them. I literally can't imagine a depth that they wouldn't sink to, given the opportunity.
I've read studys suggesting that a lot of the "junk" DNA is actually more on the line of a biological CRC checksum. If that is the case, it'll have pretty solid ramifications for any sort of genetic manipulation...Wouldn't want your spliced DNA "correcting" itself in the next generation.
I'm all for people being allowed to try and game the system...Anything else would restrict the whole purpose of the Internet as a repository for whatever the hell someone wants to put in there.
At the same time, I'm all for search engines blacklisting people who game the system, parked domains, crap aggredator pages, etc. It's all about building a better mousetrap.
Shrug. I got to Comp Sci by way of Cognitive Science, which means I had all the logic I could handle long before I had to take the fricking circuit design course...CS required two logic classes, which, compared to the five I'd already taken was like having to go back to Algebra I after finishing Calc IV. I'd be fine with having to take a course on binary numbers, machine code, and circuit design, but having to take one of each is absurd for a non-engineer. And you don't have to take all the same courses to get into a Medical program, not even close...In fact different medical schools require different courses, and some medical schools look favorably on things like Psychology (which blows my mind, though my doctor friends assure me its true).
Anyway, Comp Sci is a practical degree. You can have a perfectly fulfilling career without going past your BS. All I'm saying is, use the 100 and 200 level courses to give you a nice grounding, and then loosen up the requirments on everything else, so individuals who are interesting in programming can go one way, people who are interesting network protocols can go another way, and people who are interested in hardware design can go their own way as well. I still posess the ability to do binary long division with a pencil and paper, and it irritates the hell out of me.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Ah, CS snobbery from an AC...I mod ACs -4, but I still check 'em when they're under my threshold, which is stupid. Anyway, Turing was deeply interested in practical computing you know, and in his day, there really wasn't enough computer science that it was in any way difficult for one person to study it all. Thank you for making my point though, because, for what I do, there was no other choice for a degree program.
I know the CS purists sneer at the guys in the trenches, like we should all have gone to ITT or something, but I get a hell of a lot of use out of my programming, dbms, and network architecture classes. Every time I have to do memory management, packet shaping, or funky data conversion between networks, I rely on theory I never could have gotten from some piddly tech college. But there was a lot of crap in there I didn't need: a whole class on binary number theory, a class on machine code, another on circuit design. I'm never going to work with computers on that level, and I'm hardly unique among CS majors in that.
At the same time, majoring in programming was too fluffy and useless for me. There wasn't even a networking degree, because most four year universities view that as akin to plumbing. You have to actually get out in the field to get anything other than vague theory, and that stuff is seriously interesting and difficult once you move past the "plug this machine into dat machine" crap.
I guess I kind of think of it like medicine...Nobody majors in "Doctor" but we're all expected to major in "Computer Scientist" even though that describes us about as well as "Doctor". I'm not looking for more practical classes, because practical becomes obsolete too quickly, I'm looking for theory that is focused and useful to whatever specialty you're going into within the set of specialties that is comp sci.
I flirted with Comp Sci a long time before I actually got physical, and took a lot of classes at a lot of different places. I had classes that were too heavy on theory, I had classes that were too heavy on "practical" skills, which usually amounted to "how to use this language/program to do this thing".
I think, in the long run, a lot of places really don't have the faintest idea what it takes to make a good CS person. It doesn't help that CS covers way too much ground anyway. I'm unusual in that I don't really have a specialization within the field. I'm a programmer/administrator with java/c#/perl/php/python experience and unix/linux/windows/mac experience...Not claiming to be godlike at any of those things, but I'm competent and flexible. The thing is, as fricking crazy as I am, I still haven't used all the classes I had to take for my degree.
I can't help but think we need better "gut" courses, and more flexibility with higher level classes, so that you get a more elegant toolkit to take with you into the workforce. If you give people a better range of courses that appeal more to their interests, you don't need a fricking robot to make them excited about their subject. It's a hell of a lot better than pushing students to design another "airline reservation system" (I had to do this in Scheme and Java), or "Pokemon" (Java and C), or "IM client" (Java, C#).
Not in the sense that they're talking about. Diablo had random maps but those maps were drawn with the same graphics template every time, so now, 10 years later, the orginal Diablo graphics look blocky and campy.
What they're talking about is a way to generate the graphics on the fly, rather than working with bulky image maps, so you could "upgrade" the graphics simply by feeding the rendering engine more cycles.
The ability to pass a government security clearance is a useful skill for a lot of jobs, especially ones that require discression. What they're basically checking for is to find out if you're a spaz, have a lot of skeletons in your closet, or lead a blackmailable lifestyle.
It's not like you'd need a security clearance to be forced to turn over information to the gov't, nor is there anything in a security clearance that says, "And when the gov't comes along and asks you to betray your current employer (or their clients), you have to do it." Secret/Top Secret clearance just means that some people who are pretty good at that sort of thing think you can keep a secret, and that they haven't caught you proving them wrong yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Play Horde for a bit, and see if the same thign doesn't happen. I've played both, and both sides camp each other's lowbie towns. They ought to set up some freaking alliance vendors at the Crossroads, and at Taren Mill.
Blah blah blah.
I'm in an unusual position in that I have a lvl 60 shammy, and a lvl 60 pally, so I know both classes pretty damn well. Sure pallys have advantages in PvE...At lvl 60, if you're specced anything except holy or protection, they treat you like crap. Your forced to pure support. Buffs and heals, buffs and heals. And don't spout bubble crap at me, because the bubble is fricking worthless. It's good for one full heal, la de da, and the other bubble is laughable, pally drops that on his warrior friend, you toss a frost shock at him, and by the time the shock wears off, no more bubble.
Shammys aren't suited to pure support. They have a whole talent tree dedicated to spell DPS! And while they have some abilities that pallies can beat, they have some abilities that pallies can't touch. Tremor Totem, which is godlike, all the weapon enchant totems, poison and disease purge totems, grace of air, strength of earth, etc. Sure they're not as strong, but there are a hell of a lot more of them. Raiding on the Alliance side, you're forced to worship the dwarf priest for the fear ward...Horde don't even notice fear.
And pvp? Shammys dominate pvp, group and solo. Warlock/Priest comes running into your group and fears. What happens? Alliance scatter all over the place, get crushed. Horde? Scatter for about a second, then tremor kicks in and they crush the priest/lock. Purge is huge...shammy only. Grounding totem? Earth shock?
So pallys have a lot of raid utility. Shammys have a definite place in raids, and they are excellent in pvp...They're much better offtanks than pallies, even without plate. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and, assuming you don't let people force you to spec to something annoying, they're both fun to play, and putting them together is going to be collossal. Think a Pally and a Warrior running at you is something to worry about? Think Pally + Shammy, and that'll teach you real fear. This is going to make for some interesting matchups, and a real shift in dynamics.
But people always bitch and moan. Waaaaaaaaaa, it's going to be different. Deal with it.
You can say the same about a lot of MMOs. I used to really like playing Planetside (now there is a use for the Unreal 3 engine), but I ended up quitting because of all the jackasses. Trying to level your command rank was like trying to herd cracked out cats with ADD.
No no, bang on the table, not "jump up and down on the table while screaming and frothing".
Anyone else read "A new complete version of SWG" as "A completely new version of SWG"? I actually thought for a moment, "Well, at this point, starting over from scratch is probably not the worst idea..."
I'll be surprised if they can beat CoH/CoV with a superhero themed game though. There are things I think could be done better in CoH/V, but I don't think Sony can do 'em.
Ticketmaster is a more interesting case, because they have access to a resource that is a seriously tough nut to crack. You can record, mix, and burn your own CD, but if you want to play a venue bigger than your local bar, you're going to have to play their game (or find a nice field somewhere, build your own stage, etc).
Record companies, on the other hand, only have that sort of stranglehold on the retail outlets, and retail outlets have been slumping for years. I think the indies are in a really good position right now, and I think that's only going to get better.
I see two possibilities...
One, we get "good" drm, which is to say, DRM that is both hard to break, and mostly transparent to the user (good quality, not good ethically). Right now DRM is really obvious, it's like a leash, and every time you try to exercise your rights, that leash jerks you up short, causes anger and irritation. It's also easy to break, so the benefits of breaking the DRM and getting full use of the content are way ahead of the actual hassle of breaking the DRM. In my opinion, the best way to get "good" DRM would be to stream everything from central servers, and make it available through a range of wireless integrated devices. This is obviously serious future tech, but the potential exists already, so it's not farfetched.
The other possibility is that the current distribution model will break down as artists opt-out of the restrictive RIAA practices, and some more organic system grows up in its place, where content is not so rabidly protected, and artists are more directly compensated by their fans.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a little of both, in the next 10 years. All these subscription sites are technically crappy implementations of the first concept...Pay a subscription fee and access the music all you want, in any number of crappy non-portable formats. But if you could browse it in your car, or anywhere else through a range of compatible devices interconnected wirelessly? Who gives a damn if you can't copy it, if you can access it any time, from any where? It'd be the death of the physical media sales, so they won't support it for a while to come, but it's the best approach for them. They keep control, they get your money.
As far as the second goes, there have been independant artists and independant labels for years, but they're exploding now, with all the production costs going down. They have so much less to lose, and so much less access to physical media stores, they're trying all kinds of new methods of distribution, and it's not unlikely that some of them will be popular enough to pull in some of the mainstream.
I'm even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one, because those bargain bins are an artifact of the whole "Shipping things from place to place" model of distribution...Eventually they have to clear out a warehouse, so stuff ends up in your grocery store at a loss.
And it doesn't come with the nice packaging, etc.
This whole "Selling digital content for the same price as a hardcopy" crap is starting to piss me off. They're not the same! Hardcopy costs should ALWAYS be higher. If they aren't, we're getting screwed...There is no second option!
If I have to spend hours of my life, plus money for the goddamn media, plus download, plus cpu time while the DRM mangles the download into somethign I can't reburn, the damn thing should cost 5 bucks at most. I am sick and tired of being treated like a moron.
Let's see:
Cost compared to buying it from the store: Same
Rights compared to buying it from the store: Less (Assuming DRM still works 5 minutes after they release it)
So, let me get this straight...I'm going to waste hours and dollars downloading a movie that (I assume) can only be ripped to DVD, which will be less functional than same dvd bought from the store, though just as pricey.
Tempting...If they include a free beating or tax audit, it'll be impossible to resist.
Well, it's not funny haha as much as funny sad. "You set a parameter for a style element, and that setting falls to the next element unless you provide it with a different element definition."
No...Really? You're saying that, if you set something to something, then it stays that way unless you tell it to be something else? And that that's a problem?
Come on! Don't push your own lack of skill off on the tool. If you want to do each page seperately, by all means, go right ahead. Otherwise, learn a little about CSS before you dimiss the whole thing as crap. I'm not a designer, but the "problems" he describes are are both familiar to me, and user error. Fixing inheretance is not that difficult.
I find CSS to be vaguely annoying because I'm not a visual guy, and my formatting never looks quite how I want it to, but there is no denying its simple and effective.
You should never pass an unescaped string to anything. End of story. Even php has addslashes() and stripslashes(), and even though they're a kludge, they still work.
With a more strongly typed language, there is no excuse for passing unescaped strings.
Normalization is still desirable, just because of its efficiency. No wasted space.
Just looking at the tree representation of the class structure, I don't know what they're thinking...Tier 1, the "Supertype" level, has two nodes (not counting the units-of-measure bits). Okay... Tier 2 has more than a hundred! More than all the Tier 3s combined! That's not moving from simple to complex, which is what the goal of structured data should be! It's just throwing stuff in a pile, and telling people what the pile looks like.
People at government agencies all over the country are going to be writing parsers to pull data out of this train wreck of a format, and it's not going to be easy, because there is no easy way to traverse to the data that you need. You can say this is just an interchange format, but the reality of it is, some joker is out there right now putting together the code to read an "XML database" with this structure. If your goal is to create yet still more bloated systems with yet still more arcane data constructs, this is a good start. Otherwise, it's a joke.
Just glancing at it, I can see problems. XML is too often used for databases when it shouldn't be, but there are similarities, and just looking at it I can see that it violates one of the most basic database design principles: normalization
Just as an example, there are three different namespaces dedicated to the various FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards)...To three different STANDARDS.
I'm no expert on government info, and I just looked at this thing for the first time, so maybe it's brilliant and I'm ust not seeing it, but it sure looks a lot like they've fallen victim to a database noob mistake, and created a monster tree with disproportionate crazy branches everywhere, and that is bound to cause relational problems, redundant data, and warped design challenges.
Okay...I can see the need for u:SuperType->u:ActivityType->c:ActivityType->im:Al ienEncounterType...I mean, we're bound to encounter aliens at some point, right?
But im:AlienStudentDisciplinaryActionType? Planning for Alien encounters is one thing, but planning for dealing with them in our school systems seems like bureaucratic bloat to me. I don't think the Red Staters will be down with their taxes going to teach godless little green people.
(end humor tags)
Speaking from experience...Financial code is usually secure only because it is usually too stupid to be fooled. The financial databases where I work wouldn't even notice a sql injection attack; they're not smart enough to process one, even if someone was clever enough to put it through the "validation" process used to homogenize the data.
Making something too stupid to be hacked is an excellent line of defense where this kind of hacking is concerned...You can't trick it into doing something it can't do.
Come on, if they had some shame, they'd couldn't live with themselves. Their whole business model is basically to leech as much cash as they can off the works of people who are more creative than they could dream of being, and if this involves exploiting those same people and removing their rights to their own creations, they have no problems with that. They'd screw their grandmothers for an extra nickle.
As far as they're concerned this is one of the most important things in the world...someone is impinging on their leeching! Their blind, rapacious greed is the overriding impulse in their miserable lives.
Nothing would suprise me, coming from them. I literally can't imagine a depth that they wouldn't sink to, given the opportunity.
I've read studys suggesting that a lot of the "junk" DNA is actually more on the line of a biological CRC checksum. If that is the case, it'll have pretty solid ramifications for any sort of genetic manipulation...Wouldn't want your spliced DNA "correcting" itself in the next generation.
I'm all for people being allowed to try and game the system...Anything else would restrict the whole purpose of the Internet as a repository for whatever the hell someone wants to put in there.
At the same time, I'm all for search engines blacklisting people who game the system, parked domains, crap aggredator pages, etc. It's all about building a better mousetrap.
Shrug. I got to Comp Sci by way of Cognitive Science, which means I had all the logic I could handle long before I had to take the fricking circuit design course...CS required two logic classes, which, compared to the five I'd already taken was like having to go back to Algebra I after finishing Calc IV. I'd be fine with having to take a course on binary numbers, machine code, and circuit design, but having to take one of each is absurd for a non-engineer. And you don't have to take all the same courses to get into a Medical program, not even close...In fact different medical schools require different courses, and some medical schools look favorably on things like Psychology (which blows my mind, though my doctor friends assure me its true).
Anyway, Comp Sci is a practical degree. You can have a perfectly fulfilling career without going past your BS. All I'm saying is, use the 100 and 200 level courses to give you a nice grounding, and then loosen up the requirments on everything else, so individuals who are interesting in programming can go one way, people who are interesting network protocols can go another way, and people who are interested in hardware design can go their own way as well. I still posess the ability to do binary long division with a pencil and paper, and it irritates the hell out of me.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Ah, CS snobbery from an AC...I mod ACs -4, but I still check 'em when they're under my threshold, which is stupid. Anyway, Turing was deeply interested in practical computing you know, and in his day, there really wasn't enough computer science that it was in any way difficult for one person to study it all. Thank you for making my point though, because, for what I do, there was no other choice for a degree program.
I know the CS purists sneer at the guys in the trenches, like we should all have gone to ITT or something, but I get a hell of a lot of use out of my programming, dbms, and network architecture classes. Every time I have to do memory management, packet shaping, or funky data conversion between networks, I rely on theory I never could have gotten from some piddly tech college. But there was a lot of crap in there I didn't need: a whole class on binary number theory, a class on machine code, another on circuit design. I'm never going to work with computers on that level, and I'm hardly unique among CS majors in that.
At the same time, majoring in programming was too fluffy and useless for me. There wasn't even a networking degree, because most four year universities view that as akin to plumbing. You have to actually get out in the field to get anything other than vague theory, and that stuff is seriously interesting and difficult once you move past the "plug this machine into dat machine" crap.
I guess I kind of think of it like medicine...Nobody majors in "Doctor" but we're all expected to major in "Computer Scientist" even though that describes us about as well as "Doctor". I'm not looking for more practical classes, because practical becomes obsolete too quickly, I'm looking for theory that is focused and useful to whatever specialty you're going into within the set of specialties that is comp sci.
Just sounds like a gimmic to me.
I flirted with Comp Sci a long time before I actually got physical, and took a lot of classes at a lot of different places. I had classes that were too heavy on theory, I had classes that were too heavy on "practical" skills, which usually amounted to "how to use this language/program to do this thing".
I think, in the long run, a lot of places really don't have the faintest idea what it takes to make a good CS person. It doesn't help that CS covers way too much ground anyway. I'm unusual in that I don't really have a specialization within the field. I'm a programmer/administrator with java/c#/perl/php/python experience and unix/linux/windows/mac experience...Not claiming to be godlike at any of those things, but I'm competent and flexible. The thing is, as fricking crazy as I am, I still haven't used all the classes I had to take for my degree.
I can't help but think we need better "gut" courses, and more flexibility with higher level classes, so that you get a more elegant toolkit to take with you into the workforce. If you give people a better range of courses that appeal more to their interests, you don't need a fricking robot to make them excited about their subject. It's a hell of a lot better than pushing students to design another "airline reservation system" (I had to do this in Scheme and Java), or "Pokemon" (Java and C), or "IM client" (Java, C#).
Blah blah. I'm rambling. Summary: Robot == lame...Cooler courses > Robot.
Not in the sense that they're talking about. Diablo had random maps but those maps were drawn with the same graphics template every time, so now, 10 years later, the orginal Diablo graphics look blocky and campy.
What they're talking about is a way to generate the graphics on the fly, rather than working with bulky image maps, so you could "upgrade" the graphics simply by feeding the rendering engine more cycles.
The ability to pass a government security clearance is a useful skill for a lot of jobs, especially ones that require discression. What they're basically checking for is to find out if you're a spaz, have a lot of skeletons in your closet, or lead a blackmailable lifestyle.
It's not like you'd need a security clearance to be forced to turn over information to the gov't, nor is there anything in a security clearance that says, "And when the gov't comes along and asks you to betray your current employer (or their clients), you have to do it." Secret/Top Secret clearance just means that some people who are pretty good at that sort of thing think you can keep a secret, and that they haven't caught you proving them wrong yet.
You forgot killing bugs, fool!