If Higher Education == College, then online lectures and collaboration software are already changing how students learn.
If Higher Education == Graduate level, then try waiting another 100 years. It's still an master-apprentice relationship established centuries ago, and after completion, you put on a robe and get hooded by your advisor^H^H^H^H^H slave "master".
I know it's fashionable to bash Unity, but what is broken?
For me it's bizarre menu bar behavior.
1. It is hidden by default. This means a new user (or someone not familiar with an application) has nothing to go on. Auto hide should be an optional feature that YOU turn on, after you have learned what to do with the item. 2. Because the menu's are hidden, you cannot see the menu target before your mouse gets there. This slows me down a lot, as I constantly have to guess where the menu I want is. So instead of looking and making a linear movement with my mouse, I have to go up, then sideways. Furthermore, it doesn't let me scan the menu for possible choice of options. I have to move the mouse before I can even begin to think of what to do. 3. I can't turn off auto-hide. WTF? Now I have all this empty space for absolutely nothing. 4. The menu bar is impossible to use with a touch screen.
Basically, they have taken the static menu idea from the Mac (which isn't half bad, except on very large monitors), and made it unusable. I've been using Ubuntu daily for 6+ years now, and I want to shoot the person who did this. My 4 Ubuntu machines are now all running 10.4 LTS, and will do so until I find an alternative.
Are you people too busy transferring scientific data, supply orders for the coming winter, and personal messages to SOs thousands of miles away to burn your precious link bandwidth getting the latest, coolest, most Mozilla-ish browser available?
Speakig as one of the thousands of people on Antarctica with fast internet connections, I was tempted to download it while you were watching, but I think I'll wait until "tomorrow".
Yeah, this should get me some down votes. Karma to burn and all that.
I would say that if you want to have a nice tablet experience now, buy an iPad. If you can wait, wait for iPad2. If can wait even longer, then I think the second round of Android tablets after Honeycomb (Honeycomb 2?) should be awesome. iPad has literally one year head start vs everything else and iPad 2, presumably with video chat camera is just around the corner. Android is moving up fast, but it will take time to catch up to the quality and the quantity of apps iPad has/will have in the next 6 months.
I really got hooked on plants vs zombies recently. It's fun and challenging, with excellent graphics and one of the best game music ever written. It's replayability is also very high. It's only $20, downloadable, with five activations. Excellent deal.
What's ironic about that video is that China has actually done more of the exact things that is supposed to bring down the US:
* Stimulus/spending out of recession: China has spent more of their GDP on stimulus spending that the US, and as a result has felt less impact from it. In fact, there is a linear correlation between amount a of GDP a country spent on stimulus and the length of the recession: the more they spent, the shorter the 2009 recession. Most economists acknowledge that if US had spent more, our recession would have been shorter.
* Government take over of health care: Seriously? China has government (actually, Communist) health care. Neither they nor Korea, Japan, Taiwan are about to privatize their national health care system to stay or become competitive with US.
* Government take over of private business: Chinese government owns and subsidizes many key corporations so that the corporation benefit the nation as a whole and not the CEOs and the shareholders.
If one follows the logic of the ad, it would seem that the Chinese state controlled capitalism is much more effective than our form of capitalism, and if our biggest competitor is China, then we should counter with our own similarly designed policies.
But no, this ad was carefully created to instill a feeling of fear and uncertainty, juxtaposition it with fiscal conservative ideas with almost no basis on fact. It is perfect propaganda.
In fact, I believe blaming foreigners for self created domestic problems was the first step in the decline of Greece, Rome, UK....
As other replies point out one by one, the ignorance of the parent poster is staggering. But what bothers me the most is not that he/she gets the facts wrong, but is the sheer conviction of his/her beliefs--based on nothing but ignorance.
Our understanding of economics is not perfect, but it is deep and profound. And like any knowledge that took a long time to discover it has pieces that a naive person would find utterly unintuitive and contradictory. Same can be said about statistics, biology, physics, information theory, whatever.
And yet, we (US) have come to believe that experts that tells us counter intuitive things are trying to lie to us. Yes, it is counter intuitive that different species came into existence by gradual change over millions of years. It is counter intuitive that frequent mammograms do not decrease breast cancer deaths. It is counter intuitive that deficit spending during a recession will help the economy. But all of these things are true, even if they go against your intuition of how things work.
It's one thing for the general population to be ignorant. It is a whole another thing for them to elect leaders who are also ignorant and sets policy based on gut level intuition or religious beliefs instead of facts and careful analysis of cause and effect.
If US is in decline, it is because of the ignorance of its people--people who refuses the advice of experts, people who blame foreigners for their problems, and people who believe that the purpose of childhood education is moral indoctrination. And most importantly, people who believe that they are right without understanding any of it.
That may be true, but QWERTY was created before the understanding of typing mechanics and ergonomics, and thus missed out on a lot of easy optimizations. For example, when you drum your fingers on the desk, it's much easier to drum pinky->index then index-> pinky. Dvorak layout takes advantage of this.
I can type 100+ words per minute in either layout after a little warm-up. I *much* prefer to type at that speed in Dvorak than in qwerty. It feels a lot more comfortable.
With ever increasing densities on the platters, doesn't that just mean if there's a malfunction like a HDD head crash, you lose more data?
Yes, if a full 3TB disk crashes, you definitely lose more data than a full 1GB drive crash. It's call the process of "bigger they are, the harder they fall".
Huh, it's the opposite for me. Eclipse is the *BEST* IDE I've used.
I used be a purist. I wrote my PhD thesis in Vim. Afterwards, I switched to EMACS (org mode rocks!). I still use it every day as my main notebook system. But when I started writing software more or less full time, I tried many many different IDEs and always end up with Eclipse. Why?
* Supports many different languages. At one point, I was writing and debugging python, perl, java, javascript, flex all at once. Eclipse let me do this without switching ides. No IDE comes even close. * Good emacs binding. (emacs+) * Excellent Java support: good refactoring, auto completion, "quick fix" (god, I love that feature. Must for syntax heavy java). * FindBugs for Java * Amazing auto format for Java. With Android development, you just load their xml template, turn on "format code on save", and I don't have to worry about lining up my brackets, sorting imports, or any of that. Just hitting Save formats everything. * Native widgets and font rendering (I really hate netbeans font rendering. No anti-aliasing? In 2010?)
Sure, it's got its share of bugs. Sometimes it gets hosed based on some changed setting. I take a working snapshot every now and then. It's a memory hog. Give it at least 512MB on startup, if not a whole gig (-Xms512m -Xmx1024m in eclipse.ini). Still, it's an amazing piece of free software. And add the ridiculous number of plug-ins available, there is no need to use anything else. And it's Free!
(I guess if you are using writing for Windows, you are stuck with Visual Studio, the same if you write for Mac, you're stuck with XCode. I can't say anything about those--I'm a linux user.)
If history means anything, the market can only support so many different operating systems (3?). Even with a huge market like handsets and mobile devices, 5 maybe too many. Currently we have 6+ (in no particular order)
Only two of these are available from multiple hardware vendors, and it's hard to imagine new entrants MeeGo (Intel) and Bada (Samsung) gaining any sort of traction. Unlike desktops, hardware/software integration seems to be key in this market, which may mean iOS may have an upper hand. Or perhaps its ease of development, which favors Android or WinMobile. So those will be my pick for top 3. Sorry Nokia, it was good while it lasted. Thanks for the cute ringtone!
IAAB (I am a biologist) and I think the article's claim is ridiculous.
For example, there is a debate in the microbiolgy community about how many different species of bacteria is in one gram of soil. The low estimate is something like 20,000 different species in a gram of soil [1], with a high estimate in the millions. Read about soil metagenomics sometime.
Basically, the lower the frequency, the further it reaches. Verizon bought gobs of spectrum in the 700Mhz range, which is great for building penetration and longer reach. Compare that to Sprint/Clearwire's 2500Mhz spectrum, which is known to be blocked by wet leaves. T-mobile also bought spectrum in the 700Mhz range, but likely will use it to build out their 3G network.
AT&T pretty much sat that auction out, so I can't imagine their data service getting much better. I hope their pico cell strategy pans out.
I've been using this lately, and it beats the crap out of anything else I've seen. It _feels_ like I'm writing a swing app, but it's ajax enabled without writing javascript. And since it keeps _all_ the logic (even loops to generate tables or bullets) inside java code, refactoring is trivial. I will never go back to a framework with a separate templating language again (I'm sorry, Django!). !
Slashdot Mirror
Swooooooosh
If Higher Education == College, then online lectures and collaboration software are already changing how students learn.
If Higher Education == Graduate level, then try waiting another 100 years. It's still an master-apprentice relationship established centuries ago, and after completion, you put on a robe and get hooded by your advisor^H^H^H^H^H slave "master".
I know it's fashionable to bash Unity, but what is broken?
For me it's bizarre menu bar behavior.
1. It is hidden by default. This means a new user (or someone not familiar with an application) has nothing to go on. Auto hide should be an optional feature that YOU turn on, after you have learned what to do with the item.
2. Because the menu's are hidden, you cannot see the menu target before your mouse gets there. This slows me down a lot, as I constantly have to guess where the menu I want is. So instead of looking and making a linear movement with my mouse, I have to go up, then sideways. Furthermore, it doesn't let me scan the menu for possible choice of options. I have to move the mouse before I can even begin to think of what to do.
3. I can't turn off auto-hide. WTF? Now I have all this empty space for absolutely nothing.
4. The menu bar is impossible to use with a touch screen.
Basically, they have taken the static menu idea from the Mac (which isn't half bad, except on very large monitors), and made it unusable. I've been using Ubuntu daily for 6+ years now, and I want to shoot the person who did this. My 4 Ubuntu machines are now all running 10.4 LTS, and will do so until I find an alternative.
I know I'll be in -1 land as soon as I submit this, but why not? If popularity and longevity is the concern, I think Java has them covered.
Notice twice as many fatalities per 100000 vehicles in the US (15) than the UK (7).
You forget, that many Americans carry guns in their cars. /joke
we'd still be banging rocks together to make dinner.
We would be, except for these nerds who keep shoving technology down our throats in the name of "convenience". /sarcasm
A useful trick is to stick a powerful magnet (like ones found in hard drives) under neath your bike. Works for motor cycles, too.
Not while I was watching, anyway.
Are you people too busy transferring scientific data, supply orders for the coming winter, and personal messages to SOs thousands of miles away to burn your precious link bandwidth getting the latest, coolest, most Mozilla-ish browser available?
Speakig as one of the thousands of people on Antarctica with fast internet connections, I was tempted to download it while you were watching, but I think I'll wait until "tomorrow".
WebM and Chrome are both open sourced under public licenses. To say Google "owns" them is to not understand how these open licenses work.
Yes, that's right. And Oracle doesn't "own" Java either.
Yeah, this should get me some down votes. Karma to burn and all that.
I would say that if you want to have a nice tablet experience now, buy an iPad. If you can wait, wait for iPad2. If can wait even longer, then I think the second round of Android tablets after Honeycomb (Honeycomb 2?) should be awesome. iPad has literally one year head start vs everything else and iPad 2, presumably with video chat camera is just around the corner. Android is moving up fast, but it will take time to catch up to the quality and the quantity of apps iPad has/will have in the next 6 months.
I really got hooked on plants vs zombies recently. It's fun and challenging, with excellent graphics and one of the best game music ever written. It's replayability is also very high. It's only $20, downloadable, with five activations. Excellent deal.
What's ironic about that video is that China has actually done more of the exact things that is supposed to bring down the US:
* Stimulus/spending out of recession: China has spent more of their GDP on stimulus spending that the US, and as a result has felt less impact from it. In fact, there is a linear correlation between amount a of GDP a country spent on stimulus and the length of the recession: the more they spent, the shorter the 2009 recession. Most economists acknowledge that if US had spent more, our recession would have been shorter.
* Government take over of health care: Seriously? China has government (actually, Communist) health care. Neither they nor Korea, Japan, Taiwan are about to privatize their national health care system to stay or become competitive with US.
* Government take over of private business: Chinese government owns and subsidizes many key corporations so that the corporation benefit the nation as a whole and not the CEOs and the shareholders.
If one follows the logic of the ad, it would seem that the Chinese state controlled capitalism is much more effective than our form of capitalism, and if our biggest competitor is China, then we should counter with our own similarly designed policies.
But no, this ad was carefully created to instill a feeling of fear and uncertainty, juxtaposition it with fiscal conservative ideas with almost no basis on fact. It is perfect propaganda.
In fact, I believe blaming foreigners for self created domestic problems was the first step in the decline of Greece, Rome, UK....
As other replies point out one by one, the ignorance of the parent poster is staggering. But what bothers me the most is not that he/she gets the facts wrong, but is the sheer conviction of his/her beliefs--based on nothing but ignorance.
Our understanding of economics is not perfect, but it is deep and profound. And like any knowledge that took a long time to discover it has pieces that a naive person would find utterly unintuitive and contradictory. Same can be said about statistics, biology, physics, information theory, whatever.
And yet, we (US) have come to believe that experts that tells us counter intuitive things are trying to lie to us. Yes, it is counter intuitive that different species came into existence by gradual change over millions of years. It is counter intuitive that frequent mammograms do not decrease breast cancer deaths. It is counter intuitive that deficit spending during a recession will help the economy. But all of these things are true, even if they go against your intuition of how things work.
It's one thing for the general population to be ignorant. It is a whole another thing for them to elect leaders who are also ignorant and sets policy based on gut level intuition or religious beliefs instead of facts and careful analysis of cause and effect.
If US is in decline, it is because of the ignorance of its people--people who refuses the advice of experts, people who blame foreigners for their problems, and people who believe that the purpose of childhood education is moral indoctrination. And most importantly, people who believe that they are right without understanding any of it.
That may be true, but QWERTY was created before the understanding of typing mechanics and ergonomics, and thus missed out on a lot of easy optimizations. For example, when you drum your fingers on the desk, it's much easier to drum pinky->index then index-> pinky. Dvorak layout takes advantage of this.
I can type 100+ words per minute in either layout after a little warm-up. I *much* prefer to type at that speed in Dvorak than in qwerty. It feels a lot more comfortable.
With ever increasing densities on the platters, doesn't that just mean if there's a malfunction like a HDD head crash, you lose more data?
Yes, if a full 3TB disk crashes, you definitely lose more data than a full 1GB drive crash. It's call the process of "bigger they are, the harder they fall".
I think it's suspicious that I keep trying to tag the story skynet, and it (the machine) refuses.
Why did you switch to EMACS?
Org mode. It was that compelling for me.
Huh, it's the opposite for me. Eclipse is the *BEST* IDE I've used.
I used be a purist. I wrote my PhD thesis in Vim. Afterwards, I switched to EMACS (org mode rocks!). I still use it every day as my main notebook system. But when I started writing software more or less full time, I tried many many different IDEs and always end up with Eclipse. Why?
* Supports many different languages. At one point, I was writing and debugging python, perl, java, javascript, flex all at once. Eclipse let me do this without switching ides. No IDE comes even close.
* Good emacs binding. (emacs+)
* Excellent Java support: good refactoring, auto completion, "quick fix" (god, I love that feature. Must for syntax heavy java).
* FindBugs for Java
* Amazing auto format for Java. With Android development, you just load their xml template, turn on "format code on save", and I don't have to worry about lining up my brackets, sorting imports, or any of that. Just hitting Save formats everything.
* Native widgets and font rendering (I really hate netbeans font rendering. No anti-aliasing? In 2010?)
Sure, it's got its share of bugs. Sometimes it gets hosed based on some changed setting. I take a working snapshot every now and then. It's a memory hog. Give it at least 512MB on startup, if not a whole gig (-Xms512m -Xmx1024m in eclipse.ini). Still, it's an amazing piece of free software. And add the ridiculous number of plug-ins available, there is no need to use anything else. And it's Free!
(I guess if you are using writing for Windows, you are stuck with Visual Studio, the same if you write for Mac, you're stuck with XCode. I can't say anything about those--I'm a linux user.)
If history means anything, the market can only support so many different operating systems (3?). Even with a huge market like handsets and mobile devices, 5 maybe too many. Currently we have 6+ (in no particular order)
Symbian (Nokia)
Blackberry (RIM)
Android (Google)
iOS (Apple)
palmOS (HP)
WinMobile (Microsoft)
Only two of these are available from multiple hardware vendors, and it's hard to imagine new entrants MeeGo (Intel) and Bada (Samsung) gaining any sort of traction. Unlike desktops, hardware/software integration seems to be key in this market, which may mean iOS may have an upper hand. Or perhaps its ease of development, which favors Android or WinMobile. So those will be my pick for top 3. Sorry Nokia, it was good while it lasted. Thanks for the cute ringtone!
Informative, this thread was.
IAAB (I am a biologist) and I think the article's claim is ridiculous.
For example, there is a debate in the microbiolgy community about how many different species of bacteria is in one gram of soil. The low estimate is something like 20,000 different species in a gram of soil [1], with a high estimate in the millions. Read about soil metagenomics sometime.
[1] http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v3/n6/abs/nrmicro1160.html
Basically, the lower the frequency, the further it reaches. Verizon bought gobs of spectrum in the 700Mhz range, which is great for building penetration and longer reach. Compare that to Sprint/Clearwire's 2500Mhz spectrum, which is known to be blocked by wet leaves. T-mobile also bought spectrum in the 700Mhz range, but likely will use it to build out their 3G network.
AT&T pretty much sat that auction out, so I can't imagine their data service getting much better. I hope their pico cell strategy pans out.
The really interesting stuff is after 1:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6ZN6r5-1QE
I've been using this lately, and it beats the crap out of anything else I've seen. It _feels_ like I'm writing a swing app, but it's ajax enabled without writing javascript.
And since it keeps _all_ the logic (even loops to generate tables or bullets) inside java code, refactoring is trivial. I will never go back to a framework with a separate templating language again (I'm sorry, Django!).
!
If what you are saying is true, I would speculate that they would be porting it to ARM.
That should be interesting.