I set up my nine year old with Zork. After the initial shock of at the concept of a game that can be played without the mouse, she loved it. It got annoying after the fifth time she asked me how to spell "examine", though.
You need to look at the post more carefully, because I carefully split everything into "the last 200 years" vs "the last 100 years". The only one I screwed up was hypercomplex algebra; for some reason, I thought that the infamous piece of graffiti was only around 100 years old instead of 150.
For example: Probability was indeed invented before 1900, but almost all of a first year undergraduate statistics course (which everyone from physicists to sociologists have to do) was invented within the last 200 years, and large swathes of it are 100 years old or less. The chi-squared test and t-test, for example, are only about 100 years old.
I don't know where you did your degree, but if you didn't study any maths in your first year of undergraduate work that was less than 50 years old at the time, I'd demand a refund. That goes double if it was a computer science degree, where pretty much everything is less than 50 years old.
Why are we teaching children to do jobs that can be done by computers?
Someone needs to teach the computer how to do it, and everyone needs to verify (even if only as an estimate) that the computer got it right. Do you really want a generation of kids who grow up to be Carol from Little Britain?
To me this all seems equivalent to teaching kids to farm using ox-powered plows rather than tractors [...]
More like teaching kids how to play music on violins rather than MIDI sequencers.
How about we rewrite these tests so you don't need a programmable calculator at all? There'd be no problem with cheating and it'd be cheaper for students.
But the quality isn't better! The resolution is better, but that's not the same thing.
When I watch a movie on blu-ray, all I see is the compression damage. Remember how on early DVDs, the eyes of people used to wobble around relative to the face? It's the modern equivalent of that, only display devices are better now, so it looks even worse.
Some of the arithmetic (e.g. computing cube roots) would be difficult for a modern student without a calculator, or other mechanical computing aid. I'm not sure I could have done it when I was 18.
Yes, it would be a win if the public transport is crap where you live, and your colleagues are horrid. For my part, public transport here is pretty damn good. We only need one car. We're a single income family, so we don't need child care.
Did you factor in all of the facilities that are provided in an office, like that really swish printer/photocopier which won't fit in your house, or the cafe-quality espresso machine? Some workplaces have a well-stocked library, or a gym. How about if you actually have good colleagues? Won't you miss that "geeking out over coffee" time? Or, the worst part from when I telecommuted, the difficulty in separating work and home life.
And be realistic: Would you actually get rid of the second car?
You'd need to pay me more (obviously I'd accept tax rebates as part of the package) to get me to telecommute.
I'm not a scientist. I write software for scientists. This gives me an advantage, since I didn't have to go through eight years of postdoc, trying to play the tenure lottery game.
Everyone around me fall into one of the following categories: those started in academia and just moved across from the University to the lab, are exiles from the formerly-monopolistic-telco labs (or equivalent, e.g. defence labs, meteorology centre etc), or sat it out in a bunch of failed startups and bumming around universities before finding their home. So yes, anything in possible in this business. But the real question that they're going to ask is: Is someone from the finance industry smart enough for this business? There's a feeling that anyone who is smart enough to do the serious high-tech R&D has either already done it, or has just never had the opportunity. Someone who did have the opportunity and didn't take it may not be right for this gig.
Again, the issue is that the level of compensation in banking is disproportionate to the value created (but then, it is the other fields which underpay, not the reverse).
Aye, there's the rub. I do work in science (it's a cliche, but we really are trying to cure cancer). I, like all of my colleagues, am grossly underpaid because of it.
But that's kind of the point. I take a pay cut because the work is interesting. I actually get paid to learn molecular biology as a side-product. If I didn't have a family, I easily could see myself working on this stuff for free at night while doing something else during the day.
To put it another way, there is no way in hell that I would work for a financial firm on a biomedical R&D-level salary. Is there anyone who would? Seriously? Even those who are working in that sector now? Didn't think so. Those high salaries are necessary, because the work itself isn't interesting enough on its own.
Last week's news was all sad, horrifying and depressing. This story gave me a warm fuzzy feeling like nothing else. While DNF is still in development, I know something is still right with the world. Long may it remain so!
You need to be clear on what you mean by "existing sheet music".
High-quality editions of classical music are ultimately based on research into early editions and, if possible, the autographs of the composer. These results are usually compiled into critical editions, which represent our state of knowledge about what the composer intended for this piece.
But that's not what you buy at the sheet music store. That is a version that has been further edited to produce a version which represents the closest to the composer's intent that's playable on the chosen instrumentation (e.g. if old instruments are no longer available), and is also well-designed.
The reality is that producing high-quality playable editions of classical music is a lot of hard work, and involves considerable creativity and good judgment. And, of course, to the old-school publishing industry, this means "we have a monopoly".
It's news that the lawyers have caught up to what everyone on the internet was thinking when they first encountered Wikileaks. Usually they're multiple years behind on this sort of thing.
This is only news if you've never heard of Geoffrey Robertson before.
Oh, thanks for that link. I didn't know that mass transit in the US was so much less efficient than everywhere else in the world (e.g. where I live). You learn something every day!
My reference to reckless spending is regarding the Myki system which cost a billion dollars, and counting, to replace a system that wasn't broken.
It was broken. Quite literally, in fact. One of the reasons why there are fewer Metcard issuing machines and validating machines than they were is that they've been scavenged for parts that you can't buy any more.
Yes, Myki was badly managed. Yes we could have gone with another system like Oyster more cheaply. But you also have to weigh that against the fact that Victoria uses an outdated zone system, so whatever scheme you use would have to be localised. And no, you couldn't fix that because it wouldn't fly politically; Victorians have a heightened sense of "this change is clearly going to screw us over" whether it's true or not. (Admittedly, this is partly because we got burned by Citylink and Eastlink, where this actually was true.)
In summary: Metcard wasn't going to last much longer, and anything you replaced it with was going to be a dog's breakfast no matter what you did. Welcome to Victoria!
If you read the mailing list threads, you'll see that many KDE people don't find that proposal convenient at all because it has the consequences of massive restructuring, different release cycles that don't match SC's, Nokia's currently lacking code submission process, etc.
It would also be extremely inconvenient for the KDE folks to have to make their code work with standard C++. Exception safe KDE will not happen any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
When she gets a phone (for which she has been agitating), she can abbreviate all she wants. Playing text adventures was part of my typing education.
I set up my nine year old with Zork. After the initial shock of at the concept of a game that can be played without the mouse, she loved it. It got annoying after the fifth time she asked me how to spell "examine", though.
I remember my body. Flabby, pasty-skinned, riddled with phlebitis. A good Republican body. God, how I loved it.
You need to look at the post more carefully, because I carefully split everything into "the last 200 years" vs "the last 100 years". The only one I screwed up was hypercomplex algebra; for some reason, I thought that the infamous piece of graffiti was only around 100 years old instead of 150.
For example: Probability was indeed invented before 1900, but almost all of a first year undergraduate statistics course (which everyone from physicists to sociologists have to do) was invented within the last 200 years, and large swathes of it are 100 years old or less. The chi-squared test and t-test, for example, are only about 100 years old.
I don't know where you did your degree, but if you didn't study any maths in your first year of undergraduate work that was less than 50 years old at the time, I'd demand a refund. That goes double if it was a computer science degree, where pretty much everything is less than 50 years old.
Someone needs to teach the computer how to do it, and everyone needs to verify (even if only as an estimate) that the computer got it right. Do you really want a generation of kids who grow up to be Carol from Little Britain ?
More like teaching kids how to play music on violins rather than MIDI sequencers.
Invented/discovered within the last 200 years or so:
Invented/discovered within the last 100 years or so:
That's off the top of my head.
How about we rewrite these tests so you don't need a programmable calculator at all? There'd be no problem with cheating and it'd be cheaper for students.
But the quality isn't better! The resolution is better, but that's not the same thing.
When I watch a movie on blu-ray, all I see is the compression damage. Remember how on early DVDs, the eyes of people used to wobble around relative to the face? It's the modern equivalent of that, only display devices are better now, so it looks even worse.
I think what they were looking for, though, is the now-considered-obsolete long-division-like method, rather than binary search or Newton-Raphson.
The math was trivial.
Some of the arithmetic (e.g. computing cube roots) would be difficult for a modern student without a calculator, or other mechanical computing aid. I'm not sure I could have done it when I was 18.
Yes, it would be a win if the public transport is crap where you live, and your colleagues are horrid. For my part, public transport here is pretty damn good. We only need one car. We're a single income family, so we don't need child care.
Did you factor in all of the facilities that are provided in an office, like that really swish printer/photocopier which won't fit in your house, or the cafe-quality espresso machine? Some workplaces have a well-stocked library, or a gym. How about if you actually have good colleagues? Won't you miss that "geeking out over coffee" time? Or, the worst part from when I telecommuted, the difficulty in separating work and home life.
And be realistic: Would you actually get rid of the second car?
You'd need to pay me more (obviously I'd accept tax rebates as part of the package) to get me to telecommute.
In Soviet Russia, anyway.
Apologies for the atrocious grammar in that post, BTW. I really should have proofread.
I'm not a scientist. I write software for scientists. This gives me an advantage, since I didn't have to go through eight years of postdoc, trying to play the tenure lottery game.
Everyone around me fall into one of the following categories: those started in academia and just moved across from the University to the lab, are exiles from the formerly-monopolistic-telco labs (or equivalent, e.g. defence labs, meteorology centre etc), or sat it out in a bunch of failed startups and bumming around universities before finding their home. So yes, anything in possible in this business. But the real question that they're going to ask is: Is someone from the finance industry smart enough for this business? There's a feeling that anyone who is smart enough to do the serious high-tech R&D has either already done it, or has just never had the opportunity. Someone who did have the opportunity and didn't take it may not be right for this gig.
Aye, there's the rub. I do work in science (it's a cliche, but we really are trying to cure cancer). I, like all of my colleagues, am grossly underpaid because of it.
But that's kind of the point. I take a pay cut because the work is interesting. I actually get paid to learn molecular biology as a side-product. If I didn't have a family, I easily could see myself working on this stuff for free at night while doing something else during the day.
To put it another way, there is no way in hell that I would work for a financial firm on a biomedical R&D-level salary. Is there anyone who would? Seriously? Even those who are working in that sector now? Didn't think so. Those high salaries are necessary, because the work itself isn't interesting enough on its own.
I'm ashamed at all you people.
Last week's news was all sad, horrifying and depressing. This story gave me a warm fuzzy feeling like nothing else. While DNF is still in development, I know something is still right with the world. Long may it remain so!
You need to be clear on what you mean by "existing sheet music".
High-quality editions of classical music are ultimately based on research into early editions and, if possible, the autographs of the composer. These results are usually compiled into critical editions, which represent our state of knowledge about what the composer intended for this piece.
But that's not what you buy at the sheet music store. That is a version that has been further edited to produce a version which represents the closest to the composer's intent that's playable on the chosen instrumentation (e.g. if old instruments are no longer available), and is also well-designed.
The reality is that producing high-quality playable editions of classical music is a lot of hard work, and involves considerable creativity and good judgment. And, of course, to the old-school publishing industry, this means "we have a monopoly".
It's news that the lawyers have caught up to what everyone on the internet was thinking when they first encountered Wikileaks. Usually they're multiple years behind on this sort of thing.
This is only news if you've never heard of Geoffrey Robertson before.
Oh, thanks for that link. I didn't know that mass transit in the US was so much less efficient than everywhere else in the world (e.g. where I live). You learn something every day!
On the other hand, driving is environmentally irresponsible compared to mass transit.
My reference to reckless spending is regarding the Myki system which cost a billion dollars, and counting, to replace a system that wasn't broken.
It was broken. Quite literally, in fact. One of the reasons why there are fewer Metcard issuing machines and validating machines than they were is that they've been scavenged for parts that you can't buy any more.
Yes, Myki was badly managed. Yes we could have gone with another system like Oyster more cheaply. But you also have to weigh that against the fact that Victoria uses an outdated zone system, so whatever scheme you use would have to be localised. And no, you couldn't fix that because it wouldn't fly politically; Victorians have a heightened sense of "this change is clearly going to screw us over" whether it's true or not. (Admittedly, this is partly because we got burned by Citylink and Eastlink, where this actually was true.)
In summary: Metcard wasn't going to last much longer, and anything you replaced it with was going to be a dog's breakfast no matter what you did. Welcome to Victoria!
If you read the mailing list threads, you'll see that many KDE people don't find that proposal convenient at all because it has the consequences of massive restructuring, different release cycles that don't match SC's, Nokia's currently lacking code submission process, etc.
It would also be extremely inconvenient for the KDE folks to have to make their code work with standard C++. Exception safe KDE will not happen any time soon.
On the other hand: If journalists were doing their job, Wikileaks wouldn't be in business.
I would make a joke about that, except that someone from EngIT might be reading this, and I wouldn't want to give a mistaken impression. So I won't.
Almost everyone in EngIT is a delight to work with. And all of those same delightful people know exactly why I just said "almost".
OK, hands up all you Unimelb peons...
Hand down in my case. I'm NICTA.