It's amazing how quickly you can fight (and win) a war when:
You have millions of people who volunteer to fight. And many more millions at home who are supporting those fighting.
Soldiers aren't brought up on charges for questionable field mistakes.
You can level entire cities in an attempt to destroy the enemy.
Your enemy wears a uniform and follows a chain of command.
When the leader surrenders, the soldiers go home.
WWII was such a different war than the ones that came after it (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). It's the difference between a conventional war that takes place on a battlefield (or the burned out ruins of a city) and one where you have the enemy mixed in with innocent civilians.
The opening theme song said so much about the game. Who else remembers putting in the cartridge, hitting the power button, and having that glowing waterfall appear with that deep, bassy music? It was so different from that loud, cartoony music that you would often hear at the start of most games. I don't know, it just made Zelda seem more epic and not just some throw away game.
Good point. 3rd party spam filters will still catch these emails. The difference is that it is now costing the spammer more money to still end up in my filtered spam folder. I think 3rd-party spam filters are way better than the ones offered by an ISP anyway. So go ahead, let the spammers through, make some money from them, and pass the savings on to me.
As someone who works closely with the IT department at my company, I think I understand why there is so much red tape to get the simplest things done. Whenever something goes wrong with the technology at a company, the first people lined up and shot by upper management are the IT workers. The reason is that since so much of peoples' work is done on a computer, the technology becomes the scapegoat when the slightest thing goes wrong. It can never be the employees fault that the report wasn't done in time, or was the wrong font, or the cover page was the wrong color... it had to be IT's fault for not setting up the computer correctly.
In my experience managers have a habit of shooting first, asking later. So IT needs to document everything they do in order to cover themselves when things go wrong. Like in court, IT departments need to have the documents as evidence that they did everything "by the book" so that they don't get nailed for things that aren't their fault.
Why Harvard and Oxford? Do these school have the computer science talent to really dive into this problem? Or is Google and SUN trying to look a little more fair by not always heading up the road to Stanford and giving their alma mater some kickbacks? I know that Harvard and Oxford have produced some of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century, but are they up to the challenge of figuring out how weatherBug got on my system?
I could never motivate myself to make a product which wastes time for everyone. Real innovation comes from making productive programs which not only save time, but make money.
Yeah, because the video game and movie industries aren't that profitable. They only generate what? $5 billion or something like that every year in revenues? Programmers that work in that industry make what? $60,000/year salary on average?
There are plenty of decent subjects which you can actually achieve and produce valuable code. Games are just throw away work afterall. Engineering areas need good programs for simulation, nuclear stations could use better monitoring programs, even improvements to existing code which does REAL WORK is great too!
Keep in mind that some of the most demanding programming is game development. It requires knowledge of math, physics, and knowing every hardware and software hack on the books. Everything that they learn designing these games can be applicable to other areas as well. Most of the students in the class are graduate students doing real research and not punk "kids". By the time a lot of people take this class you've already weeded out most of those "I want to get a CS degree so I can write games!" crowd anyway.
This game competition is not part of a games class, but part of a graphics class that is very graphics-theory intensive which has a wide range of applications besides games. It's just that writing games is a great way of learning and applying those theories.
Oh sure, I was a finalist a few years back in this video game competition and I just got a pat on the back. This year's entries get front page on slashdot and the adoration (and criticism) of the entire nerd world! Not that I'm jealous or anything, I just like to have my ego fed every once in a while.
Why is the fact that 5 autonomous vehicles where able to traverse 132 miles not a bigger deal? I hardly saw any media coverage on this (not even mentioned in those closing "isn't this interesting" segments on local news). IMHO, this is another great "first" for mankind on par with Lindberg crossing the Atlantic or Rutan winning the X Prize. In the future, when automnomous vehicles are more ubiquitous, we will see that the pioneers were vehicles like Stanley. These engineers solved (or at least furthered our understanding) some very difficult problems of computer vision and perception. However, whenever I mention the Grand Challenge to people, they just give me a blank look. One person asked me if the Grand Challenge was some sort of football event.
Oh well, from what I heard no one was too excited about the Wright brothers' achievement at the very beginning either.
While I agree with some of the classes that Dan Zambonini suggests, most of them are way too specific for a CS education. The purpose of computer science is to provide someone a toolkit of knowledge which can then be applied in a wide range of fields. It is not solely to teach people the mechanics of programming, but instead on how to think through problems. Classes like AI, Operating Systems, etc. may seem pointless once you get out into the "real world". However, they are teaching you different ways of approaching problems. For example, I'm not working in building the next Deep Blue, Linux OS, or gcc compiler, but I have had to bust out concepts learned from my AI, OS, and compiler classes more than once to design and implement some programs at work.
Dan Zambonini basically wants things learned on the job to be placed in the classroom. I have learned things like test-first development, extreme programming, system engineering, etc. where I should be... on the job. Think of Computer Science like law. You don't spend three years in law school going over courtroom procedure (because not every lawyer ends up in a courtroom for starters). Instead, you study cases and build up a toolkit of knowledge which you can then apply later in whatever environment you land in. Same with CS... study the concepts and learn how to think. If you know how to solve problems, then you can more easily learn the mechanics of programming.
I keep being inundated with movie marketing in such away that I really want to see certain movies. But by the time they come out on DVD so I can rent them, I no longer care to do so. The marketing fog surrounding me has long since cleared
I think online DVD rental companies like NetFlix can take advantage of this situation of peoples' attitude cooling off about a movie after the marketing blitz has subsided. I think it would be great if you could put movies that are currently out in theaters into your NetFlix queue while you are still interested in seeing it. Most of us have queues that are long enough anyway that by the time the movie comes out on DVD, it will be somewhere in your queue ready to be sent. I know I find myself frequently in the situation where I'm browsing NetFlix and say to myself, "Oh, yeah, that looked like a good movie that I wanted to see but I forgot all about it." It would be much better if that DVD just showed up in my mail because I queued it up a few months earlier.
Unfortunately the movie companies want us to do exactly the opposite. They don't put millions of dollars into advertising so that people can plan on watching a movie months in the future on DVD. But if a system like this did get in place, perhaps it could be another metric on how successful a movie is. Studios could see that there is interest in a particular movie, just that it's in the DVD market. It also might make the phrase "straight to video" not have the stigma it has now.
Like other posters, I agree that he broke the terms of the EULA and should be banned from the game. But did he break a law? What he did might not be ethical, but it certainly isn't illegal. For those who say that he stole peoples' time and money, what game doesn't do that? If I pay a monthly fee to play a particular game and I keep getting killed by far better players, are those players crooks for beating me? If they do beat me because they have an unfair advantage (such as a bot) then they should be banned in accordance with the EULA but they aren't doing anything illegal. If I didn't accept the terms that I could get beaten and virtual goods could be taken from me, then I shouldn't play the game and spend my money elswhere.
I don't know the law in Japan, but I assume that there is no law saying that using a bot in an online game is illegal. So, to all extents and purposes, under the law, he has legally acquired these goods. And as the parent said, these goods have no value outside the game except for the value placed by the buyer. So can someone tell me what law was broken?
We all know that most people who work 8-10 hours/day don't spend all that time actually working. This is especially true for those jobs that require a lot of creative thinking or intense periods of concentration. You need time to recharge a little. And by not working straight through, you'll probably work more effeciently and come up with better solutions to problems.
To use this study's logic, I'm being productive and justify my salary for coding 8-hours straight even if my solutions sucks. But if I work 6-hours with small breaks in between, I'll probably get just as much done and the work that I do will be of a higher quality. So tell me, which worker is being more productive? Who, in the end, will better meet the business needs of the company?
cuz apparently renting movies is such a pain... you know leaving the house for 5 mins to interact with other humans
It seems so easy unless you live in a semi-large, urban area. It then breaks down into something like this:
10+ minutes of driving through city traffic
10+ minutes of circling the block trying to find a parking spot.
10+ minutes of walking 5 city blocks because that was the closest parking spot you could find.
Fighting to find a good rental because the one Blockbuster in the city probably sees 5x the traffic that one in a suburban settings encounters.
Repeat procedure when returning the movie.
So in the meantime I'll stick to mail-order rentals and then move to streaming video when it becomes feasible. Because my time is better spent interacting with my friends and not a store clerk.
Microsoft wants to compete with your work, that's a badge of honor man, you're made now.
OB Simpson's quote:
Bill Gates: "Buy them out boys!"
[Goons trash Homer's living room]
Bill Gates: "You don't think I got this rich writing checks do you?"
Isn't it amazing how, for the past few years, the music labels have been blaming online music piracy as the reason why they are loosing money. Now they come out in this article saying that "school yard" piracy makes up 66% of music piracy. That means that physically handing out copies of CDs to friends and family beats online piracy at a ratio of 2:1. If that is the case, then why has the music industry been focused on P2P apps instead of staking out school playgrounds and parks so that they can bust people for making these rampant, illegal transactions?
Either the music industry is performing really bad studies on copyright infringement or they haven't done any studies at all and are just making up numbers to scare people into thinking a problem is bigger than it really is. I hate it how the RIAA and its friends are always shifting what the big problem is in order to compensate for their outdated marketing model. Yesterday it was online piracy, today it's school yard piracy, tomorrow it will be non-commitment piracy because you didn't buy your government-mandated 3 CDs a month to keep the recording industry alive.
One of the things that I hate about Steve Jobs is that if he doesn't like something, then NO ONE should be allowed to have it.
Actually, it's more like Steve Jobs is trying to push better, more progressive technology in an attempt to make them standards. Remember something called the floppy drive? Every computer needed to have one right? Then Jobs decided that his new Macs were not going to ship with them. Why? Because it was an obsolete technology that had it's day in the sun, but needed to be phased out. The same goes for FM radio. Although it isn't as obsolete as the floppy, why should Jobs settle for a lesser technology on such a trend-setting device like the iPod? Let's leave using the statusquo to Bill Gates and the innovation to Steve Jobs.
Ebert also gave Ep. I 3.5 stars saying that it does a good job at setting up the story for the other movies in the prequel trilogy. For some kicks, check out the Ep. I review here. So while I think Ep. III will be a good movie, I would take his reviews with a grain of salt.
I know industrial engineering wouldn't be peoples' first choice to couple with a C.S. degree. However, it makes a lot of sense. Industrial engineering is the study of pipelines/assembly lines and how to put things together effeciently. So while that doesn't directly tie in with programming, it does teach you a slightly difference skill set that you can apply to any programming project. It seems like every project that I work on we always ask, "How can we make this run faster?" Or, "Is there a way to streamline this process and make it more efficient?". So you can approach those questions from both a C.S. and an industrial perspective. Combine a degree in Industrial Engineering with Computer Science and that will move you up from the position of code monkey to someone who actually architects and designs things.
Oh, and if that doesn't pan out, get the MBA. Computer Science people are already well suited for those programs.
A good example of just how thorny the Social Security issue is... I can't even tell which side of the isle you are supporting and which side you are bashing in your sacastic comment. I'm sure you have both liberals and conservatives saying "Yeah, way to rip them a new one!".
Don't the TV studios understand that TV downloads help them? Would they rather have people just stop watching a particular show because it airs at a bad time (or is up against the latest flash-in-the-pan reality show)? I think keeping an audience is a lot more important for a show, even if a small percentage of them aren't watching the commercials. I know there are shows I've stopped watching because it didn't fit in with my schedule and I will probably never pick up again. That means that the show (and hence the station/advertisors) has a 0% chance of me watching it again. But because of Internet downloads, one could still stay current with the show. That means that they talk about it with friends and coworkers who in turn might watch the show and build a larger audience. Some of the best advertising for a show is word of mouth, not the ads plastered to the sides of buses. So why cut off those people who might do your advertising for free because they took the time and interest to download the show from thet Net?
As a side quesiton... is there a TV watchdog group similar to the RIAA or MPAA? If so, who are they?
Hey, I can string together a bunch of random words to:
"hyper-fluctuating communications coffee mug". "Rainy IP Microsoft helmet".
"MP3 plastic raisen sports dome?"
I guess a confusing title is the first step to getting your submissions through.
I don't know if the "enjoy your summers" approach is a good one for someone who wants to land a good career after college. Don't just "bum around" because you will regret it later when an interviewer asks what experience you have that suits you for the job. Who do you think a company will pick, the person who spent their summer traveling through Europe or working summer camp, or the person who spent it working in a relevant field for the job? I do agree that you should enjoy your summers, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it working towards greater career goals. Furthermore, at a college age you are an adult and do have to think about the future and can't have everything be fun and games. Adult responsibilities don't start when you get a college degree, but way before then. Sorry if I sound like someone's parent.
From the article: But because video games tend to have very large digital files, a large part of the industry's piracy problem stems from illegal hardware and illegal copying of game discs.
In other news, federal authorities raided and destroyed core Internet routers citing that the hardware was facilitating piracy.
For your first job out of college, the college from which you graduated and your GPA are important. I've dealt with a lot of college recruiters and a lot of them either only look at specific schools or give applicants from specific schools a much higher priority. While your CS education may be no better at a well-estabilished university, the name of it on your resume counts for something. Perhaps if you have connections or are some sort of mega-genius, hacker type then the name of the school won't matter since you have an inside track. But if you fall into the "I have a CS degree, have done a few cool school projects, and now I'm looking for a real job" category, then having a well-known college on your resume is a major plus.
Also, due to the large volume of resumes some companies receive, recruiters will toss your resume directly in the trash if you do not meet a certain GPA. They have to make cuts somewhere. Keep in mind two things. Think of it like poker... the GPA and school name will deal you in at the table, but you still have to play your way through the interviews. If you fail at interviewing, then GPAs and school names don't matter. Also, the school you went to grows less important over time. Once you're in the real world, what you've done at various companies is what matters.
Slashdot Mirror
- You have millions of people who volunteer to fight. And many more millions at home who are supporting those fighting.
- Soldiers aren't brought up on charges for questionable field mistakes.
- You can level entire cities in an attempt to destroy the enemy.
- Your enemy wears a uniform and follows a chain of command.
- When the leader surrenders, the soldiers go home.
WWII was such a different war than the ones that came after it (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). It's the difference between a conventional war that takes place on a battlefield (or the burned out ruins of a city) and one where you have the enemy mixed in with innocent civilians.The opening theme song said so much about the game. Who else remembers putting in the cartridge, hitting the power button, and having that glowing waterfall appear with that deep, bassy music? It was so different from that loud, cartoony music that you would often hear at the start of most games. I don't know, it just made Zelda seem more epic and not just some throw away game.
Good point. 3rd party spam filters will still catch these emails. The difference is that it is now costing the spammer more money to still end up in my filtered spam folder. I think 3rd-party spam filters are way better than the ones offered by an ISP anyway. So go ahead, let the spammers through, make some money from them, and pass the savings on to me.
In my experience managers have a habit of shooting first, asking later. So IT needs to document everything they do in order to cover themselves when things go wrong. Like in court, IT departments need to have the documents as evidence that they did everything "by the book" so that they don't get nailed for things that aren't their fault.
Why Harvard and Oxford? Do these school have the computer science talent to really dive into this problem? Or is Google and SUN trying to look a little more fair by not always heading up the road to Stanford and giving their alma mater some kickbacks? I know that Harvard and Oxford have produced some of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century, but are they up to the challenge of figuring out how weatherBug got on my system?
Yeah, because the video game and movie industries aren't that profitable. They only generate what? $5 billion or something like that every year in revenues? Programmers that work in that industry make what? $60,000/year salary on average?
There are plenty of decent subjects which you can actually achieve and produce valuable code. Games are just throw away work afterall. Engineering areas need good programs for simulation, nuclear stations could use better monitoring programs, even improvements to existing code which does REAL WORK is great too!
Keep in mind that some of the most demanding programming is game development. It requires knowledge of math, physics, and knowing every hardware and software hack on the books. Everything that they learn designing these games can be applicable to other areas as well. Most of the students in the class are graduate students doing real research and not punk "kids". By the time a lot of people take this class you've already weeded out most of those "I want to get a CS degree so I can write games!" crowd anyway.
This game competition is not part of a games class, but part of a graphics class that is very graphics-theory intensive which has a wide range of applications besides games. It's just that writing games is a great way of learning and applying those theories.
Oh sure, I was a finalist a few years back in this video game competition and I just got a pat on the back. This year's entries get front page on slashdot and the adoration (and criticism) of the entire nerd world! Not that I'm jealous or anything, I just like to have my ego fed every once in a while.
Oh well, from what I heard no one was too excited about the Wright brothers' achievement at the very beginning either.
Dan Zambonini basically wants things learned on the job to be placed in the classroom. I have learned things like test-first development, extreme programming, system engineering, etc. where I should be... on the job. Think of Computer Science like law. You don't spend three years in law school going over courtroom procedure (because not every lawyer ends up in a courtroom for starters). Instead, you study cases and build up a toolkit of knowledge which you can then apply later in whatever environment you land in. Same with CS... study the concepts and learn how to think. If you know how to solve problems, then you can more easily learn the mechanics of programming.
I think online DVD rental companies like NetFlix can take advantage of this situation of peoples' attitude cooling off about a movie after the marketing blitz has subsided. I think it would be great if you could put movies that are currently out in theaters into your NetFlix queue while you are still interested in seeing it. Most of us have queues that are long enough anyway that by the time the movie comes out on DVD, it will be somewhere in your queue ready to be sent. I know I find myself frequently in the situation where I'm browsing NetFlix and say to myself, "Oh, yeah, that looked like a good movie that I wanted to see but I forgot all about it." It would be much better if that DVD just showed up in my mail because I queued it up a few months earlier.
Unfortunately the movie companies want us to do exactly the opposite. They don't put millions of dollars into advertising so that people can plan on watching a movie months in the future on DVD. But if a system like this did get in place, perhaps it could be another metric on how successful a movie is. Studios could see that there is interest in a particular movie, just that it's in the DVD market. It also might make the phrase "straight to video" not have the stigma it has now.
I don't know the law in Japan, but I assume that there is no law saying that using a bot in an online game is illegal. So, to all extents and purposes, under the law, he has legally acquired these goods. And as the parent said, these goods have no value outside the game except for the value placed by the buyer. So can someone tell me what law was broken?
To use this study's logic, I'm being productive and justify my salary for coding 8-hours straight even if my solutions sucks. But if I work 6-hours with small breaks in between, I'll probably get just as much done and the work that I do will be of a higher quality. So tell me, which worker is being more productive? Who, in the end, will better meet the business needs of the company?
It seems so easy unless you live in a semi-large, urban area. It then breaks down into something like this:
- 10+ minutes of driving through city traffic
- 10+ minutes of circling the block trying to find a parking spot.
- 10+ minutes of walking 5 city blocks because that was the closest parking spot you could find.
- Fighting to find a good rental because the one Blockbuster in the city probably sees 5x the traffic that one in a suburban settings encounters.
- Repeat procedure when returning the movie.
So in the meantime I'll stick to mail-order rentals and then move to streaming video when it becomes feasible. Because my time is better spent interacting with my friends and not a store clerk.OB Simpson's quote:
Bill Gates: "Buy them out boys!"
[Goons trash Homer's living room]
Bill Gates: "You don't think I got this rich writing checks do you?"
Either the music industry is performing really bad studies on copyright infringement or they haven't done any studies at all and are just making up numbers to scare people into thinking a problem is bigger than it really is. I hate it how the RIAA and its friends are always shifting what the big problem is in order to compensate for their outdated marketing model. Yesterday it was online piracy, today it's school yard piracy, tomorrow it will be non-commitment piracy because you didn't buy your government-mandated 3 CDs a month to keep the recording industry alive.
Actually, it's more like Steve Jobs is trying to push better, more progressive technology in an attempt to make them standards. Remember something called the floppy drive? Every computer needed to have one right? Then Jobs decided that his new Macs were not going to ship with them. Why? Because it was an obsolete technology that had it's day in the sun, but needed to be phased out. The same goes for FM radio. Although it isn't as obsolete as the floppy, why should Jobs settle for a lesser technology on such a trend-setting device like the iPod? Let's leave using the statusquo to Bill Gates and the innovation to Steve Jobs.
Ebert also gave Ep. I 3.5 stars saying that it does a good job at setting up the story for the other movies in the prequel trilogy. For some kicks, check out the Ep. I review here. So while I think Ep. III will be a good movie, I would take his reviews with a grain of salt.
Oh, and if that doesn't pan out, get the MBA. Computer Science people are already well suited for those programs.
A good example of just how thorny the Social Security issue is... I can't even tell which side of the isle you are supporting and which side you are bashing in your sacastic comment. I'm sure you have both liberals and conservatives saying "Yeah, way to rip them a new one!".
As a side quesiton... is there a TV watchdog group similar to the RIAA or MPAA? If so, who are they?
Hey, I can string together a bunch of random words to:
"hyper-fluctuating communications coffee mug".
"Rainy IP Microsoft helmet".
"MP3 plastic raisen sports dome?"
I guess a confusing title is the first step to getting your submissions through.
Or they were once employed by HP or Compaq before the dark times... before Carly.
I don't know if the "enjoy your summers" approach is a good one for someone who wants to land a good career after college. Don't just "bum around" because you will regret it later when an interviewer asks what experience you have that suits you for the job. Who do you think a company will pick, the person who spent their summer traveling through Europe or working summer camp, or the person who spent it working in a relevant field for the job? I do agree that you should enjoy your summers, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it working towards greater career goals. Furthermore, at a college age you are an adult and do have to think about the future and can't have everything be fun and games. Adult responsibilities don't start when you get a college degree, but way before then. Sorry if I sound like someone's parent.
In other news, federal authorities raided and destroyed core Internet routers citing that the hardware was facilitating piracy.
Also, due to the large volume of resumes some companies receive, recruiters will toss your resume directly in the trash if you do not meet a certain GPA. They have to make cuts somewhere. Keep in mind two things. Think of it like poker... the GPA and school name will deal you in at the table, but you still have to play your way through the interviews. If you fail at interviewing, then GPAs and school names don't matter. Also, the school you went to grows less important over time. Once you're in the real world, what you've done at various companies is what matters.