If I had to choose between schools, and I really wanted to hire the right person, I'd take a look at syllabi from each school.
There are big well-known schools that have good reputations whose undergrad CS departments don't amount to anything more than programmer farms with classes taught by TA's and professors who consider teaching a distraction from their research. There are also relatively unknown liberal arts colleges with strong theoretically-based CS programs taught by dedicated professors who love to teach.
The one thing I would really warn about is that if your CS program puts its emphasis on theory rather than practise and you aren't looking at going to grad school, you're likely going to have an incubation period before you get a good job. A lot of employers want to have someone who can say, "my school taught me VB, Java, and Win32." True, you can get up to speed in all of these very quickly if you have a strong theoretical background, and on top of that you'll probably have a much better understanding of combinatorics and automata theory than the guy who knows VB, Java, and Win32 ever will, but I just haven't gotten the impression that most companies are thinking six weeks ahead when they are deciding who has the right skills for the job.
I must agree that I have listened to both and I like the Sirius playlists much better.
But I am afraid that Sirius is in trouble, simply because for most people satellite radio == XM. I'm pretty sure this is entirely because Sirius has failed to advertise, especially in the ways that count (like getting auto dealers to offer their decks).
Lately, I have noticed that chains like Circuit City and Best Buy have been cutting back on their Sirius stock.
When i was young and you had several guys attack one monster and the first attack killed it then your other attacks were wasted, and we liked it!
I think maybe if they kept that feature in FF1, it wouldn't sell so well because people would realize that FF1 really wasn't all that great of a game in many respects. =D
Maybe if they made an option for "Nostalgia Mode" . ..
That really depends on the Linux. While I agree that most Linux apps are generally more secure, there are certainly plenty of Linux distributions out there where the default install sets you up with scads of open ports.
On top of that, you have a lot of Linux folks still using telnet and non-anonymous FTP, which isn't much of a virus risk at present, but is still a huge security problem any way you shake it.
I think the folks who really got the floppy disk eject thing right were Apple, right around the time they made the Macs (Quadras, i think) with the power button located right next to the floppy drive.
Being Macs, there was no floppy disk eject button. This computer was designed to severely punish anyone who forgot that. =D
Given that the problem with using no spaces in most languages is that it becomes difficult to tell where one word ends and anther begins, I'm not so sure that printing without spaces is a crippling problem in Chinese or Japanese. The traditional alphabet for both is the same, and one character is one word.
control-option-splat-8 is your best friend. One simple key combination to switch the screen to inverse greyscale. (Unless, of course, you're in emacs. Then it'll start up the spellchecker or a game of textmode Quake or something.)
Personally, I think it's a lifesaver - 8 hours of using my computer without it, and I feel like I've spent the day staring into a flashlight.
Frequently the problem isn't the needs of the big pharmaceutical companies or what have you. It's that nowadays one of the biggest driving motives for a doctor is to not get sued. When you go into the hospital, you are most likely going to get handled in a very by-the-book, mechanical manner, and this is because stepping out of line even a little bit looks terrible in court.
Like everyone else I know of, my first experience with Mac OS X was on someone else's computer. =D
I recognize that it's not on by default, but it is still an excellent example of a horrendous UI bobble if your goal in UI design is to make the GUI or GUI feature as pleasant as possible for a naive user who suddenly encounters that feature for the first time.
The funny thing about all this UI talk is that, while Apple is better than most, Apple also breaks a whole lot of UI design guidelines, especially its own.
For one, the titlebar pills are really quite small, esp. in comparison to the titlebar itself. I remember when I first got OS X I noticed that these buttons were among the smallest ones I've ever seen on a GUI.
I'm sure a lot of people will hate to hear it, but Expose tends to be another feature that can be annoying, especially to people who aren't familiar with it. In particular, the option to activate it by moving the mouse cursor to one of the screen corners. It's always a bit annoying to overshoot the down arrow on a scrollbar a little bit only to suddenly have your whole world change without any sort of clicking or anything on your part. I've escaped this by turning off the ability to activate Expose by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen (keyboard only for me), but I still find it maddening when I'm working on someone else's Mac. And to someone who doesn't know what Expose is, it's even worse because they don't know how to make all their windows go back. In programing, unexpected side-effects in functions is generally considered to be impolite. I think this applies to UI, too.
I don't think anything I've seen recently really shines on most of the points TFA is talking about. I think that's why HCI people like stuff like Fitt's Law - it means they will always have something to complain about. But it's also a perfect example of worrying about minutia when there are much bigger problems to deal with.
The big issues that most folks seem to need to get a handle on w/r/t UI is 1)no surprises 2)everything is discoverable 3)don't keep every single thing you own on the floor of your house and 4)it's polite to answer questions when asked.
It'd be more difficult to run copied games, what with the GameCube using a medium that is completely incompatible with any other optical drive that I have ever heard of.
I get the impression from the article that the mod chip includes flash memory, and runs code that you've transfered directly to this memory from the computer (via a serial cable or some such). If that's right, then I suspect that there's not enough flash memory to contain an entire pirated copy of a GC game on the device for cost reasons.
Too bad there wasn't a link to the company website to clear some of this up.
I would love it if I could plug my iPod into my computer at work and be able to play songs on it in iTunes. As is, you can see what songs are on the iPod, but beyond that it's a lookee-no-touchee type thing.
Re:If it connects to Steam every time I play. . .
on
Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: 1
. . . then I won't be buying HL2. I don't always have an internet connection available.
True. And it's worth pointing out that Java is plenty good for games if you're looking for cross-platform. But Java is slow enough on older Macs that using it might lose a significant portion of your potential audience if you're going Mac-only. (I have no numbers to back this up, it just seems that Mac users don't upgrade nearly as often as PC users from what I've seen.)
Single console gaming magazines end up having the most forgiving coverage
According to TFA, multiplatform magazines were the most forgiving. Single platform magazines were the second harshest, right behind mainstream media.
That said, I would like to see some more information about how Game Daily came up with these absolutely magical numbers. In particular, I'd like to see how all four of the categories of publications could score below average. Is there some secret "fansite" category that isn't shown in any of the graphs but is clandestinely throwing all of the numbers all out of whack?
I think that maybe everything Java was overlooked because that's kind of a duh. I mean, if you're going to work with IB, your options are C, C++, ObjC, and Java.
That, and it's a video game website, and the list they gave looked pretty game-oriented.
Ya know, the Bush administration really fascinates me. It really shows that although the Cold War is over, the USA hasn't lost its Cold War modes of thought. We're spending so much money and pulling so many dumb stunts in part because we seem to think that we're still standing off against some monolithic enemy that spans 10 time zones. (And yes, I mean to say "we." Don't forget who vote him in.)
I mean, this is the administration that was honestly pushing for the ballistic missile defense shield. And I think that this idea that the only way to make sure a country isn't going to stab us in the back is to make sure it is a republic comes straight out of a 15 years obsolete line of thinking that says that anything that isn't a democracy is going to be much more vulnerable to falling into the USSR's camp.
You step back for a moment, and it almost looks like the USA is some poor traumatized vet who still sometimes sees visions of a battlefield from long in the past and dives under tables to take cover from imaginary grenades and the like. Only you can't take time to feel sorry for him, because for all his raving lunacy, he's still the guy holding the biggest gun in the room.
It doesn't do a whole lot - 3 infrared rangefinders for sensors, not much (if any room) to add more sensors or devices, but it does move holonomically. =D
I think if you watch a lot of pornography, then that can distance you from other people and perhaps interfere with forming a healthy relationship with your parter
I've had more problems with books doing this to me, let alone Civ III.
If I remember right, the download accelerator Prozilla has billg@microsoft.com set as the default e-mail address to send when logging into anonymous ftp.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had to choose between schools, and I really wanted to hire the right person, I'd take a look at syllabi from each school.
There are big well-known schools that have good reputations whose undergrad CS departments don't amount to anything more than programmer farms with classes taught by TA's and professors who consider teaching a distraction from their research. There are also relatively unknown liberal arts colleges with strong theoretically-based CS programs taught by dedicated professors who love to teach.
The one thing I would really warn about is that if your CS program puts its emphasis on theory rather than practise and you aren't looking at going to grad school, you're likely going to have an incubation period before you get a good job. A lot of employers want to have someone who can say, "my school taught me VB, Java, and Win32." True, you can get up to speed in all of these very quickly if you have a strong theoretical background, and on top of that you'll probably have a much better understanding of combinatorics and automata theory than the guy who knows VB, Java, and Win32 ever will, but I just haven't gotten the impression that most companies are thinking six weeks ahead when they are deciding who has the right skills for the job.
I must agree that I have listened to both and I like the Sirius playlists much better.
But I am afraid that Sirius is in trouble, simply because for most people satellite radio == XM. I'm pretty sure this is entirely because Sirius has failed to advertise, especially in the ways that count (like getting auto dealers to offer their decks).
Lately, I have noticed that chains like Circuit City and Best Buy have been cutting back on their Sirius stock.
So how is the company doing health-wise, really?
It's not too hard to learn Inform, at all. The language's manual and tutorial puts most projects' documentation to shame.
Inform homepage
When i was young and you had several guys attack one monster and the first attack killed it then your other attacks were wasted, and we liked it!
.
I think maybe if they kept that feature in FF1, it wouldn't sell so well because people would realize that FF1 really wasn't all that great of a game in many respects. =D
Maybe if they made an option for "Nostalgia Mode" . .
That really depends on the Linux. While I agree that most Linux apps are generally more secure, there are certainly plenty of Linux distributions out there where the default install sets you up with scads of open ports.
On top of that, you have a lot of Linux folks still using telnet and non-anonymous FTP, which isn't much of a virus risk at present, but is still a huge security problem any way you shake it.
I think the folks who really got the floppy disk eject thing right were Apple, right around the time they made the Macs (Quadras, i think) with the power button located right next to the floppy drive.
Being Macs, there was no floppy disk eject button. This computer was designed to severely punish anyone who forgot that. =D
Given that the problem with using no spaces in most languages is that it becomes difficult to tell where one word ends and anther begins, I'm not so sure that printing without spaces is a crippling problem in Chinese or Japanese. The traditional alphabet for both is the same, and one character is one word.
control-option-splat-8 is your best friend. One simple key combination to switch the screen to inverse greyscale. (Unless, of course, you're in emacs. Then it'll start up the spellchecker or a game of textmode Quake or something.)
Personally, I think it's a lifesaver - 8 hours of using my computer without it, and I feel like I've spent the day staring into a flashlight.
Frequently the problem isn't the needs of the big pharmaceutical companies or what have you. It's that nowadays one of the biggest driving motives for a doctor is to not get sued. When you go into the hospital, you are most likely going to get handled in a very by-the-book, mechanical manner, and this is because stepping out of line even a little bit looks terrible in court.
Like everyone else I know of, my first experience with Mac OS X was on someone else's computer. =D
I recognize that it's not on by default, but it is still an excellent example of a horrendous UI bobble if your goal in UI design is to make the GUI or GUI feature as pleasant as possible for a naive user who suddenly encounters that feature for the first time.
The funny thing about all this UI talk is that, while Apple is better than most, Apple also breaks a whole lot of UI design guidelines, especially its own.
For one, the titlebar pills are really quite small, esp. in comparison to the titlebar itself. I remember when I first got OS X I noticed that these buttons were among the smallest ones I've ever seen on a GUI.
I'm sure a lot of people will hate to hear it, but Expose tends to be another feature that can be annoying, especially to people who aren't familiar with it. In particular, the option to activate it by moving the mouse cursor to one of the screen corners. It's always a bit annoying to overshoot the down arrow on a scrollbar a little bit only to suddenly have your whole world change without any sort of clicking or anything on your part.
I've escaped this by turning off the ability to activate Expose by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen (keyboard only for me), but I still find it maddening when I'm working on someone else's Mac. And to someone who doesn't know what Expose is, it's even worse because they don't know how to make all their windows go back. In programing, unexpected side-effects in functions is generally considered to be impolite. I think this applies to UI, too.
I don't think anything I've seen recently really shines on most of the points TFA is talking about. I think that's why HCI people like stuff like Fitt's Law - it means they will always have something to complain about. But it's also a perfect example of worrying about minutia when there are much bigger problems to deal with.
The big issues that most folks seem to need to get a handle on w/r/t UI is 1)no surprises 2)everything is discoverable 3)don't keep every single thing you own on the floor of your house and 4)it's polite to answer questions when asked.
It'd be more difficult to run copied games, what with the GameCube using a medium that is completely incompatible with any other optical drive that I have ever heard of.
I get the impression from the article that the mod chip includes flash memory, and runs code that you've transfered directly to this memory from the computer (via a serial cable or some such). If that's right, then I suspect that there's not enough flash memory to contain an entire pirated copy of a GC game on the device for cost reasons.
Too bad there wasn't a link to the company website to clear some of this up.
I'm sure if you spend enough time visiting porn and warez sites, you'll get infected with all sorts of nasty spyware.
I would love it if I could plug my iPod into my computer at work and be able to play songs on it in iTunes. As is, you can see what songs are on the iPod, but beyond that it's a lookee-no-touchee type thing.
. . . then I won't be buying HL2. I don't always have an internet connection available.
True. And it's worth pointing out that Java is plenty good for games if you're looking for cross-platform. But Java is slow enough on older Macs that using it might lose a significant portion of your potential audience if you're going Mac-only. (I have no numbers to back this up, it just seems that Mac users don't upgrade nearly as often as PC users from what I've seen.)
Single console gaming magazines end up having the most forgiving coverage
According to TFA, multiplatform magazines were the most forgiving. Single platform magazines were the second harshest, right behind mainstream media.
That said, I would like to see some more information about how Game Daily came up with these absolutely magical numbers. In particular, I'd like to see how all four of the categories of publications could score below average. Is there some secret "fansite" category that isn't shown in any of the graphs but is clandestinely throwing all of the numbers all out of whack?
I think that maybe everything Java was overlooked because that's kind of a duh. I mean, if you're going to work with IB, your options are C, C++, ObjC, and Java.
That, and it's a video game website, and the list they gave looked pretty game-oriented.
Ya know, the Bush administration really fascinates me. It really shows that although the Cold War is over, the USA hasn't lost its Cold War modes of thought. We're spending so much money and pulling so many dumb stunts in part because we seem to think that we're still standing off against some monolithic enemy that spans 10 time zones. (And yes, I mean to say "we." Don't forget who vote him in.)
I mean, this is the administration that was honestly pushing for the ballistic missile defense shield. And I think that this idea that the only way to make sure a country isn't going to stab us in the back is to make sure it is a republic comes straight out of a 15 years obsolete line of thinking that says that anything that isn't a democracy is going to be much more vulnerable to falling into the USSR's camp.
You step back for a moment, and it almost looks like the USA is some poor traumatized vet who still sometimes sees visions of a battlefield from long in the past and dives under tables to take cover from imaginary grenades and the like. Only you can't take time to feel sorry for him, because for all his raving lunacy, he's still the guy holding the biggest gun in the room.
It can move in any direction, it can turn while moving in a straight line, blah blah blah.
If so, give him the PalmPilot robot kit!
It doesn't do a whole lot - 3 infrared rangefinders for sensors, not much (if any room) to add more sensors or devices, but it does move holonomically. =D
I think if you watch a lot of pornography, then that can distance you from other people and perhaps interfere with forming a healthy relationship with your parter
I've had more problems with books doing this to me, let alone Civ III.
I think that what the grandparent was implying is that water isn't so impressive because its expansion is accompanied by a phase change (freezing).
This material in the article is neat because it contracts when heated over a large temperature range and without melting or anything like that.
If I remember right, the download accelerator Prozilla has billg@microsoft.com set as the default e-mail address to send when logging into anonymous ftp.
I dunno. I know lots of people who think that Wal-Mart is a bunch of bunkwards but continue to shop there every day.
People will throw a lot aside if you offer them the right incentives. (Like a complete lock on the market, for example.)