Amazing guitarist. Think it was CTS that he had, though it may have been tendonitis. He is kind of rare among guitarists who get RSI in that he got it in his right hand (he says it was from fingerpicks) rather than on the left hand, which is usually the one doing all the funky contortions. (reverse left and right if you'd prefer I talk in a southpaw-centric mode).
I don't think it's that you can't get RSI from playing musical instruments such as guitar; I think it's just that there are very very very few people who spend eight hours a day playing a guitar the way people spend eight hours a day clicking away at a keyboard.
The fuel on rockets used to put people into space is some of the weakest rocket fuel around, if I remember right. That's a GOOD THING. If we powered the Space Shuttle (or future equivalent) with something akin to the fuel on, say, a Sidewinder missile, the accelerations involved would probably give us problems with dead astronauts.
Granted, there/is/ still room for increases in power. As a recent Slashdot article pointed out, the accelerations your normal Joe/Jane experiences on a rollercoaster are much greater than the kinds of forces astronauts have to deal with.
I do C++ programming with C libraries and API's all the time. It's not like C++ can't interface with C libraries. . .
If you absolutely need to have it be OO, it's not too hard to write wrapper classes for all the functions you'll be doing. For OpenGL work I have a few classes of that kind that I use a lot - a camera class, for example.
Unfortunately, due to an old mishap involving an previous owner intalling Windows XP on R2-D2, the poor little droid has been left crippled, unable to play any audio format other than Windows Media.
Typing the keystroke sequences you listed does different things in different programs. For example, Alt-A is the standard keystroke for "select all" and does exactly that if you try it in Netscape. In emacs, alt-A does something completely different.
There is no keystroke standardization in X. I don't even think X itself does anything to trap keystrokes whatsoever - just windowmanagers and any other programs you have running. 's one of the most *ahem* beautiful *ahem* things about GNU/Linux - absolutely NO user interface standardization, and no way for a user to create it without modifying the source code to every piece of program he or she has.
It means whatever you want it to mean. I seem to remember it being some sort of bastardization of "Jinkies" from Scooby-Doo, but it could just as easily be a real word with a real definition that I heard once that slipped into my vocabulary.
FAQs are commonplace - they've been around for at least a decade, and it'd be pretty damn hard to get a copyright for the idea of something that has probably been around since before you got plugged into the Internet.
Much better to write an OAQ (Often Asked Questions) document, since nobody's done that before. Then you can get your lousy copyright.
READ THE DAMN ARTICLE BEFORE YOU POST IT ON THE MAIN PAGE!
This court case is so banal it doesn't even deserve mention. The plaintiff was suing the defendant on the grounds that it basically ripped off the idea of having a FAQ at all, which is about as asinine as having one publisher sue another for putting a synopsis on the back of a book. It wasn't even over whether one FAQ was a copy of the other - they didn't cover the same questions or use the same answers to those questions that were the same.
What's next, Slashdot posting an article about a court ruling that it is indeed legal for everyone to write books about how to use computer software without paying royalties to O'Rielly?
One thing to look for is a program with no slavish devotion to any one language
SO true. For example, I've been working in perl recently, and have discovered the falsity of the statement that just about the only difference between most languages is syntax. It's amazing how minor changes in how a programming language handles variable scopes can fuck you up if you aren't expecting it. . .
The practice of shifting requirements up until the ship date is one that we, as professionals, have a duty to curb.
This seems like an area where software engineers could take a hint from building contractors. Once the construction begins, they aren't too willing to change the architecture. The customer had their chance to set the requirements when the plans were being drawn out, and if they can't make up their minds, tough shit.
If you want one that covers those culprits, read Rapid Development by the same author - it talks about the management end of software engineering. Code Complete is meant to cover the programming end.
Ask whether the course is theory or application oriented. In my experience, there are two approaches to teaching computer science out there.
The first is what I call the "academic" method. You're going to learn lots of theory under this method, but are left up to your own means to figure out specific tools such as the Windows API.
The second I like to call the Trade School approach - it's probably what's being taught at your local community college, and it's pretty much the opposite. You'll be an expert at VB by the time you get out, but (from what I can see) will probably also be left without any concept of things like functional programming or automata theory or what have you.
A catalog can tell you without a doubt whether or not you're going to get the Trade School approach - there will be a separate class for every programming language the department ever uses, and most every class will look like it's trained towards giving you job skills. However, there are a lot of CS departments that look like they are academically oriented when they really aren't. You'll sign up for a course called Computer Graphics that claims in the catalog to go through the basics of how to really do graphics programming, but when you finish the course, you'll realize that everything you just learned over the past four months you could have just as easily picked up with a few days of free time and a copy of "Teach Yourself OpenGL Game Programming In [lessons | ]" and don't have a clue what the math behind perspective projection looks like. (My experience.)
Decide whether you're looking to be a grunt coder, a software engineer, an academic or researcher, or a Web Developer/NTadmin/networking guy/etc. If you're looking for the latter, don't even waste your time with college unless you really honestly want a bachelor's degree or a liberal arts education or what have you, because with most of those a trade school and some certifications will give you every bit as good of a preparation for your carreer as a BS, and you'll probably still have to get the certificates after you have your BS anyway. For a software engineer or academic, go for the academic approach. If you want to be a grunt coder, you can probably get away with any of the above, so pick which one looks more fun.
Good point about learned behavior. The researcher in question might do well to see if he can study the meowing habits of stray cats, which presumaby wouldn't have learned to meow towards humans' likings as well due to less exposure.
But your concept of natural selection is bunk. Natural selection has just about nothing to do with living and dying except insofar as it assists reproduction.
If we look at mechanisms of evolution and take into account reproduction and not just survival, there is plenty of room to see how humans could unconsciously affect the evolution of cats. The situation that comes to mind for me is a family with only one cat. If they find that first cat pleasing to be around in some way, they will be far more likely to get more cats, thus providing the first one with potential mates (assuming they don't fix their pets).
Now spread that out over 5,000 years of feline domestication. Noticeable evolution has happened in far fewer generations than that before. . .
Unless a few of the unimplemented language features have uses that nobody has thought of (not entirely unlikely since this is the first compiler I know of that supports all of them), I doubt it will make a huge difference for most coders. C++ programmers have gotten along fine without them thus far.
However, it is nice to see that they have made it in. Maybe now other groups will start imlementing the full language, too.
No, because a lot of the job of a good teacher is seeing where the student is getting caught up and thinking of new ways to explain something so that it makes sense to the student. I think we're a long way from creating software that can recognize how an individual student learns best and create analogies for how something works based on a particular student's prior knowledge.
If we ever get to the point that primary school class sizes are in the area of 200 students, we're in deep shit, computers or not.
Considering that I know more adults who drink and drive, and considering that I have yet to see a cutoff age where people who drink stop doing stupid shit when they drink, I'd say if you take those two together and add to it that the world is getting overpopulated, the only real option as far as national alcohol policy is to replace the ethanol in all alcoholic products with methanol.
Granted, in college, there is plenty of use for them (Mathematica in calculus classes, for example, really helps with visualizing what is going on for things like multi-variable equations and vector fields).
However, it has been shown that kids don't learn any better with computers than they do without with the way they are applied in most primary and high-school education settings. In essence, computers in the classroom is just a huge waste of money and a distraction.
You've got a good point there. And people could say, "well, 18 is the standard age for stuff like this." That's an asinine argument, though because the USA departed from that on the driving age (16, 14 in some circumstances if I remember right) and the drinking age (which is ludicrously high). I'd say that for the most part, 15 is a good age. OTOH, I'm sure many many adults wouldn't agree in the case of games like GTA3, where you can go pick up prostitutes and have sex with them in the back of your car.
I agree that limiting stuff on TV too far is going overboard, and we need to recognize that there is a trade-off between enabling parents to shelter children from things they deem to be a bad influence and denying children the ability to be exposed to things that are necessary to develop a mature understanding of the world.
I say enabling parents to shelter their children from bad influence because that is all this law does. There is nothing saying that kids can't get their parents to go out and rent or buy these games for them. Just as parents are free let their kids watch Terminator 2 as they deem fit, parents would still be able to buy their children a copy of GTA 3. I realize that some parents take things too far, but we need to realize that children have varying levels of maturity, and what is appropriate for one kid is not necessarily appropriate for another. Unfortunately, the best way to take this into account is to leave the decision up to the kids, which is clearly an imperfect solution considering the dogmatic, self aggrandizing idiocy that all too many adults seem to think passes as raising children. I don't think there's really a better way, though.
This law isn't saying that kids shouldn't be allowed to play some video games. It's saying that kids should have supervision in some areas. As long as the law is made with that in mind, I don't think it's a bad thing. It's the mindset that children need to be sheltered that scares me - in the same way that we need to be exposed to pathogens to develop a healthy immune system, I think kids need to be exposed to the harsher side of life in order to learn how to deal with it. It's just that we still need to take care of them to some extent.
All communist countries lie about their accomplishments
Nicaragua wasn't communist in the sense of Cuba or the USSR. I'm not talking about governmental systems here, I'm talking about economic systems. Even then, capitalist countries aren't completely honest, too. Admittedly, democracy seems to help keep corruption levels down, but that's a function of democracy and totalitarianism, not capitalism and communism. I will also agree that communist countries tend to be totalitarian, but using that as a justification for blanket statements is just as irrational as blindly following every statistic a government publishes.
We won't know the truth of Cuba until communism falls, just as we didn't know the truth about the Soviets until they fell.
We can't know with 100% certanity, but our concept of life behind the iron curtain in the USSR didn't prove to be all that different from the fact. About the only difference I see is that we now know that the USSR's technology level wasn't as high as the Cold War hype held it to be.
Efficient countries create surplus capital (even Marx agreed) and in capitalist ones, they end up making more and more until all are satisfied. Communist ones are inefficient and try to satisfy everybody but year after year, they make less and less. This fact is what makes the leadership eventually flinch and change from communist to capitalist societies.
I think I mentioned that in my original post. But economic efficiency is not a good measure of public health, since it includes not just things like the amount of food, but also things such as the number of TV's a people owns, and it tends to measure only efficiency, not equity. No, places like Cuba didn't have the number of fatiron computers and such that we have, but a country's ability to produce enough food for its people is not so directly related into GDP. Again, look at Nicaragua. Since it went capitalist, its GDP has increased while its ability to take care of its citizens has decreased markedly.
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Amazing guitarist. Think it was CTS that he had, though it may have been tendonitis. He is kind of rare among guitarists who get RSI in that he got it in his right hand (he says it was from fingerpicks) rather than on the left hand, which is usually the one doing all the funky contortions. (reverse left and right if you'd prefer I talk in a southpaw-centric mode).
I don't think it's that you can't get RSI from playing musical instruments such as guitar; I think it's just that there are very very very few people who spend eight hours a day playing a guitar the way people spend eight hours a day clicking away at a keyboard.
The fuel on rockets used to put people into space is some of the weakest rocket fuel around, if I remember right. That's a GOOD THING. If we powered the Space Shuttle (or future equivalent) with something akin to the fuel on, say, a Sidewinder missile, the accelerations involved would probably give us problems with dead astronauts.
/is/ still room for increases in power. As a recent Slashdot article pointed out, the accelerations your normal Joe/Jane experiences on a rollercoaster are much greater than the kinds of forces astronauts have to deal with.
Granted, there
I do C++ programming with C libraries and API's all the time. It's not like C++ can't interface with C libraries. . .
If you absolutely need to have it be OO, it's not too hard to write wrapper classes for all the functions you'll be doing. For OpenGL work I have a few classes of that kind that I use a lot - a camera class, for example.
I bet he could play MP3's too.
Unfortunately, due to an old mishap involving an previous owner intalling Windows XP on R2-D2, the poor little droid has been left crippled, unable to play any audio format other than Windows Media.
Typing the keystroke sequences you listed does different things in different programs. For example, Alt-A is the standard keystroke for "select all" and does exactly that if you try it in Netscape. In emacs, alt-A does something completely different.
There is no keystroke standardization in X. I don't even think X itself does anything to trap keystrokes whatsoever - just windowmanagers and any other programs you have running. 's one of the most *ahem* beautiful *ahem* things about GNU/Linux - absolutely NO user interface standardization, and no way for a user to create it without modifying the source code to every piece of program he or she has.
It means whatever you want it to mean. I seem to remember it being some sort of bastardization of "Jinkies" from Scooby-Doo, but it could just as easily be a real word with a real definition that I heard once that slipped into my vocabulary.
FAQs are commonplace - they've been around for at least a decade, and it'd be pretty damn hard to get a copyright for the idea of something that has probably been around since before you got plugged into the Internet.
Much better to write an OAQ (Often Asked Questions) document, since nobody's done that before. Then you can get your lousy copyright.
READ THE DAMN ARTICLE BEFORE YOU POST IT ON THE MAIN PAGE!
This court case is so banal it doesn't even deserve mention. The plaintiff was suing the defendant on the grounds that it basically ripped off the idea of having a FAQ at all, which is about as asinine as having one publisher sue another for putting a synopsis on the back of a book. It wasn't even over whether one FAQ was a copy of the other - they didn't cover the same questions or use the same answers to those questions that were the same.
What's next, Slashdot posting an article about a court ruling that it is indeed legal for everyone to write books about how to use computer software without paying royalties to O'Rielly?
One thing to look for is a program with no slavish devotion to any one language
SO true. For example, I've been working in perl recently, and have discovered the falsity of the statement that just about the only difference between most languages is syntax. It's amazing how minor changes in how a programming language handles variable scopes can fuck you up if you aren't expecting it. . .
'cos I'll be jiggered if I can figure out how to get any international characters out of my Linux box w/ a US 101-key.
The practice of shifting requirements up until the ship date is one that we, as professionals, have a duty to curb.
This seems like an area where software engineers could take a hint from building contractors. Once the construction begins, they aren't too willing to change the architecture. The customer had their chance to set the requirements when the plans were being drawn out, and if they can't make up their minds, tough shit.
If you want one that covers those culprits, read Rapid Development by the same author - it talks about the management end of software engineering. Code Complete is meant to cover the programming end.
I had that problem, too, so I had to give my roommate's account on my computer a disk quota. . .
What I really don't get was the way he would download piles of shit that he didn't even like, like boy bands.
Ask whether the course is theory or application oriented. In my experience, there are two approaches to teaching computer science out there.
The first is what I call the "academic" method. You're going to learn lots of theory under this method, but are left up to your own means to figure out specific tools such as the Windows API.
The second I like to call the Trade School approach - it's probably what's being taught at your local community college, and it's pretty much the opposite. You'll be an expert at VB by the time you get out, but (from what I can see) will probably also be left without any concept of things like functional programming or automata theory or what have you.
A catalog can tell you without a doubt whether or not you're going to get the Trade School approach - there will be a separate class for every programming language the department ever uses, and most every class will look like it's trained towards giving you job skills. However, there are a lot of CS departments that look like they are academically oriented when they really aren't. You'll sign up for a course called Computer Graphics that claims in the catalog to go through the basics of how to really do graphics programming, but when you finish the course, you'll realize that everything you just learned over the past four months you could have just as easily picked up with a few days of free time and a copy of "Teach Yourself OpenGL Game Programming In [lessons | ]" and don't have a clue what the math behind perspective projection looks like. (My experience.)
Decide whether you're looking to be a grunt coder, a software engineer, an academic or researcher, or a Web Developer/NTadmin/networking guy/etc. If you're looking for the latter, don't even waste your time with college unless you really honestly want a bachelor's degree or a liberal arts education or what have you, because with most of those a trade school and some certifications will give you every bit as good of a preparation for your carreer as a BS, and you'll probably still have to get the certificates after you have your BS anyway. For a software engineer or academic, go for the academic approach. If you want to be a grunt coder, you can probably get away with any of the above, so pick which one looks more fun.
30% of the settlement, or an equal share, which ever is less.
That's right up there with "Heads, I win. Tails, you lose."
I got mine at 24" x 36" for about 6 bucks by downloading an extremely hi-res image of the nebula and printing it on the plotter at work.
Good point about learned behavior. The researcher in question might do well to see if he can study the meowing habits of stray cats, which presumaby wouldn't have learned to meow towards humans' likings as well due to less exposure.
But your concept of natural selection is bunk. Natural selection has just about nothing to do with living and dying except insofar as it assists reproduction.
If we look at mechanisms of evolution and take into account reproduction and not just survival, there is plenty of room to see how humans could unconsciously affect the evolution of cats. The situation that comes to mind for me is a family with only one cat. If they find that first cat pleasing to be around in some way, they will be far more likely to get more cats, thus providing the first one with potential mates (assuming they don't fix their pets).
Now spread that out over 5,000 years of feline domestication. Noticeable evolution has happened in far fewer generations than that before. . .
Unless a few of the unimplemented language features have uses that nobody has thought of (not entirely unlikely since this is the first compiler I know of that supports all of them), I doubt it will make a huge difference for most coders. C++ programmers have gotten along fine without them thus far.
However, it is nice to see that they have made it in. Maybe now other groups will start imlementing the full language, too.
No, because a lot of the job of a good teacher is seeing where the student is getting caught up and thinking of new ways to explain something so that it makes sense to the student. I think we're a long way from creating software that can recognize how an individual student learns best and create analogies for how something works based on a particular student's prior knowledge.
If we ever get to the point that primary school class sizes are in the area of 200 students, we're in deep shit, computers or not.
the law is to protect everyone
With alcohol, I would agree that 21 is too late
Considering that I know more adults who drink and drive, and considering that I have yet to see a cutoff age where people who drink stop doing stupid shit when they drink, I'd say if you take those two together and add to it that the world is getting overpopulated, the only real option as far as national alcohol policy is to replace the ethanol in all alcoholic products with methanol.
Wow. Now I'm getting profane. I like it.
Fuck right, motherfucker. Shit on the man's head and let Linux dominate the world, bee-yatch! WORLD DOMINATION, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!
Granted, in college, there is plenty of use for them (Mathematica in calculus classes, for example, really helps with visualizing what is going on for things like multi-variable equations and vector fields).
However, it has been shown that kids don't learn any better with computers than they do without with the way they are applied in most primary and high-school education settings. In essence, computers in the classroom is just a huge waste of money and a distraction.
You've got a good point there. And people could say, "well, 18 is the standard age for stuff like this." That's an asinine argument, though because the USA departed from that on the driving age (16, 14 in some circumstances if I remember right) and the drinking age (which is ludicrously high). I'd say that for the most part, 15 is a good age. OTOH, I'm sure many many adults wouldn't agree in the case of games like GTA3, where you can go pick up prostitutes and have sex with them in the back of your car.
I agree that limiting stuff on TV too far is going overboard, and we need to recognize that there is a trade-off between enabling parents to shelter children from things they deem to be a bad influence and denying children the ability to be exposed to things that are necessary to develop a mature understanding of the world.
I say enabling parents to shelter their children from bad influence because that is all this law does. There is nothing saying that kids can't get their parents to go out and rent or buy these games for them. Just as parents are free let their kids watch Terminator 2 as they deem fit, parents would still be able to buy their children a copy of GTA 3. I realize that some parents take things too far, but we need to realize that children have varying levels of maturity, and what is appropriate for one kid is not necessarily appropriate for another. Unfortunately, the best way to take this into account is to leave the decision up to the kids, which is clearly an imperfect solution considering the dogmatic, self aggrandizing idiocy that all too many adults seem to think passes as raising children. I don't think there's really a better way, though.
This law isn't saying that kids shouldn't be allowed to play some video games. It's saying that kids should have supervision in some areas. As long as the law is made with that in mind, I don't think it's a bad thing. It's the mindset that children need to be sheltered that scares me - in the same way that we need to be exposed to pathogens to develop a healthy immune system, I think kids need to be exposed to the harsher side of life in order to learn how to deal with it. It's just that we still need to take care of them to some extent.
All communist countries lie about their accomplishments
Nicaragua wasn't communist in the sense of Cuba or the USSR. I'm not talking about governmental systems here, I'm talking about economic systems. Even then, capitalist countries aren't completely honest, too. Admittedly, democracy seems to help keep corruption levels down, but that's a function of democracy and totalitarianism, not capitalism and communism. I will also agree that communist countries tend to be totalitarian, but using that as a justification for blanket statements is just as irrational as blindly following every statistic a government publishes.
We won't know the truth of Cuba until communism falls, just as we didn't know the truth about the Soviets until they fell.
We can't know with 100% certanity, but our concept of life behind the iron curtain in the USSR didn't prove to be all that different from the fact. About the only difference I see is that we now know that the USSR's technology level wasn't as high as the Cold War hype held it to be.
Efficient countries create surplus capital (even Marx agreed) and in capitalist ones, they end up making more and more until all are satisfied. Communist ones are inefficient and try to satisfy everybody but year after year, they make less and less. This fact is what makes the leadership eventually flinch and change from communist to capitalist societies.
I think I mentioned that in my original post. But economic efficiency is not a good measure of public health, since it includes not just things like the amount of food, but also things such as the number of TV's a people owns, and it tends to measure only efficiency, not equity. No, places like Cuba didn't have the number of fatiron computers and such that we have, but a country's ability to produce enough food for its people is not so directly related into GDP. Again, look at Nicaragua. Since it went capitalist, its GDP has increased while its ability to take care of its citizens has decreased markedly.