Use your excreta to enter the amazing world of the dung beetle. Much more basic but just as fascinating for some. If you are ever caught short in the open, says New Scientist, turn the accident into an opportunity by lingering nearby and watching what happens. "It won't take long for the beetles to appear, scuttle boldly up to your deposit and begin rolling balls of it away, head-butting it and pushing it with their forelegs."
...or rather out. I shall videotape the event and post it on this thread shortly. Keep posted! Science rocks.
6% of fresh fruit consumers have made the switch from PCs to Macs. An additional 7 percent of the apple eaters said they are planning to dump their old PC for an Apple machine; it's not clear, however from the results mentioned whether there's a strong causal relationship here.
They found out that you can either hire a domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire an imported techie for 25-35k/yr.
As noted in a footnote to the article), U.S. employers *must* pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.
In my experience the BCIS (formerly INS) has pretty stringent about these requirements and as a result companies end up paying H1 workers the *same* amount as they would pay a domestic worker. Please do the research or atleast RTFA.
Under the H1-B program, U.S. employers must pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over. The foreign worker must have at least a bachelor's degree or the equivalent
Is this a side effect of the fact that less Americans are pursuing higher education? A significant number of people in the software profession (particularly software development) tend to be fresh graduates, and younger than other fields (lesser experience). Is this group of youngsters showing a statistically significant drop off in enrollment for Bachelor's/Graduate study?
I don't know...and don't have any firm figures to back up the claims in paragraph above....but it certainly seems so from anecdotal evidence (Universities facing economic crunch, due to lack of researchers/students).
If the number of Americans pursuing higher study is indeed dropping off, that could be one of the factors leading to the present situation as described in the summary.
Again, I'm just brainstorming here from personal experience...there are bigger factors at work here than just 65K people "taking the jaabs away".
Bill Gates world's most spammed man CNN
and Rediff are
reporting that Bill Gates gets 4
million e-mails a day, making him world's most spammed person. However,
unlike lesser mortals, he has an entire department dedicated to filter
unsolicited e-mails and only a few of them actually get through to his
inbox, said Steve Ballmer at a
Microsoft Research event in Singapore. Other sources are also reporting
the breaking news story.
There are some channels I automatically tend to skip over, because I know there'll be some crappy "reality" shit on it.
Maybe there are some good shows on, but I've learnt to limit myself to Comedy Central (Southpark, John Stewart), G4TechTV (Screensavers), Scifi (occasional Star Trek TOS), and Discovery (Mythbusters, BIG!), after being barraged by commercials about these "popular" TV shows that Joe and Jane Sixpack wait to watch all week.
The goal is to make it possible for people to express their ideas in the same way they think about them.
That's about as far as I got. I guess he didn't really express his ideas in the same way that I wanted to think about them.
Which nicely illustrates the point that there's always a "semantic gap" associated with natural languages, which builds up because people have different ways of thinking. The semantic gap is even wider when one of the entities being communicated to happens to be a machine. There's a reason why traditional programming languages are precise and exact...it's so that the gap is reduced - the machine will do exactly what you tell it to do...even then we have a disconnect between what the programmer's thinking, and the code that he's writing.
Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier Posted by
michael
on Tuesday December 02, @05:06PM from the sweetness dept. megas writes "Max Lyons has just posted on his site what seems to be the first 1 Gigapixel picture, created from 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite. According to Max, he has 'been unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.'"
We have contributed more lines of open source code than any other entity on the planet except for Cal Berkeley
The WHOLE solar system.
xfree86 is *still* "sexually explicit"
on
MSN Search Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Several readers pointed out that xfree86 isn't blocked by the beta MSN search engine, as it was earlier...well I think it still is.
The difference is that the defalts "Safesearch" settings are set to "Moderate - Filter sexually explicit images only">. I changed it to "Strict - Filter sexually explicit text and image results">, I got this message for xfree86
The search xfree86 may return sexually explicit content.
We didn't return results because your SafeSearch setting is set to Strict. To get results using the current search, change your SafeSearch setting.
The main differences I see between the machines in the US and in India is that the machines over in India are *simple* and completely *hardware* based. Also look at the graphic of the machines (in several areas candidate names were replaced by well-known party symbols to cater to the illiterate population, which the picture doesn't show).
In the US, on the other hand, there's been a great deal of corporate lobbying to introduce *complex* machines running a complete *OS* (for Chrissakes!) with some machines even sporting a connection to the Intarweb. Their main argument for these "features" seems to be that they can be used easily by disabled people. It sounds pretty hollow, when you see that most people spouting these justifications either stand to profit from the elections (Diebold, Microsoft) or are getting paid to push them (politicians). And again, there are a zillion other ways to make the elections more "disabled friendly" without having to install the entire OS on it.
Granted, the elections in India were not completely without incident, but for a democracy with an electorate of 600 million people, a million voting machines and 543 constituencies, they were pretty darn effective.
4. Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day's election before bedtime. It's less important in other countries, where people don't mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed.
I never really understood *why* people in the US expect to know results "before bedtime". Do they really? Or is it just a sensationalist media creation, which tries to portray elections like a "game" - this was even more evident in this year's election coverage - with CNN's bank of wide screens and "more projections after the break".
Almost every other country I know goes through the tedious process of counting (and recounting) votes (electronic and/or paper based) and it's about 5-7 days before the results are known for sure.
What is the real need to know results on the same day (especially at the cost of accuracy), and when we have a few months at hand before major changes are affected anyway?
...I've increasingly come to believe Southpark and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart offer a more realistic and balanced view of current affairs.
It's a pity most people still consider Fox25 the "most reliable news source". And maybe it is too...as long as you're mostly concerned with the social lives of celebrities and your neighborhood pet accidents.
The technology uses light impulses to detect video recording devices. A second component is an audio watermarking system.
...that the "detection mechanism" consists of a bad tempered "theater cop" who synchronizes his eye movement with the light impulses to scan the theater for cameras. When a camera is detected by the system, it triggers off a series of unique 4-letter word sequences which serves as the audio watermarking component of the mechanism.
how do you get stuff off of your computer and onto your TV, stereo, etc.?
you insensitive clod!. But on a more serious note...I find it very convenient to use one setup for all my "entertainment needs".
A TV Tuner card and capture software nicely double up as TV, VCR and (albeit rudimentary) TiVo, while a 5.1 surround sound system provides the desired audio capability. Don't need no fancy-schmancy "bridging PC/home entertainment" crap when everything's a PC.
The only thing lacking in my setup is a way to streaming audio to my car....a CD burner serves the purpose in the interim (Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pack of CDs riding in your back pocked:))
I think there's a bright future there for games based on these new properties as well as original Star Wars games like a new real-time strategy PC game.
...I'll stick to playing my digdug.com, prince.exe and nibbles.bas till they come up with something really worthwhile.
Took the CS Subject AGRE
on
IT Literacy Test
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So has anyone out there taken a test like this? Did it seem to measure critical thinking and problem solving skills?
To answer your question....I took ETS's CS Subject AGRE 4 years back after completing my Bachelors....and found it pretty interesting.
The exam webpage (no time to dig it up) lists a few CS categories that they'll test on, and happily, these include all the core areas of CS. From memory, the list goes roughly as follows:
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Algorithms
Languages and Compilers
Computer Architecture
Logic
Databases
All questions were multiple choice like the regular GRE test (the pattern has changed since), but I liked the fact that they focussed on the "core" CS subjects, which every Bachelor's CS course should cover.
New buzzwords like "IT" frighten me....hope they continue to adhere to fundamental knowledge than buzzwordish software/peripheral areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds more like TV Guide, rather than content itself.
6% of fresh fruit consumers have made the switch from PCs to Macs. An additional 7 percent of the apple eaters said they are planning to dump their old PC for an Apple machine; it's not clear, however from the results mentioned whether there's a strong causal relationship here.
Can you hear me n*BOOM*
As noted in a footnote to the article), U.S. employers *must* pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.
In my experience the BCIS (formerly INS) has pretty stringent about these requirements and as a result companies end up paying H1 workers the *same* amount as they would pay a domestic worker. Please do the research or atleast RTFA.
Is this a side effect of the fact that less Americans are pursuing higher education? A significant number of people in the software profession (particularly software development) tend to be fresh graduates, and younger than other fields (lesser experience). Is this group of youngsters showing a statistically significant drop off in enrollment for Bachelor's/Graduate study?
I don't know...and don't have any firm figures to back up the claims in paragraph above....but it certainly seems so from anecdotal evidence (Universities facing economic crunch, due to lack of researchers/students).
If the number of Americans pursuing higher study is indeed dropping off, that could be one of the factors leading to the present situation as described in the summary.
Again, I'm just brainstorming here from personal experience...there are bigger factors at work here than just 65K people "taking the jaabs away".
sarcasm
Bill Gates world's most spammed man
CNN and Rediff are reporting that Bill Gates gets 4 million e-mails a day, making him world's most spammed person. However, unlike lesser mortals, he has an entire department dedicated to filter unsolicited e-mails and only a few of them actually get through to his inbox, said Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft Research event in Singapore. Other sources are also reporting the breaking news story.
Maybe there are some good shows on, but I've learnt to limit myself to Comedy Central (Southpark, John Stewart), G4TechTV (Screensavers), Scifi (occasional Star Trek TOS), and Discovery (Mythbusters, BIG!), after being barraged by commercials about these "popular" TV shows that Joe and Jane Sixpack wait to watch all week.
dated Aug 2 here. Apparently the preview version has been available to CrossOver Office customers for a while.
Large scale deployment of fiber is quite likely to lead to "geysers of raw sewage" if not properly contained.
That's about as far as I got. I guess he didn't really express his ideas in the same way that I wanted to think about them.
Which nicely illustrates the point that there's always a "semantic gap" associated with natural languages, which builds up because people have different ways of thinking. The semantic gap is even wider when one of the entities being communicated to happens to be a machine. There's a reason why traditional programming languages are precise and exact...it's so that the gap is reduced - the machine will do exactly what you tell it to do...even then we have a disconnect between what the programmer's thinking, and the code that he's writing.
Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier
Posted by michael on Tuesday December 02, @05:06PM
from the sweetness dept.
megas writes "Max Lyons has just posted on his site what seems to be the first 1 Gigapixel picture, created from 196 separate photographs taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera, and then stitched together into one seamless composite. According to Max, he has 'been unable to find any record of a higher resolution photographic (i.e. non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.'"
Found the string "Deepz0neSound Forge 4.5" though for some reason I was unable to copy/paste it to this textbox.
The WHOLE solar system.
The difference is that the defalts "Safesearch" settings are set to "Moderate - Filter sexually explicit images only">. I changed it to "Strict - Filter sexually explicit text and image results">, I got this message for xfree86
The search xfree86 may return sexually explicit content.
We didn't return results because your SafeSearch setting is set to Strict. To get results using the current search, change your SafeSearch setting.
"Starting this week and lasting through the end of the season, you can get the #1-selling lawsuit game for an unbelievable $29.95!"
The main differences I see between the machines in the US and in India is that the machines over in India are *simple* and completely *hardware* based. Also look at the graphic of the machines (in several areas candidate names were replaced by well-known party symbols to cater to the illiterate population, which the picture doesn't show).
In the US, on the other hand, there's been a great deal of corporate lobbying to introduce *complex* machines running a complete *OS* (for Chrissakes!) with some machines even sporting a connection to the Intarweb. Their main argument for these "features" seems to be that they can be used easily by disabled people. It sounds pretty hollow, when you see that most people spouting these justifications either stand to profit from the elections (Diebold, Microsoft) or are getting paid to push them (politicians). And again, there are a zillion other ways to make the elections more "disabled friendly" without having to install the entire OS on it.
Granted, the elections in India were not completely without incident, but for a democracy with an electorate of 600 million people, a million voting machines and 543 constituencies, they were pretty darn effective.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed.
I never really understood *why* people in the US expect to know results "before bedtime". Do they really? Or is it just a sensationalist media creation, which tries to portray elections like a "game" - this was even more evident in this year's election coverage - with CNN's bank of wide screens and "more projections after the break".
Almost every other country I know goes through the tedious process of counting (and recounting) votes (electronic and/or paper based) and it's about 5-7 days before the results are known for sure.
What is the real need to know results on the same day (especially at the cost of accuracy), and when we have a few months at hand before major changes are affected anyway?
It's a pity most people still consider Fox25 the "most reliable news source". And maybe it is too...as long as you're mostly concerned with the social lives of celebrities and your neighborhood pet accidents.
you insensitive clod!. But on a more serious note...I find it very convenient to use one setup for all my "entertainment needs".
A TV Tuner card and capture software nicely double up as TV, VCR and (albeit rudimentary) TiVo, while a 5.1 surround sound system provides the desired audio capability. Don't need no fancy-schmancy "bridging PC/home entertainment" crap when everything's a PC.
The only thing lacking in my setup is a way to streaming audio to my car....a CD burner serves the purpose in the interim (Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pack of CDs riding in your back pocked :))
To answer your question....I took ETS's CS Subject AGRE 4 years back after completing my Bachelors....and found it pretty interesting.
The exam webpage (no time to dig it up) lists a few CS categories that they'll test on, and happily, these include all the core areas of CS. From memory, the list goes roughly as follows:
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Algorithms
Languages and Compilers
Computer Architecture
Logic
Databases
All questions were multiple choice like the regular GRE test (the pattern has changed since), but I liked the fact that they focussed on the "core" CS subjects, which every Bachelor's CS course should cover.
New buzzwords like "IT" frighten me....hope they continue to adhere to fundamental knowledge than buzzwordish software/peripheral areas.