Typical testing for computer skills would have us believe so. Most of the questions on them, I've found, are testing you for how much of an object model you've memorized, or how many niggling UI details you've memorized, or how many levels deep on a menu hierarchy of a particular frontend you've memorized. They focus on knowing jargon and/or memorization of specific programs, rather than what is really worthwhile: the ability to think in a useful way, and to learn these details on the fly.
That's why I maintain that certifications like MCSE or A+ are worse than meaningless.
And soon, it appears, sociology degrees will be too. I don't beleive for one second that they've written a program that can follow thinking and decide whether it's valid. People will essentially learn to feed the program the text patterns it's looking for, get their diplomas, and wonder what went wrong.
The difference between republicans and democrats is how they want to spend your money.
Also in how they want to collect that money. Democrats want to collect it directly from you (taxes). Republicans want to collect it from your descendants (debt). This tends to garner Republicans more votes, since the vast majority of your descendants can't vote yet.
I'm no expert on getting falling-down drunk, but doesn't vodka have a very definite and unavoidable (even if, like me, you wish to) flavor? I thought that flinch you mentioned was not due to alcohol content, but to awful flavor. (It is with me, anyway.) Do a drunk's senses get so suppressed that even this flavor is indiscernable from water?
Right now, it makes no sense to make something repairable. It is cheaper to build something that can't be fixed and throw it away. When we get very distributed manufacturing however, things will be built with only one or two raw materials. Things will be built so they are easy to assemble. It would make sense to build a new heating element for your coffee pot.
I think you have that exactly backwards. It is only the high cost of manufacturing a new instance of something (above a certain price limit) that lets us repair anything at all now. If we had make-anything machines, we would not repair anything. We would simply feed the broken thing into the machine's materials hopper (perhaps with a lil' something extra in case of lost parts) and tell it to make a new one. New lamps for old -- literally.
N.B.: If the make-anything machine uses a high enough amount of energy, this could still be uneconomical and your repair scenario might make more sense. Alternately, you could consider the re-creation process to be a kind of ultimate repair.
Waste would go down.
You got that much right. In fact, garbage dumps might become valuable mines of material.
Stuff like "Access is stupid." followed by a brief explanation of something it does that's completely broken and how that's why the bizarre thing I'm about to do in my code was necessary.
I have never understood people who have these problems with cell phones.
Can't find it? Easy: keep the damn thing on you! I assume you take it with you in some way when you leave the house...keep doing that when you're at home. In my case, that means my pocket. I have yet to misplace my phone for even a minute. Over several years. How difficult, eh?
Always running out of charge? How about plugging it in to charge when you drop it from your pocket (or whatever)? In my case, that means plugging it in when going to bed (along with dumping all the keys, wallet, etc., and in the same spot). I have yet to run out of charge. Over several years. Gee, amazing, huh?
...show the characters not in your national character set as a different foreground/background color combination. Something even the colorblind could make out, like invert colors or invert-and-shift-a-bit or something.
"Geek" is a way of being. Sere here for a description of what makes you a geek (or hacker, in the language of this lexicon). People don't become geeks because they want to be part of the geek crowd. They become geeks because certain things appeal to them.
Q: Why should you avoid running over a bicycle-riding lawyer?
A: It might be your bicycle.
Someone please explain to me...
on
Today in P2P
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· Score: 1
...how BitTorrent is inherently better than, say, eDonkey?
They seem like much the same things, with the exception that if the guy hosting the.torrent file drops it, that file ceases to be findable till someone else hosts it. Whereas the eDonkey file is findable as long as anyone has any of it shared. This single-point-of-failure seems like a major weakness for BitTorrent, doesn't it?
(Oh, and the torrents can be sets of files rather than singletons, which is a nice-to-have.)
So why is it that everyone's so gaga over BitTorrent and pooh-poohs eDonkey?
nick v. 1. Steal. To nick something is to steal it. Likewise, something you buy from a dodgy bloke over a pint has quite probably been nicked. In a strange paradox, if a person is described as nicked, it means they've been arrested and if a person is in the nick, they're in prison. 2. Condition. Commonly used in the phrase "in good nick", the nick of something is the sort of state of repair it's in. Seen in contexts like "Think I'll buy that car; it seems in pretty good nick".
one would be a temporary copy, the other permanent.
Nothing is permanent. Eventually the heat death of the universe will occur, and we won't be able to play our libraries any more. Therefore, they're temporary.
I'd like to see any of you sit through a silent film from the 20s
I don't "sit through" them -- I watch them. (You might get a bit more enjoyment if you tried it that way too.)
I know about 100 of you will respond
Step one in controlling Slashdotters: predict that they'll do what you don't want them to do.
and claim that you love silent films
We don't love them because they're silent. We love them because they're good. (And, no, not all of them are.)
and have the worlds greatest collection of radio plays
Actually, I wouldn't even know where to get those. But I bet a lot of them are great.
I say to you that you're full of shit.
If by "shit", you mean "appreciation for quality", then sure. (And it sounds like that might in fact be the general case with you.)
A word to the wise: technology does not great art make.
Unless you're telling me that Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus", being silent and in black and white, is therefore not as good as Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Jingle All The Way", which was of course in glorious multichannel digital sound and full color, then try to think before posting the brilliant argument that "old stuff sucks".
If, on the other hand, that is what you're saying, then...well...go on down to Wal*Mart. I hear they have loads of inexpensive DVDs with high-quality movies on them (which is to say, they have clear sound and color).
How true. EA is one of the originals from wayyy back. Check out this history of the company and you'll see that they were once the good guys. Just look at the list of utter classics they published:
The bricks can be assembled "in a big pile of bricks or it could be a one-dimensional wall of bricks," which could make maintenance even easier.
Last time I checked, walls were at least two-dimensional. Though, I'll grant you, a one-dimensional wall would be easier to maintain than the two- variety, unless you want the things to stay in contact the whole time.
Called CIB (Collective Intelligent Bricks)
Borg what now?
CIB is an effort to make highly reliable storage systems from less-reliable standard components, said Robert Gardner, a research center staff member and co-leader of the development project at IBM.
<spade>Oh yeah, I liked that concept the first time...when it was called RAID.</spade>
The storage units are literally designed as square bricks that can be assembled into large, Rubik's Cube-like blocks.
They're literally designed? As opposed to figuratively?
"Square bricks". Again, number-of-dimensions problem. I would think they would be cubes.
Individual bricks can have varying amounts of storage capacity of up to 80 GB.
Wow...80 whole gig, huh? Thanks, IBM, former leading hard drive manufacturer in an era of 250 gig hard drives!
The bricks can be assembled into systems containing terabytes or even petabytes of storage capacity.
Double wow. At 80GB max per cube, you're going to need a warehouse to hold a petabyte. (13,000+ cubes, anyone?)
Rather than using typical wire prongs or plugs, the bricks are connected with a novel technology called "capacitive coupling," in which one block is mated to the next through a conductive plate.
All the benefits of plugs, but without that pesky stability of mechanical connection! Bump one with your elbow? Your elbow hurts less, and the cube goes crashing to the floor.
The laboratory model displayed by IBM used aluminum cooling jackets to circulate water through stacks of individual bricks. The water would pass through an external heat exchanger on a building roof or in an outdoor tank, much like an air-conditioning system, he said.
Uh-huh. So much for that ease of installation and maintenance and low cost and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
...to use help files? Or Google?
Typical testing for computer skills would have us believe so. Most of the questions on them, I've found, are testing you for how much of an object model you've memorized, or how many niggling UI details you've memorized, or how many levels deep on a menu hierarchy of a particular frontend you've memorized. They focus on knowing jargon and/or memorization of specific programs, rather than what is really worthwhile: the ability to think in a useful way, and to learn these details on the fly.
That's why I maintain that certifications like MCSE or A+ are worse than meaningless.
And soon, it appears, sociology degrees will be too. I don't beleive for one second that they've written a program that can follow thinking and decide whether it's valid. People will essentially learn to feed the program the text patterns it's looking for, get their diplomas, and wonder what went wrong.
And people thought it was silly to have that high school team in on the DARPA Grand Challenge.
...you have no sense of humor?
I'm no expert on getting falling-down drunk, but doesn't vodka have a very definite and unavoidable (even if, like me, you wish to) flavor? I thought that flinch you mentioned was not due to alcohol content, but to awful flavor. (It is with me, anyway.) Do a drunk's senses get so suppressed that even this flavor is indiscernable from water?
Or do some people just not taste it?
I think you have that exactly backwards. It is only the high cost of manufacturing a new instance of something (above a certain price limit) that lets us repair anything at all now. If we had make-anything machines, we would not repair anything. We would simply feed the broken thing into the machine's materials hopper (perhaps with a lil' something extra in case of lost parts) and tell it to make a new one. New lamps for old -- literally.
N.B.: If the make-anything machine uses a high enough amount of energy, this could still be uneconomical and your repair scenario might make more sense. Alternately, you could consider the re-creation process to be a kind of ultimate repair.
You got that much right. In fact, garbage dumps might become valuable mines of material.
Stuff like "Access is stupid." followed by a brief explanation of something it does that's completely broken and how that's why the bizarre thing I'm about to do in my code was necessary.
I have never understood people who have these problems with cell phones.
Can't find it? Easy: keep the damn thing on you! I assume you take it with you in some way when you leave the house...keep doing that when you're at home. In my case, that means my pocket. I have yet to misplace my phone for even a minute. Over several years. How difficult, eh?
Always running out of charge? How about plugging it in to charge when you drop it from your pocket (or whatever)? In my case, that means plugging it in when going to bed (along with dumping all the keys, wallet, etc., and in the same spot). I have yet to run out of charge. Over several years. Gee, amazing, huh?
...show the characters not in your national character set as a different foreground/background color combination. Something even the colorblind could make out, like invert colors or invert-and-shift-a-bit or something.
...to put everyone who's never used P2P in a building they're not allowed to leave, and call the rest of the world "jail".
Similar concepts have been envisioned.
"Geek" is a way of being. Sere here for a description of what makes you a geek (or hacker, in the language of this lexicon). People don't become geeks because they want to be part of the geek crowd. They become geeks because certain things appeal to them.
Screw that. I want cash.
Q: Why should you avoid running over a bicycle-riding lawyer?
A: It might be your bicycle.
...how BitTorrent is inherently better than, say, eDonkey?
.torrent file drops it, that file ceases to be findable till someone else hosts it. Whereas the eDonkey file is findable as long as anyone has any of it shared. This single-point-of-failure seems like a major weakness for BitTorrent, doesn't it?
They seem like much the same things, with the exception that if the guy hosting the
(Oh, and the torrents can be sets of files rather than singletons, which is a nice-to-have.)
So why is it that everyone's so gaga over BitTorrent and pooh-poohs eDonkey?
Logo:
...fantasy worlds often pay handsomely.
I'm sure the AACS people (or whoever gets the gig) will clean up on whatever gets put in, ultimately futile though it may be.
Henceforth, all numeric variables shall be of type BigNum.
A word to the wise: technology does not great art make.
Unless you're telling me that Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus", being silent and in black and white, is therefore not as good as Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Jingle All The Way", which was of course in glorious multichannel digital sound and full color, then try to think before posting the brilliant argument that "old stuff sucks".
If, on the other hand, that is what you're saying, then...well...go on down to Wal*Mart. I hear they have loads of inexpensive DVDs with high-quality movies on them (which is to say, they have clear sound and color).
It was a joke, dude.
...and I'd like to recieve your newsletter.
I wish we could get a sizable chunk of society to go along with this. I'd be advocating it twenty-four seven -- er, twenty-eight six.
- Archon (1983)
- M.U.L.E. (1983)
- The Seven Cities Of Gold (1984)
- Pinball Construction Set (1985)
Cornerstones of my childhood, all.And now they're acting like Wal*Mart. Guh.
"Square bricks". Again, number-of-dimensions problem. I would think they would be cubes. Wow...80 whole gig, huh? Thanks, IBM, former leading hard drive manufacturer in an era of 250 gig hard drives! Double wow. At 80GB max per cube, you're going to need a warehouse to hold a petabyte. (13,000+ cubes, anyone?) All the benefits of plugs, but without that pesky stability of mechanical connection! Bump one with your elbow? Your elbow hurts less, and the cube goes crashing to the floor. Uh-huh. So much for that ease of installation and maintenance and low cost and whatnot.
RIAA And MPAA Team To Crack Down On Secret Piracy Tool: "Copy" Command