The cost of education really has sky-rocketed. Perhaps a study or two needs to be done on the real cost of education, because to hear tell, the educators aren't getting big raises, and this even occurs at schools with no need for capital expansion. So where is all this additional money going?
Perhaps state funded schools should need to justify every increase in their tuition, and certainly business projects, such as stadiums and sports teams, should be excised out of the report (ie, they need to be self-funding)
Some have stated that Win8 is stated to be a failure already as far as x86 machines go, based on the fact that companies waited 10 years on XP and skipped Vista, and are only now moving to W7. Companies won't be going to W8 anytime soon. Consumer PC purchases in the windows market are down, so who's actually going to go with W8? Tablets and phones seem about all that's left, and they're not running x86. (That means no W7 interface on those devices)
I actually thought about this, and perhaps the solution is to not allow more than 1 point in escalation per 10 minutes or something. So only 1 point shows in the first 10 minutes, and then you don't have an option to raise it until the next 10 minute window
That addresses getting rid of the spammers/trolls, while still limiting the upward motion of postings.
There's been an avalanche of research published in the last year or so regarding these types of things, with a lot more scientific backing than the little bit I read in this article.
In one of many articles on the topic, this one raised a whole new series of questions about our ancestry:
Or check out these that all relate to different areas of genetic research, most empirical, one modeled, all relating supporting information about homo sapiens (that's us!) inbreeding with various offshoots and close relatives, with us apparently coming out the better? for it.
To be really fair, you'd have to admit that assigning them only applies while the drive is connected, once disconnected, any newly connected drive can take that drive letter.
And the question wasn't concerned about mount points in windows, it concerned drive letters.
I gave ubuntu a shot about a year ago, installing it on relatively old hardware.... 2.4GHz Athlon X4 with GeForce 3200 integrated graphics, etc.
It works flawlessly, installed in less than 20 minutes, and only took another hour to configure various items to make it a media server, share screens with other systems, install an AFP file share, a couple of DBs, handbrake, etc. It all just worked.
I also have a copy of W7 Ultimate. It sits on the shelf, unused after the initial install on another system. That system now runs OSX, which is much more user friendly and useful.
How would you like them shown? (Note that the spaces could be spaces, periods, dashes, or pretty much any character not banned by the system) MMM+ is the month name, abbreviated to the length shown, MM would be numeric as noted previously and does sort naturally.
YYYY MMM dd.... (sorts by year and month, months not naturally sorted) MMM dd [YYYY].... (sorts by month and day only, months not naturally sorted) dd MM YYYY.... (sorts by day, month, year)
I personally prefer the YYYY-MM-dd method, since it means that things are naturally sorted, easy to read, and does not require any special escaping.
Because drive letters are limited to 26, and mount points are unlimited. Mount points can also be fixed per device, while drive letters get reused, leading to no end of fascinating issues when two only slightly different directories structures get switched during a power cycle (think snapshots).
I'd say that the fact that / doesn't interfere with MSDOS's own '\' escape character would be enough reason to have NOT chosen it as the path separator.
I personally didn't care about the standard location for / being close to the pinky, but more about the non-standard '\' location on various keyboards, even MS branded ones IIRC.
Then there is the fact that Bill chose \ over any of the already existing systems out there. Although I used VMS for years, I didn't remember it's odd directory structure, thanks for bringing that back to the fore...
Lastly, why MS couldn't have allowed either / or \ (OS/2 did) and start the conversion to sanity with / being the default with NT. There have been lots of complaints about the backslash over the years, since it is the classic escape character in most systems across the board.
It is language agnostic to a point. Ultimately you need to do examples in some language. I hope I won't rain on anyone's parade by mentioning, just in passing, that the CLR and the languages that run on it often provide reasonably state-of-the-art functionality when it comes both to back-end compiler features and front-end language design. And I'm not a MS fanboy, just somewhat worried by stagnated state of C++ and ObjC.
C++ took a left turn back around the namespace and STL issues. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you missed out on some serious fun).
I would use the CLR to point out how LCD limits the way the multi-language supported VM functions. How this differs from the GNU approach on C/C++ and even FORTRAN support. (Yes, the CLR has serious issues that no one really wants to talk about. Namely, it's inherently type unsafe, since it has to support pointers)
But, all of those merely build on top of assembly, and machine language. You really do need to understand the basics before you can make good use of the higher level languages and understand why somethings happen the way they do.
There should be no class focusing on a single language, unless it's a lower level language. At least not for CS concepts.
As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program. It was definitely aimed at the beginner to intermediate level programmers...
Lucky you, C++ didn't exist when I went to High School. Hell, the first real book on C had just come out, and certainly wasn't in use in my high school.
That said, Steven Prata's Primer on C++ was pretty useful for OO concepts. It's now in it's 5th edition. Sigh. But it all depends upon what you want to learn. In the Java language (my current meal ticket) I wouldn't even know what to point you to since all the books I originally used are horribly out of date and I haven't bought one in at least 7 years. I can tell you that most of the grads out of college don't know a lick of true CS concepts though, they barely know Java syntax. Makes you wonder what happened to colleges over the past few years? (many years? 5s of years? decades? Let's just skip that thought.)
All that said though, perhaps you want to look into Objective-C if you're interested in the Mac/iPhone/iPad world.
Honestly, I'd work on concepts, and start with C and then add an OO language such as C++/Java/Objective-C. It will teach you many things and adding any other language afterwards should be relatively trivial. Assembly remains its own forte, however. That's a different beast, also worth knowing, but mastering it is worthwhile as mastery can apply broadly. Note the key: mastery. Just "knowing" assembly doesn't gain you much.
I really would start with C for 6-9 months, then add 3-6 months of assembly just for exposure, then about a year or 2 of C++/Java/Objective-C for OO concepts. They should be more ready than most for the market after that.
Back in those days, hacking directly on binaries was common, macroassemblers were for wimps, and all data communications were carried out on mag tapes carried via sneakernet, which was usually faster than our suitcase-sized 300-baud modem.
Yeah, I remember those days. You could sit at your supposed 300 baud modem, start typing and wait for the server to catch up, and you weren't even a very good typist.
I also remember having "talk", the precursor to IM and a companion to finger. After all, you fingered the person before you'd talk to them... just to be sure they were there.
The movie rental industry is based on a very simple arrangement actually.
I agree to sell you a copy of a movie which I own(this is still legal for movies even if you can't do it for all media).
Right of first sale still exists and conditionally covers all media as far as I know. (Conditionally because there are certain software packages that are leased, which can't be resold, such as on Steam)
Apple makes more than a third of their revenue off of macs, from their report 2 quarters ago (haven't read the latest one)
As far as being "on the second team", I'm not so sure about that anymore. Everywhere you look, you see macs. And I do not see them running windows, or even MS office much anymore.
Take that into account with a 10+% market share, by sales, and the fact that macs last at least twice as long as PCs (and don't tell me about your 10 year old windows box in the back that still runs, mine was swapped to linux long ago) then the numbers may switch a lot more. There seems to be a large swell of people moving to macs. Apple has the mindshare. Apple is gaining market share. MS is losing market share, rapidly. IE is dropping to near 40%. They can't buy a search engine. Their new mobile OS barely got any publicity. Their MP3 player.... does anyone really own one anymore? The only thing that hasn't dropped precipitously is MS desktop share, and that may only be a year or two away. If people don't buy a mac, they may well buy a Ubuntu system. It's come a long way recently and is almost as easy to install as windows, which is a huge hurdle that needed to be overcome for adoption by the masses. Actually, Ubuntu's almost easier to install on recent hardware.
... where Microsoft's architectural compromises cased huge incompatibility issues and security nightmares until they were resolved.
They've been resolved? Somebody better start the presses rolling. Last time I checked (Server 2008 R2) you could still inject your code into a system level DLL and run as root, regardless of your privileges.
The most frustrating part of this is that Watchmen was actually *good*.
Indeed! In fact if there were an Oscar for "Best Performance by a Blue Weiner", I'm sure Watchmen would have won it.
I agree. While wanting to like it, it truly was a boring movie. The slow pace, lack of action, and lack of meaningful storyline made this a snoozer that was best left on when insomnia hits.
The only good thing about it was that it was better than "A Passage to India".
I always considered myself a hacker in its original sense. Someone who modded an existing piece of hardware or software to suit their needs, or to work around an existing issue. My latest and most simplest "hack" is getting Froyo on my phone, since my carrier wouldn't send the update.
You're a hacker in my book. Those others are not. And I'm surprised that Slashdot has started using the word *exclusively* to mean criminals.
Whatever happened to the word "cracker" (the original word describing a hacker with criminal intent)?
The only thing that's stopped is the EPG service, if I read it correctly. Grab another EPG type service, convert if necessary to the format the Tivo needs, and point the Tivo to your new service and voila - you should be ready to go. If you need authentication/keys, sniff the current stream and you may have to do a little more work depending on what's there. I'm actually considering this for another service I'm using as I don't particularly like the one it wants me to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of education really has sky-rocketed. Perhaps a study or two needs to be done on the real cost of education, because to hear tell, the educators aren't getting big raises, and this even occurs at schools with no need for capital expansion. So where is all this additional money going?
Perhaps state funded schools should need to justify every increase in their tuition, and certainly business projects, such as stadiums and sports teams, should be excised out of the report (ie, they need to be self-funding)
Some have stated that Win8 is stated to be a failure already as far as x86 machines go, based on the fact that companies waited 10 years on XP and skipped Vista, and are only now moving to W7. Companies won't be going to W8 anytime soon. Consumer PC purchases in the windows market are down, so who's actually going to go with W8? Tablets and phones seem about all that's left, and they're not running x86. (That means no W7 interface on those devices)
I actually thought about this, and perhaps the solution is to not allow more than 1 point in escalation per 10 minutes or something. So only 1 point shows in the first 10 minutes, and then you don't have an option to raise it until the next 10 minute window
That addresses getting rid of the spammers/trolls, while still limiting the upward motion of postings.
It's a slashdot thing - the first to post gets the mod points, then the mods short attention spans go elsewhere.
Perhaps there should be a minimum time before mod points can be used within a posting, maybe 1 or 2 hours?
There's been an avalanche of research published in the last year or so regarding these types of things, with a lot more scientific backing than the little bit I read in this article.
In one of many articles on the topic, this one raised a whole new series of questions about our ancestry:
Scientists unveil a newly-discovered, ancient human ancestor
Or check out these that all relate to different areas of genetic research, most empirical, one modeled, all relating supporting information about homo sapiens (that's us!) inbreeding with various offshoots and close relatives, with us apparently coming out the better? for it.
Neanderthal genes 'survive in us'
Sex with Neanderthals boosted human immunity
Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence
Frontiers of Anthropology
Ancient DNA Reveals Secrets of Human History
Fossilised finger points to previously unknown group of human relatives
It was still a screwed up bad port of the BSD stack.
To be really fair, you'd have to admit that assigning them only applies while the drive is connected, once disconnected, any newly connected drive can take that drive letter.
And the question wasn't concerned about mount points in windows, it concerned drive letters.
the obvious answer here would be:
get a mac.
I gave ubuntu a shot about a year ago, installing it on relatively old hardware.... 2.4GHz Athlon X4 with GeForce 3200 integrated graphics, etc.
It works flawlessly, installed in less than 20 minutes, and only took another hour to configure various items to make it a media server, share screens with other systems, install an AFP file share, a couple of DBs, handbrake, etc. It all just worked.
I also have a copy of W7 Ultimate. It sits on the shelf, unused after the initial install on another system. That system now runs OSX, which is much more user friendly and useful.
So, do my anecdotes beat your anecdote?
You're impressions of Windows are outdated. It has been a stable OS since XP was released.
Not hardly. It wasn't until SP2 and serious tweaking that it became anything close to "stable", and it still has issues even today.
How would you like them shown? (Note that the spaces could be spaces, periods, dashes, or pretty much any character not banned by the system) MMM+ is the month name, abbreviated to the length shown, MM would be numeric as noted previously and does sort naturally.
YYYY MMM dd .... (sorts by year and month, months not naturally sorted)
MMM dd [YYYY].... (sorts by month and day only, months not naturally sorted)
dd MM YYYY.... (sorts by day, month, year)
I personally prefer the YYYY-MM-dd method, since it means that things are naturally sorted, easy to read, and does not require any special escaping.
Why are mount points better than drive letters, and why is / better than \? Unix's own particular way of naming files is far from universal.
Because drive letters are limited to 26, and mount points are unlimited. Mount points can also be fixed per device, while drive letters get reused, leading to no end of fascinating issues when two only slightly different directories structures get switched during a power cycle (think snapshots).
So yes, drive letters are moronic.
> and why is / better than \?
/ doesn't interfere with C's escape char '\'
I'd say that the fact that / doesn't interfere with MSDOS's own '\' escape character would be enough reason to have NOT chosen it as the path separator.
I personally didn't care about the standard location for / being close to the pinky, but more about the non-standard '\' location on various keyboards, even MS branded ones IIRC.
Then there is the fact that Bill chose \ over any of the already existing systems out there. Although I used VMS for years, I didn't remember it's odd directory structure, thanks for bringing that back to the fore...
Lastly, why MS couldn't have allowed either / or \ (OS/2 did) and start the conversion to sanity with / being the default with NT. There have been lots of complaints about the backslash over the years, since it is the classic escape character in most systems across the board.
It is language agnostic to a point. Ultimately you need to do examples in some language. I hope I won't rain on anyone's parade by mentioning, just in passing, that the CLR and the languages that run on it often provide reasonably state-of-the-art functionality when it comes both to back-end compiler features and front-end language design. And I'm not a MS fanboy, just somewhat worried by stagnated state of C++ and ObjC.
C++ took a left turn back around the namespace and STL issues. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you missed out on some serious fun).
I would use the CLR to point out how LCD limits the way the multi-language supported VM functions. How this differs from the GNU approach on C/C++ and even FORTRAN support. (Yes, the CLR has serious issues that no one really wants to talk about. Namely, it's inherently type unsafe, since it has to support pointers)
But, all of those merely build on top of assembly, and machine language. You really do need to understand the basics before you can make good use of the higher level languages and understand why somethings happen the way they do.
There should be no class focusing on a single language, unless it's a lower level language. At least not for CS concepts.
As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program. It was definitely aimed at the beginner to intermediate level programmers ...
Lucky you, C++ didn't exist when I went to High School. Hell, the first real book on C had just come out, and certainly wasn't in use in my high school.
That said, Steven Prata's Primer on C++ was pretty useful for OO concepts. It's now in it's 5th edition. Sigh. But it all depends upon what you want to learn. In the Java language (my current meal ticket) I wouldn't even know what to point you to since all the books I originally used are horribly out of date and I haven't bought one in at least 7 years. I can tell you that most of the grads out of college don't know a lick of true CS concepts though, they barely know Java syntax. Makes you wonder what happened to colleges over the past few years? (many years? 5s of years? decades? Let's just skip that thought.)
All that said though, perhaps you want to look into Objective-C if you're interested in the Mac/iPhone/iPad world.
Honestly, I'd work on concepts, and start with C and then add an OO language such as C++/Java/Objective-C. It will teach you many things and adding any other language afterwards should be relatively trivial. Assembly remains its own forte, however. That's a different beast, also worth knowing, but mastering it is worthwhile as mastery can apply broadly. Note the key: mastery. Just "knowing" assembly doesn't gain you much.
I really would start with C for 6-9 months, then add 3-6 months of assembly just for exposure, then about a year or 2 of C++/Java/Objective-C for OO concepts. They should be more ready than most for the market after that.
Note that this only applies to the ninth court.... SC did not actually rule.
Back in those days, hacking directly on binaries was common, macroassemblers were for wimps, and all data communications were carried out on mag tapes carried via sneakernet, which was usually faster than our suitcase-sized 300-baud modem.
Yeah, I remember those days. You could sit at your supposed 300 baud modem, start typing and wait for the server to catch up, and you weren't even a very good typist.
I also remember having "talk", the precursor to IM and a companion to finger. After all, you fingered the person before you'd talk to them... just to be sure they were there.
The movie rental industry is based on a very simple arrangement actually.
I agree to sell you a copy of a movie which I own(this is still legal for movies even if you can't do it for all media).
Right of first sale still exists and conditionally covers all media as far as I know. (Conditionally because there are certain software packages that are leased, which can't be resold, such as on Steam)
But right now Linux interface (yes, Gnome, I'm talking about you) feels so old it's frustrating.
Honestly, it reminds me of OS/2 PM in a lot of ways.
Apple makes more than a third of their revenue off of macs, from their report 2 quarters ago (haven't read the latest one)
As far as being "on the second team", I'm not so sure about that anymore. Everywhere you look, you see macs. And I do not see them running windows, or even MS office much anymore.
Take that into account with a 10+% market share, by sales, and the fact that macs last at least twice as long as PCs (and don't tell me about your 10 year old windows box in the back that still runs, mine was swapped to linux long ago) then the numbers may switch a lot more. There seems to be a large swell of people moving to macs. Apple has the mindshare. Apple is gaining market share. MS is losing market share, rapidly. IE is dropping to near 40%. They can't buy a search engine. Their new mobile OS barely got any publicity. Their MP3 player.... does anyone really own one anymore? The only thing that hasn't dropped precipitously is MS desktop share, and that may only be a year or two away. If people don't buy a mac, they may well buy a Ubuntu system. It's come a long way recently and is almost as easy to install as windows, which is a huge hurdle that needed to be overcome for adoption by the masses. Actually, Ubuntu's almost easier to install on recent hardware.
... where Microsoft's architectural compromises cased huge incompatibility issues and security nightmares until they were resolved.
They've been resolved? Somebody better start the presses rolling. Last time I checked (Server 2008 R2) you could still inject your code into a system level DLL and run as root, regardless of your privileges.
The most frustrating part of this is that Watchmen was actually
*good*.
Indeed! In fact if there were an Oscar for "Best
Performance by a Blue Weiner", I'm sure Watchmen would have won
it.
I agree. While wanting to like it, it truly was a boring movie. The slow pace, lack of action, and lack of meaningful storyline made this a snoozer that was best left on when insomnia hits.
The only good thing about it was that it was better than "A Passage to India".
I always considered myself a hacker in its original sense. Someone who modded an existing piece of hardware or software to suit their needs, or to work around an existing issue. My latest and most simplest "hack" is getting Froyo on my phone, since my carrier wouldn't send the update.
You're a hacker in my book.
Those others are not.
And I'm surprised that Slashdot has started using the word *exclusively* to mean criminals.
Whatever happened to the word "cracker" (the original word describing a hacker with criminal intent)?
The only thing that's stopped is the EPG service, if I read it correctly. Grab another EPG type service, convert if necessary to the format the Tivo needs, and point the Tivo to your new service and voila - you should be ready to go. If you need authentication/keys, sniff the current stream and you may have to do a little more work depending on what's there. I'm actually considering this for another service I'm using as I don't particularly like the one it wants me to use.
Q: How can you find out if someone doesn't use Facebook?
A: They're posting on slashdot.